After 6 days at Kiwiburn, the regional burning man even in new Zealand, I could tell you about how the libertarian idea of self-reliance wins over the communist one, when comparing a burn to a rainbow gathering. Or I could describe the acceptance of ‘different’ body ‘images’ along with sexual and gender orientations as being taken for granted. I could tell you about the amazing women heading construction crews and leading different camps like the fire spinning/eating camp and the body painting camps, without the need of using the word feminism. Or I could delve into the role of nudism in the community or the obsession with burning, but instead I’ll try to provide an account of my 27 hour trip down the rabbit hole.

THE MAN
He crashed when they tried to stand him up but it was still awesome

After the highest night of my life I awoke with 7 sentences I wrote down on myself in fear of forgetting. As I’m not sure how to even start describing that night I guess I’ll trust my drugged self and start with that.

Memento
I’m sure you’ve all seen the movie with the guy with short term memory loss. Well I was smarter than he was. As reality started warping around me I realized this was an experiment like no other so I turned on my video camera and started filming and recording myself. It was so hard to keep track of a single thought I was sure I wouldn’t remember anything in the morning but I was wrong, I remember that night just as I do any other. But back then the memory of an action was out of phase with the action itself reaching me ‘too late’ causing disorientation and the feeling of ‘how the hell did I get here?’

Trying to check if my pupils are dilated

I knew my camera had a limited battery and memory and I was afraid to lose it throughout the night so I set myself on a mission to find a pen from the PostArt exhibition and scribble the word Memento on my hand. Then, if I woke up remembering nothing, at least I’d know shit happened.

Cliché ≠ Untrue
All throughout the night I was highly aware that what I was experiencing was a cliché. That it was indeed pathetic that a chemical reaction was behind all this. It made me sad that through all of my martial arts training I could only reach glimpses of this while here all I needed was to swallow two ‘all natural’ space cookies and bang the door was finally open and there was ‘no spoon’.

Yet the fact that I was living through a cliché also helped me calm down and not freak out. When I felt extremely paranoid just by someone walking behind me, or doubted if I would ever return to ‘normality’ I knew it was ‘natural’.  In fact, I could finally truly understand some of my friends I had baby sat through a similar ‘trip’.

KiwiBurn Is a real ‘trip’ even without any additives.
pic by Raúl Fragoso

It was a cultural cliché in the widest meaning as my knowledge and memory tried to make sense of the present. Ramachandran’s brain ‘map’ and his work on synaesthesia came to mind when light, sound, gravity, emotions, pain, words and body movement all manifested as one (although for the life of me I couldn’t remember his name when I was high). The sound of a car passing by was manifested by me being crushed to the floor, my head throbbing everything darkening. The word religion had black smoking fangs coming from it stabbing me. Music literally did lift me up or take me down. People passing me by would manifest in me rubbing my hands together. I could see my thoughts as light threads bouncing off from one area in my head to another, (the girl with me said I was tracing a round halo over my head even though it didn’t feel round to me).
I tried to apply Turing’s test to people when I wasn’t sure if they were figments of my imagination or not by asking them to teach me stuff I didn’t know (I finally  believed the girl was real when she apologised for something my selfish self would never in a million years think about apologising for).

I thought about Jill’s stroke of insight (without remembering her name again), in the way she, as a brain scientist, reacted to a stroke in her left, ‘rational’,  hemisphere.  With her ‘serial processor’ gone, her right hemisphere took control and gave her the feeling of interconnectedness and bliss in ‘the now’. My left hemisphere was working, although perhaps not at full capacity, but it wasn’t shutting up my right side.

As I was ‘coming down’ for hours and hours thinking I had finally reached the ground, just to discover another shell was being peeled away, one of the best star trek  episodes floated into being, Riker is mentally tortured by aliens, awaking from one delusion just to discover ‘reality’ is another delusion.

When I felt each of my limbs move separately without asking ‘me’, as I moved through the dancing crowd, I thought about the book I am reading now. The Rainbow and the Worm, a prominent biologist gives proof of a proto-network of communication between cells. She claims this network is our ‘body conciseness’ and is enabled by quantum coherence, as the cell is actually a liquid crystal allowing quantum coherence on larger scales.

As I could feel each separate thought fighting to gain control over the others Meme theory became a reality.

When I described these things to N, the Israeli girl who had to convince me she was real (well, what are the chances of meeting one of the two people I came with to the festival, and the one person I could speak to in my native language, just as I made it to my PostArt exhibit and was the most lost I have ever been?) told me, “Just because something is a cliché doesn’t mean it’s not true,” which I ferociously wrote on my arm.

Slaughterhouse five
I haven’t read this sci fi book by Kurt Vonnegut but as I was describing my sense of time to N she said it sounded like this book so I wrote it on my hand to make sure I remember to read it.

‘Outside’ time slowed down while ‘inner’ time became faster. I looked at people dancing and it seemed as if they were dancing in slow motion.  To test this I tried walking between them without crashing into them. It was almost too easy it was the Spiderman fighting scene where the world slows down.

The pirate ship at the lake
pic by Raúl Fragoso

I would think a million thoughts and one minute would go by. After 3 minutes of talking to the camera it felt like two hours had gone by.
Time became a series of elongated beads threaded on a line. At the end of each bead there was a cutoff point after which there was a nothing ness I could slip into until the next bead arrived yet all the beads were still treaded together continuously. The ‘paradox’ of oneness vs. separateness was so strong yet so un-paradoxical.  Time was one endless moment stretching forever filled with little black holes that sliced and diced it or was it actually a series of still images that were almost, but not quite, glued together into a movie? Well, it was both. This is being god I thought and laughed at my overdramatic reaction.

Guess which bottle in this art project is mine?
Yep, even when I was high as a kite I had to be different

All is Yes and No
It is the ‘mystical’ cliché  which I have been rambling on about for most of my life yet I still was compelled to write it because it is yes… and it is no. Because when people were talking to me, half the time I didn’t understand one word they were saying but I understood it all! Because a circle doesn’t have a beginning or an end yet it has both… because I could keep on spewing this new age shit forever.

A volume of dimension
As this whole trip began I felt the volume go up. But it didn’t go up linearly or even exponentially it blew up in all dimensions, and there are way more than 3! (or even 4 if you count time).

Everything went to extreme. If I had to say something I HAD to. If someone didn’t understand me or someone was worrying about me it was the WORST.

My ‘survival’ instinct went up to the maximum, keeping me away from the edge of hills and electrical fences (yep they had those on the grounds), forcing me to limp slowly on my aching ankle as not to hurt it and warning me of people that were not ‘good’ for me, even if they were just ‘draining’ me. I suddenly understood an artist I had talked to a few hours before this all began. He had been ‘high’ and I had drained him by not ‘going in’ to his world. I felt the GUILTIEST I had felt in my life. But not only did the volume go up separately in each dimension but the interconnectivity between these dimensions went up causing synesthesia (as I have explained above).

The burning of the ‘Temple’
pic by Raúl Fragoso

Yet as the volume went up the energy and information available to me went down.

My body only needed minimum movements to cross the dancing floor and there was a very high potential barrier that wouldn’t allow me to do anything more than the minimum. When I needed something, like standing up, all facilities of myself would focus and gather together to allow me to do what I wanted but in general everything was delocalized.
I didn’t know anything except what I needed to know. That’s how I made my way from the dancing area to my tent, one step at a time, having no idea where the actual tent was just where my next step needed to land. I didn’t even know if I could speak English until I spoke it.

My dad’s idea that the whole Quantum uncertainty principle is a computer programmer’s way of saving processing power stuck to me. This was true efficiency, why waste time/power/worries on what is so far away. The next step is the only thing that matters.

Remembering one memory:

Remembering 1 Memory!

Each thought was a wave in an ocean filled with thoughts and memories all connected to each other and spreading out to infinity – one memory! Once I got on a wave all others were forgotten in the sea underneath me but it was so easy to fall off a wave and crash in the ocean since other waves were trying to reach me and pull me in. I had to try and surf the specific thought to reach its completion and arrival to shore.

I told myself this is how Alzheimer’s feels and wrote ‘Alzhemer’s is fun’. I kept on thinking maybe Alzhimer’s patients aren’t forgetting things, they are remembering one thing so strongly that that memory takes over all others.

No worries I did this after returning to ‘earth’

I knew doubting my sanity was a good start at proving I was still o.k. but I needed proof. Then it dawned on me that I didn’t have to ‘remember’ I just had to solve this problem. I could cheat! So I started asking the people around me. But they had no idea so then I asked GOD for help, and in GOD I mean the real one, GOOGLE. I don’t think I’ll be exaggerating when I say this was the hardest and most complex task of my life. Turning the internet on in my phone, typing in search words, all when everything had so much meaning most things had lost their meaning. My thoughts were leaking all over the place. And GOD was messing with me, sending me to Wikipedia pages filled with proofs and equations that made the world go round and round. I was so close to giving up but I knew I couldn’t. So I invented a story in my head. There is a girl; her mother is head of the earth defense systems. Aliens have attacked the earth with psychic warfare and the mother is incapable of turning on the defense system. The girls is the only one who knows her mother’s password which was specifically designed to check if one is ‘rational’ enough to turn on the defense system. The girl knows it is the square root equation but she can’t remember it because she is under attack too. She can’t remember it but she manages to solve the problem by using a computer that isn’t under attack. I was that girl, I had to save the world, to save myself.
Once I succeeded in finding the equations I realized it wasn’t enough, I had to prove to the world that I was sane, not only to myself… so I did the only rational thing and posted the equation on Facebook 🙂

I painted some of the back of the green women on the left.
pic by Raúl Fragoso