The NZT Pill Experiment

Date: 22/01/2022
Bedtime: 3.30am
Awakening: 8am
Return to bed: 8.05am
Method of entry: deferred direct
Attempt: successful
Awakening: 9am
Phase experience: The Pill Experiment
Duration: 35 seconds

DREAM STATE

Me and my wife have moved to Albania and we walk down an alley with rows of doors and windows. There is barely any space between them and we comment on cramped residents must feel living there. We reach our new home, which feels like it is at the end of a dark tunnel next to a dead end. Our landlord is an apron-wearing Albanian woman in her 30s with a strong accent and she takes us upstairs to show us around. When she turns we get an eye full of nakedness—her back and buttocks are exposed. I wake up.

WAKING STATE

I get up to use the loo and return to bed after a few minutes in order to induce a WILD and execute Project Elijah's experiment.

PHASE STATE

After a period of relaxation and imagining impossible movements whilst lying down, my legs soon bend and sink into the bed, which is conspicuously impossible. I aggressively get up and look around. It's dark and I can barely make out the bed. I start touching the mattress and the bedframe and shout, 'Clarity! Clarity!' expecting vision to improve, which at this point can be described as a bright background obscured by dark patches.

I start spinning in a bid to get rid of them and when I stop, I find myself standing at the bottom of a strange staircase in an unfamiliar environment. The dominant green walls remind me of The Matrix: Resurrections which I saw with my son at the cinema on his birthday. I rush up the stairs, going up in a spiral, listening to my footsteps and describing the surroundings and my actions out loud, noticing that my voice is muffled.

I reach an open window and climb on the ledge in order to jump and fly away to a vast blue sky but then I recall Project Elijah's task; I look down and realise I'm wearing grey pyjamas with pockets so I reach inside one of them and feel two pills. I grip one and it appears to be elongated, which I subsequently discard because it differs greatly from the NZT pill in the film Limitless. I grip the other one and pull it out of my pocket without seeing what it looks like but it's round to the touch so that's good enough for me.

When I swallow the pill—expecting to experience superconsciousness—I briefly acquire the secondary perspective of observing myself from a few feet away squatting on the window ledge with my head tilted back and gulping; subsequently, I'm back in my squatting body staring at a blue sky being consumed by a multicoloured cloud of pixels that ends up taking over my field of vision. The effect is over in a few seconds before everything fades and I foul.

No superconsciousness was experienced and what had followed the act of swallowing the pill had been purely visual.