DOSE:	100 mg	oral	MDMA
			Cannabis

BODY WEIGHT:

95 kg

I have been using a variety of psycedelics, entactogens and marijuana on a fairly regular basis during the past year or so, and I have discovered an interesting (to me at least) property of marijuana that I thought might be interesting to share. I have no idea whether this experience is fundamental (what I mean by 'fundamental' here is 'typically experienced by all individuals'). I do know that for myself it only become apparent at higher doses, so it may well be that it is fundamental, but only at sufficient dose.

Now something which I have come to realise for quite a while is that I tend to enjoy marijuana more when I am alone than when I am in the company of people , but the reason for this only fully crystallised in my thoughts clearly very recently (in fact, today is Wednesday, and only this weekend, on Sunday to be exact, did full realisation finally occur).

Since the experience itself was also interesting, I thought I'd describe the experience itself, and intermittently offer a small quasi-analysis of what may be involved in the mental processes that lead me to experience things in this particular way.

Before I continue, though, I do note with some sense of caution that I would lie to suggest that the experiences were all enjoyable. If you read on you will discover why, for me, the use of higher-dose marijuana will from now on have to be when I am isolated, or at best with very close friends. If you are one of those who have never had any difficulties using marijuana with many random people present, maybe reading on is not the best advice, if it may so happen that these descriptions become suggestions for your next trip :-)

But before I go into details of exactly how the past Sunday played out, lets go back a little. Here in sunny South Africa one usually finds a decent grass before finding hash. That said, it would be a gross lie to suggest that hash is not available, it's just not something I find as easily. Now saying that grass is your typical find, the quality can range from very poor to truly wonderful. A 'brand' which I often indulge in, is locally called 'california orange'; now while the 'california' part shall, for me, surely remain a mystery; at least the 'orange' part kind of rings true: the heads clearly show thin sticky orange threads that I am told are the true reason these tend to sell for a little more than usual. So this is 'typical' fare: I've got myself one of these little credit-card pipe-bongs and it works wonders. At home I usually partake three to five decent inhalations, by which time the presence of minor kinesthetic hallucinations are a clear signal to myself that I am at 'the comfy level'.

Now here I should quickly interject to note that 'comfy level' is somewhat dependent on set (or is that setting?). Here I specifically refer to the presence of other individuals. Almost unconsciously, I've always had an inner voice that somewhat limited my willingness to partake in higher doses whenever I have friends over. What could possibly be the reason for this? Could it be merely that I'm afraid I might 'do something crazy', that ever-present fear of 'losing the plot', 'doing something stupid' that people so often associate with getting high? I always thought so, and so I never gave it a second thought.

However, this weekend, after a fairly long party that lasted a whole evening thanks to a very enjoyable dose of MDMA, that inner voice, found itself silenced. As a result, in the presence of a fairly large crowd of people, I had smoked a considerably larger-than-usual dose of marijuana from what turned out to be a hash/tobacco mixture. The result, I have to say, was beyond what my imagination, and would finally lead me to understand why I have always had an inner voice that cautioned me from higher marijuana doses, whenever I'm in the presence of strangers. And it has nothing to do with 'doing something stupid'.

How do we interpret sentences? If I say 'look how funny that dog is walking?!' well, you expect to see a dog, and you expect to see it doing something atypical. This atypical action would be similar to walking, but since it does not exactly resemble walking, you expect that the act was sufficient reason to give the person talking that inner moment that culminates in a smile. So aside from the sentence itself, these are also a series of inner expectations generated, and each of these puts the sentence in some context. Now this sentence was chosen to make the context obvious, unfortunately (and maybe typically for people in altered states of mind) a sentence can also easily be constructed to make the context very difficult to gauge.

And this, my dear readers, is the reason why I have that inner voice. Because in order to make sense of discourse, context, which is often subconsciously expressed, is more difficult than usual to interpret - and I will soon give reason why. For now I will only give an example. I am sitting nice and comfy in a crowd of ten odd people and I notice someone looking in my direction, looking for quite a while. Then he comes over and says softly 'look how funny, is that, were you, talking?' and he sits back and for a moment I cannot say, at all, what the context is. He looks over to his mate and they suddenly start laughing. Now I weren't talking. But they thought I were. But was I? For a moment I'm sure I wasn't. But suddenly I can't remember. He asked: 'were you, talking?' And that short delay focussed my thoughts on his question. And being stoned the act of focussing is enough to displace the momentary train of thought as being stoned typically does. And it is too late, neither myself nor him can say: was anything said? We don't know!

Of course, the funny thing is, nothing was ever said. (Yeah, the REALLY funny thing in retrospect, sorry; I couldn't help it :-D) Seeing me, he thought I said something, but being stoned he was in the same strange world I was, where what was really happening was: we could not clearly interpret facial expressions. So when context is lost, he cannot be sure whether I did say something; and I cannot tell whether he is joking, is trying to make a joke at my expense, or is his sentence actually supposed to have an aggressive tone? If you read it again, which is it? Where is the accent, is it on 'funny', on 'you', or on 'talking'? What exactly does the sentence mean? Without the relevant context, one cannot clearly say... In fact, by this point no-one can even remember why the sentence was said at all! And this is what marijuana does, for me. Aside from the tendency to focus on local thought (which I'm fairly used to), it also opens up options.

I have in the past experienced this lack of context, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. I typically found myself taking a little longer than usual to answer sometimes rather obvious questions but thought it was rather that I had to keep the question in mind more 'strongly'. Here I mean I thought that I had to focus my mind more clearly on the question in order not to forget it, and because of all the energy going into keeping the question in mind, it takes a little longer to answer, but that isn't it. The question has really lost some of its meaning. And so most of the time is spent trying to focus on what the context was. Because the context is not immediately apparent, it takes a little longer.

So to get back to our story. What happened next? And this is where it got a little bit scary: I realised that I cannot give a meaningful answer. The best answer was not to answer. But as soon as the thought cemented, I effectively became aphasic. I realised that no coming question will make enough sense for me to attempt an answer and that was a little disconcerting, because I experienced myself in a space where it is imperative that I should be able to answer questions, should they come in order not too appear the fool; lol! so I guess in some strange way I really was thinking I'm 'doing something stupid'! - the act of not acting, ... weird! The best solution was clearly to flee the moment. That is ultimately what I did, and two hours later that sense of uncertainty was still enough to prevent me from making conversation. A range of rather complex and interesting religious insights some good some bad some genuinely bizarre followed, but that's a different story.

The drive home two hours later (I was thankfully not behind the steering wheel) was spent sitting in the back, every once in a while looking for some sign in my mates' faces, to see if they noticed how confused I actually was. Of course, they didn't. In fact: my best mate later told me (did I notice a tinge of anger even?) that she is disappointed I felt I had to 'hide' as she would never ever 'laugh' at me. But so powerful was the realisation at that moment that I was in the space 'without context', that my only resolve was to exclude myself...

So what remains is only to discuss why this happens? My best thinking at present links up with the notion of free association. Marijuana makes it possible to connect sometimes very unexpected things in unusual and interesting ways. However, in order to us to correctly interpret context, requires of us to make such connections unconsciously. In fact, I would wager that our minds need this ability in general day-to-day activity to correctly interpret signals that are usually not part of the conscious realm. For us to make sense of each other, we need our imaginative, free associative ability; without it we could never interpret each other correctly. Part of this free associative internal process is sieving through how we imagine specific contexts would look when someone else says something, and then once someone actually says something, we can (maybe even without any conscious effort) link the correct internal context to the one we are actually presented with... and so 'normal' consciousness is possible. But by liberating that creative power, the marijuana requires that that perception to be performed consciously. And as with so many things in life, processes running subconsciously run there because they are too exhaustive to track consciously; and this is exactly what I have discovered.

So at least now that I know my ability to track context is severely impaired when I'm stoned , the simple and obvious solution to this problem is thus: to get heavily stoned, but only when I'm not in the presence of people I don't know very well. In fact, for those blow-your-mind sessions, I will choose to experience those in the privacy of my home... there the only relevant context is my own, and so far I have managed not to get too lost there.

Or rather: whenever I do get lost, I've also forgotten getting lost anyways, in which case, it doesn't matter that much either way... Now, where's that bong!

Exp Year: 2010	ExpID: 90693
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 30
Published: Nov 8, 2019	Views: 563
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