iDosers are the new "in" thing. They are binaural brainwaves that are supposed to alter your state of mind. It's something old. Heinrich Wilhelm Dove discovered them in 1839. They are slightly different frequencies played separately to each ear producing a perception of interference at the same rate as would be physically created.
Needless to say, I was highly skeptical of iDosers. I'm not a huge believer in drugs in general, but a "sound" drug? What kind of desperate weirdo would try this? A tired, white noising writer on a Saturday afternoon. That's who! After walking the dog for a whole day, I was sitting in front of my computer, trying to write something, realizing I had shot myself in the foot by hitting the pavement so hard for so long.
Failblog was making fun of iDosers that day, calling it "trend fail". In my ever persistent macho quest for the extremes, I told myself: "How bad can it really be? Worse comes to worse, I'll be able to rip on them". So I found one on YouTube called "Weed". In case it worked well, I knew what weed felt like so I wouldn't trip balls and stab my dog in the face, thinking she's a giant spider. "Weed" sounded safe to me. It almost was.
I sat down in front of my computer and listened to five minutes of white noise with a strange, regular beacon over it. I sat through it, droning out from my day of walking, sinking and sinking into that comfortable, reassuring sound. I even closed my eyes. This was more like hypnosis than drugs really. A dude would've popped behind me, telling me to go kill my neighbors, I would've did it. It was that fun and soothing.
Then the five minutes mark kicked in. The smooth beacon changed into a strange, deranging low tone alarm. Think about that moment in Twilight Zone where the protagonist sees the alien/monster/demon/etc. The sound reflected this horror moment. I started feeling warm, heavy and the patterns on my desk started doing waves like the dunes of the Saharah. I had smoked weed before, but rarely I had such a heightened effect. It was fun for a few minutes, but afterwards I had to step out with the dog again because this was getting heavy.
I guess it's cooler to experience with friends, during a house party. I wouldn't do it alone again. Because it works well. And with names like "Hand of God" and "Gates of Hades", you'd have to pay me a lot of money to do these alone. I had a discussion with a friend on Facebook afterwards who argued that it had to be 100% placebo. I agree that you have to WANT it to work, because there's no intruding substance. You have to sit through a track, which requires you to be completely opened.
I did not imagined those effects though. Hell no. What did it bring to my creativity? Nothing. What benefit did I pulled from this? None. Conclusions? Drugs are overrated. I'm no yardstick of knowledge, good taste or perception, but trying iDosers was a tremendous waste of time. I could have tried to write a paragraph, make a coffee, drink a Red Bull or live a worthy experience. It's comforting to know not every way of self-destruction is working for me. Fighting is enough.
But please do know, advocates of drugs, salesmen of bad dreams, that you have to be bored and without ambition to enjoy those. Boredom killers, that's how you should have called them. This whole experience had no point and left me more confused and white noising than as the start.
DAMN YOU HUNTER S. THOMPSON!
0 comments:
Post a Comment