The year is 1885. A man in England snaps up in bed, crying out, sweat pouring down his face; he’d been thrust awake from a once-in-a-lifetime nightmare.

Desperate to preserve the dream, he took up a pen. Writing with speed and intensity, a tale of darkness hidden within the heart of an otherwise respectable man flowed from the tip.

After five short days, Robert Louis Stevenson laid down the pen, having completed the first draft of the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

I’ve always been enamored

with tales of Possessed Creative Outburst, wherein a human crosses a threshold to become a dancing marionette transmitting some deeper truth from the collective unconscious.

The pattern goes one-way: inspiration strikes; a period of manic work follows to realize the inspiration before it fades.

But what about the opposite? What would happen if you just ripped the manic work first, without the inspo?

That’s the experiment I decided to run. Historically, there’s a massive, gaping hole in my writing process. I always tap out at 3ish hours. And that’s on a good day.

“I’m outta juice” // “writing more would just lead to diminishing returns”

This assumption was so thoroughly unexamined it may as well have been water to a fish.

But a few weeks ago, I decided to examine it. Little did I know, this little maneuver would open a portal to my own Mr. Hyde, leaving me with more questions than answers and an.. unsavory… taste in my mouth.

Into the Unknown

Five hours into day two of the challenge, I kissed The Limit. Or so I thought. Turns out I was stealin’ third base with The Limit but like off 3 jaegerbombs and a tab of acid; I’m not sure I’d consent again if I knew what was to come.

A quick note on the format of this challenge:

While I was writing (or editing), the timer ticked. If I stopped to take a shit or a walk, eat food, or recite Temperature by Sean Paul word-for-word at tempo with no mistakes, the timer paused.

I’d often sit down to start at 10am and finish up my 9hrs of writing at 10pm or later, having taken breaks to chop water and carry wood.

As early as day 2, hour 5, I ran completely out of gas. I had spent the morning working on two essays to the point of exhaustion. I switched to journaling and extinguished whatever salient emotional energy was there. Finally I moved to stream-of-consciousness writing, but quickly got tired of even that. I felt desperately sick of it all with nowhere else to turn and only one way forward.

To really take you into the moment, here’s an exact excerpt from it:

This flavor of exhaustion was not unfamiliar—it had come up during the marathons, as well as the time I tried to self-induce Kundalini Psychosis, and while I was writing on The Schizo/Psycho War.

Whenever I meet the threshold to my unconscious, it only becomes clear afterwards. It’s like the event horizon of a black hole. Chaotic. Violent. Dynamic. You cannot look in from the outside. You don’t really know when you’re close to passing through. But once you’re through, it becomes self-evident.

Right as this crescendo of mental torture peaked, I crossed over.

I closed my laptop, paused the timer, and pulled out my notebook and pen. I walked out onto the balcony in the sun, and paused for a moment to watch the aspens shimmer in the wind. With everything else expunged from my mind, I decided to just follow the first thread that popped up.

What followed would become one of the strangest experiences of my life…

Here’s what happened: