I had done the bad thing and that was a mistake. I had screwed up and that was an error. I made a very bad mess of things and that was wrong – so very wrong.

The words were running around and around in my head ‘It’s wrong, it’s wrong, it’s all so extremely wrong…’ I was trying as hard as I could to backtrack, to reverse hastily out of the situation, but it just wasn’t happening for me. I couldn’t undo what I had done. I couldn’t cover it up. No backtracking allowed, says the sign. No backtracking allowed.

Ghost figures were shaking their heads at me – ‘There is no way back, there is no way back, there is no way back..’ they were telling me. ‘No, no, no – you can’t ever go back,’ they told me. Grim figures, serious figures, austere figures, shaking their heads dolefully. They were communicating telepathically of course. That’s how they always communicate – by direct non-verbal telepathy.

People don’t believe in telepathy of course. They think they know better! They laugh out loud when you try to inform them about it. People automatically think that you’re soft in the head if you bring telepathy into the discussion; they assume that you must be some kind of messed-up drug casualty who has permanently messed up their brain by having amphetamine psychosis too many times.

‘How many times is too many times?’ you ask cannily, but I can give you no answer. I wouldn’t know. I can’t say anything about that. Somewhere or other out there in possibility space there is a critical boundary condition that we would be well advised to keep a close eye on, but beyond that I’m fairly hazy. Beyond that I am very hazy indeed, in fact. The following visualization exercise might help, however.

Imagine yourself in the following situation, if you will. You are somehow suspended in the middle of a dark and terrible void and there is absolutely nothing there for you to perceive, not even yourself. You’re a disembodied presence only you’re not really that present. You’re only barely present. And there is something that’s not right in this situation – you have an awareness of an ominous problem somewhere nearby. The awareness blossoms silently within you; becoming more and more awful as time goes on. You have realised to your horror that the problem is you.

So that’s the situation we’re talking about here. This is the key repetition of the core revelation, and it could well relate to the point at which the critical boundary condition may, or may not, have been reached. Or could be reached. The entire hallucinatory sequence of which I speak lasted no more than five minutes, but during that time I hallucinated myself as a hallucination. ‘Wow – that’s too much!’ I told myself excitedly, but me saying this was also a hallucination. It was the hallucination of a hallucination. I was hallucinating myself hallucinating and so there was no way to know if this was actually true or not.

‘Is it true that this is a hallucination, or is it not true?’ you ask yourself, ‘or is it the case that I am only hallucinating that is true?’ You have smoked plenty of weed in your time of course, but you have never known yourself to hallucinate this badly before. This is a new one for you. ‘Or am I perhaps hallucinating well?’ you ask yourself, ‘could it be the case that I am hallucinating very well?’ You can’t be sure if it’s the one way or if it’s the other. Are you perhaps only hallucinating that you are hallucinating badly when actually  — if the truth were to be known – you’re hallucinating very well indeed? How would you know, after all? How could you tell the difference?