First Ayahuasca Experience

I've been reading so much about ayahuasca, and viewing videos online, that I decided to take the plunge and try it.  I had flirted with the idea of doing this last summer, and I purchased shredded caapi vine and brewed it, but I couldn't find a source for psychotria viridis and accepted that I couldn't find a source and simply froze the brew (after two full days' work of boiling, adding more water, boiling again, adding more water, boiling again, straining and reducing the strained brew while boiling and straining the vine twice more).  I had read online that caapi brew keeps well frozen.  Anyway, after a lot of reading and a lot more soul searching--including, especially, considering my intentions--I tracked down a source for the psychotria and added them to the mixture, repeating the process described above.

Before I describe what I experienced last night, I need to note a few important facts and factors.  To begin with, I have never in my life taken an illicit substance, and I've never even so much as smoked a cigarette.  I didn't take my first sip of alcohol until I was 22 years old because I was afraid of becoming addicted, as alcoholism runs in my (Irish--go figure) family.  So I have never experienced a psychedelic or hallucinogenic substance with a single exception: about ten years ago, I made a very, very weak tea from a brugmansia (datura, angel's trumpet, etc.) flower and took maybe three sips.  Within minutes, my pupils were almost the size of my irises, when I walked I felt as if I were stepping through the floor, and I went straight to bed and lie there for about twelve hours in a state of acute and severe panic, and I felt certain I was going to die.  It was a nightmarish experience and I have never been tempted to try it again.  I did it pretty much on a whim and out of boredom.  Other than that, I have taken several prescription drugs, including for the past year and a half all of the following: klonopin (for panic attacks), Wellbutrin (for severe depression; a very high dose for almost a year--200mg, which I had my psychiatrist cut back to 100mg because of its awful side effects), Zoloft (a low dose/25 mg, for depression and anxiety), and a low dose (25mg) of Seroquel, an atypical antipsychotic that is generally prescribed for bipolar mania and schizophrenia, though at much higher dosage of 800-1,200mg.  My shrink gave me the Seroquel after I had a month of excruciating pain centered in my right eye--it felt like a terrible toothache--that would come on almost every night, and she felt it was likely a symptom of conversion disorder and speculated that Seroquel might help.  (Incidentally, two days after I started taking Seroquel, I had my last-ever eye pain of that nature.)  So I have been on a great deal of psychological medications over the past year or so, and mixing those drugs with ayahuasca can be extremely dangerous and potentially could result in seizures or death.  I haven't taken Klonopin for about three months, I weaned myself off Wellbutrin entirely about six weeks ago, and I slowly cut back my dosage of Zoloft and finally stopped taking it, as well, about two weeks ago.  I still take Seroquel every night, as I could find no indication of danger in mixing it with ayahuasca.  I know that I should have waited at least a couple more weeks to fully flush the Zoloft out of my system, but I didn't, which was admittedly stupid.  But anyway, last night I took the ayahuasca and what follows is my experience.

I had a stressful day at work and it drove me to want to try this supposedly therapeutic brew as soon as I got home.  It was already made and waiting in my freezer.  I debated whether to actually try it so soon after having stopped taking Zoloft, but my job can be very upsetting and whatever one might call the opposite of life-affirming, and I just decided to do it.  I thawed the brew in a warm water bath and then I took about a third of it, put on some Tori Amos music because I listen to it so much that it's a natural comfort to me now, and I waited.  I sat in a chair and even put my two little potted plants on the floor because supposedly ayahuasca is known to enable communication between human beings and plants.  It felt silly, but I was alone and figured why not?  There was nothing to lose by doing it.  I also removed my contact lenses because I was curious whether the 'visions' that might set in would be clearly defined or blurry since I am legally blind without visual correction.

So I sat and waited for something to happen.  I listened to the music that was playing--I began the play list with several songs from Abnormally Attracted to Sin--Strong Black Vine, Flavor, Starling...nothing happened.  I became bored pretty quickly and started text messaging on my phone.  Then I got on the floor and started adding songs to the play list and suddenly I felt like I had ridden a large swell on a small boat.  I stopped moving and waited.  A minute or so later, the same thing happened.  That happened for several minutes.  And I developed a visible, strong twitch in my right biceps that lasted for about ten minutes.  And then...nothing else.  I waited and waited and nothing was happening, so after about 45 minutes, I drank more...and waited.  Other than feeling an onset of mild panic/paranoia about what I was in the middle of doing to myself, nothing happened.  I thought about what Tori sings in Strong Black Vine: "strong black vine/submission is my mission for a/strong black vine/con-concentrate," and I decided that I was too impatient and too easily distracted, and so I drew a warm bath, turned out the light and got in.  I felt slightly disoriented, as if I kept sinking into the water although I was lying perfectly still, and I experienced several waves of severe panic--not unlike the feeling I had with datura or when I used to have horrifying panic attacks from social anxiety, usually at the grocery store of all places.  I decided the bath was not the place to be, so I got out, dried off, and got in bed.  Nothing seemed to be happening except a sustained feeling of panic, and I decided to drink the rest of the ayahuasca and wait it out.  Nothing at all.  I decided that it simply was not going to work, which could be for several reasons:

1. I had brewed the vine about a year ago, and I had no recollection of how much I used.  I knew how much psychotria viridis was in it, which should have been enough, but nevertheless, perhaps the vine had lost its potency in the freezer over time.
2. I didn't take it last night, but I had been taking Seroquel regularly for about six months.  Given that it is an antipsychotic medication, albeit in a very low dose, part of the medication's action is to reduce visual and auditory hallucinations, which I figured may have deactivated the psychotropic effects of the brew.
3. I didn't concentrate; I was distracted the whole time.
4. Although I decide constantly to behave open-mindedly, I am by nature a very reserved and skeptical person; so, this could have affected the experience in that: 1) my skepticism may have kept some of the effects at bay or 2) I figure it is possible that there must be some kind of 'buy in' for the usually described ayahuasca experience, which often are very new-agey.  Most descriptions I read online involve talk of chakras, third eyes, spirit guides, etc., and I've never had any awareness of these sorts of thing and can't help but feel prejudiced about them as airy-fairy and fantastical.
5. I have no way to know whether either plant that I purchased is authentic, so for all I know, I may have boiled shredded pine bark mulch and oak leaves.

So I decided to go to bed.  I lay in bed, but I couldn't sleep because of the panicked feeling.  I had a sense of dread that I might be in for another nightmarish night like the one I had under the influence of datura tea, but I was willing myself not to give into the panic because, unlike datura, which can easily kill a person, ayahuasca often comes with a "near-death" feeling, but almost never results in death, even in cases of antidepressant drug interactions.  Eventually I became more comfortable and then I did a bit of a double take as the lights on the ceiling seemed to be very slowly moving.  I thought, oh, yikes, is this the beginning of seeing crazy LSD-type things?  The truth is, I have zero interest in psychedelic hallucinations; in fact, the idea of them scares me.  My hope with trying ayahuasca was that it might allow me to perceive things that I am normally closed off to, but not things that are not really there.  My apartment faces a large park that is lit up at night, and the horizontal blind slats were letting through lines of light that look something like: === | ==== | === .  The horizontal ones seemed to be swaying a bit, but when I focused on the ones that were moving, they were still; it was only the ones in my peripheral/unfocused view that seemed to move.  It was a little unnerving, and so I put on my glasses.  With them on, the lines of light were still.  So I calmed down and though, oh well, big fat fail, bed time.  I eventually fell asleep.  And then I awoke from a nightmare, but it was a very strange post-nightmare feeling.

I have extremely vivid dreams as a matter of course.  I actually get annoyed when people tell me "you can sleep when you're dead," because for me, dreaming is a very active, very alive experience. Even nightmares are fascinating to me, and I almost always realize that I am dreaming when I am dreaming, and so I watch the events and visions unfold in my sleep and I really treasure them.  I don't take them as portents of events to come in waking life; I don't get creative inspiration from them, but I do get the same kind of feeling that I get from traveling to new places--dreaming is one of my favorite parts of life.  I always think about my dreams when I wake up from them--so last night's post-dream experience was strange.  I couldn't recall any events or even any clear visions.  What I could remember wasn't really so much a dream memory as a feeling that something had just happened to me.  Somehow, without any vision, my interpretation of the feeling was that I was in a dusky wooded area and something very tall and dark--I didn't see it, so to say it was a tree would not be accurate, but I had the sense that it was--was encroaching on me, and I was scared to death.  And when I woke up, I was afraid, but I also felt some weird sense of comfort from it.  It didn't make sense rationally.  I went back to sleep and awoke again after the exact same experience.  It happened for hours.  My interpretation all night was that I was dreaming, but that the dreams were influenced by the panicked feeling I got from the ayahuasca, and I probably dreamed about trees or the jungle or something because of the obvious connection...but somehow it felt slightly more lucid and real.  Anyway, it was a pretty miserable and restless night.  After I got used to waking up in a panic over and over, and my pillow feeling unusually hard under my head all night, I turned my head to the left and suddenly a very typical ayahuasca/Mayan sort of image was moving about at the speed of a steady stream of water.  My eyes were closed, and I opened them and what I saw was just the blurry room, and I closed them again expecting not to see anything, and there was that strange scene again.  Shape-wise, it was very much like Quetzalcoatl, the Mesoamerican diety (pictured below) known as a 'feathered serpent,' except that every part of it was moving around like gears in a clockwork.  I couldn't discern anything specific, but I felt like I was seeing some kind of humanish creature in a strange getup surrounded by just a bunch of flowing shapes.  Unlike every single ayahuasca vision I have read of or seen depictions of, there was no color whatsoever.  It was just a bunch of shapes.  I focused on it for a while and then moved my head and then suddenly it was gone.  No more vision.  I believe it was only a minute or two.  I went back to sleep and then woke up again, this time not having had a nightmarish feeling, and as I woke up, I felt very calm and warm.  Actually physically warm, which was a huge change from the chills I had been having all night.  And I thought, oh, this is really nice.  I went back to sleep.

When I finally woke up for the day, around 5:30 a.m., I awoke with a mild feeling of panic and feeling very alone and empty.  That feeling has persisted all day.  I definitely did not have a life-affirming or life-altering experience, and it was really very uncomfortable and ruined what could have been a lovely night of sleep.  However, those little moments of some kind of new dreamlike vision and that feeling of comfort, albeit short-lived and ultimately fleeting, made it a very interesting and in the end not bad experience.  

I believe we contribute to if not make our own realities, and so I would guess that the fact I didn't see any crazy technocolor-trippy lucid visions may very likely have to do with my fear of hallucinating, not to mention that I take a medication that is supposed to suppress natural hallucinations in mentally ill people.  I feel like something of a failure for having had such a mild and abbreviated ayahuasca experience, and it was not as fascinating and certainly not as enlightening as I had hoped it could be.  But I really didn't have any expectations other than preparation not to be surprised by anything I might feel or see or hear, and since what I did feel and see actually wasn't exactly as I have read and heard described, it made the whole experience just a little bit more surprising that it would have been otherwise.