First trip. Oops! I fell out of the unverse.

I was 18 years old and completely naïve regarding hallucinogens, which was why I took so many. I am now 52, and I remember it like it was yesterday. It has, in some respects, defined my life - my thinking, spirituality and work. I don't have a clue how much they weighed, but I do know I ate and drank 350 liberty caps, fresh and in tea.

Everything looked normal. It started to rain very lightly, so lightly in fact, that the raindrops made no physical impact. Hang on, they weren't raindrops, but tiny rain discs. Exactly half of them were a lovely mint green, the other half a gorgeous purple. From horizon to horizon, they fell to earth but, just before touching it, they turned and headed for me, entering into my forehead, just above and between the eyes. Hmmn, I thought, I think I need to go home and have a little lie down.

So I went home. I opened my bedroom door and there was a full-on circus happening in there. I walked in, just as a clown drove by in one of those backfiring clown cars, honking a little horn in greeting. The circus got louder and louder, brighter and brighter, beyond crescendo, as the clown drove round me in circles, honking and hooting. On his third circuit, he was followed by a set of enormous razor blades, rotating towards me like a combine harvester. The clown was my psychopomp, leading me through my death. He drove anticlockwise, and I felt warmth at my wrists, throat and ankles. Looking at my body, I realised that I was bleeding out. I was in an ocean of blood, with just my head, hands and feet sticking out above the surface. This terrifying imagery should have driven me mad, except I was surfing ahead of  the fear. I was moving faster than thought, faster than fear, and was therefore without either. I suppose I am about two hours in now.

The circus, with all its joyful, celebratory  light and sound, began to spin anticlockwise, everything amalgamating to form a huge, rotating wheel, wilder, faster, louder. Suddenly, it formed itself into a tunnel and, whoosh, I was flying down it at warp speed. This tunnel was made of every phenomenon that had ever existed in the whole universe, and every sound that had ever been made. I imagine that being strapped to a jet engine during take off would sound like that. I roared along it, very, very far. It seemed like I travelled for hours in that maelstrom of light and sound until, just as suddenly, and with a very audible pop, I emerged on the other side.

Into silence. Light, stillness, peace.

This was (is) an infinite space, of complete tranquillity, the only stimulus is calm white light. I became aware of a presence, and saw three beings of light and love. They stood on a flat plane, and there was no paradox in this being an infinite space and containing these simple structural forms. One approached and we communicated telepathically, his words, or rather concepts, arriving in the centre of my being. I asked, pleaded, not to have to return to my incarnated form, as it was so much more beautiful here. But I was nudged firmly, not unkindly but irrevocably, back towards my incarnation. Moments before leaving, I asked him why I had come to earth as a human in the first place. He told me, but he sealed it from my ability to consciously retrieve the information. It remains there, somewhere. I left what I now call the forever place, and was sent for healing, to become a drop of colour in a floating ocean of beauty, rolling, morphing, lovingly soothing and celebrating itself. From there, I returned to my body and my life, forever changed. The forever place is much more real than this bundle of perceptions we think of as reality. More real!

I now work as a shamanic practitioner, and have met the beings of light through the use of drums and other shamanic approaches. I am unable to climb back into the perceptual box and live as though these realities don't exist. I have no wish to either, but it makes me a bit of an oddball in a conformist society. The beings I met have always been there, in the background, to guide me along life's road.