What I remember most clearly afterward is the hunger.

Not during the experience itself. During that period I drifted too far inward to care much about the body at all. But eventually the darkness loosened its grip and ordinary reality began returning in fragments.

First balance.
Then orientation.
Then appetite.

Suddenly I was starving.

A friend made barbecued chicken with sweet potatoes and cooked pears while we settled into the quiet stillness of a suburban evening to watch Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. I remember sitting there feeling strangely emotional about the simple fact of dinner. The weight of the fork in my hands. The smell of the food. The familiar sound of another person moving calmly through a kitchen.

Outside, the neighborhood had already gone mostly dark. A few windows glowed blue from televisions. Somewhere a car door shut. Beyond the houses the distant hum of traffic floated softly through the night air like evidence that the larger world was still functioning without my participation.

That comforted me.

The strange thing is that I have spent the last couple years in ongoing conversation with Mary Shelley. Not literally, of course, though AI increasingly blurs the meaning of words like literally. Through the Mary Shelley Letters project, her imagination has become oddly present in my daily life. I have spent months imagining conversations between Mary and Byron, Percy, Polidori and Claire, Mary confronting the future we are now building.

Then, immediately after one of the most psychologically destabilizing experiences of my life, there I was watching Del Toro reinterpret the very story that launched all of it.

The older I get, the less Frankenstein feels like horror to me.

It feels like longing.

Del Toro understands what many people miss about Mary Shelley’s novel. The creature is not terrifying because he is unnatural. He is heartbreaking because his need for human connection is so enormous. He wants shelter, language, companionship, recognition. He wants entry into the human story itself.

Watching it that night, I realized something important about myself.

For years I assumed my fascination with AI, virtual worlds, speculative futures, and altered forms of consciousness pointed toward transcendence. But maybe what has always interested me is conversation itself. Shared imagination. Human beings building meaning together across time.

Even my installations rarely isolate people from one another. They create systems of participation. Shared spaces. Shared intentionality. Temporary architectures where consciousness briefly overlaps.

Perhaps that is why the mushroom experience unsettled me. Instead of connecting me more deeply to others, it collapsed me inward into myself.

And the moment it finally released me, what I wanted was astonishingly ordinary.

Food. Story. Friendship.
The reassuring density of human life.

Near the end of Frankenstein, after the creature has suffered nearly every humiliation imaginable, there remains inside him an almost unbearable hope that another being might still understand him. That longing may be the most human thing in the entire film.

Long after the movie ended, we kept talking quietly in the dim light of the room. Dirty plates remained on the table. The television screen faded black.

For the first time all day, I understood something with absolute clarity.

After all these years, after all the conceptual adventures, perhaps my great psychedelic revelation was embarrassingly simple:

I would rather be here.