2 weeks on...

...and how things have changed.

For the better, I should add. Even though I knew it was only pride and stubbornness that was stopping me getting help, it was still impossible to actually overcome these (irrational) things alone. I'm sure that everyone else could probably see what was going on too (I'm lucky to have people around who will take notice of such things) and of course in the end it was an outside intervention that pretty much forced me to take action.

Now I'm on the road, it seems pointless to fight it, I might as well embrace whatever it brings along; there might be some interesting new experiences to be had. And (the initial couple of days aside) it's been good so far. Much less edge. It'll be interesting to appraise the situation once the course is through; as I think it's been pretty effective so far, I would imagine I'll be getting a repeat prescription but maybe with a tapering-off. We'll see.

The thing I'm most glad about is that despite being pretty off it for the three months April-May-June (whilst deluding myself to the nth degree that I was 100% with it), I don't seem to have harmed my memory or capacity to think at all, which - given that I wasn't eating or sleeping properly either, especially towards the end - is a fuck of a relief. The couple of days after the 4th July, I wasn't sure what was going to happen to be honest; there were still elements of the real and not-real getting mixed up. But that all passed. I can look back on the whole scene with remarkable clarity now and separate pretty clearly the real bits from the hallucinatory bits.

I will come back to this again and again, I'm sure, because the hallucinatory bits were very interesting indeed and not necessarily just absurdist crap. There were two definite states of consciousness that I was able to move freely between on that night - call them "real" and "dream" - and I realise that some of the "dream" stuff was tempered by the outside influence of the "real" stuff, but some of the things I saw (and realised) were big, about as big as they come. Big Ideas.

Trouble is, some of these ideas were a bit too big for me to grasp at the time, so although I can recall certain aspects perfectly, I've only got a vague notion of some of the other concepts that were flying around at the time. And I'm sure some parts of it have either gone for good; there was a lot going on that night and even at the time I realised that - at best - I was only tenuously aware of some of the bigger concepts. I could feel things slipping and sliding in the memory even as they were happening, so I'm guessing my recall might not be completely accurate.

It's not like I entered an altered state and saw the face of God or encountered some sort of universal truth or anything, but the ideas I was having and the things I was seeing did seem to represent the whole of everything; all that had gone before, all that is now and all that will happen in the future - all of that formed a kind of continuum: analogous to the electromagnetic spectrum rather than a timeline. I think that was the crux of it anyway, that all past, present and future events, people, things, all co-exist and are actually part of a larger body, one of whose dimensions is time. When I wrote earlier of having the sensation of being able to move between two different states, it was as though I could alter the physical properties of my body to shift between the "real" and the "dream"...I know, it doesn't make much sense and I'm describing it incredibly badly. I'll have another go one day, maybe I can get it down a bit more clearly, given a bit more processing time.

So...yeah.