Drugs, I've done a few. I have left reality behind and sampled temporary insanity on a few occasions. The brain is clearly not to be fucked with, holding on to reality when the effects of acid or too many magic mushrooms are pumping round your head is impossible to control. These drugs are way too powerful. I remember feelings and emotions getting magnified to a level too intense to bear, one minute far too happy and the next in the depths of depression, worry and paranoia. The ups and downs of micro manic depression took place within the blink of an eye. One one occasion, after too many mushrooms and in an uncontrollable state of paranoia, there was knock at the door, it was the police, I freaked. But of course this meant I had a reason to be paranoid, it wasn't the drugs after all. I also remember on this occasion the kitchen stretching off into infinity, which is pretty cool really. You're probably thinking; "what the fuck was he thinking? This sounds like hell!" Well there is a method to this madness. My first hallucinogenic trip took place as a teenager. A friend of mine at the time had a load of magic mushrooms, these I had to try. After taking shit loads I was disappointed to find nothing was happening, so we smoked a load of sticky black instead and I eventually went home stoned off my head to my parents. It was about four or five on a Saturday afternoon, I was watching Dickie Davis round off Sports Day with my Dad in the front room. Dad was in his chair, he's still there to this day, just like Davis's Moustache. I remember the boring patterned covering on Father's chair, the covering was a dull green with even duller horizontal and vertical corduroy outlines forming an irregular pattern of squares and rectangles. I glanced over at dad and it was then that to my amazement the crappy chair had suddenly come to life. The dull corduroy stripes were now bright red. Result. At this juncture I realised it was time to retreat to the confines of my then bedroom.
My parental home is a rather quaint thatched cottage in Devon. And as such this means that walls and ceilings are never even; covered in lumps, oak beams, and bumps; decorating is a pain. The place has character and seems to have a life of its own; a four hundred year old life. Shortly after entering my room and lying face up on my bed with my Furguson Tower System blasting Ritchie Blackmore's Difficult to Cure, I notice the room coming to life. First the paint on the ceiling starts to kind of shift and smudge, it moves up and down like it's breathing. Okay, now shit is happening, I glance over at the walls. The wallpaper in my room at the time was a simple brown flower outline pattern on a white background repeated in vertical fashion, so you could trace the same patern from top to bottom. What happened I will never forget. In the years that followed I tried repeatedly to get back to this moment, but it never happened, this was the basis for the method to my madness. From the ceiling the most amazing vibrant rainbow colours fell and uniformly filled the pattern on the wallpaper. They gushed from the ceiling like a waterfall of colour, ran all the way down the wall and disappeared in to the carpet, which by now was heaving.
By this time I am laughing hysterically, I've gone mental but I don't give a shit. Blackmore is sounding very strange but I'm loving it. I glance back up a the ceiling, my head hits the pillow. Why are the neon minature people doing a tango to Blackmore in my Attic? And more importantly where did that mountain range come from? You see there was a whole other world in the attic of our old cottage, a neon fantasy landscape where people made of light tangoed the night away to heavy metal. A world where uncharted neon capped mountains stretched off into an infinite distance and beacons of light stretched off uniformly into nowhere. And the wallpaper, the psychedelic wallpaper, perhaps the world in my attic is feeding the wallpaper with colour? Yes that's it. The colour is now saturating the carpet, the hysteria continues, the colour moves closer to my bed. Where is it going? It gets even closer, it's going to envelop the bed and then me and I will become part of this new world, I will be absorbed into this new dimension. I will be neon, i will tango with my new neon friends to Blackmore. The colour pours like a torrent from the ceiling, soaks the carpet and encases my bed touches my hands and starts to retreat. The bed sheets return to their cream colour, the colour in the carpet washes out. The waterfall of colour slowly dries up, the mountains crumble away, the lights fade and the dancers slowly vanish. My hysteria falls away and I find myself back in my cottage bedroom, I go downstairs, Dad is still in his chair, I watch Bullseye with him. And I never return to that special place.
