I’m thinking of writing a story about how it would feel when, back in the early 90s, we would be at a friend’s house on a Friday evening. We would smoke weed or hashish, or eat space cake, and the house would become this different place. It would grow in size, it would feel like the inside of the house would become much larger than the outside.

Drifting through the house in that state, you could find yourself surprisingly, slumped at the base of the stairs leading up to the bedrooms, in the hallway and you would just sit there on those stairs, in that hallway, and it would morph into a different place. The hallway would become a kingdom in itself. The roller shutters would be down, keeping out reality and the house would become a fortress, it would engender a cocooning feeling. Time would dilate, stretch out and the moment would grow to epic proportions and feel larger than life.

Then suddenly you would be sitting on the couch with your friends and there’s music playing, Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Aphex Twin or Patashnik by Biosphere. Sucked into the couch, you would get absorbed, mired in this dark green, lush swamp, this morassy feeling.  Everything slowing down and the room filling up with this organic and dark green atmosphere. You’d just sit there experiencing that for however long, just losing time, experiencing it, being in that moment.

Taking a hit of weed or hash, or the cake kicking in, sometimes these images would start to appear in front of your eyes. You had your eyes closed and it was like you were generating a whole world of animation yourself. Images would grow out of each other into this self-perpetuating world of imagery, that would unfold in front of your eyes, the vision cascading out of itself. We used to call that video mode, for the video games that sometimes popped up on pinball machines, where if the ball went someplace, a little video game would pop up on the screen of the pinball machine.

I’ve been thinking of a story that takes place in such a moment, in such a place, where the outside world doesn’t matter anymore and there’s only the experience taking over the moment, taking over your being. And there’s no rush, no distraction, there’s just the experience of this liminal space and liminal consciousness. I’ve always loved that atmosphere, that experience.

The friends that are there are fellow travelers, fellow consciousnesses, they aren’t exactly persons anymore, they are entities that are experiencing this with you. It’s a shared individual experience, like a ritual or a mass.

I long for such experiences again. These breathe the atmosphere of Lovecraftian tales, its alienation, not necessarily its horror. Thinking about these nights, there was this carefreeness, it was safe, a house on a Friday night in a suburb or village in the south of Limburg, yet it felt like a true adventure, like in a movie where the protagonists find a portal to another dimension inside a familiar, loved house.

Lately I have been thinking about this a lot. I never just experience something anymore. Everything has to have a purpose, a goal, a usefulness.

In those days, my friends and I would spend our nights outside in the gently rolling hills of Limburg. The place where we’d meet was on a hill with meadows and woods. In one of the woods on the slope on the far side of the hill, near the treeline, there was a hollow, looking out over the meadows. The hollow had a dead tree in the middle, in front of which we would light fires. The trees behind us, the hollow around us and the fire in front of us, we could look out at the undulating meadows and hedgerows, and the lights of a small village far off in the distance.

We would go there and just be. We didn’t have a purpose or a goal, it was just a place to be, in the woods, under the stars, with friends, a fire, some (perfectly proportioned THC/CBD 90s, not like the modern overpowered blow-your-mind-with-one-toke stuff) weed, and the eternity of our youth.

As were the nights spent at one of the houses, with the parents out. We’d sit, listen to music, talk, be weird, draw, make up stories, sit with our eyes closed looking at images appearing out of nowhere, think…

I miss the camaraderie, the bonding sense of adventure and the freedom, of course, but I’m lucky enough that these people are still in my life, and my friends at 50, but I also miss the ability, the permissibility of just existing, experiencing, being. I don’t have that anymore. I don’t do that anymore. If I go for a walk, I have to go for a walk, if I do my household chores, I need to listen to an audiobook at the same time. Sitting on the couch, I watch tv shows and movies.

Enjoying consciousness and altered consciousness, enjoying being inside of time. Inside of space. Being out of your mind. There are less interesting things to write about, right?