4 ... Gabriel Morriswrong in our world, the reality now hit me deep in my being of how
horribly screwed up modern-day human society is. Although we see
evidence of this every day on the evening news in terms of the ter-
rible things that people do to one another, I had never quite seen how
this dark reality pervaded our society in other, subtler ways. A veil of
illusion was stripped from my eyes, and what I now saw was almost
more than I could handle.
As I sat there shaking and clutching my knees, overwhelmed and
cracking apart with these various realizations and revelations, to
make things worse, I suddenly felt as if I were about to fully separate
from my body somehow. Scott had poured me a glass of water at
one point, sensing that I was having something of a bad high. But
I found myself unable to drink the water, due to an altered view
of myself in relation to both the water and the glass. Trying to put
the glass up to my mouth, I realized that there was some strange,
subtle separation between my consciousness and my physical body.
I experienced myself not as simply moving the glass with my hand
to my mouth, but as commanding my body to move itself. Though
I was obviously connected to my body somehow, I wasn’t really “in
it” in quite the way that I had always thought I was. It felt almost as
if that which I called “I” was actually a command center somewhere
within my mind, centered in my head, that was ordering my body to
perform the tasks that it so desired.
It was with this disconcerting realization that I almost totally lost
control. I felt as if I were about to lift up and out of my body some-
how, as everything in the room appeared to shift momentarily into
another dimension of perception. It was fascinating for an instant,
but far more frightening. My body went through a spasm as I pulled
myself back down into it, fearing that, for all I knew, I just might die,
or else black out, if I didn’t get a grip on my experience. Although I’d
never heard of someone overdosing on marijuana, I certainly didn’t
want to be the first. I held tightly onto myself, determined not to let
go, clutching my knees as if they were a shred of rope dangling over
a deep precipice of darkness within my own consciousness.