I was joining in, as I always joined in, in the rousing, joyful, melancholic and sentimental chorus of the most precious and highly revered national anthem of my deeply beloved homeland. I cannot describe the feelings which stir in me at such times – they are indescribable feelings of pride, joy and unintelligible splendour. Such mighty feelings ought not to be described – they ought only to be experienced. Savoured – most certainly – but never mentioned.

Anyway, there I was, on this special occasion, joining in, as I always join in, in the rousing and yet deeply melancholic tones of the national anthem of my most beloved homeland, and experiencing the solemn but at the same time deeply sentimental joy that comes with that, when out of the blue I remembered in a flash that the whole thing was just an illusion. I both remembered and realised beyond any doubt that none of this was real, that it had all been a made-up thing in my mind. I had known this all along, and yet had forgotten. I had been cosying up to a dream, as determinedly as I could.

The strains of the proudly triumphant – if somewhat dull and fusty – music that I had been milking so much vanished abruptly, it receded into unreality so fast that it made me dizzy. I actually had to sit down for a minute. It was like someone pulling away the rug, the way people sometimes do, just when you’re just getting comfortable. Just at that precise moment, when you’re getting supremely comfortable and you can actually see in your mind’s eye the gates of bliss swinging open. ‘At last’, you’re saying to yourself, ‘at long last…’ You have waited so long for this moment and you know that you deserve it. You know that you richly deserve it.

I was participating, as I always participate, in the tremendous fabrication – ‘Oh tremendous fabrication’, I intoned reverentially, ‘bestow upon us your very special blessing, bestow upon us the very special blessing of your phantasmagorical bullshit…’ Pure religious fervour had overcome me at this stage you see, and I just had to roll with it. Satan was doing his very best to interfere, as he always does, but I was determined to renounce him at every step. ‘Renounce Satan and his ways,’ I shouted hysterically, ‘renounce Satan and his evil ways!’ Little did I know that Satan himself was inspiring me to shout like a fool in this way. He was laughing at me all the way.

The old illusion and come and gone. The old illusion had come and  gone and a brand new illusion had just arrived on the scene. The new one had taken control of my senses and was busy dictating terms. In this new illusion I believed myself to be a top-flight hypnogogic researcher, conducting cutting edge research into the nature of subjective reality. I was a laboratory phenomenologist. ‘Cutting edge research, cutting edge research, cutting edge research…’ I muttered away to myself, as I carefully extracted the isolate from the bottom of the thin glass tube that I had just taken out of the centrifuge. The time had come for me to test the new isomer. My intuition was telling me that this was the isomer we had all been waiting for – the ultimate hallucinogen, the Holy Grail of all psychedelic researchers. ‘What will this drug show me?’ I asked myself soberly, ‘and will I be able to take what is – or what might be – the ultimate revelation?’