Last night’s nitrous experiment had been planned for a few days, mainly so I could give an account to myself of exactly why I like this strange and wonderful gas and also as an opportunity to experience yet another state of consciousness.

The day leading up to the nitrous session was peculiar in a way I can’t quite describe. There are occasional days when almost everything seems alien to me and everyone is speaking Martian (or they might as well be!). This was one of those days. I also had a huge energy build up for no obvious reason. I always like to explore such feelings and find that LSD facilitates this analysis immensely. I also liked the idea of doing nitrous while I was tripping.

The following is an account of what happened with much of it written, and also tape recorded, as it was experienced.

The curtains are drawn, it’s warm and I can feel the subtle effects of the acid I’ve taken creeping over me. The Doors are playing and the lamp in the corner of the room is pulsating a soft pink light, darkening and brightening again in waves. It has an extremely comforting effect and I feel exceptionally pleasant. "Light My Fire" has just begun and now I’m going to do some nitrous.

Instead of the familiar numbness seeping in, I start feeling very warm. The room darkens slightly and I’m acutely aware of how hot I feel and the shadows in the room around me. There is nothing threatening about these shadows but I feel the need to acknowledge their existence. In light there is dark. There is a distant buzzing sound in my head and I feel as though I’m distancing from myself. The music gets louder until I feel as though it’s coming from within me. There is a definite sensuality to this. I’m slightly shaky but I think it’s the acid doing that. The nitrous wears off and I’m left with the feeling that this really does need to be explored further. Can I detach from myself completely and what in hell do I mean by this?!

There’s a whole universe in my nails (I was wearing black, spangly nail polish)! It seems to me that ALL people are strange and by that definition they can’t be but, even if they are, it’s not important – I feel connected to it all and that feels just fine. I can feel the music being drawn into my body (by osmosis? Do the Doors include potassium pumps with their albums purely for this purpose? Which of us is the ion and who is the CATion? Miaw.) and into my soul. I’m not hearing it with my ears anymore!

I feel as though I’m on the edge of the world and I’m about to tip right over. I can see a twinkling in the corner of my left eye. O! Clumsy and disorientated – fragmented – I think I need to defrag my head! When I close my eyes, I can see green lightening spreading in slow motion against the blackness of my lids. Open them! A beautifully tessellated pattern of pink diamonds….

The trips are working well and I’m in some sort of lucid dream. I feel really close to reality.. but!… this is a mistake… I mean insanity!! I’m going to investigate that twinkling in my eye.

O fuck!! Hmm… waiting for the sun.. if God is anything then he/she/it is a sound – a sound in the purest sense – toe curling – shocking – HA! – to say the least – orgasmic. A mental orgasm! The music has colours…

I didn’t write anymore on this one.. I was kind of incapacitated by a sensory overload! The only way of communicating this would be via sensation, and sensation is extremely subjective.

Perception… hmmmmm…. of detachment from my body. The room is dissipating around me. This is because it is irrelevant. Materialistic and worldly. There’s no need to see it anymore. I am riding a wave through the universe and this world just fades away. I’m not my body! I AM NOT MY BODY! It does belong to me, of course, but my car belongs to me too.. and yet I am not my car anymore than I am my body right now.. "The duality of nature, godly nature, human nature, splits the soul. Fully human, fully divine, yet divided.. the Great Immortal Soul" (Lou Reed). All of my energy is absorbed into the cosmic wave that I’m riding and we become connected. There was nothing without me... were we ever apart? The universe just became more penetrable.. must be something to do with those CATions.. but it’s huge.. more than me and yet exactly the same as me.. and it’s all sound! It’s a great circulatory system and I’m travelling to its heart! Quite suddenly there is a feeling of trepidation. I can see the "end" (the heart?) of the universe. It appears as an illuminous yellow glow at the end of my field of vision.. I have a need to "ground" myself in case I disappear. I hear a voice and it tells me; "You are going to have the child that saves the world". It’s a soothing voice and not at all exclamatory or supernatural. It’s very matter of fact and seems like the most natural thing in the world for me to hear.

I feel slightly panicky for a moment.. in case I never come "back" and just float off into the night sky with Jim Morrison as a fucking musical note! Would that be so bad?

I feel as though I’m on some sort of road to madness and yet feel it’s the only way of learning what I need to know.. and besides.. "Madness is a perfectly rational response to an insane world" (Laing). I’m going to fall right out of my head. I wonder if I need this body for anything at all. I’m having a huge build up of sexual energy – acid doesn’t usually make me THIS horny – I feel as though I will pop! The music is touching me and tantalising my senses… and the sensations just keep feeding back to me over and over again… sunset sunrise sunset sunrise sunset sunrise sunset… I just know I’m going to explode.. it’s dancing up my thighs.. the hairs on the back of my neck are on end and my breathing is quick with anticipation… if I cum right now I will surely die….

Obviously, I did not die, but I did experience one of the most intense, soul racking orgasms that I’ve ever had, and all without being touched physically once (either by myself or anyone else). God is not a word but is a sound.. and fucked me as a musical note! I wonder if I will get pregnant.. will the child that saves the world be born as a treble clef??!!

I was quite deranged for the rest of the acid trip. I felt that I had had some kind of amazing experience, in a spiritual sense, that required a deeper understanding, and my sensibilities, being lost in a chemical haze, were failing me miserably. There wasn’t a hope in hell of looking at this objectively because I was hyper, over excitable and generally nuts! I became acutely aware of my existence in a world to which I felt I didn’t belong anymore… even more so now.

As I came down, I began to rationalise the experience as drug induced ramblings (my scientific mind wouldn’t allow it to be anything else), but even then I wondered what the significance was. I’m a firm believer that everything has a function and things happen for a reason. I’ve taken acid somewhere in the region of 150-200 times in the last twelve years and I have NEVER had an experience such as this so I can only say that it must have been the nitrous. Would I care to repeat the experience? What do you think?!