An inordinate fondness for beetles

I'm tripping this morning after skipping last week. I'm going to try going to every other week. The are somewhat challenging and they knock me out for several hours When I could be up and doing other things

I had one cube of the Casper soup this morning. This should produce a light to moderate trip.

Gazing at the ceiling with still eyes - there is not much movement, but the bumps of plaster that make up the texture of the popcorn ceiling do replicate a little bit, and they also go in (recede) rather than out some of the time, which may just be a vision effect rather than a drug effect. Some of this stuff it is difficult to tell, because the drug actually amplifies and encourages some of the weird behavior that our eyes already know how to do. Things like persistence of vision, creation of pattern in blind spots, etc.

Now I'm getting a little bit of flowing. I feel like if I don't go for at least a level three trip, moderate impact to visual perception, I think that's the right place on Josie's scale, if I don't go at least some distance into the weirdness, I don't get most of the good effects. It doesn't last me like a deeper trip will. It doesn't have the same sense of everything being connected and my mind being open. But I'm there. I could not comfortably drive a car, but I could easily walk on the sidewalk and people would probably not know that I'm messed up. If I have a conversation, it will tend to be somewhat fixated, in the sense that I will become fascinated with particular things or visual moments that I will definitely have difficulty suppressing. Talking to me while tripping is not a "whoa, dude" experience, but you definitely can tell that I'm on something. They [there] will be long pauses, followed by intense introspection or strong fascination with something that the other party is wearing, the way the light is hitting their hair, something weird. It's always weird with me.

I'm still together enough that it bothers me when autocorrects changes something that I meant to say. I'm not together enough that I go back and edit it word by word. I find that it is much more conducive to my experience being pleasant and getting the deep stuff worked on, if I let a few typos go through and a few random misuses like above the dictation picked up they instead of there. That kind of thing I will typically fix and post, this one I may leave in just as an illustration. I feel like the extent to which my fixation on grammatical orthography makes me go back and fix things is an indication of how far down the ladder I've gone. It's a fairly good signpost.

When I'm in really deep, I have enough struggle to get the words to show up on the screen, that I can't even mess with major errors. That's why often I will repeat the same sentence with the correction because I saw it happen but switching to the text editor and back is exceptionally challenging when my visual apparatus is strongly affected. It breaks up my flow a lot; it's like having to go and completely wash your brushes. And sometimes, when I'm in the Fairly deep space, I have difficulty remembering the process to do it. The physical motions but also which software choices I need to make, where I need to push a button, etc., are very difficult to remember.

I still have no idea why the speech to text engine randomly capitalizes certain words. There are sometimes when I think it recognizes a name, like I will say the Audubon Society, I can totally understand the capital letter s. But when it just randomly assigns capitals to words like the Fairly earlier. I don't know why it is making the decision that fairly is a special word. And it doesn't do it consistently. I did not type that out, that is just me speaking and for some reason my phone deciding that one of those two words got a capital and the other didn't. It is a significant obstacle to me in using dictation for regular conversations. I enjoy dictating rather than typing. It is certainly much faster for me in most situations. I can touch type fairly quickly (thanks to an IBM Selectric in TYPING class in high school, I'm one of the last groups that actually learned to type on a typewriter before our school switched over to keyboarding); that training allows me to type with my hands fairly quickly, but on my phone I have to use the little swipe keyboard and it is awkwardly slow. I'm still fairly quick with it if that makes any sense. My use of it is not challenged usually and I can get good clean writing out of it at a reasonable speed. But nothing like what I can do with dictation.

It's around ten. I had my soup at 8:00. This is probably close to the visual peak of the trip. Looking at the ceiling, there are little areas where the light from the sun strikes a wall and is reflected on the ceiling above my bad. The bed has curtains that go all the way down and block the light fairly strongly, but I have one side kicked open just for air and light and it makes segmented shadows, what they call a penumbra, on the ceiling. The areas of different amount of Shadow move against one another. Like the level one shadow will be flowing to the left and the area with the direct reflection of sunlight will be flowing to the right. It's not a highly detailed effect; if I move my eyes it goes away. The thing where the dots on the ceiling change into divots reminds me of embroidery where the appearance of someone having walked in snow is manufactured by pulling down the fabric with stitches. I will link to a picture. It also reminds me of the hollow masks illusion. A lot. It very definitely has that same thing where you can look at it one way and then try to look at it the other way and your eyes will struggle to switch back and forth. Moving my gaze from side to side shakes it up pretty quickly and it goes away. Most of the visual effects at this level of hallucination are very fragile in the sense that they don't bear up to moving your eyes around. I feel like this gets fresh photons engaged with your optic nerves, and knocks the psilocybin molecules out of attachment with them. That's just my guess. It is nothing that has been studied or supported that I've found, but that's what it feels like. It feels like my visual apparatus can be refreshed by moving my eyes. Once I get to the next level of tripping, moving my eyes will get rid of the floating waves of kelp that form in front of my face or things like that, but it will still be accessibly visible as I'm looking around regular reality. A level beyond that, and things look like I'm in a cartoon. 

One of the ways that I check to see how deep a trip is, is to look around a room and see what moves. What changes or flows. When I'm very deep, it feels like I'm walking through an unreal world. Things like wood grain and the patterns of the orange-peel style plaster on the walls will shift and replicate. I can only render shapes in brilliant color. There are times when I can't get off the couch without significant discomfort. This is not that. That's got to be a level four to almost five, this is a light level three.

The adjustments that I made two weeks ago, turning down the Horny Stoner, was moderately successful. It still has a lot of impact and it is still challenging to get that to settle down when I want the Horny Stoner experience to end. I feel like I did get a little bit more control. My husband and I had a couple of unpleasant nights do mostly to failure of communication. There's some of the stuff that I still feel like is his therapy conversation rather than my therapy conversation, and when I am upset or in that shut off state, the vape pen is remarkably attractive. And then that brings forward that Horny Stoner persona. I have to say, and this is a little excessively intimate even for some of these conversations, but once I've gotten off, then my mind clarifies somewhat and I've had some remarkably good experiences with writing about weaving and drawing. Going into the stuff that fascinates me creatively and artistically. So the Horny Stoner is tied to some of those things. It's a conduit that picks up my creative energy, and while he's in control I don't have a lot of ability to distract or confuse him enough to get back to being stoned but not horny, if that makes any sense. Getting off early rather than making it go forever allowed me a long period of mental clarity and attachment to that creative energy and strong memories about the work that I've done. Also, I'm having a creative conversation with another person who is very like me. His efforts have been very fast, very swiftly moving, and he's done some remarkable stuff for somebody with no training at all. It's exactly how I took to the medium. He is making mistakes and fixing himself faster than I can correct sometimes, because I'm just seeing it through Facebook. I'm watching his questions and his photos and his comments. But it is fascinating to watch another person in a similar portion of the autistic spectrum dive into something that I've experienced from the inside and start to pick things apart and understand them. It's a very combination left brain right brain kind of thinking. You have to have an understanding of a physical thing that is happening in the yarn which is very spatial, and you have to have a lot of body sensitivity to be able to make the weaving go right. It's a challenging thing to teach.

Watching him go through iterations of a process reminds me so much of myself in my twenties. The way that I dove into this stuff was overwhelming in a way, but it was constantly following the scent of a path. I would see some pattern that I wanted to understand or replicate, and I would spend absolutely timeless hours in a nonverbal design trance that resulted in some remarkably good stuff, and then I would have to come out and go into more of a left-brained organized structural understanding mode and make the actual weaving. The design process is like drawing. The making process is like cross stitch. It is exceptionally unforgiving in some ways and you can't make things up as you go. Following a chart is the only way to reliably get to a detailed pattern. Simple patterns of diagonals and things like that can be followed without recourse to paper, but when I'm doing something detailed, and I want it to look exactly like a particular style, I can't fake it as I go. I can't make up writing without a graph. There are people who do it. Some of them are good enough that it doesn't look like they're working without a graph. Some of the knotwork patterns, I've gotten to a point where I can work the pattern without looking at anything on paper for hours at a time, but I got there originally with lots of graph. One of the things that I like about the kind of weaving that I do is that it engages my whole understanding. It's like drawing a botanical illustration where one part of my mind is observing the curve of the petal and the shade of light, fascinated in a nonverbal way with the beauty of the thing in front of me, and then another part of me is going along with the scalpel and the labeling pen and noting that the pollen capsules remain closed in this particular flower until full antithesis. The generative parts of certain pea flowers remain closed and unavailable to the bees, opening one part or the other selectively so that the bee will pick up their pollen and carry it to another flower, and it will not pollinate itself.

Anyway, there's a part of my mind that finds the understanding exceptionally satisfying. Ending up with something like a drawing where I not only used my understanding of art and the way the light falls and the way the curves go, but also pulled up deep and important knowledge about the reasons things work, makes my head sing. It's the same thing with a well-woven piece. I have to be able to engage in two very different kinds of being. I don't even want to call them ways of thinking, because they are entire sets of parameters with how I engage with my world, and I go into a space that is so completely wordless when I draw that I have to dip my toes into it quickly if I'm going to be able to explain to someone standing in a classroom what the hell I'm doing. I've taught drawing just enough to be able to observe other drawing teachers and see how they're doing it; some of them can slip back and forth so effortlessly that they can continue speaking, while others draw a bit, talk a bit, and go back and forth. It reminds me of one of my high school teachers whose left-handed penmanship was equally perfect to her right hand, and she could write different things. It made my head spin. I know that I've said that before but trying to do it, and of course I tried to do it, I am in awe of her double processing. I think she had a few words that she could do it with as stunts rather than being able to have an entire written conversation going on with her right hand and a different one with her left hand. Either way it was a remarkable trick. It got a lot of the students to sit down and shut up and pay attention because clearly here was someone who could do this cool psychomotor circus trick, and she had important things to tell you about government. She's the one who put her hand on my chest and sent me to the nurse's office when I had my first attack of tachycardia. My heart went from its normal 60 something beats a minute to about 180, just sitting at my desk doing a regular assignment. I was in no way stressed or upset. It wasn't a difficult test or anything that was making me psychologically challenged, it was just like a quiz or some sort of answering questions out of the book. I don't really remember; I just remember walking up to the front of class and saying I don't feel well, I don't think this is right would you feel my heartbeat and she put her hand on my chest rather than my wrist, which was fine, and actually more comforting, and my chest was thumping so much and so fast it was like there was a scared bird inside of me. I didn't go to the emergency room, because it resolved quite quickly in the nurse's office with just a deep breath and it went back to completely normal. It happens from time to time, but usually only a few beats. 

I know that a lot of people have a much rockier experience of tachycardia, but I just went from first gear to fourth gear for several minutes, long enough to walk to the nurse's office, but only barely, and then it switched right back to first gear. It didn't have any other effects on my body aside from a moderate amount of light headedness because my blood was moving so quickly that I was not breathing in time to keep up with it. I have learned now that the thing for me to do is to take a deep breath and hold it, and once hypercapnia kicks in, the body sort of resets a lot of things and one of those things is sinus rhythm. Many forms of Vegas [vagus] stimulation will reset this.  No, I did mean vagus - I rarely talk about the city; I often talk about the nerve. I wish that I could set some slider in my dictation software that would say choosing a proper noun versus choosing a regular word. I use a lot of words that are not used by many people. I don't mean that to be snobbish or flaunt my vocabulary by saying that, but it allows me precision of meaning that is important to me. It always has been. I was that kid who would look things up in the dictionary to get a long detailed word because it was the right word rather than some more vague approximation. I would prefer to be able to say that something trembles or quivers or shivers, rather than just to say it shakes. I want the name for that color. whichever color it is. Old names fascinated me the most. Having held vermilion-painted vellum manuscript in my hand, there is nothing else like vermilion. The same it's true of aquamarine and viridian and all of those weird old words because they qualify a specific mineral. Vermillion is not only a brilliant range of shades of scarlet, it is a sulfide of mercury. Vermillion shows up in the world sometimes. It is the red color of brilliant holly berries. It is the red color of certain cardinals in fresh breeding plumage. It is a screaming slightly orangey red that you get from very few other sources. The same is true of cadmium red and lead white and all of those horrible things that you shouldn't lick your paint brush after using. Even the old books recognized how toxic a lot of this stuff was, and they cautioned people when they were making these things to work outside, to use an airy day, to avoid the fumes. The old authors recognized that with things like orpiment, which was aurum pigmentum, the color of gold, and it is the gold that you see in most good old paintings, it has the rich luster and the warmth of gold but it is made from arsenic. And even Cennino Cennini knew that you don't lick your brush. He's the guy who wrote Il Libro Del Arte. I wrote papers on the book. I did a lot of the practice work he recommends. His work in the explanation of silverpoint drawing is perfectly sufficient and I don't need a modern text. I ground rocks to make paint, I worked in real silver on gesso board and paper. I wanted to go back to first principles in some senses. And I feel like having done that gives me a grounding in the world and in art that is very different from a person who doesn't know vermilion other than it being a Pantone paint chip. I see the world in a remarkable array of color.

I haven't ever had it tested, and I know that my acuity is not as great now as it once was when my eyes were younger, but I had a conversation with someone about the way people see birds and the way birds see birds, and I think I'm slightly further along the human/bird continuum than many people. We were actually having that conversation based around what happens when you take mushrooms, and the engagement of psilocybin with the visual apparatus. I was talking about the remarkably brilliant color that you see in many of the hallucinatory experiences, and she was explaining to me the nearly hallucinatory experience of color that she has on a daily basis. I think if she's an eight, I'm a six, and average is somewhere like three to five, if that makes sense. I see a lot of the stuff that she and I were pointing out in photos, but not as intensely as how she describes it. Iridescent black birds are one of the clearest, but I see it in beetles, I see it in butterflies and iridescent wasps. I see it in a variety of natural things where I am responding to patterning that I think that a lot of people don't look at or even notice, and sometimes I need names for things like those colors. I describe my favorite color as dark opalescence, or the iridescent color of deep water with oil on it on a shady day. It is like a soap bubble, and I have been fascinated with soap bubbles and enjoy the beauty of the way they reflect and refract light and turn it into a myriad of hues as they age, but pictures of bubbles in a clear strong light against a dark background pull out the rainbow that fascinates me. All of the colors are a specific range. It's also a  range that you get in flashed copper, the copper that you hit with a torch. One of the first exposures that I had to the actual process was in a University ceramics class where a teacher was torching a copper frit glaze to make patterns that look like the scales on a butterfly's wing. I was enchanted. But peacock copper has the same range of color. There's a lot of magenta, there's a lot of a darkish blue purple, there is a lot of a brilliant sort of pale teal green and there's typically very little or no yellow or orange. Sometimes there will be a pale tawny yellow, or a very deep almost like a persimmon orange but that set of colors is my favorite color. When somebody says what's your favorite color, I come out with the story because it's not easy to point to in the real world on an instant basis, but everybody knows what I'm talking about. It is oil slick. It is iridescent sheen. You see it on the skin of certain fish and even in the meat of them sometimes. That dancing play of light fascinates me. There is no pigment that causes most of it in the real world. The wings of butterflies, the feathers of birds, the backs of beetles are all made by microscopic and nanoscopic manipulations of proteins in their chitin or keratin which create those colors. If you powder a purple beetle, there's no purple. It is entirely created in their structure. I find this absolutely fascinating and delightful. 

I have to edit some of the stuff out - because some of the weird hobbies I have explored are rare enough that my own results are the top hits. My main concern is that I don't want to get somebody calling my office to tell my boss, or showing up to beat me up or try to get me arrested. It's a little sobering. My first thought was that I didn't want to be made fun of, but because of our current climate politically it almost instantly went to "I don't want to get shot." I don't want to have hate epithets scrawled on the front of my house with spray paint. I don't want to have my car bombed. But that's the kind of thing that I am afraid of, talking about this in the wrong company. It makes me not paranoid but cautious in my conversations now. When I first discovered the mushrooms and began to fix my head, it was so brand new and so intense and so hot that I could barely shut my mouth about it and I talked to a lot of people who probably didn't ever want to know about it. Most of them were happy for my happiness, but I could see the look on some of the faces. I look forward to seeing the continued research work because that legitimizes using psychedelics the way I'm using them. I don't think that any reasonable judge could look at my website and think that I am encouraging illegal drug use for party benefit. I'm talking about situations where somebody has to judge my intent. I do not feel like this constitutes malum in se, an evil in itself. I do not have mens rea, a mind conscious of guilt. I don't have that. I don't have consciousness of doing a bad thing. I don't have bad mind about this. I am aware that the laws I'm breaking are there. I've read them. I do not feel that they are reasonable laws. I feel that they were whipped up out of paranoia and a concern for America being able to mount a strong military. That's really what it comes down to, I think, in a lot of the laws against illicit drugs. The fact that they are illicit drugs now. I think that the free-thinking and the introspection and the love and the peace and the hippie feelings that psychedelics inspire were terribly threatening to a post McCarthy America. I feel like a lot of the stigma that we have around appropriate mental health care is tied to the same thing. I think that it is an artifact of the Bikini Industrial Complex. Free thought does not grow easily in rows to make the weeding convenient. The kind of people who would take psychedelics and open their consciousness and explore their insides are not nearly as likely to listen to an order to shoot or bomb someone.

I think that that fact set back the cause of psychedelics research by decades. The pushback that we got in the 60s was phenomenal. And I will admit the way that they were doing some of the stuff was very open and very uncontrolled, and I am certain that there were some bad consequences. But getting on the bus with Timothy Leary or whatever researcher at that point had been handing out acid or mushrooms there's another one, Ram Dass. Anyway I think he's the one that was handing out mushrooms after what's his name (Gordon Wasson) came back from Mexico. But my point is they were being very open and free with things rather than being controlled and careful in some cases and I don't know how many safety rails they had around things in the beginning. I don't know if they were checking for things like schizophrenia and fragile personalities. It can certainly screw up people if it's not handled responsibly. I read an article recently that I will probably link to this about derealization. People were having flashbacks where they thought they were in mushroom world or psychedelic world, and it can make things in your daily life seem unreal for a moment. I haven't had that myself. I haven't had a sense of consensual reality being fractured. I have definitely experienced the emotional side of flashbacks though. I have been in a conversation with someone and through the emotional paths that we took and the things that we talked about I ended up in a space where the dots on the ceiling were moving. It was very weird for me. But it was like my mind recognized that psychedelic was an option and if we're going to have this deep and probing conversation about the way our minds work, psychedelic is the right space for it. When I was taking Xanax on a regular basis and needing it on a regular basis to control significant anxiety problems that would literally make me unable to function, I learned to go into Xanax space through meditation rather than medication. I think I talked about this in a previous entry. But those special spaces exist in all of our minds and we just have to explore them just right. I think that the space that Buddhist monks go to in deep meditation is very much the same space that I go to in a psychedelic trance. I've been to the Buddhist side a little. I've walked up The Path just a short ways from the foot of the mountain. But I can definitely tell that the understanding of the way the mind works and the cancellation of a lot of the noise and a lot of the nagging things that distract an upset us, is the same. That sense of powerful clarity and ability to focus on something like light or color or a train of thought is very much the same in my psychedelically altered self and my well-meditated self. There has actually been significant research on some of that.

I would love to make another batch of that same soup. If I'm not mixed up, I have one or two blocks of it in the deep freeze that I'm not planning to touch for 6 months, but I am pretty sure I took the last of the ones that was not the saving ones. One cube is a moderate trip; two cubes was a very strong trip. I was in a level four quite definitely. I never got to the point in that trip where I was completely divorced from reality. I didn't believe I was a bunny or think that I was floating through infinite space or anything like that; I could still sense my body fairly strongly. I could still continue to type with my voice and make cogent English, and my arguments were clear. But the struggle to write in that space was very real. It was like I was having to shape the words with my hands out of wet clay or something. It was deep enough that even though I was still connected to my phone and dictating English, it was a strong effort of will. I don't feel like that much psychedelic is good for me on a regular basis. It is difficult to bounce back from, in the sense of the whole rest of the day is weird. With this milder kind of trip, I can pop up in another say 2 hours and go to the grocery store or fold laundry. I may actually start folding laundry here in a few minutes. It helps me to feel engaged and productive and connected if I keep doing all of those things. But with a really deep trip, it's got to be almost like a camping experience. You've got to plan on having nothing else to do with the rest of your day. And when I did that the first time with the soup, I had not made those plans. I had not planned anything for the afternoon, which was good, but I had not taken it in a full awareness that my whole day would be that impacted. That's one of the difficulties in working with real mushrooms rather than an injected dose of 25 mg of pure psilocybin. You never know for sure how strong something is until you've put it in your brain. And one of the delights and glories of working with fresh mushrooms is that there's an ensemble effect that the research so far almost completely fails to replicate. A lot of these chemicals I don't have a very strong knowledge of and I haven't done enough writing them down in charts and things like that; some of them are hallucinogens present in other plant medicines. But I haven't taken any psychedelic other than the mushrooms and one brief attempt at LSD which I think was underpowered because the LSD was too old; someone gave it to me because it had sat in her refrigerator for a very long time and her brother had done it forever ago and she didn't know if it was still any good. It was interesting. I got to like a Level 1 trip; there was some waviness on the pavement, but no colors. I want to try the real stuff. I want to see what difference it has to psilocybin, and I want to understand the psychological territory that allows me to work in. But it's nothing that is urgent for me. I don't have a strong sense of needing to research all of this stuff and go on an Ayahuasca journey next weekend. I do not feel that way about this right now. I know people. I could take most of those trips without leaving the state or even the city. But, I've kind of got my hands full with what I'm doing with the mushrooms right now. I definitely do want to do more fresh cooking.

I'm only half joking when I say that I do the things that Republicans scare their kids with.

And that's true both in terms of the weird gayness and in terms of the psychedelic tripping. I know that there are plenty of people who are told that one dose of magic mushrooms can make you criminally insane for the rest of your life. That they'll make you jump out of high windows because you think you can fly. That you'll fracture your connection with reality. My experience has been the total opposite - I feel more connected to the world around me than I ever have. 

The soup was made together with a batch of portobello mushroom soup. I took a measured dose, I think in that case it was almost exactly 125g , and I dosed enough soup to make one quart which divided neatly into 10 of those cubes, thinking that two of those 12.5 g cubes would be 25 g of fresh mushroom, which is very very roughly equivalent to the 2.5 mg of psilocybin which is what they give you in the studies. And that's really the reason that I've stuck with that number, is because that is the studied number and when they did testing to determine if the neurological benefits in terms of axon growth were the same with small doses, 10 mg had no such effect. And so I don't feel like for me microdoses would have been able to fix my big problems. I do feel like now microdoses could be helpful and in many cases delightful. I just haven't explored it that much.

But if I wanted to make microdose soup, I would take something like 30g of fresh mushroom and treat them the same way. I would chop them down, sauté them in butter, knock in a little bit of cream just to make them pull together and pick up the juice out of the pan because I don't know how much of the psychedelic stuff runs out in the juice, and then put all of that into a quart of soup and divide it up.

I made portobello mushroom soup the same day so that it was all fresh and wet at the same time and then I just blended in with a stick blender the special mushrooms into the container of soup to be dosed until everything was perfectly homogenous and then portioned it out into the giant ice cube molds. So I would do the same thing, but do math to where I would get roughly a third of a gram worth of dried which would be 3 g of wet, which is a very small amount of mushroom if you're looking at it, but that's what the microdose would be, is something like a third of a gram dry equivalent. Now being fresh mushroom and being cooked you will definitely need to experiment with dosage to make sure that it's sub perceptual. But the taste of the stuff is just exactly cream of mushroom soup. I could possibly tell if someone switched the bowls for me, like a blind Pepsi taste test, but I could not swear to the fact that I could identify which one was which. The dosed or the undosed. I taste a bitter chemical quite strongly when I take lemon tek or make tea. If I dilute the tea enough and sweeten it and put something tart enough like hibiscus to make a flavor that is not the mushroom flavor, it's not really gross. But it's not delicious. The mushroom soup is delicious. The mushroom chocolates are delicious. One of the things that I love about putting them in something like chocolate or in soup and then freezing it is that it stops the chemical reactions. Air does not have access to the center and so it cannot oxidize or spoil the chemistry as quickly as it would if you had just a mushroom in the freezer or a mushroom in the refrigerator. Even a dried mushroom will off gas significantly and the potency goes down over time much more quickly if they're not kept in cool vacuum. But once they're sealed inside something, it's much more stable. Or at least that's what the reading that I'm doing is indicating. And my experience with taking the stuff after months of time, because this has been in the freezer for 2 months and not only is it still perfectly potent, I would still serve it to any dinner guest. The stuff is still delicious and doesn't get weird consistency or clump or fracture out the ice or anything like that. Of course some of this depends on technique. They are frozen and then stored in vacuum packs to prevent freezer burn. They are cooked and then immediately frozen fresh in order to maximize the preservation of consistency. I'm not into anything like spray freezing but I imagine that commercial that would probably be a very good way to do this. The point being that the stuff, once frozen, seems to decay much less.

You have to cook the mushroom to get the water out of it before it will freeze well. That's something that I got from Alan. He's one of the lead researchers in a lot of this stuff, and if he says it I consider it absolutely gold. But he says that once frozen, the cooked mushrooms are fairly stable and last well. I don't think that there's been any chemical assay testing done with this.

I know I've talked about this in previous entries and with y'all but the charts that everybody points to to show that psilocybin is degraded under freezing are pointing to powdered mushroom being stored in open air as something like negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit. I think we're probably a little ways off from somebody with a big lab wanting to test homestyle frozen mushroom soup.

Everybody reads the headlines and the press release, and not a lot of people read the study. I'll admit that I do it myself, studies are tedious and challenging to read. But if you don't at least get into the methodology portion enough to understand what's going on methodologically, you have no right to comment about the results or use that graph when you're trying to make a point.

And now I think I may have to make a double dactyl poem around methodologically. I was fascinated with a double-dactyls when I was in high school. That use of the rollicking language rhythms absolutely fascinated me and of course I was a dude who knew big words and weird people and I could tie big weird words to those people

They all start with nonsense. Pocketa pocketa or higgledy-piggledy or something like that. Then the name, then two other lines and then the weird word and then a final line. The word has to be a double-dactyl. Some people allow for the use of compounds or two words in the position, but the purists don't. The name pretty much needs to be a double dactyl or there needs to be some way in which it is said easily which is a double dactyl. It's like manufacturing little crystals of poetry. They have words in them in the same way that a diamond necklace has carbon crystals. You think of them both as the vocabulary term with its denotative and connotative meanings and also as a little shaped brick like something you can play Tetris with. I was fascinated with this kind of poetry in high school. Some of it is fairly good. Much of it is very high school. And I'm not just talking about the double dactyls, which I only made a couple of because they're just not easy to find the right combinations, but I did a lot of writing in rigid poetic forms when I was in high school. One of my favorites was iambic hexameter. The thing Shakespeare used was pentameter and the five-footed line rolls fairly smoothly and sounds in places like natural speech. A 6-footed line marches like a centipede. It is so structured that it needs to be very regular and not something that gets played around with much like pentameter does. Added to the fact that I also enjoyed assonance and consonance and in-rhyme and things like that, my poetry was sometimes like it was made out of sprung wire. The Moon, a maid in white upon a steed of black, rides solemnly and slow across the ebon sky; And leaving not a trace to mark her silver track glides on upon her way across the Heavens high. Yeah I had to use words like that because they would fit into the amount of space left for a descriptor.

Some of that stuff is starting to rattle around in my head again now. Some of that I look at and recognize as immature emotional passions that I didn't really fully understand at the point. I don't know now, if I would be able to sacrifice emotional content to the extent that you have to be able to get the Tetris brick. When I write now in terms of thinking like poetry, it is shuttled along and turned and collided with words based on their feeling rather than their metric value. It's difficult to weigh words by the gram like that and have intense feeling suffuse the whole thing. It can definitely be done. Great poets do it. Some of the stuff that Coleridge and Shelly and Yeats and some of the others wrote was exceptionally structured like that. But the work that they did that was more popular in many cases was less rigid.

I'm having an inability to recall the name of a poet (WB Yeats). I can quote lines of his but I can't remember the name of the dude that wrote it. He's Irish; I remember that he wrote a great deal using Fairyland as a metaphor and a lot of the old Welsh or Gaelic words for things. "The jester walked in the garden. The garden had fallen still. He bade his soul rise upwards, and sing it her windowsill. The young Queen would not listen, she rose in her pale night gown; She drew in the heavy windows, and pulled the shutters down." Something like that. I may not have it entirely perfect. But that kind of highly crystalline, almost chant-like rhythm is what I love. That one's iambic hexameter as well. 

But his dreams of Fairyland were very much the theme of my high school and college life. I kept hearing the song of the silver fishes. I kept listening to voices from the tree in the garden. I remember talking to a friend of mine and watching huge cloud of moths, many of them I now know as giant silk moths, Luna and Polyphemus and Regalis and Io, as well as all their smaller brethren, fluttering around a sodium vapor light. It was up in our backyard and went on every night. And I said they must be fairies. That light must be a door. And I felt like if I could get the fairies to hand me a book it would have my name written on the cover and I would open the book and step into it and go away. Or I would be tormented by madness because I had experienced it. I always looked for the doors in the trees. I wanted to leave the world a lot. This world was unkind; it was confusing; it was terrifying very often, and the idea of being able to go to a magical place where all I needed to remember to do was turn my jacket inside out and carry salt and silver in my pockets was exceptionally appealing for me. It was a dream that I really felt very deeply and dreamed about often at night and I didn't usually in those dreams go into a door or change into an animal, but there would be dreams where I was a different kind of person and my people would come and find me and take me away. In one of them I was a dragon-person, and I remember breathing fire and setting fire to the straw in a barn and having to fly away and I woke up and had peed myself. But I was so excited about going to be with my dragon people. I don't remember how old I was but I couldn't have been more than seven or eight. It's still very distinct. I can smell the stable. My sense of my large scaly body is very strong even now. When I would hold on to a submerged log snag in the creek where we went to play and close my eyes and dive under the swift-flowing water such that I felt it zooming around my entire body, pulling my hair back from my face and pressing my eyelids so that I was like a merman or like a dolphin and I could curve my body and feel the way the current zoomed along my skin. That was what it was like to go into the world of water. And that was another place that I wish that I could have stayed. There were dreams in which I could breathe underwater, there were hours that I would spend at the creek doing nothing but that. Not all at one time perhaps because it became too comfortable and the best way to experience the brilliant shock of it was to stand up for a while, because this was only hip deep water, and get out of the water and be a land person for a little while and then go back into the creek and hold on to the snag and let the current take me and I was flying again. It was very much more like my experience of parachuting then it was like my experience of scuba diving. The zooming is so strong. There's almost nothing you can get human- propelled with fins that gives you the same zipping sense of the water shuttering all around you. There's a Korean spa not far from here, and they have a pool with these strong water jets, where the intent is that you should normally sit with your back against the jets and then the water vigorously massages your back and shoulders. But if you hold on to the grip bars, and instead submerge your entire body, you get to be 12 again. I nearly cried the first time I figured that out. I'm sure that everybody sitting around watching me thought I was some kind of weirdo, and of course I am some kind of weirdo, but I do that every time we go there. The warm water and the zipping current soothes and excites something very visceral in me and it's not like a roller coaster ride but it's like being able to fly like a bird again. I can fly like a bird with a lot of my dreams. Except it's not bird-like most of the time. Sometimes I will actually have bird-like flight where I can move swiftly and maneuver nimbly, but most of the time I am rising into the air with my awkward mammal body and I have to propel myself with vigorous sculling of my arms and often there is a sort of running and leaping where the whole point is diving toward the ground and gaining momentum to then swoop up higher. After five or six swoops I could get beyond the grab of gravity and fly and be able to look down on trees. It is exactly the same flight pattern that a male hummingbird uses in its courting dance, although they have a more consistent arc and mine were always higher higher higher. It was almost like when someone pushes you on a swing and then you begin to lean back into the swing chains and push yourself with your own manipulation of gravity. The muscular motion of setting you out of counterpoise becomes propulsion. Flight in dreams for me like that was very common. I get it very infrequently now. Some of that is because I am not currently in good lucid dreaming shape. 

Lucid dreaming shape is almost like running shape. It's a thing you can do, and then stop doing, and then you get flabby and weird and can't do it and then you can pick it up again. I want to pick it up again. This is something of a resolution for me; it's a thing that I want to devote my time to a little bit. It involves waking up in the morning and taking time to recall dreams and journal them in at least brief note form and then later go into them in longer form to recognize things like dreams signs. Very often in dreams bizarre stereotypical things happen. If I find myself in school, am I dreaming? If I find myself flying in the air, am I dreaming? It's that constant questioning. It's actually a Buddhist thing as well. The Buddhists did a whole Yoga of Dreams that is exceptionally powerful although it is a little bit beyond what I ever done. But the consciousness becomes trained to recognize the state of dream and that recognition, like I said, is a thing that you can get in shape with or out of shape with in just the same way that you can become fluent in remembering all the Latin names of your garden plants because you have a society that you attend where you discuss hybridization and culture and the Latin names are important, but then if you don't keep up with them, 5 years later you don't remember half of the scientific part. It's the same. The brain focuses its attention on what we direct it toward, and it gains facility and fluency in the things that we have given cogency and importance in our lives. So by taking time in the morning to wake up and journal my dreams, I impress upon my mind not only that I want to understand my dreams, but the fact that dreaming is important. That's what I need to do to get back to lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming was remarkably therapeutic for me in many ways. When you get to that state, you can ask a direct question of your subconscious. Often you get very weird answers or the ground shakes like thunder and everything goes dark or something happens like that, but sometimes you just get an answer. Sometimes you hear it as a literal voice, sometimes you have a feeling or an understanding that suddenly makes sense out of a pattern you've been seeing in your life again and again, but other times you'll get an allegorical explanation that you can then parse apart in thinking. 

One time in a dream I was being chased by a bully with a club with nails. I hid in a bedroom at my grandmother's house under one of the antique beds, and he busted through the door and I became aware that I was dreaming and asked him who he was and realized that he was internalized homophobia, he was me beating myself up. I hugged him and he faded into sparkles, dissolving into me. I reintegrated that part of myself in that moment in that dream and it's been fixed ever since. I'm not saying that my internalized homophobia isn't still there. I'm saying that I know it and I'm aware of it and I recognize the social forces that created it and I don't dream of it as a man with a club with nails anymore. One of the authors that I've read about a lot of psychological stuff her name is Emily Nagoski, and her twin sister is Amelia Nagoski. Amelia is a choir director and a brilliant speaker and totally out of touch with her own body to the point that she had constipation that required going to a medical doctor and spending time in the hospital because her bowels became impacted. She ended up doing some of the work of learning about her own body's signals through lucid dreaming. I find that incredibly helpful to think about.

One of the authors that I've read about dreaming, and I don't remember which one it was that said this, but it was one of the Buddhists: someone asked what it means if we have a recurring dream. He said that dreams are us teaching ourselves a truth. And sometimes we recognize that we are poor learners. I laughed so hard, but it is so true. Every time I've had a recurring dream, it is something that I am trying to understand or a difficulty that I am trying to figure out and if I can understand that my tornadoes are a fear of catastrophic life events that I can't predict and my creepy guys in the alley are me trying to figure out how to deal with aggressive strangers who try to manipulate your thinking, that sort of understanding almost always ends the recurrence of a recurrent nightmare. It doesn't always fix the problem, but being able to look at it and tell the subconscious, "I've got it. I see it. I understand the message you're trying to put across," the unconscious feels seen and understood and appreciated and the vital work that it is doing trying to scare me away from things that are bad for me is respected. Because that's what's going on - there's a part of me that is trying to warn me or shield me from or prepare me for something and it feels that I am vulnerable or unaware, and once I make that connection and figure out that the building that keeps crumbling around me is representative of needing to take better care of my health or whatever the message might be, once I get the message, then my dreams stop being unpleasant about that. It's almost like it can't speak English. It has to speak allegory. The dreaming mind is amazingly powerful if we explore what it can do, but it doesn't often communicate in clear language

I am much more in tune with Jung, then I am with Freud. I think that Freud's analysis of dreams is simplistic and entirely colored by his own system of organizing thought, and I feel like the power and the majesty and the importance of dreams become ridiculous and over-simplistic when you look at them through a Freudian lens. It only wants to recognize the things that are Freudian and cut off all of the rest of our personalities. I'm not saying that there aren't some insights to be gained through interpreting things as sexual drive or parent aggression or whatever, but I feel like that is very often one of half a dozen different angles going on in a dream or in a psychological situation and I don't think that Freud has helped me as much as the works of others like Carl Young, Robert moss, Patricia Garfield.  Steven Laberge. These guys gave me ways of understanding my dreaming self that were powerful in my life. Dreams would not only be delightful and pleasant and artistic creative inspiration, but I could solve big problems in them in a lot of ways. I could put the power of that nonverbal mind to work on a problem or an issue or a feeling and I would recognize when I dreamed about the thing that I was trying to work on but it was a group of oddly shaped wading birds walking through snow, I would still recognize whatever the message was because I had asked the question. It was like learning to read an oracle. Learning to row [Tarot] really helped. Learning to row was also awesome but I haven't used it as much in my life. We used to canoe with the scouts and I've been in a canoe some other times in my life and I enjoy it, but it's not the word I was looking for.

But understanding that kind of allegorical language. A woman lies awake in bed oppressed by nine swords, unable to sleep. That kind of thing is remarkably instantly powerful in your mind and once you understand a symbolic vocabulary that includes things like the Medusa and Icarus and the Three of Cups and the Mexican understanding of moths and all of this weird symbolic language stuff, I'm not saying that my dreams are necessarily weirder than the dreams of ordinary people, but they are certainly more interpretable to me because I recognize the language of dream metaphor in which they speak and quite often if they are responding to a question, because I know the question I can understand how watching leaves fall off the garage roof answers it. But having that allowed me to go into my dream journal and parse out things that would have otherwise been nonsense. One of the things, and I don't remember which dream author I read this in, but most of the stuff that we see, the visuals, the patterns of things happening, are tied to what is called day residue. It's bits and fragments of things that were cogent during your day, often in ways that you didn't even recognize. So you might see a section of street that you went down, or a street that reminds you of the street that you were on, or you may have had a memory of the street you grew up on while you were driving on a particular residential street, and your dream will place you on that street you grew up on because of it. But I see things like colors, unusual animals, news stories, interesting things I've read in books, this kind of stuff pops up in my dreams. The stuff that the dream is knitted out of is made from daily life. The feelings are like shapes underneath the knitting; they are like marbles under a tablecloth. The marbles are the genuine parts. Once you recognize the feeling, the feelings are very often the parts that you can really work with. The superficial dressing is usually just some sort of explanation of what the feeling is made out of; a quilt of various things you saw over the course of the past day to 5 days. When I stood in the tiny decrepit house trailer with my grandmother and she pressed needles into my hand, and I mean she passed me a pack of needles, not that she stuck them into my fingers, but she gave me the tools of stitching. And the feeling as it happened was so deep and so meaningful and so powerful. It was the love and the gratitude that was real in the dream. That's the important part. The trailer we were in didn't matter. The things that I saw on the walls were mostly things that I had picked up the day previous just going about my daily life. The room itself was a mix of buildings I've been in. But the love. It still makes me cry now. It was so deep and so powerful. I need to go look that dream up again, because I think there were needles in one hand and paint brushes and a pencil in the other, but she handed them to me like she was some kind of goddess bestowing a gift. I am thankful for those gifts everyday.

Although I had a lot of problems with my dad, and although there were things in my family that have not been easy, I had in some ways the kind of loving family that many people dream about. Both my grandmothers taught me to create and to make beauty. Both my grandfathers taught me to garden and to care for land and to recognize and study and understand the natural world. I recognize my incredible good fortune and having them all as long as I did. I learned much of this from my father and my mother as well, but for some reason the particular lessons of stitching and drawing came from that older generation. I think some of it is that you spend so much time fighting with your dad, it's difficult to relax and sense the love in rebuilding a carburetor, especially when my weirdness and his temper would interact poorly and he would get angry and shout and slam tools on the table. But I recognize as an adult, and I have thanked him and talk to him about those things, and how I recognize that that is valuable and important to me. From my dad I gained an understanding of computers work, not only in the sense of being able to work with them a little bit, but understanding how they operate, how databases work, how search commands perform their functions. I learned about machines. I learned about electricity; I learned about gardening; I learned about woodworking all kinds of things from my dad. I learned to cook and to sew and to make a home for my mother. All of them, my grandparents and my parents, all instilled in me a love of learning and reading and appreciating stories and writing and education and nature. I know that I am exceptionally lucky in those things. When I talk about hiding under the bed or spending time in the bottom of the closet because I was afraid, it is all very real but at the same time I have to remember that the same father who yelled at me for letting a flower bed go to weeds and then threatened to mow it down, was the one who taught me how to compost and how to dig, and his tomatoes are still better than mine.

I always feel like it's not a good trip unless I've had a good cry. They are so emotional for me almost every time. Some of them can be very powerfully intellectual, and I get so caught up in the intellect that I am not as deeply moved. But almost every trip there is some point that my face is completely cracked with tears. I'm not talking about the running down my cheeks, which happens probably 60% of the time or more that I'm tripping, just because I'm digging into emotional stuff. I'm talking about ones where if you were watching video instead of reading a report, there would be 20 or 30 seconds at a time between when I'm able to summon a word. They are very intense almost every time. At least at some point. There is some moment in the trip that hits a deep nerve and I feel very connected to beauty and tradition and family and love and human support. The overwhelming waves of gratitude are very powerful. I'm still trying to figure out how to process what happened yesterday; my dad forgave our house note. So that means about 5 years of being ahead on payments because we were making payments fine, but that's a huge gratitude that is almost impossible to figure out how to thank him for appropriately. I think it's probably going to be a handwritten letter. One of the good studies on gratitude worked with this particular methodology where they had the participants right a letter of thanks to another person, a detailed letter and then they would read it aloud in the presence of the other person. It is life-changing. It radically rearranges depression and feelings of disconnectedness and anxiety because it focuses intensely on feelings of being loved and supported and cared for and I need to look up and we'll make a link to the study in this, but I also want to point to Andrew Huberman's explanations of it because he had a whole long podcast episode about gratitude protocols, and I think that that may be what I need to do. I've done this with my boss. Having the actual letter allows me to think through precisely what I want to say and to not be dissuaded in the moment because my face cracks. And then, of course they have the letter. They can go back. They can refresh the memories on their side of being caring and loving and supportive. So it's good all around. It is the best effect of any of the gratitude studies, so far as I'm aware. But I think that may be what I need to do.

I think I may need to do it again with my boss, the one time that I did something like that it was fairly brief and it was years ago. I need to do that with my husband as well. I express gratitude in my daily life as much as I can remember and manage to do so, but I recognize that often I am caught up in other thought and I don't say as much as I am thinking. I will say thank you, but it doesn't carry as much content as what's going on in my head sometimes. My train of thought is often very busy. However, the more time you spend loading your freight trains with gratitude, the better your life is.