Hallucinations

I am not schizophrenic. I have been hearing inexplicable noises and seeing things that aren’t there my entire life.

Throughout childhood, I sporadically heard a sound not dissimilar to voices being fast-forwarded by a cassette player. I could never discern what was being heard, but would catch random words, especially my name, within the high-pitched frenetic jumble. As an adult, I’ve heard coherent sentences being said and have been legitimately confused as whether anybody spoke them. For example, I once heard a female voice ask if I had a flashlight. I turned behind me to the only girl in my vicinity and she gave me a “What are you looking at” face. Since there was no reason why she would be asking for a flashlight, I left the comment unacknowledged. I still don’t know if she said it or not. Today, when I turn on a vacuum, I often hear music clearly enough that I can notate it playing in the background that stops when I shut the vacuum off. I have long since stopped sticking my head out of the shower curtain and trying to talk to the audible voices I hear during my shower.

Mouskie was the first imaginary friend I ever saw. I might have been three; four at the oldest. Ironically, he didn’t look at all as I had imagined him; he was about twelve feet tall, was bright sky blue and had big ears that came out of the sides of his head. I continued to see creatures as a kid. Zork mysteriously appeared twice from under the same tree in our front yard. I tried futilely to talk to him. Sergeant appeared on the back deck years after I had thought he had been killed in battle. Even as a kid, I easily understood that these were projections of my overactive imagination. But they were as visible as the witch that floated outside my bedroom window at night. My dad assured me that creatures would stop appearing when I became an adult.

The first time I remember vividly hallucinating while drumming I was uncharacteristically playing along to Steppenwolf. The autumn of 1997, when little people straight out of The Gnome-Mobile appeared hopping along to “Magic Carpet Ride,” was an emotionally tumultuous time for me, and I began regularly seeing auras on people. I attributed it to stress, but did not dismiss the experience outright. The next semester I began exploring with inducing visions while drumming, and I got pretty good at it. They always appeared in rather random and unpredictable ways and forms, but I could turn them on and shut them off quickly. Years later, in California, I conducted recording tests to see if I could perceive an aural difference in my drumming at times hallucinating and not, but never found one, save one occasion where I played an interesting duet of sorts with my own independently moving shadow.

I have never tried a hallucinogenic drug. I would not want to deal with what I’ve seen for eight hours until the drug wears off. You people that do that shit have a crazy idea of fun.

Once, while drumming, a long, blue dragon flew in through my front door and turned towards me, spewing blue flames in my direction. I threw my drumsticks at it and dived under my drumset. It disappeared, but I decided to immortalize that experience in ink. (Sweet Cicely at Cyclops Tattoo in San Francisco did the artwork and tat.)