November 1999
Subject: Trip Report 1
Date: Thu, 25 Nov 1999 03:22:16 -0800
From: “xavier liberti” [email protected]
Here comes the report of the two eboga trips I made during october 99. I wanted to make a detailed report, so it is quite long and I have to post it in two parts. Therefore this post is the first one.
First I have to say that I am french and live in France. So I didn’t break any law because nor iboga (the plant itself) neither ibogaine are forbidden or restricted in France. Although conclusions of this report are extremely favorable to the ibogaine, I don’t encourage anybody to contravene laws of his country if this one regulate iboga. Otherwise my English is quite limited , so I apologize if certain parts are not expressed very clearly. I made my better in the limit of my means. This report has first been written in French then translated in English by myself, so if some of you are interested by the French version, they can contact me privately by E-mail.
Contrary to what seems to be here most of interest for people, I am not really interested myself by the anti-addictive properties of iboga. I am not really an addict, although since some years and particularly these last months, I used to drink alcohol (sometimes strong doses) and to smoke tobacco or cannabis regularly, but I always held myself aside from the hard drugs because I knew very well that my psychological problems could have made very easily of me an addict. I am what one calls a “self-primaler”, that is someone who use to practise on himself the primal therapy (if you don’t know what the primal therapy is, make a tour here: http://home.att.net/~jspeyrer / . It’s the best site to start a search about this topic. I discovered here the existence of the ibogaine, since its effects rejoin objectives of the primal therapy).
I underwent an extremely traumatic childhood and I passed my adult’s life (I am 42 years old) to try to heal of it to me. I worked a lot and many progressed, especially these last years since I know the primal therapy. I arrived to solve problems a lot, but by far not all, because I could never have gone up again to the source, that is my first four or five years where I never succeeded in making reappear the traumatic memories that remained there, emotions that were associated with, and therefore to repair damages that they caused me. Merely these first years appeared me little by little, as my therapy went on, like a huge black hole full of something vastly frightening and painful, but I definitely could not go in it, I just could sense that there were essential and terrifying things here. Also, when I discovered the existence of ibogaine and began to accumulate knowledge about this topic on internet, I quickly understood that it was the right tool for me to progress in my recovery, the tool that would permit me to dive in the black hole to face what can be found there and delete it.
Finally I got 60 grams of rootbark that, according to my supplier, contained 5% of pure ibogaine, what had to correspond to a quantity of 3 grams and therefore to be more that sufficient for my experience. My girlfriend and I left to isolate us in a small house close to the sea, quiet and suitable to my experience.
My trip was foreseen for Sunday 3 October in the morning. On Thursday 30 September, I tested the rootbark while absorbing about 2 grams. It made me nearly no effect. I felt a little bizarre, but hardly. So on Friday morning, I redid a test while absorbing this time pretty much 4 grams. Was this the effect of heap with the root of the day before? I ignore it, but as true that the two grams of the Thursday made me feel nearly nothing, as true that the four grams of the Friday made me a very powerful effect. More or less one hour and half after the ingestion, I had to go in bed and lie down. I wanted to vomit, and I felt on this point of view that I better should remain immobile. Besides, all things turned around when I moved the head or tried to stand up, my vision and my muscular coordination didn’t function correctly anymore, lightnings occured in my peripheral vision. So I decided to remain stretched out without moving and with closed eyes. I began to have some colorful visions in 2D, then hallucinations without personal abstract, but with more and more rich and varied content and in 3D. At the end of a quite long time I began to have metaphors with personal content according with my philosophical or metaphysical ideas, but nothing by the way of my personal history or the black hole. Excepted this physical uneasiness like a seasick, it was enough pleasant and interesting. All this ended in a bizarre way: I was lengthened therefore on the back, on the bed. This one appeared to me gradually like a launching pad, or rather like a flying saucer on a launching pad, that would get ready to take off over with me. My eyes were still closed and, at that moment, visions represented the room but greatly enlarged and imposing, as if I was inside a cathedral. An opening occured on the top of the cathedral, and I felt that I was just about to take off. It was as if, in my back and under the saucer, reactors switched on. I had the sensation that the bed rose up in the air and rose skywards. Then all stopped, reactors died out progressively while the saucer land again. Visions stopped. I had the very strong feeling at that moment that all this stuff had only been a metaphorical preparation to the true trip, a general rehearsal in a way, intended to verify the right working of the machinery until the ultimate instant of the departure. I was sure at this time that all was OK, that I was ready for the big departure on Sunday. All this had lasted between three and four hours. From this instant I didn’t have any psychological effect, vision or other, on the other hand the physical effects lasted all day long, until the evening, attenuating progressively. I even had some vision problems with lightnings the following day morning on awakening, but they vanished very quickly.
On Sunday morning toward nine o’clock, I rose and, with empty stomach, began to ingest the iboga. It took me pretty much one hour and half to swallow 35 grams thereabouts, before the ibogaine begins to make effect, and then I had to lie down. It happened pretty much as on Friday, with the same progression in visions, then the impression that I was going to take off and that reactors ignited in my back, ready to propel me. But this time there was not a cathedral: I saw a tunnel opening in front of me where I felt advanced, on a progressive way, to very big speed. I had in head since the beginning of my researches on the ibogaine that this one had to dive me in the black hole, so I had the idea that this tunnel was the way that finally would allow me to reach this, that I was going to appear somewhere inside it to start my work there. This moment that I waited so much finally happened, I felt ready and determined, although naturally afraid by these mysteriously terrifying feelings that always seemed to me emiting out of here. But suddenly, it was as if an immense iron curtain rose up in front of me, against which I came to stumble (something like a metallic curtain in front of a shop window when it’s closed, wich prevents all intrusion). Of course it interrupted brutally my race in the tunnel. Something or someone derided me, this something or someone that made the curtain appear, and meant me that I could not go in, that I could not go where I wanted. I harassed the curtain while trying to find a crack, a flaw, a hidden door, whatsoever where to slip through. It was the first phase of my trip that lasted until the following day early in the morning. During this time, I didn’t sleep at all. I remember it as an immense fight. First of all, I harassed the curtain without success. Of course this was not a true curtain, similar to those in the real life. It was a complex and changing object that proved to be animate, living, accompanied by rhythmic sounds. It was something extremely heavy and massive, metallic, powerful, harmful and without mercy. The jerky sounds that emanated from it were violent and strident, they tore eardrums and at the same time it was like steps of a giant that hammered soil and made all tremble around me and in me. In the beginning I remained myself and fought against the curtain that was like an outside element tempting to collapse, to grind me, to destroy me to stop me from entering; but gradually it became me and I became it, I was an element of the curtain, it was as if it tried to absorb me, to dissolve me while taking me in its movement and its fury, in its uproar.
It is a very difficult experience to describe with the common words, so I am going to use a metaphor to try to explain you what I felt: imagine that you are a sailor and that you go to the sea. But hardly gone out of the harbor an immense wave arrives, raise you and carry you away, as to reject you on the beach. In the beginning you try to keep your balance while operating your boat and try to tame the wave to cross over. But imagine that the wave is too much strong and makes you fall while dragging you in it, fall on you with clash, ejecting you of your boat while pushing you toward depths, imagine an enormous wave, several kilometers high, imagine its weight and its strength when it falls on you, imagine that once it collapsed on you and attracted you toward its depths eddies it lasts not some minutes or some hours but an eternity during which you only have an idea in mind: survive while fighting to go up again to the surface to breathe the rare times it is possible, and that during this time you felt your body laminated, jagged by this immense strength, imagine the clash of these tons of water falling on you and of whirlwinds that follow, try to imagine all this, indeed, and you will have a small idea, very attenuated, of what happened to me.
In the beginning therefore, I tried to cross over the obstacle by all means to continue my progression. But after my fall, my only stationary idea, my obsession was merely to survive. At the end of this eternity, it was as if this wave that dragged me had finally rejected me on the shore, where I stood stretched out in a pathetic state. It was Monday morning, the phenomenon stopped, I was again in my bed, exhausted and laminated. I had the feeling to have missed everything, to have failed in my tentative to go into the black hole, I had the sensation of have beeing repulsed violently and, in spite of all my efforts, not to have been able to get over the doorstep. In fact it was only a false impression, I would see it later, because everything that I had lived since the day before was actually an essential part of the black hole. But at this moment on Monday morning, I didn’t realized it at all, I was persuaded to have failed completely, persuaded that my ibogaine experience was missed irreparably, that therefore the black hole had remained inaccessible to me, that probably it would remain so for evermore, that I will ever go farther in my therapy nor heal completely, that all this was hopeless, definitely hopeless. I felt deeply unhappy and desperate. By this way I entered the second phase of my trip that was also, although I didn’t realize it at all on the moment, another important, fundamental part, of the black hole’s content. I felt therefore completely distressed, unhappy, unhappy, unhappy, with a feeling of solitude and nothingness, of absolute abandonment, of infinite despair, of total and definitive defeat. When my girlfriend came to see me on Monday morning after her awakening, I asked her to remain with me and sit next to me on the bed. I felt so shattered that I needed to confide in her, to confide her my misfortune. It is what I made with difficulty because I had difficulty speaking. But very quickly I began to cry, to sob while tightening me to her. I cried for a long time like a child, and I believe that I cried the same way every time that she camed to see me on that day (she came approximately every hour). In the meantime I often sobbed alone. I didn’t have any vision, no memory bound to my childhood, no intellectual reflection, nothing else that this absolute disaster feeling and this immense pain that made me cry, a need to cry oceans of tears. I was just invaded, swallowed by these feelings and I felt painful and extremely tired. I thought that my iboga trip was finished on this failure, that nothing more could happen. In my mind, it seem to me that I would just need to wait for one or two days so that the physical effects of the iboga disappear and that I can rise -but for what to make? My life appeared me done definitely.
This second phase lasted until Monday evening, late in the evening. Finally I fell asleep for a part of the night, and this sleep constitutes the phase 3 of my experience. I haven’t much to say about it, because I was really asleep. I woke up somewhere to the middle of the night, and there I realized that during my sleep important things did happen but I wasn’t able to remember precisely what. I had had visions, and in these visions I remember that there were two big icons, a bright one and a dark one that seemed to symbolize the goodness (or at least something protective and kindly) and the badness (or at least something destructive and malevolent). It seemed to me that I had entered in contact with these two principles, that I had met them and had exchanged with them, maybe also that themselves had consulted, as if negotiations had taken place between us, that things had advanced, that decisions had probably been taken, I don’t know precisely. I am nearly sure to have seen and understood a certain number of these things rightly to the instant of the wakening, but they vanished very quickly, leaving me only the picture of the two icons and a general impression. It is quite the same impression that one sometimes has to the wakening on the morning, just on the output of a dream, when one remembers vaguely about this dream but this memory fades away nearly immediately, and that one doesn’t manage to recover it anymore.
After that I fell asleep again, and occurred then phase 4 of my trip that is the most intense and most prominent psychological experience of my life, wich I will never forget. It took place under the shape of a conscious dream wich was characterized by a length, an intensity and an appearance of reality that was properly extraordinary. I felt myself like a very young child in a child’s body (I don’t know precisely how old I was, let’s say between three and five years). The decor resembled greatly home where I was for my eboga trip. All happened as if these surroundings represented my child’s mental universe, expressed my interior universe. So I was this child and I was alone, unhappy and apprehensive. The scene around me was dark, the ambiance of the house, the atmosphere surrounding was unhealthy and seemed dangerous, contours of objects were menacing and frightening. What I lived in fact was the production of this universe where my child’s life took place, day after day. This unfriendly reality was lived, as haunted by a multitude of other universes that opened up before me when I approached of certain places or objects, or when my look met some silhouettes. It was at that moment as if doors opened up in space-time and that other universes were either revealed to my approach to my look, like hypertext links taking to other inclusive realities in the first. These universes are impossible to describe with the human and Cartesian words, it was completely non-Cartesian universes populated of bizarre, ludicrous beings that didn’t resemble at all on rational earth’s beings where we live, that didn’t depend on neither the same physic laws nor the logic ones. They were completely unbridled universes, populated of stranger creatures the some that others. These creatures and these realities had a common point: the one to be tortured, morally anxious, sick, bad, frightening, destructive, pitiless -it had all nuances, all tonalities that one can imagine the negative side of the mind and a total absence, everywhere and in everything, of whatever that can be connected to a positive, quiet, soothing or beneficial side.
Thus the decor was filled of a multitude of universes, that varied according to hours of the day or the night. Universes of the night were the more awful and terrifying, most destructive. In the beginning, I was merely successively snatched to live there, in these universes, there to participate as a being integral part. I traveled thus for a long time, a very long time from a reality to an another one as being submitted evidently to its rules and all its dark, negative sides. It is as if were represented there all facets of the hell that I visited the some after others, came back there then there came back again, in which I was absorbed and burnt, consumed and often physicaly crushed. It really lasted an incredibly long time (I will come back later on this notion of time lasting the different stages of my trip). But gradualy an important change occurred. From the beginning I was snatched by these realities, was submitted to their rules, was only a victim that didn’t have any means to either fight to escape. Then progressively, I tempted and arrived to come closer psychologically of all creatures that lived them, they became day after day nearer and nearer, then became my confidants, then my friends, and at the same time I became their confidant and their friend. It was as if I tamed them progressively while they also tamed me. Day after day they were less afraid of me, I was less afraid of them, we were less afraid of eachothers. I remember of long discussions and long confidences, of whispered secrets, of mutual confessions and so, slightly walking on the edge of time, of mutual appeasement. Every time that peace was thus definitely established between one of them and me, that all had been said and alleviated, then one by one each of these universes vanished, completely and definitively disappearing.
At the end of my dream I was always a small boy, I had not aged but I had changed internally as my around universe had changed. I watched everywhere, approached all but no universe opened up under my look or to my approach. There was nothing but a soft light, a comfortable, quiet, reassuring house -and I felt myself, as a small child, quiet and reassured, and smiling. I felt delivered. It was like a newborn dawn after had left the night and its ghosts. My dream ended thus in a last circular look where I noted and especially felt that all these universes and all these ghosts had left definitely, that nothing was henceforth more haunted. It is the moment I woke up.
It was on Tuesday, very early in the morning, it was still dark, and it was the fifth and last phase of my trip where I thought on everything that had arrived me, valued it and understood it. It lasted some hours.
What struck me most was first how I felt. I felt deeply changed. I had the impression that my body was more thin and light, a lot less massive, less stiff and better lubricated. My head seemed to me unbelievably light, quiet, and especially without the painful pressure that I felt there before my trip. It seemed to me that my brain only occupied a very small part of the space in my skull, as if this one was filled of emptiness – not a negative emptiness, on the contrary it was very pleasant and positive, relaxing. I felt marvelously well, and delivered as I was in my dream. And I understood that all had perfectly well functioned, that Mother Iboga had accomplished a fantastic work.
Here is in summary everything that I understood during this phase 5: When I was a child, I have ever been liked either respected, protected, pampered. I never knew what meant tenderness or affection. My mother was cold and distant, my father was demanding, hard, violent, sadistic. So I progressively developed a feeling of extreme solitude, suffering and misfortune. Psychologically I felt vastly desperate and torn, filled of screaming and tears that I could not express because I wasn’t allowed to cry, under any circumstance. My first years were thus, for me, years of absolute despair, of a feeling of incontournable defeat, of impossibility to escape an implacable destiny. I believe that it is this psychological bruising that encouraged the emergence, by the weakening of my immunity system, of very numerous illnesses of which some serious (I had a parameningitis and the poliomyelitis). All these illnesses in my first childhood caused numerous and deep fevers accompanied by deliriums, where were gradualy crystallized all features of my real life. Thus I created inside myself one mental universe where all sufferings and violences of my reality were embodied of imaginary and symbolic way. These “parallel realities”, extremely gloomy and malevolent, arose and developed all along my numerous fevers, then the night lasting my innumerable nightmares, and went up to invade my days while distorting the reality of what I saw and heard. I lived in a world where the real and the imaginary confounded themselves, where the pain and the danger resided more and more everywhere. I lived in a perpetual terror and a permanent destruction feeling that I felt in my mind as in my body. That is probably what men name the lunacy, and that is what I designed, without knowing what it was, as the black hole.
I left to explore this black hole while using the ibogaine, with in mind a certain number of ideas on work that I had to make, a certain type of strategy. I had prepared my trip minutely with a list of questions, of questioning to solve on my father, my mother, my environment. I had recovered a certain number of memories or elements of memories on which I wanted to concentrate, to focus to manage recovering much more things and understanding them, solving them. I had brought childhood photos that could have used like springboard to dive in myself. I wanted to enter my unconscious, the black hole in it, with a plan of attack that characterized himself by the fact that I was concentrated on the personal reports with my family surround, and I thought that the origin of my problems and therefore the solution was there. I was mistaken completely. What made me so fear the black hole, what was in my head that made me feel without stop under pressure to such point that I had these last months the permanent impression that my skull was going to explode -as if a volcano sped up inside, that threatened to every instant to enter in eruption -, the origins of this were deliriums caused by my fevers and my nightmares, were all these ghost universes which arose from, wich had grown in me and were still in me, still alive and active.
Ibogaine unearthed all this stuff, brought back everything to the surface and in short treated him -and the whole to its manner that is symbolic and emotional, while completely short-circuiting the strategy that I had elaborated. Phase 1 of my trip was only a reproduction, a production of what really were my deliriums and nightmares lasting of long years. Phase 2, this feeling to be so deeply unhappy, lonely, without hope, quit by the destiny, this cosmic despair way, that was my child’s daily feeling. These tears and these sobs that I could also have expressed during this phase 2, it was my child’s tears and sobs that I could never have expressed until this day and that were therefore still in me. In fact, phases 1 and 2, that was, precisely, the black hole, exhumed and put in stage of suitable symbolic way to circumstances. And this long conscious dream that I did during the phase 4 was a symbolic production, invented and led by the ibogaine to take care of me, to heal me of these ghosts, these violences and this suffering.
So it was Tuesday morning, I felt at the same time psychologically free and physically much better in a way, but completely exhausted. I had the sensation to have spent a phenomenal energy in this adventure and to be completely unloaded, out of power, so weak. Physically, the ibogaine effects were not yet gone away, I had still lightnings and all turned around when I tried to rise. So I remained in bed all day long, trying to relive and to fix in my memory everything that had happened. My trip ended thus.
(Beginning of the second part)
I spent the two following days taking strengths again. I restarted to eat progressively. In the beginning foods or drinks seemed to me cold and metallic, not good at all. I went for some short walks at the seaside, that made me feel really better. I had difficulty walking, my girlfriend had to sustain me. I was indeed very weak but it didn’t disturb me because I felt my body and my mind free of the pain and the pressure that filled them before, and it was a very great feeling. My head continued to be unbelievably light and aired. It was as if I had been cleared from thorny undergrowth and after that as a cool and healthy ground was soon ready to be sowed. Within two days it seemed to me that new seeds began to take roots, I restarted to have desires, to project me in the future, to consider of the concrete projects -all things that existed no more before ibogaine. I felt therefore very satisfied and very confident.
It is alas the moment when I had problems with my friend, who from her side, for reasons that I won’t develop here, felt really bad because my experience had disturbed her. So she left and, from Thursday evening to Sunday evening, I had to stay alone. It was very hard for me because her presence to my side helped me a lot, I felt the desire of a human heat on which to lean to carry out my come-back, I felt still fragile, as newborn, and it was as if her departure made me fall again in the rut of which I had just taken out hardly. I restarted to feel pain, I had the impression that my interior seeds had been trampled on, and that they were dying. When she came to look for me on Sunday evening to bring me back in Bordeaux (it was foreseen since the beginning that this Sunday would be the last day of the stay here), I had restarted to drink and to smoke whereas I didn’t feel the desire of it anymore until her departure.
Therefore I would have to be alone at home in Bordeaux for the week, quite distressed because I had hoped a lot in the ibogaine, I waited for the end of my problems and the opportunity of a new departure, I had believed one moment to have gotten this objective and I felt losing it. That is why I decided to take ibogaine again, hoping that this second dose would make me rise again, going on again on good bases. It remained me thereabouts 20 grams of rootbark that I decided to absorb on Wednesday morning. I knew for having read it here and there on the net that to ingest some ibogaine a short time after a first taken was not recommended, because long terms métabolites seemed to block its effects. However, as I felt really bad, I thought that I didn’t have anything to lose trying this, and anyway, I didn’t wait to make an as strong and powerful experience than the first one, I just wanted to start again rightly, switch on again the process of recovery.
This second experience was extremely negative. I had the same physical effects that at the first time, or nearly (in fact a little bit less): deformed vision, lightnings, desire to vomit and impossibility to rise alone. But I had much less psychological effects. Things were brought to my conscience but were not solved. I felt for example that an important part of the black hole had been removed, probably the more essential and most painful, but that it remained lot of problems to solve that had a more classic aspect, a lot more in accordance with the strategy that I had in mind while incoming my first trip. About this topic I remembered a pair of elements of my childhood; I remember to have met my mother in dream and to have spoken to her, asking her questions about my early childhood. I remember to have felt a very deep feeling of sadness, witch made me understand that many negative feelings and tears remained inside of me, but made of a quite different nature than those having been treated before. This kind of feeling was made with absolute and deep sadness that invaded every part of my body and my mind. I felt that I was entirely made, build with sadness. In the same way as the skeleton of each one is composed largely of calcium, it was as if my “mental skeleton” was composed of sadness. The big difference here with my first experience was that then an important material had been brought back to the conscience and treated, so after this I felt cleaned, washed from this stuff. This time these things were only brought back to the surface, but weren’t treated. Thus today they appeare to me merely conscious and I have to live with, without the possibility to solve them. It is like ibogaine had just shown me the work that remained to do, or a part of this work.
Another important part of this second experience was like a general review of my life in its entirety. I saw who I was and who I had become, with immensely of acuteness and precision, without indulgence and even without mercy. It was like a passage to the X radiuses, a scan of my whole life and all facets of myself. I experimented the same thing concerning people I ran along in my existence and that took a meaningful part there. It was a very important and very prominent experience where I was able to see, with an acuteness and a bigger lucidity that ever, the futility and the smallness of the existence, the pathetic and even miserable character of all human being, including myself. This was not indeed a discovery because it is rather a usual way for me to see. What changed here was the intensity, the size, the depth of this look, as if a multitude of things, of beings, of feelings that I had seen until then separately and chronologically were then reunified “here and now”, as if I saw them for the first time together and simultaneously. It was a rich and deep but negative and moving experience.
These were the only things that occurred during this second trip with ibogaine, during Wednesday and Thursday. My sleep was not affected, I normally slept during the first night, then the second and others. Nothing special happened, apart this second night’s dream where I remember to have met my mother and have spoken to her, but it didn’t especially touch me nor didn’t apparently modify whatever it is. If the psychological effects were very moderate, on the other hand the physical consequences of this second trip were stronger. I felt more tired, more “out of power”, and it took a long time to recover (in fact, until Tuesday or Wednesday of the following week where I physically felt put back definitely ).
Today, about fifteen days after the end of this second experience, here are my reflections and commentaries:
– I think that the ibogaine is really and definitely a great curative tool. It did a gigantic work in me, making me clear of what made me feel so badly and handicapped me so much. Do you know this? :
” So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night
An infant crying for the light
And with no language but a cry “.
Alfred Tennyson: In Memoriam
It summarizes what I was before the ibogaine. Since I don’t cry anymore in the night for the light, my language is finally becoming something else that a shout, I can run another dream -simply because I am not haunted anymore. And I know, and I feel, that it is definitive. I am especially impressed by the symbolic strength of the ibogaine that allowed me to treat the most pressing, the most painful and handicapping part of my problem, but to its manner and not at all the way I had imagined. I am absolutely astounded by the strength of what I lived -the strength of pictures, of sensations, of emotions, of universes in which I have been dived, by the as much creative than curative strength of such a process. That such a gigantic work could be accomplished such a radical way and in such a short time seems to me amazing. As “self-primaler” since some years now, I know from experience how it is long and difficult to extract and to treat emotions and events that are bound with. On this point of view, iboga is an atomic bomb that destroy selectively only bad things.
– But I also understood that ibogaine is not a wand -just a tool, a great tool. Thus it only treated a part of my problems. It remains a lot to accomplish before cleaning me completely of my childhood, thus I will have to do other iboga trips -I don’t know how much. I believe the reason of this fact is the quantity of traumatisms that I had to undergo during my early childhood, and therefore to the necessary work quantity to solve the whole of these problems. It cannot be done in one trip, all the more since it is absolutely exhausting. Our reserves of energy, then the amount of work that we can provide, are limited, and the ibogaine cannot make miracles on this point of view, just a really good work, in the limits of each other’s means.
– The fact that I relapsed after my first experience shows evidently that the ibogaine is only a tool that must be considered in a global process, like an essential element but only an element of a whole therapy that must include the psychological and material preparation of the ibogaine ingestion, the material and psychological environment of the trip himself, then the accompaniment and the support after the experience. It is a process in three stages where each is as important one that the other, where the iboga is only the necessary but no sufficient element of the whole. It is a conclusion that rejoins a lot of points of view that I have read here or there on internet. Ibogaine doesn’t accomplish anything by itself: it makes things possible. The success of an experience depends on the capacity of each one to manage the best way this possible. Circumstances, coincidence, luck or misfortune take an obvious place there. If I have been able to cry (and this permitted me to be delivered of an enormous weight that remained enclosed inside of me since my childhood, and contributed strongly to my new well-being), it is thanks to my girlfriend who knew how to be there, available and reassuring. I would never been able to cry alone, or with a no-familiar. But if I relapsed then, it is because of my friend who could not remain with me, available and reassuring. Circumstances… The success or the failure of an eboga trip seems to me to depend on the quality of these circumstances to the center of which is the human relation quality exchanged with the people who watches over you. It is why I doubt, for example, about the value of a clinic environment, maybe sure on a medical point of view, but what about human heat? It is why I doubt about the value of a bwiti “initiation”, whose doubtful circumstances have been brought back lately on this list.
– What also appears to me astonishing, is the distortion of time dragged by ibogaine. Indeed during my first trip, ibogaine began to produce its effects toward 11 o’clock on Sunday morning, to probably end on Tuesday morning toward noon, what makes about fifty hours. That is the real, objective time. But in my interior space-time things were quite different. The phase 1 appeared me to last an infinitely long time, but I cant be more specific because I didn’t have reference mark of time at all -say: days or weeks. For the phase 2 I have more reference marks because my friend came to see me pretty much every hour, and I had each time the sensation that several days had flowed out, so I always asked her what day it was. Of course she inevitably answered me: Monday, so I used to ask her for exact time – and I found every time incredible that so little time passed since her last visit, whereas it seemed to me to have flowed out several days. So the whole Monday appeared to me to have lasted several weeks. For phase 3 I just can’t evaluate anything. Phase 4 was the longest, because every time that I brought in in an universe, it was to install my life here during several weeks or several months, the necessary time to be adopted there and to become intimate with its inhabitants, to side then with them and finally to see this universe vanishing. As there were several ten or several hundred of these universes, I don’t know anymore, I can affirm that I lived there at least the equivalent of a long life during some hours. I affirm otherwise that this interior life was materially as real, concrete and palpable, sensitively or emotionally, than every day’s life we share you and me, including the conscience of passing time. This time dilation is indeed a very important point, and very impressive, of the full iboga experience. During my second journey this time dilation didn’t occur.
– If you have soon read a lot of other reports on eboga trips, you surely noticed that my experience is very different in its shape than most of them. A supplementary detail is to note on this point of view: a lot of people note a reduction of their sleep need lasting several weeks, or even several months after the ingestion of ibogaine. For me until now, it is precisely the opposite. Before, I needed about 6 hours of sleep to feel rested. If I slepted more, I felt less well. Now I feel the need of more sleep, seven hours and a half to eight hours seem to be necessary, seven hours are a minimum under which it is me anyway impossible to descend. Maybe this is due to the fact that I have the very clear feeling, without being able to explain it however logically and rationally, that my brain is rebuilding itself currently on news bases since the two experiences, that day after day important underground restructurings take place, and that therefore my inner work with ibogaine didn’t stop as physical effects stopped two weeks ago. Only the visible aspects stopped, but something is still acting in backstage. Don’t ask me what, I just don’t know! I just can say it has something to do with the sensation of new seeds wich are growing in background. It’s much less clear than the first time but apparently working. If theories on the paradoxical sleep (REM) and its role in the structuring of the brain are exact, the important modifications generated by the ibogaine in my mind could explain this increased need of sleep.
– Something that greatly hurt me on a physical plan is the absolutely disgusting taste of the rootbark, or of the excerpt that I had prepared according to Howard’s recipe. It is the most awful mess that I ever had to swallow, and I confess that I don’t understand how so many people can support to swallow several ten grams (or several glasses for the excerpt) for their trip. Fortunately after my first test on Thursday morning, I understood that I never will be able to ingest sufficiently of this barbaric shit and I procured gel caps, which permitted me to absorb the necessary quantity on Sunday. So if I have an advice to give to neophytes on this point of view, it is very simple: don’t prepare an extract, don’t foresee to swallow the rootbark as it is naturally, but prepare the necessary quantity in big gel caps -even if you have to ingest lot of them, it will be anyway much less laborious to swallow than pure rootbark or extract. In my opinion, the fact not to feel this repugnant taste at all decreases both the physical uneasiness and the risk to vomit during the first hours. That is what happened during my second experience where I swallowed everything in gel caps, I was not therefore embarrassed at all by the taste of the root and I felt less nauseating after.
– By the way of uneasiness and possible vomits lasting the first hours of the trip, I have two very useful advices for those that intend to take iboga. The first is to concentrate, to focus in thought on visions and all psychological effects that come with them. One is very quickly and very easily absorbed by this psychoactive aspect of the trip, and then one forgets his body and its possible uneasiness, one doesn’t feel sick at all. If one lets go to think about his body and his bodily sensations, the uneasiness and the desire to vomit amplify automatically. The second is to use an urinal for his physical needs. So it avoids to rise to go to the toilets, what is a dangerous and risky test about vomiting. The urinal is very easy to use and without risk, one can nearly use it without moving. It is sufficient that the one that surperwise your trip empties it for you regularly. Really simple and convenient.
I will finish this posting putting two questions that more especially are addressed to Howard and all participants of the next conference of NYC -of course everybody’s help will be welcome:
– Don’t you think that the visions induced by ibogaine, whatever is the name that one gives to them -visions, dreams, hallucinations – and the shape that they take, is an essential part of the treatment and recovery process, and that wanting to suppress them is as absurd and dangerous as to want to suppress dreams of the nocturnal rest? (I put this question by the way of this Howard’s posting on the ibogaine list, about the conference program and objectives:
Discrimination studies: Drug discrimination studies offer a possible approach to the issue of ibogaine’s mechanism of action, and the question of the possible resolution of ibogaines therapeutic from its hallucinogenic effects.)
It seems to me that all these ” visions “, as are dreams, are the natural expression mode, the language of the unconscious, and that wanting them to shut up is not the best way to hear what they have to tell us… It seems to me that it is also the operative mode of ibogaine, and that removing its main tool is not the best way to guarantee its efficiency… Well, I’m just curious: why is the presence of visions so disturbing??
– How to determine, after having done an iboga trip, the moment when supposed long-term métabolites will have disappeared and when it will be possible again for someone to redo a new trip while benefiting from ibogaine with 100% effects? On the net, one can read here or there that one has to wait for some weeks or some months. But how can an individual know this delay precisely for himself?? Are there objective signs of whatsoever nature that permit to answer to this question with a minimum of certainty? (I suppose that everybody will understand the sense of this question. Personally I will have to take ibogaine again, and I want to make it as soon as possible, without waiting more that necessary the time that it recovered its efficiency. But how to know when the moment will have come??)
Well, I hope my testimony will be useful.
I thank all the people here and there who helped me providing useful informations and advices.
Love to them all.
Best regards,
Xavier