What Hyperdimensional Leeches Taught Me About Psychedelic Metaphor
You saw an alien — now what?
It wasn’t until my third ayahuasca ceremony that I started seeing the multidimensional energy leeches.
I was on a 12-day retreat at the Temple of the Way of Light1 in the Peruvian Amazon. The first couple ceremonies had been mildly psychedelic. But things got serious by the third ceremony.
The healers sang traditional songs in near complete darkness while the other participants began vomiting — all standard ayahuasca ceremony stuff. But then I started seeing leeches come pouring out of the other participants’ mouths as they threw up.
My neighbor, a big gruff guy from Australia, was projectile vomiting swarms of these leeches everywhere — on the healers, the floor, and me. These leeches weren't just dark; they seemed to drink the light around them. They were pure energetic negation. And they could only be seen in extra dimensions.
What does that mean? Imagine your life has always happened on a big IMAX movie screen. Everything you see, hear, and smell is happening in the screen, so all your attention is on the screen itself. You see some mosquitos on the screen, but then — ouch — you get bitten by a mosquito in the movie theater. Suddenly you realize there’s a whole other dimension of reality that some creatures live within: the theater dimension.
As these leeches launched out of my neighbor’s guts, I had a horrifying realization: I was covered with them myself. They were attached to my shoulders, neck and jaw — anywhere I carried physical tension in my body. I had the urge to vomit them out but I couldn’t, so I started shaking. You know how a kid’s body shakes when they’ve been sobbing? It was like that, without the emotion. And as my body shook, the leeches lost their grip and sloughed off.
The day after that ceremony, I felt amazing. As I did yoga that morning, I could feel even more leeches lose their grip as I stretched and breathed into stagnant nooks and crannies of my body. Movement is a form of hygiene, I realized. Just as I wash my body to remove bacterial parasites, I can move my body to remove energetic parasites.
A few things were especially striking about this multidimensional leech epiphany :
It was (and remains) very motivating. Those leeches were fucking gross, and removing them from my body felt liberating. Sometimes when my body feels stiff and yucky, I still say to myself “time to wash off the leeches,” by which I mean “exercise.”
It felt realer than normal waking reality. Just like getting bit by a mosquito in the theater rather than seeing one on the screen, I felt like I had gained insight at a higher level of reality than the normal three-dimensional one.
Despite this, it also felt metaphorical. My mind, scrambling for a familiar file, labeled them leeches. It was the only way I could begin to understand what I was feeling. There was something I couldn’t perceive with my everyday consciousness, that had a real effect on my normal, three-dimensional body.
So were these leeches real or not? I struggled with that question for days after the ceremony. But then I realized it’s like asking whether the “H” on the hot water tap is actually hot water. It’s the wrong question.
Metaphors all the way down
Remember the diagram of an atom we all learned in school? The one that’s a nucleus of neutrons and protons surrounded by electrons in specific orbits? Turns out that’s not real.
Electrons don’t orbit around the nucleus. They exist in a quantum mechanical “superposition” of many possible states, which collapses into a specific point when the electron is observed or measured.
The idea of an atom that we learned in school was a metaphor. It was a representation of reality that lets us understand it at a useful level. For most middle schoolers, imagining electrons spinning around the nucleus in certain “orbits” is a good enough metaphor to help understand other concepts like chemical bonding.
These metaphors change as science changes. It’s currently en vogue to talk about hormones like cortisol as physical representations of mental stress. Cortisol’s role in the body is way more complex than just being a stress response. But when we say something like “my cortisol levels are making me tired” we are really using a metaphor to mean “stress is doing something to my body that is making me tired.”
Cortisol, like a multidimensional energy leech, is a way to distill something complex into a conceptually workable idea.
Take it seriously, not literally
The menu is not the meal. The map is not the territory.
The ideas and images we get on high-dose psychedelic experiences are representations. They might teach us something useful or important, just as a map or menu does, but we shouldn’t confuse them for the real thing.
Maybe you realized on a psilocybin journey that your soul came from the Pleiades star system2. You were sent to Earth on a Third-Rock-From-the-Sun-style3 mission to observe and understand human society, and report back after your death on everything you learned. You live here, but you’ll never really belong here.
That’s pretty interesting! And it’s especially interesting when something like that happens to you and feels hyperreal. But realize you have a choice about how to integrate your epiphany:
Seek out as much information as possible (and there’s a lot, believe me) about other people who believe they are Pleiadean. Read the books. Go to the conferences. Prepare your report for the Intergalactic Federation.
Reflect on the core message of this epiphany. What does alienation feel like? What would it mean to truly belong? How do you want to spend your short time on Earth before you return “home” forever?
I’m not saying you’re not from the Pleiades. You might be. But what matters is how you choose to navigate your human incarnation. If identifying with a soul or spirit that transcends this Earthly form helps alleviate anxiety, that’s great. You can and should take the message very, very seriously.
Just don’t get caught staring at the map — or menu — by taking it literally. We all know people who mistake the map for the territory, who take a powerful metaphor literally and insist everyone else buy into it. It’s not helpful. In fact, it impedes everyone involved.
I don’t need you to believe in my energy leeches. If it helps you, as it has helped me, motivate to stay “clean” by moving your body, then by all means believe in the critters! If it sounds like the took-too-much ravings of an acid burnout, then forget about it and find your own metaphor.
Including a link as a recommendation, not a sponsorship.
Weirdly, this isn’t that uncommon.
Aging myself?