4.2 On session two
Temperature, pee in the can, “feel okay?” and let's go.
drugs
After the first session, I was slightly less enthused about the second one, though not entirely averse. We raised the dose a little.
The kernel of the sensations at the start was pretty much the same as the first time: fast sinking into a dark-grey tunnel with music amusingly shattering into quirky digital noises.
The first trip was very egg-headed, full of concepts, realizations, and attempts to attain some deep UNDERSTANDING of the world and shit. The second was a party. I was literally dancing on the bed (I asked). Pretty sure looked cringe.
rock&roll
The “dance” contained three components:
- Part of me was just doing the thing;
- Part of me used it as a tool to learn and was curious about the thing;
- Part of me stared judgementally.
It became very apparent; the central theme was the focus on experience for the experience's sake. But I felt a little pullback that didn't let me fully dissolve: I'm not here to be entertained; I'm here to resolve my issues and find new insights (and use them to indulge my graphomania afterward). And if I'd just give in completely, nothing would be remembered, and there will be nothing to tell. There are two researchers here: a doctor of mine and myself as well.
During the moments I managed to just fuck off of myself with my imaginary obligations; I experienced a curious sensation: my body merged with the atmosphere. This time, the familiar feel of the “flat field of perception” mixed in my hand, the air and soundwaves from the music in my ears, which meant I could lean on the music and change its direction, and vice versa, strong currents of music dissolved me and carried me where they flowed.
sex
After the dance, sex followed. Lots of intense sexually colored images. Not necessarily accompanied by sexual arousal. I assume Facebook moderators, whose job is to clean the site from porn, experience something similar.
If I’d had a Patreon, you’d read all the details there, but I don’t. And it’s an Onlyfans kind of thing anyway.
mundane…
Then I switched to the things that stress me out in my daily life. Some started to materialize and sort of “fall on my laps.” I “picked them up” and examined them as if they were puzzle toys. In this mode, they appeared very trivial and really not worth the psychological toll they caused on the regular. I fidgetted them a bit and tossed them out one by one. That didn't necessarily mean I actually solved them, though.
… and the magic
Towards the end, close to the point of me fully regaining consciousness, the playlist jumped on a track with “my vibe.” Calm ambient with industrial undertones washed me onto the shore of my personal safe haven.
Chill whistling sound, a place where I can stand both feet on the ground and feel sure and stable. A mirror of a mountain lake painted predominantly in blue tints, or the opposite, a view of a big city at night, both these images appeared very soothing to me. I also like coffee, pizza, and travel.
I spent the last half hour of the session in close contact with my sadness and melancholy. And a lovely and harmonious half hour at that, as weird as it may sound. It was something we touched on during our regular sessions with my therapist: I'm okay with slightly dark things. Sadness, forlornness, melancholy, plain suffering even. That doesn't mean I'm a Satanic spawn that feeds on pain; it's just a little quirk of mine. Sometimes a useful one.
As I got to read later, these kinds of contrasting experiences are a hallmark of ketamine sessions.
insights
One insight easiest to explain is about avoidance and how it works in my case. Before, I thought that avoidance was that thing when I stall some trivial things at work, but there's a decent chance the scale of my avoidance is way more global than that. Maybe this whole “work” thing is just one big act of avoidance. Maybe I put a wall of “work” between myself and things I actually ought to experience, and I hide behind this wall. Considering my world-class level in the discipline (avoidance, not work), the wall turned out to be thick and sturdy. And maybe I'm tired of it.
I also got some insight into the nature of creativity. The conventional image of creativity is that of an act of conjuring something out of nothing, more often than not, coupled with some struggle. But perhaps we can take another angle. The whole struggle is only about getting out of one's own way and not pestering oneself. Creativity is fracturing one pattern into another via a third one. You are the third pattern here. And the less insistent you are on turning a creative act into one of constipation, the higher the chance to come up with something decent in the end. That doesn't negate the usefulness of the act of editing. It's just these two should never co-occur. Like Rick Rubin taught us.
Psychologically speaking, the most valuable insight was about the way I can't live with my emotions. It's my reflex to dodge them, run through them, and not pay any attention. And not without reason: an unstable environment provokes reactive attitudes and not intentional actions. This thing harbors a significant potential to make my life better; unfortunately, that same thing will take some effort to utilize.
And most importantly, despite the disembodied way of the experience, I felt my presence as clearly as I have never felt it before. My conceptual model for the last few years was “objects all the way down.” There are no personalities, egos, or agents, these are all illusions, but there is a soulless process that just happens to happen. Sometimes it spirals into these fairy tales about the people who imagine they exist. I'm pretty much of the same opinion still. Though I now must submit, illusion or not, this first-person perspective I inhabit is a vital part of the faceless process, and unskillful attempts to negate it do not promise anything worth looking forward to.
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Andrey