ILLUSTRATED ADVENTURES DAY 53
drug-induced hallucinations

2005-03-15
Last night I had a rather sore throat, probably due to the dryness of the indoor air during winter days, so in order to sleep easier I took a sip (OK, so I took three sips, I'm a large man after all) of Maria's cough medicine. I was sleeping within five minutes (like a clubbed seal as we Swedes use to say), kind of sleeping I must add, because after a while I started to have these weird lucid dreams; Chinese dragons swam peacefully in a white space, they seemed to be made out of amber or honey, and as they swam around they melted and dissolved and became whole again. What the hell is going on I wondered. And so I wondered and so it went on until four in the morning when I awoke feeling as I've slept for a week. I had to get up and walk a few laps around the flat. The outdoor thermometer showed -23C. I went to bed again and stared at the ceiling until Maria went up for work at seven o'clock. My hands were shaking slightly and I felt much worse than I ever had after getting (ordinary) drunk. Then I got the idea to check what that cough medicine really was about and that explained a lot; the active ingredient was morphine.

It was not a pleasant experience, I get a feeling of nausea whenever I bring that orange liquorice flavour of the cough medicine to mind. But, it gave me an important insight about the nature of the source of my art. As you might know I paint visions that on some occasions pop up in front of my eyes; that's the core of my inspiration. But however cool those morphine based "honey dragons" were they wasn't near the crisp clarity of my spontaneous art-visions - this episode gave me insight that those visions must emanate from a much more true and complex source than drug-induced hallucinations (a fact which I kind of knew before, but one can't be too certain).


The honey dragons cough medicine lucid dream-hallucination.
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