The pipe is in your hands. You take a deep breath of the dense, slightly acrid smoke and hold it. For a few seconds nothing happens — and then reality begins to slide sideways.
It starts at the edges: a pulling sensation, as though gravity has suddenly decided to operate at a ninety-degree angle to its usual direction. The room begins to stretch and distort. You become aware that you are laughing — hard, uncontrollably — though nothing is funny. The laughter feels mechanical, as if something else is laughing through you.
Within thirty seconds of exhaling, the room is gone. Not dimmed, not distorted — simply absent. In its place is something else entirely. You are no longer a person sitting on a couch. You are part of the couch. Or you are a page in an enormous book that is being turned by vast, indifferent hands. Or you are one segment of an infinite conveyor belt, and every segment is a different moment of your life, and you have always been this, and the idea that you were ever a human being was a brief and incomprehensible dream.
There is a presence — or multiple presences. They are not hostile, but they are not friendly either. They are simply there, the way the walls of a room are there. They seem to be showing you something, or pulling you somewhere, with absolute authority. You have no capacity to resist because you have no capacity for anything. The concept of "you" has become meaningless. The concept of "concept" has become meaningless.
Time has stopped or is moving in a direction that has nothing to do with forward. You may relive a moment from childhood with absolute conviction that you are five years old and the last twenty years never happened. Or you may find yourself in a place that has no analogue in waking experience — a space made of pure geometry, or a landscape of living color that extends in directions you have no words for.
The physical world reassembles itself in pieces, like a puzzle being solved from the outside in. First the edges of objects, then their solidity, then the sense that you have a body, then the memory of who you are. The whole peak has lasted perhaps five to ten minutes, but it feels as though you have been gone for a very long time. You are sitting on the couch. The room is the room again. You are intensely relieved, and also bewildered, and there is a residual strangeness clinging to everything — a sense that the ordinary world is somehow thinner than it was before, that it is sitting on top of something else.
Over the next twenty to thirty minutes, the strangeness fades. You feel normal again, though perhaps quieter and more contemplative than before. There is no hangover, no stimulation, no residual visual disturbance. But the memory of what happened — the sensation of being peeled apart, of becoming an object, of the presences — stays sharp and clear and deeply strange, sometimes for years.
