Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I like telling drug stories. They're both funny and revelatory. That said, let me strongly emphasize — and I say this from experience — drugs are dangerous, and if you have any psychological difficulties, drugs will amplify those difficulties and seriously screw up your life if you don't treat them with enormous respect.

My feeling is that psychedelic drugs should be treated exclusively as spiritual tools in order to allow you to explore yourself, the universe, and the relationship between the two (much like my personal feelings about suspension and similar acts). If you're looking for recreation, let me recommend sex and/or masturbation — it's a lot safer and a lot more “fun”.

I was smoking DMT mixed with pot (“tryptamine giggles”) which basically takes a small subset of DMT's psychedelic effects and adds them to the grass. This was in early fall and it was still very warm out. Being that it was a gorgeous sunny day, I walked back and sat at the edge of the corn field.

I had made a powdered mix that was mostly pot, but with some DMT crystals ground into it. On smoking it in my favourite piece of glass, I felt the marijuana hit me much faster than usual. Nothing scary: I'd only smoked a little, but a very “crisp” feeling stone was immediate.

I started to hear a WHOMP WHOMP WHOMP WHOMP type noise… I couldn't figure out what it was, so I just wrote it off as some drug effect and laid back in the grass. I looked up into the sky and saw a crow flying far overhead. As I watched, I realized that somehow the sound I'd been hearing was the beating of its wings!

I watched it fly for a little while, absolutely fascinated that my senses had been amplified to such a level, and then was distracted by another sound, a shallow CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK coming from the grass about twenty feet to the left of me. As I looked in that direction, my eyes reshaped themselves into telephoto lenses, and individual blades of grass filled nearly my entire field of vision with perfect clarity.

I moved effortlessly from blade to blade, focusing without difficulty on any object I chose. An instant later my eyes caught the source of the clicking noise — a small beetle-like insect climbing up one of the leaves. I zoomed in to the point where I could see his joints bending, and every time his little exoskeletal leg hit the grass, I heard it make a faint clicking sound.

None of this seemed odd to me at the time, nor did any of it appear to be anything other than one hundred percent real — there was no feeling of hallucination or distortion whatsoever.

After that, I turned back to the sky, watched a few lone clouds move across the otherwise blue field, and, within ten minutes of the first inhalation, my perceptions had fearlessly returned to normal. I can't tell you if it really happened, or if it was a dream… That said, I don't believe it was a dream.