The Ice Age

by Luke Williams

  I think it’s fairly well recognised that sexual fantasy can express more than just sexual desire, and that the things we fantasise about are not necessarily those we want to do in real life. But I found the sexual fantasies I experienced in the Vortex to be especially morally complicated; they presented me simultaneously as who I wanted to be, and who I would never, ever want to be.

  And yet the more unpleasant and unclean the fantasies became, the more exciting they seemed. When I finally finished, I pulled the blanket off myself; my hair and face were as wet as if I’d just got out of the shower, and it seemed as if the daylight had been part of the Vortex: it was clearly still dark outside. So I got up and walked into the kitchen, where Smithy looked at me in surprise.

  ‘Where have you been?’ he said.

  ‘What time is it?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s about 8.45.’

  ‘8.45 at night?’

  ‘Yep — where you have been all day?’

  ‘All day?’

  ‘Yep, you were gone for ages,’ Smithy said.

  ‘What day is it?’

  ‘It’s Sunday night. Have you been in that bedroom all day?’ Smithy asked.

  Yes, I had. I had been masturbating for sixteen hours non-stop, and it felt as if I had been in there for less than an hour.

  Beck was also there, and took me into the bathroom to say, ‘Smithy thinks you’ve ripped him off. He’s been going on about it all day. He reckons you didn’t give him money for the gear last night.’

  ‘I didn’t, Beck, I mean I haven’t, I haven’t left the house, I’ve been, well, masturbating all day. For sixteen hours,’ I said.

  But this information didn’t seem to register — Beck was very concerned, but only about Smithy. It seemed that Smithy’s imagination had run off on a tangent of its own; he may well have pictured me sneaking out the house, laughing to myself that I had taken his drugs without paying, adding details such as I had been planning it all night, or that it had been revenge for the argument we’d had.

  So I sat him down and explained to him that I hadn’t left the house all night, and would give him the money after I got back from the main street, where I was going very shortly, and his face lit up in relief. This seemed to pop a dark fantasy of his own — started, perhaps, when I had left him alone while he was talking about sex, thus triggering his sore point.

  Here let me make the following point about fantasy — Smithy’s fantasies that he knew were fantasies, and my fantasies, which I also recognised as such, also seem to be the basis of psychotic thinking. While it was rare that I myself would be experiencing the Vortex as real, it does seem to me that the Vortex may reveal a nexus between creativity and madness. It is perfectly possible that these trains of thought — psychosis, imagination, fantasy, and creativity — exist in one inter-connected line. But in some cases, for reasons that might be related to genetics or trauma or underlying neurosis or depression or meth dosage, people take these fantasies to be actual reality.

  Twenty years ago, Rebecca McKetin did a PhD on whether repeated amphetamine use could cause psychosis in lab rats. At the time, this was considered a fringe topic in Australia. Today, McKetin is an internationally renowned expert on the links between crystal-meth use and psychotic meltdowns. In her long-term study, introduced in Chapter 2, McKetin found that methamphetamine users are five times more likely to show symptoms of psychosis than non-users. The study also showed that the greater the dose, the greater the risk of psychosis. The risk of psychosis also increased with the severity of dependence, and dependent methamphetamine users were a particularly high-risk group for psychosis even after adjusting for a history of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. The study also found that other factors often associated with regular meth use, such as lack of sleep, a history of trauma, and the concurrent use of alcohol and cannabis, also increased the odds of psychosis.

  While the link between crystal-meth use and psychosis is firmly established, the link between creativity and psychosis in the context of crystal-meth use has never been empirically studied. Dr Glenys Dore, the clinical director and a consultant psychiatrist at the Northern Sydney Drug & Alcohol Service, and a clinical senior lecturer at the University of Sydney, told me that the problem with establishing that link is that researchers would need to connect an MRI machine to someone while they were using crystal meth and performing a creative task — an ethical and funding quagmire.

  Dore, a friendly, vivacious woman with a kindly tone and slight Kiwi twang, went on to say, ‘But certainly we know that crystal meth works on the limbic system of the brain, which is also partly responsible for creativity and imagination. Also, what I think some of these experiences tell us is that not everyone has a terrible experience with the drug, and that some people do find the drug very useful in having new, creative experiences.’

  Crystal meth increases dopamine in the brain, the same hormone the brain is flush with when we orgasm. High dopamine levels are not only associated with anxiety, schizophrenia, and aggression but also with compulsive behaviours, sexual addictions, and creativity.

  Making connections between things that are otherwise considered disparate is characteristic not only of psychosis, but also authentic creativity and new scientific discovery. One of the most remarkable thinkers alive today is a woman named Nancy C. Andreasen. Dr Andreasen is the Andrew H. Woods Chair of Psychiatry at the University of Iowa’s Carver College of Medicine, as well as the director of the Neuroimaging Research Centre and the Mental Health Clinical Research Centre there. She is a prominent neuroscientist and psychiatrist, but her first career was as a literary scholar, and she was a professor of Renaissance literature at the University of Iowa for five years. She has written many books, and created many original theories on the science of creativity.

  Andreasen says her research shows many things: that creative ability has no correlation with IQ; that creative people are more likely to have immediate family members with schizophrenia; and that creative insight is more likely to happen when the mind is relaxed. She has interviewed many high-functioning, highly creative people, and also taken imaging of their brains while they complete a creative task. She says creativity is about ‘coming up with a lot of ideas very quickly’ and is essentially a process called ‘divergent thinking’, which she defines as the ability to come up with a large number of responses to an open-ended probe; this is in contrast to ‘convergent thinking’, which tends to apply a sequential series of steps to answer a question that has only one possible solution.

  Andreasen has noted that many (not all) of the highly creative people she has studied describe being in a dreamlike state when they produce creative work, and that these ‘unconscious processes’ are important for creativity. She gives the historical example of Coleridge, who once ‘composed an entire 300-line poem about Kubla Khan while in an opiate-induced, dreamlike state, and began writing it down when he awoke; he said he then lost most of it when he got interrupted and called away on an errand — thus the finished poem was only about a quarter of the size’.

  While it is, of course, possible to reach these creative states and produce creative work without using crystal meth, in retrospect I feel that my use of crystal meth helped illuminate some of the key ingredients in producing creative work — to let myself be a kid again, that kid who was playing in the backyard and creating an entire world around him. Moreover, I had to let go of my rational mind, surrendering control and giving precedence to an apparently more rudimentary, silly, imaginative part of the psyche that often serves no rational adult purpose.

  After that first weekend in the Vortex at Smithy’s, I was determined to make the most of these self-generating images. I thought the best way to handle this was to use in low doses, sit myself down at a computer as soon as I had a dose, and concentrate on putting energy into creative ideas.

  Poetry, songs, more ideas for novels followed. Songs? Yes — whi
le my dad is a musician, and I used to sing as a young teenager, I have never played an instrument, played in a band, or done anything remotely musical as an adult. Yet here I was, writing and performing songs — even if they weren’t exactly worth listening to.

  What happened next is evidence of my increasingly delusional state. One of the reasons I began writing music was that I had met some professional musicians when I was in Sydney who were exceptionally kind and who had invited me to a few events. During a conversation with one of them — a well-known performer from London — at an after-party, he told me that I had a made a ‘boring choice’ to become a lawyer when I obviously enjoyed doing creative things, and he asked me if I ever felt like writing music.

  When I was high on crystal meth, I would daydream about these events, and eventually decided that these musicians had deliberately sought me out because they believed me to be an extraordinary talent who could be a professional musician, and that they had started me on something called ‘The Journey’. I even believed that, at times, the performer from London was sending me lyrics for songs via telepathy.

  At other times, these delusions would darken, and I believed that they had invited me to the events in order to pretend that they wanted me to become a professional musician, so I would make a fool of myself on stage, and they would get revenge on me for a long list of other nasty things I had, in turn, done to other people throughout my life.

  Smithy, meanwhile, seemed to experience his fantasies (which were usually sexual in nature) almost as an entry into another world. There seemed to be some kind of twilight zone, in which he started to experience his visions not as happening there and then, but as a memory of something that had happened — and not a scene that he had directly seen, but instead one that was hidden from him. These fantasies often involved Beck, and blended with his terrible sense of persecution and rejection.

  For instance, one night, about two months into my living at the house, Smithy was standing in his bedroom. He was in typical form, hovering around the mirror with his face covered in ever-growing pus-y sores and a serious look, as if he were pursuing something immensely important in life, all the while wearing an undersized campy T-shirt (mine) with his guts pouring out the bottom.

  This was also a night when one of those sores had become infected and inflamed. When he finally turned around, one particularly rabid concoction underneath his eye had become a huge abscess, about four centimetres square.

  In much the same way he treated his face, when Smithy talked, he kept going back to the same thing over and over again — infecting and inflaming and making it worse. His fixation on this evening was a particular something that either did or did not happen on New Year’s Eve at his mum’s holiday house. Although he wasn’t in a relationship with Beck at the time, he had invited her, along with some friends, to spend a few days at the house over the New Year period. He had become convinced that something had happened between Beck and one of his friends — something that Beck denied, and that was further confused by the fact that they had all taken acid and meth.

  At times he was sure I was somehow in on it, and that I was hiding information from him. The truth was simply that I found Beck’s denial more convincing than his paranoia, and I believed that paranoia had its origins in a waking fantasy he had willed himself to experience.

  It’s hard to say what flicks the switch between fantasy that you know is fantasy and fantasy that somehow feels as if it’s real. The ecstatic creative impulses I had initially experienced became harder and harder to control and come by. Most of the time, in fact, I would stop coming up with creative ideas, and just masturbate for ten to fifteen hours, enraptured by my own sexual fantasy world, or I would engage in grandiose fantasy about the praise I would get for a finished creative product, rather than actually doing the work. This represented a downgrade from the Vortex to the self-centred world of Fantasia and inevitably, when the drug was wearing off, I would focus on how other people had jeopardised my creativity; how my parents, being so focused on class, had stunted the creative areas of my brain; and how being a full-time creative was my destiny.

  I would still experiences patches of the Vortex among all this, and would usually disappear into the garage to write songs and poetry, and jot down ideas, though I did find it tiring. In between the worlds of Fantasia and the Vortex, highly unusual thoughts would come bursting into my head. I spent many an afternoon battling against psychotic thoughts. I would tell myself, ‘No, you have had meth today, and this is not the time to try to work out ambiguities or mysteries or things you have been unsure about; you are bound to make a wrong turn.’ So many things didn’t make sense when I was in these states, and I couldn’t handle any kind of grey area — I needed absolute answers.

  Psychosis makes lots of different things, sometimes everything, feel as if it is connected in very sinister ways; there is no real beginning, end, or in-between. That said, when I describe my psychosis, it’s hard to capture what it is actually like — if you are someone who has gone through a psychotic episode, then you will know that reason and language are often completely transformed: time loses meaning, and your recollection of events is littered with mysterious blackouts — so that ideas which took six hours to form, or behaviours which took a whole day to build to, can seem as if they all happened in an instant when you reminisce, or try to explain what happened to someone who wasn’t there. The blackouts also mean that it’s very difficult to determine when you started to make a strange turn in your logic. Sometimes I had ideas that happened in a flash, or built up over a day. At other times, I would come in and out of psychotic ideas over different meth trips, and they would build steadily or change shape over the course of several weeks.

  I know now that psychosis was just my imagination at work: a combination of higher-functioning abstract ideas and a literalist, infantile, regressive imagination creating a straight train of thought that broke down the border between metaphor and reality, subject and object, self and other, inside and outside, then and now. When you’re in psychosis, doubt falls out the window: there are often very few uncertainties, and you feel as though you possess all the facts. By proxy, you can believe you know what everyone else is thinking, and that they must know what you are thinking, too. This is why people who are having psychotic episodes often talk nonsense: you know what you mean to say, but you talk in complicated metaphors about this secret/special thing because you think it’s what everybody is talking about, even when they sound as though they are talking about something totally irrelevant. When you finally piece things together in your psychotic logic, the world stops seeming so chaotic; everything just kind of slows down, and the world assumes a perfect shape with sharp ends and a clear, if unsettling, order. There are secrets being uncovered, epiphanies being had, and metaphors being interpreted.

  One day I started having invasive thoughts about things people had said on Facebook that I didn’t understand. The more I thought about these references, the more it seemed like everyone, collectively, was making fun of me. At the time I was also freelance writing, so I thought I would go over to Beck’s and check the computer to see if my article had been published. I googled my name, and some key words from the article, and nothing came up — instead, one of the first hits to come up was a blog written by an American musician of the same name. When I clicked on this blog, which was showcasing this other Luke Williams’ new music, it struck me how poorly written and self-absorbed it was. I immediately thought that everyone was making fun of me and had invented this satirical blog to send me up.

  Because I found it so incredibly clichéd and poorly expressed, I decided that it must be a parody. A parody of me! And, for some reason, I linked this back to my failed attempt at doing a show at triple j — that somehow the people behind this were people who I used to work with at the station, who were making fun of me. And when I went back to my Facebook feed, it looked like all my triple j ex-colleagues were making coded al
lusions to me, and how lame I was, in their status updates. I contacted a trusted friend, who was able to talk me down from my delusion, and soothe me, at least momentarily.

  Dr Michael Eigen, in his book The Psychotic Core, describes the experience of the psychotic individual as one of opposing extremes: ‘At times, it seems that the psychotic person dissolves their mind in order to rebuild themselves. Or he may seem to search grimly through its debris, leaving nothing out, as if he were looking for something essential, but still unknown … The flux itself becomes fixed and imprisons him.’

  And yet, for me, the psychosis would often just fall apart very quickly, and I would feel clearer and more enlightened than usual. The paranoid delusion would just become too big to sustain itself, there would be too many people involved in it, and I would realise how wrong I had been.

  One night, when Smithy kept going on about Beck and New Year’s Eve, I asked him why he was so worried about it — given that if it had happened, it had happened when they weren’t even together.

  ‘Concentrate on yourself,’ I said, and he looked at me with a glimmer of surprise. ‘What would you like to be doing with your time? I mean, I know you’re a full-time dad, but what else would you like to do?’

  ‘Play cricket,’ Smithy whispered like a little kid.

  ‘So why don’t you start playing again?’

  He didn’t respond.

  ‘I reckon you don’t want to play because you like to be good at everything, and you’re scared that if you start playing again at your age, you won’t be any good at it. I understand that, Smithy. I reckon we’re actually quite similar.’

  And upon hearing that, he nodded, staring into the distance, and said ‘I love cricket, I miss it, I miss it,’ and started to cry. I got him some tissues, waited for him to stop — which took no more than a few minutes — and then I said ‘Let’s talk about something else.’ It was like a neurosis was smashed open, shattered, and then evaporated that night; Smithy never talked about New Year’s Eve to me again.