DOSE:

2 joints/cigs

smoked

Cannabis

(plant material)

BODY WEIGHT:

150 lb

Me and some friends of friends were at a concert I'd waited six months to go to. At the end of a long an nearly uneventful summer I was charged and ready to have fun. In the parking lot we smoked a couple of premium hydro joints that someone had been saving which went down nice and smooth. Within ten minutes a roaring high engulfed me, which surprised me because it'd only been about a week since the last time I'd smoked up and it seemed to good to be true. It was, I guess, because within minutes after coming up I became so nauseated I felt I could barely move. Unfortunately we had to move, everyone else was having a great time and I was bogged down by this awful feeling of nausea, and subsequently, despair.

We made our way to a Harvey's and I went to the bathroom to try and throw up. After I came out I couldn't see anyone I recognized. This is when the terror began to set in. For at this particular concert in Molson Park there were about twenty thousand people roaming a small strip of fast food places and I had to find the 4 I knew. Needless to say I roamed around for (what seemed like) a long time until I finally made my way back to Harvey's where they were sitting calmly garfing down burgers and wondering where the hell I'd gone.

That was when the most peculiar visual illusion set in. On either side of our table it seemed to me that there was a mirror, but I couldn't see myself in it, only everyone else at our table. Eventually I realised, to some relief, that it wasn’t a mirror but just other people at other tables. Of course, you could almost argue that it wasn't really an illusion at all given that concert goers all pretty much look the same anyways.

Almost immediately after that illusion another, more significant sensation set in. On another level of awareness I saw colourful points of light within anyone I looked at that seemed to encompass my immediate perception of them. This light seemed to have a colour and a shape as well as an instantaneous sharp sound that blasted out with each different individual I looked at. Then I thought about myself and saw what I would be if someone else looked at me.

It seemed that I was experiencing a fundamental level of perception, not a different or higher one. All the things I saw in these people were my immediate classifications to them based on how they held themselves, looked and moved. I thought a great deal about this while the others were sitting there obliviously chowing burgers in their stoned stupor (half wishing I could be in their state). A theory in my mind began to form about the mechanism of pot and how it surely must work based on this experience alone.

This reaction perception of people I was seeing seemed to encompass a great deal more information about them than I would normally become consciously aware of. Therefore it seemed that pot was actually blocking functions in my brain that filtered information to my consciousness. It was propelling me into a 'higher' state of consciousness by lowering the functioning of my brain. And this makes sense to me even now. It can't possibly be practical to walk around gawking and becoming overwhelmed by every person you see and revelling in who they are when you have to struggle to survive.

Is THC an antagonist to some higher level mental filtration modules then? I'm not sure. I've read far and wide and I'm not sure I've ever seen anything that can properly state marijuana’s mechanism with any sort of authority. But after this experience I've started to think that perhaps a schematic, not neurological approach is the method to realise how the effects of any drug manifest themselves within the human mind.

Exp Year: 2001	ExpID: 8921
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jul 1, 2005	Views: 5,001
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Cannabis (1) : Difficult Experiences (5), Festival / Lg. Crowd (24)