Human Dysmorphia
Within the hour I was having the time of my life! Everything was funny; everything was fun; Wendy and I were swapping memes and talking about things that made me laugh hysterically for a while until we transitioned into something more introspective.
Wendy opened up a little more than she usually does about her job and her current frustrations synchronizing to her new boss - I was utterly transfixed. Listening to her talk about this professional world she lives in without me was both endearing and intimidating. I was entranced once again by how she’s unconscious of her own capabilities but naturally self-assured, like she's assimilated a sense of confidence and self-worth so perfectly that she’s never questioned it but takes it all for granted at the same time. Not for the first time, I felt lucky to call Wendy my wife.
I was uncomfortably high, but a delusional part of me, my internal narrator, believed I was managing an imitation of normalcy. When Wendy asked if I’d like to take a turn about the garden to get some fresh air, I realized I was melted to the couch; getting up took everything I had, and my heart rate exploded as we "casually" made our way to the garden. Chatting idly with her, my mind raced with familiar thoughts:
“Am I dying?”
“Is this a normal way to feel?”
“I’m sure this is fine. I’m fine. I’m just high.”
But when the sunlight hit my face, instead of comforting me, it only intensified my paranoia, dwindling my hollow reassurances; it was too warm and I was too aware of the tongue in my mouth. Standing in front of the garden, Wendy said:
“How cool is it that we can just put seeds into the ground and it turns into a plant that we can eat?!”
Her words jolted me, desyncing me from my inner world. With my mouth I said: “Yeah. That IS cool, but really, REALLY weird.” But my internal narrator pressed the panic button. Mesmerized, I watched Wendy inspect one of the ripening bell peppers, gently turning it in her hand. The pepper nearly glowed from the glare of the too-warm sunshine. I couldn’t stop thinking about how strange it was that Wendy was this other person holding an edible plant that grew from a seed we put in the dirt a couple months ago.
I looked down, almost to distract myself, and began plucking at the occasional, tiny, garden variety weed that entered into my line of sight. It struck me how strange it was to be right where I was standing:
On this planet
On this part of the planet
pulling little plants from the ground that were stealing nutrients from the ones I wanted to grow instead. Rapidly, the thought became much less distant, and as rapidly, everything suddenly felt very strange and weirdly staged, like everything had all been set up moments before I was paying attention. I looked at the sky above the hill where we get those wicked moonrises and it felt like there were walls just beyond my perception- walls that I could sense, but not see, like outside wasn’t actually outside of anything, like I was in a room that looked vividly like it was outside. In wonder and horror, convinced I was about to wake up, I thought:
“This feels fake.”
I didn’t want Wendy to know how much I was freaking out, yet it felt like I was watching something uncoil out of my reach; a dropped spool of twine, only it was me that unraveled. I was getting very hot. The sun, though surely an illusion, produced as much heat as a real sun, and I told Wendy I needed to cool off inside; I needed to retreat to our cool and dark house to lie down. She agreed and asked me if I was alright before returning to her office in the basement. I lowered myself to the couch like it was a hospital bed and said:
“This might be the highest I’ve ever been in my life, but it feels good in here.”
“I can tell you’re really high.” She said with a smile.
Wendy was gone and I spent the next incomprehensible amount of time writhing, tossing and turning on the couch; it could have been an hour; it could have been an entire life-age of the earth for all I know, but it was a deeply unpleasant feeling in an otherwise pleasant room.
Amidst the chaos, I became convinced I was seeing something fundamental, visualizing abstract scenes that somehow explained why everything anyone does is only a byproduct of a decision whether they understand what they’re doing or not. Whether it’s intentional or not, everything is a reverberating, karmic ripple of consequence that doesn’t necessarily start with them but can be stopped by them or at least redirected. I’ll never be able to recapture the nuance of it because of course that isn’t profound; it just is what it is. But there was an imperceptible depth to it that I can only attribute to the dose of THC I consumed.
The feeling of transcendence departed as quickly as it arrived and in the next instant, I was seeing humanity as something else; something slightly grotesque; something other, and so did I. Suddenly I was overwhelmed with controlling all of the little autonomic functions of the body I'm in: How many heartbeats do I need to do? How often do I need to breathe? How do I swallow? How do I control my hands? How do I move my eyes? How do I communicate? How do I do it all at once?
And then EVERYTHING around me, everything inside of me, everything I knew, felt alien and unreal. I saw moving, interlocking patterns in my mind’s eye from a perspective that felt outside of my head, like I was viewing someone else’s dream, and at the same time, I was seeing humans on Earth from a non-human point of view. Examples of humans I could be or could have been, and I realized that every other person was as complex as I felt. It seemed forbidden. It terrified me.
I noticed an intense pressure building in my head, like something was growing underneath my skull, like my cranium was on the verge of bursting outward. I felt for a lump that wasn’t actually there, frantically feeling for something on the outside I could only feel on the inside. Frantically, helplessly, I lay in the fetal position, rocking back and forth with my hands on my head, trying to hold in whatever was trying to come out. A repeated thought played like a mantra:
“I will never be the same after this.”
And then Wendy woke me up.
Nothing was growing out of my head.
I thought over and over again how relieved I was to feel normal again except for the memory of what happened. I was right though: I’m not the same as I was.