It was the strangest thing. It was like I came downstairs into another world. I know that doesn't make any sense, and maybe that isn't it at all, maybe it wasn't the world that changed. Maybe it was me. I smelled something I couldn't identify. Was it the spruce and pine candle I had been burning the night before? No. There was a crispness to it that was similar. I couldn't think. I had spent so many months with nasal prompts close at hand, to be sure I hadn't lost my sense of smell, which to tell the truth was never really that acute, that I was completely unprepared for phantosmia halfway down the stairs.
I made coffee. I may have made toast. I puttered around. When I first wake up I'm normally not all there yet, which is why the smell thing was so strange, the awareness of it. I did, somewhere in the middle of my first cup of coffee, determine that what the smell most closely resembled, from my internal stored library of scents, was the greenery from a tomato plant. Not the tomato itself, but rather that sharp intense green smell which to me is both beautiful and somehow dangerous, maybe poisonous, though the danger is somewhere deep in the perfume of it far beneath the conscious, distinguishing it from the wet green of floral leaves. I say I don't have much of a sense of smell, and then I seem to be lying about that, but I assure you I am not. Not lying and not a nose of any degree. I just have a thing for details.
I had had an unusual dream which might be at least partially to blame. Rather than my typical rotation of stress dreams I had treated myself to a variation on a theme. It was the end of the semester... However, instead of there being an exam for which I had not studied, a class which I had not attended and indeed had perhaps not even known existed vis a vis my enrollment, an open book essay exam with a stack of books I had not read; this time I was given an oral presentation, at the last minute, with very little time to prepare, to be pitted against two other students both of whom had spent the entire semester preparing their presentations. What was most remarkable to me was this: I was super excited about this fact in a kind of bring it on sort of way. The topic I was given was some obscure and perhaps arcane plant related in some way to blue green algae, and, most fascinatingly, having a ghost mother. I was sure I had some knowledge of this plant and was rattling off book titles I would need for reference material as I smeared a dried powdered sample around the sides of a bowl with my fingers noting the structural similarity to blue green algae. The term ghost mother having some meaning to me in the dream which does not continue in my awake mind, which has only some vague sense of it's relation to tree mothers use of mycorrhizal network and mycelium more generally.
Contrarywise, I have a longstanding fancy that what I really need is a good ayahuasca experience because then the vegetal mother could straighten me out. However, recently I visualized the vegetal mother, because I have an overactive imagination, First she looked a lot like the plant from llittle shop of horrors, then she added a big bow and a cute little lace collar, and then she changed into something much less cartoon-like, slithering in the walls and dark corners, metaphorically. She's started giving me somewhat unpleasant feedback about all the many things I thought I knew, and how it just really wasn't like that, actually. Pretty sure ayahuasca doesn't smell like tomato, though.
