3 The Demon Inside

It all started towards the end of Vose In by Autechre as I was listening to it on Winamp. I was typing an entry to my journal on the PC. This was my first experience with shrooms and I wanted to capture the experience.

Then I noticed that something on the screen was moving. Winamp back then had those graphic equalisers with sliders for each frequency band. I had it set to a certain setting that I preferred, and the sliders just started to move at their own accord - right, so this is how it starts, interesting.

But that was not the real start of the trip that changed my life. I also had a browser open and it had some pictures in it on the news article I was reading earlier. In this picture there was a girl staring right at the camera. When the percussive electronic melody started to enter the break down stage of the song near the end, slowing down to the pace of glacial movement, distorting and morphing itself to madness, a swirl appeared on the girl's face. It was as if her face was turning into a black hole induced storm where all the colours and shapes were entering the whirlpool motion and getting sucked into the growing void that started in the centre of her face. Shit - this is bad. This feels unsettling.

I quickly closed the browser window to avoid the bad vibe. That revealed the Windows desktop background picture I had, which was a picture of my and my girlfriend taken on Montmartre in Paris in the last winter, maybe about seven months ago. But everything on the screen was moving by now. As I focused my eyes on my girlfriend's lovely smiling face, she came alive on the screen and said "Jinmu, please come back". With that words like a trigger pulled, I felt like I was getting rocketed upwards into deep space, breaking through the earth's atmosphere, breaking through dimensions, while simultaneously feeling like I was getting sucked into the screen too. Then this thought hit me in the head - I'm going somewhere where I have never been with anyone before, not even with the one I love the most in my life, and this place will be the place I can never share with anyone, not even the one that knows me and understands me the best. I will have an experience in this deserted and isolated space. I have shared everything with my girlfriend, the love of my life, but by going somewhere we never traveled together and we never will I'm creating a rift that can never be mended again. Fuck. I felt bad. I didn't want this. But there was nothing I could do to stop now.

I spent the rest of the night haunted by frightening visuals and thoughts. I knew I was just tripping and this was all just hallucinations, but at the time it felt like these hallucinations were telling me what the reality that I know actually was. It did not feel like I was seeing and experiencing unreal things, these were the truths I could not see before. Also, while the external world and dimensions were breaking down and melting I felt I was falling deeper into myself, like the swirling black hole emerged on the girl's face was happening inside me too and I was falling into this abyss.

But, again, strangely this did not feel like a loss of self. This also felt like a realisation of the true self. I was not disappearing into a void, but the void revealed who I was. I was furiously writing out these thoughts and feelings into my journal Word file, and everything started click. I had algebra equations emerging from my thoughts, materialising in front of my eyes and I knew I could solve these equations, and had the instinctive conviction that the final answer to this problem is the truth about myself. I was canceling out the Xs and Ys, simplifying the bloated calculations, narrowing down to the final X, which is I - me - equals something - my true self.

I cannot remember in full detail what or how the whole of this algebraic equation looked or how I solved it in each steps, but I clearly remember that the final answer was X = 0, which was the ultimate proof that 'I' did not exist. This realisation tipped me over from being frightened by the hallucinogen induced visuals to a full on paranoia. I did not know who 'they' were, but I felt 'they' did not want me to realise this truth. I did not exist, but I wasn't supposed to know that.

So I had to delete all the traces that led me to this conclusion, in order to also hide the fact that I have found out, and now know for certain, what the true 'me' was.

Hence I started to delete. Step by step.

I naturally deleted all the journal entry of this trip I've written up to this point as that was the most clear and damning evidence. Then I deleted all my previous journal entries I've kept for years. I deleted all the emails I have ever exchanged with anyone. I have deleted all the pictures I had saved on my computer.

By the time the sun was rising I was almost done. I deleted everything that was a record of my life stored on my PC. I chucked all the bits and pieces of physical materials I had - photographs, souvenirs, hand written letters and diaries from the pasts. I tore through them in manic rush and chucked them all into a big black bag and dragged it to the waste dump container near my student hall.

When I returned back to my room I was exhausted, dehydrated and dazed. At some point here I looked at my right hand and realised that my little finger was missing. I was one hundred percent convinced that I cut it off during my trip, which brought me horrible dread. The hallucinations will go once the effects of the drug wears out, but my severed finger will never come back. As I reached this thought, I further realised that I also had a thumbnail sized hole right in the middle of my palm. I could actually see through it as it was cleanly punctured hole with no blood or jagged and torn skins blocking the way. I felt sick. Very sick.

I rushed to the loo and lifted the toilet seat as I knew I was gonna puke. I started throwing up and my whole body was convulsing. I puked so much but it felt like I had endless amount of mass inside my stomach. I knew I had to get it out. I have to get everything out.

And at the end of what felt like hours of puking, it came out. In my last desperate attempt to get rid of everything inside me, a black coloured demon came out of my mouth. It was in the state of solid gas. It had no expressions, no face, but it was smiling. Its head was about the size of a clenched fist, its body maybe the length of my forearm. The last bits of this demon was still stuck in my throat, maybe a lingering leg or the tail - I did not know, but I had to get this fuck out of my body. I grabbed the demon by the neck and yanked it out as hard as I can. I threw it into the toilet bowl with all my might and flushed it down like my life depended on it.

Once this was done I found myself standing on a flat desert ground. Not the kind with sand dunes but with dried out flat earth that cracked everywhere after getting baked by the sun for centuries. I stood on this land bare chested and spread my arms. The land was completely flat. No matter where I looked all I could see was the red coloured desert ground, the sky, and the horizon that divided them two.

I heard a voice in my head - "Wake up to the sound"

Deafening sounds of thunderous drums rang through out the world. Heavy kick, land smashing snare hits, dirty as fuck high hats that felt like rusty metal scratching my ears, and the toms that sounded like tribal drums from millennia ago.

I wasn't born again. I was born today.