The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 21 of 125
Serial sessions unfold deeper layers
By the second or third trip, however, specific themes were beginning to stand out and evolve—and the serial approach began to make self-evident sense. I had marked a passage from Realms of the Human Unconscious where Grof discusses this development of material from one session to the next. Rather than being unrelated and random, the experiential content seemed to represent a successive unfolding of deeper and deeper levels of the unconscious. It was quite common that identical or very similar clusters of visions, emotions, and physical symptoms occurred in several consecutive LSD sessions. Patients often had the feeling that they were returning again and again to a specific experiential area and each time could get deeper into it. After several sessions, such clusters would then converge into a complex reliving of traumatic memories. When these memories were relived and integrated, the previously recurring phenomena never reappeared in subsequent sessions and were replaced by others.1 Mother and child, that was probably my first clear “cluster of visions, emotions, and physical symptoms.” As with the warrior/poet of my first trip, this archetype was something I perceived from different viewpoints, sometimes from inside, sometimes from out. Sometimes I saw the child through the mother’s eyes, sometimes the mother through those of the child. There were confused episodes where I seemed to have become a woman myself and be giving birth to a child; and despite my intoxication, I became surprisingly embarrassed by this and tried to pretend it wasn’t happening.