I'm going to try something experimental. I'm listening to
Von by Sigur Ros and I'm drifting to sleep. I can barely keep my eyes open, really, but I'm just going to start typing and see what comes out. I dream when I sleep. I dream a lot. When I don't dream, something is wrong. There have been long times when I don't dream. I didn't dream when I drank. Some people do.
The Head on the Door, certainly one of my favorite albums of all time, was supposedly written based on nightmares Robert Smith had while sleeping off alcoholic binges. I could never do that. Alcoholic binges were just fade-outs and waking up in pain.
The relation of substance abuse and creativity has been vastly overrated. Clive Barker said people always ask him what kind of drugs he takes. He may use recreational drugs, I'm not sure, I know he drank a lot, but nothing for the creative process. He said drugs actually inhibit the creative process, because they make you passive, instead of a creator. Like smoking pot and watching a movie, that's a lot of fun, but it's a purely selfish, internal thing. You don't create because of that. I dunno, weed is ok, I guess. I like weed, like I like potato chips, or masturbating. They're all basically the same. William Gibson got it. He idolized Burroughs, and he wanted to do every kind of mind altering substance there was. But then what?
"Drugs are essentially a wank. Which is ok, as long as you know it's just a wank." - Gibson. That says it all. I also like Dali: "I'm a drug. Take me." Anyway, I don't dream when I'm on drugs. That's how I know they're hindering my mind, not helping it. I still remember dreams from when I was six. It's not right for me to not dream. I'm one of those people who believes there's no reason to say the dream world isn't the real world, and the waking world is the fantasy. They're both all in your head. Internal stimuli/external stimuli. Smoking that synthetic cannabis, that was really a mistake. I was really fucked up on that stuff for a long time. I didn't realize it until I had been off it for quite a while, but I wasn't normal. I didn't realize it, but I really wasn't normal. It's like the detergent commercial where the sock looks white until you put the sock that's really white next to it.
I never dreamed while I smoked that stuff. Eventually I started to black out on it, big swathes of time would pass and I wouldn't remember it. Take all the dreams and part of the awake. It was making me insane. The most insane thoughts filled my head, and not the good insane. It made me terrified. Of myself. For myself. I filled a notebook, burned it. I did that once before, on dextromethorphan. Sometimes I would just stand there and sort of phase out for 20 minutes/half hour. Fall to the ground screaming. Other things. Believing I was in Hell. This is supposed to be a weed simulation. Marijuana does nothing remotely like that. It's almost like... it's almost like the way they presented marijuana in
Reefer Madness became a real drug.
(
Von is over and now Low's
The Great Destroyer is coming on) Maybe the original synthetic cannabinoids, the JWH's, were engineered by the government for experimentation, or to infiltrate and destroy a segment of the population, like they say crack was. It really was making me insane, I'm not exaggerating at all, it was eroding my coherence. And I'm a pretty smart guy, I mean, I'll do some out there stuff, but this came to me in sheep's clothing, I never saw it until it was over. What if I hadn't been forced to stop? Would I be in a rubber room? Dead? Is this too paranoid? It's confirmed fact that the government did experiments with LSD. Acid might be an exception to the creative/drug connection, but it can also destroy your mind and freak you out permanently. That's the thing, I don't even think
real MKULTRA acid exists anymore. When the government stopped making it, what's sold as acid now is just alphabet soup. I don't think I've ever actually done acid. JWH/Government engineering, too much? Not with MKULTRA a reality.
I've actually done some really
really weird stuff to my mind, just using meditation and such. Astral projection, stuff like that. Visions. With nothing, no chemicals. It was also just a wank, but I can see how somebody might believe they were tapping into some Other. And, fuck it, maybe I was.
Everything is just synapses and neurons farting around in our brain, anyway. We can trick them with chemicals, but (Gibson again) all drugs are really doing is modifying the incoming data. Is that something you want? Really? Maybe drugs are the enemy to creativity. It's all there within your mind already. Get into your head. That's what you have to do. What did Kaspar Hauser mean when he said "It dreamed to me..."?
We are a feather bedded, placated people. We really are. We're the people in
Wall-E. I've said for years the holodeck will be mankind's final invention, and some time later, aliens will discover a forgotten race of mummies sitting in their holodecks, their art, their music, their literature forgotten. Look upon my works, ye lazy, and despair. We are bloated, medicated (self and otherwise) and obsessed with dulling the senses. Entertainment stopped stimulating and started dulling. When did this happen? Reality TV? No, I know what it is. Extinction is the Natural Conclusion. Our civilization (not our species, but our idea of how to live, which we think equals being human but doesn't) has been here for like 10,000 years, the merest eye blink on the face of the planet (which is itself the merest eye blink on the face of the universe), and we are ready to be scratched off like fleas. It's all been leading to this. What a joke. The species that pleasured itself to death. We are Mr. Hands. Infinite Jest.
Azathoth is playing doom metal. The Siberian Traps was the opening riff. The Yellowstone Caldera was the drums kicking in. And when he opened his mouth to sing, that was the Tunguska Event. Can you hear him? I'm dreaming again...
