Files in the Dark — My Iboga Experience
Preparation
Before doing it, I prepared for over a month. I had a full medical checkup — ECG, liver function tests — to make sure my heart and liver were healthy. During the process I also found out I have Gilbert’s syndrome, which is a benign condition where bilirubin levels run a bit high. It’s not a disease and doesn’t require treatment.
The following month was basically a “clearing” phase. Taking a multivitamin, magnesium, and glutathione daily. You should avoided red meat, smoking, alcohol, cannabis, and tried to stay away from ultra-processed foods. The idea was simply to make your body as clean and stable as possible. I don't smoke or drink, and I'm vegan, so everything is easier for me I guess. After that month of preparation, I flew to Thailand.
Arrival & Dosing
Once I arrived, I rested for three days before starting. Three people were taking care of me: Marbella, Max, David. We stayed in a two-story villa. I was upstairs in my room, and they stayed downstairs to monitor me. Max explained that the dosing would be gradual — not all at once. Every one to two hours they would give a small amount depending on how I responded. Some people “enter” after two doses; others need more.
At 3 p.m. I took the first dose. It was chewed bark — literally shredded tree bark. I can honestly say the bitterness ranks in the top three worst tastes of my life. After chewing, my entire mouth went numb, like chewing a handful of Sichuan peppercorns. Even now I can recall that bitter, tingling sensation.
Soon after, I started feeling unsteady on my feet. They helped me back to my room to lie down. But once I was lying there, it felt like nothing was really happening. They said many people peak around 6 p.m. I didn’t. I took another dose. By 6, I just felt weak, my face was flushed, like having a mild fever.
Later I hesitated about taking more. Marbella suggested waiting. Around 7 or 8 p.m., I took another dose.
This time something shifted.
The Music & The Shift
I felt like I entered a dark space. The ceiling looked futuristic, like flashing LEDs. Then a huge high-definition screen appeared, almost like a Netflix intro animation. I remember thinking, Oh, is this the famous iboga screen? The moment I thought that, it shut off. I thought, okay… maybe not yet.
Around 9 or 10 p.m., Max came upstairs and said that at my pace, I might not fully enter until midnight. He brought in a speaker and started playing Bwiti music. My immediate reaction was: this music is terrible. It barely qualifies as music. What is this? It feels like it’s messing with my brain. But I said I would keep listening, because they said the music “works together” with iboga. They laughed and left.
Then things changed.
The music started feeling like a drill boring into my brain. I genuinely felt as if my brain was being drilled open. The lights in the room became unbearably bright — even the dim bedside lamp. I got up to turn it off and suddenly felt like my head hit countless metal springs, clanging loudly. I realized that whenever I moved, the sound would happen — the faster I moved, the louder it became, as if metal springs were surrounding my head. I had no choice but to lie still.
That was when I clearly felt reality beginning to distort.
The music shifted again. I heard people outside arguing in a southeastern Chinese dialect. I even wondered, aren’t Max and the others downstairs? How did people get into the villa and start arguing on the stairs? It sounded incredibly real. But when I listened closely, I couldn’t understand a single word.
Then the music turned into Beijing opera. I was shocked. Isn’t this supposed to be African music? How did it turn into Chinese opera? I knew it was a hallucination, yet it felt disturbingly real.
And then the music carried me away.
Iboga had finally arrived.
The Archivist
What happened next was the core of the experience.
I entered a space very similar to my usual dreamscape — except I was fully conscious. It felt like lucid dreaming, but not exactly. It was unlike any other psychedelic I’ve experienced. The closest description I can give is this: you don’t get swept away. Your awareness stays clear. The altered state happens within that clarity.
A table appeared, slightly blurry like an ordinary dream. It was covered in files. I distinctly sensed an extremely rational, efficient presence there. It had no form, no voice, but I knew it was iboga. It was rapidly sorting through those files. I understood immediately — they were my memories.
It would sort for a while, then pull out a file to show me.
The first image was a penis. I felt immediate discomfort. The moment I resisted, the image multiplied — everywhere, of all sizes and styles, realistic, cartoonish, even flashing like disco lights, exaggerated, absurd. I said internally, “Okay, okay, I get it. I’m afraid of this.” The moment I fully acknowledged that fear, the image disappeared.
I realized I had been carrying a buried fear and aversion that I had never consciously admitted.
Safety, Projection & Narrative
After that imagery faded, another scene appeared. It was someone I know — a very gentle and good-looking guy, someone who has never carried that heavy masculine pressure or sexual projection toward me, someone I genuinely feel safe with. In the scene, he was calmly and matter-of-factly introducing his penis to me, almost like giving a formal presentation. It felt strangely real at the time. And then, I found it funny — genuinely funny. I started laughing.
My first reaction was intense and immediate: I should sleep with this person. I should be with him. He must be “the right one.” Maybe I’m not even a lesbian. Maybe this is it.
The impulse felt strong, almost convincing in its certainty. But then iboga showed me that this too was my brain grasping — taking the experience of safety and instantly turning it into a romantic narrative. It was an old pattern: converting nervous system relief into a story about destiny.
Seeing that mechanism unfold in real time was sobering. The sense of safety was real. The projection was optional.
Later, I understood it as my brain experimenting with a new association. Perhaps if the context involved someone I perceive as safe and non-threatening, my body could begin forming a different sensory response. It didn’t feel fundamentally sexual; it felt corrective — like my nervous system quietly rewriting an old script.
(My girlfriend might raise an eyebrow at this part.)
Seeing the brain’s chain reaction — how one scene instantly triggered a whole “solution-finding” narrative — was genuinely fascinating to watch in real time.
Trauma Files
It continued sorting. It showed me a childhood memory of being forced to change clothes in public while an older man looked at me with a disturbing expression. I had always remembered the event, but never processed the discomfort of that gaze. Iboga zoomed in on his expression, magnified it repeatedly, almost like annotating it in red, until my discomfort peaked. Then it resolved on its own and disappeared.
Then a small triangle appeared, made out of Chinese character radicals, buzzing around the scene like a fly. I had seen this shape before during an ayahuasca experience. At the time, I didn’t know what it was — it just felt unsettling. Suddenly it opened up and turned into a memory I had never consciously recognized as trauma: watching pigs being taken to slaughter when I was a child, hearing them scream.
I had no idea how deeply traumatic that moment was for me — perhaps one of the earliest and most profound traumas of my life. It was likely the origin of the intense guilt I later felt about eating meat, but I had never made that connection. I saw the scene again and felt, vividly, the fear and helplessness of my seven-year-old self. The pigs were screaming, and I felt as if I too was about to be dragged to the slaughterhouse. I stood at the window, just a child, completely powerless. The fear went all the way to my bones.
I was finally able to cry for that seven-year-old version of myself. I sobbed — fully, without holding back. When the crying ended, the emotion ended with it. It felt like a knot had finally loosened. That memory was “archived.”
The invisible presence continued sorting. I watched file after file being placed into folders, categorized and returned to their proper place. The efficiency and calmness of it all were astonishing.
Later it showed me more trauma — for example, the first time in childhood when I was in a near-death state and cried out to my mother for help, only to see her withdraw as if avoiding something contagious, standing at a distance and watching me. I had never truly processed that despair. There, I cried in segments. Each time a file was sorted, I would cry for a while. Marbella and the others would occasionally come in to check on me. I would say a few words, then return to the sorting.
The whole process felt like an incredibly deep therapy session without conversation. It simply presented the memory, allowed you to fully move through the emotion, and then it ended.
I once read a definition of trauma that stayed with me: trauma is not the event itself, but an incomplete neural process. That night, I strongly felt that those unfinished neural processes were being completed. And not only the ones I consciously saw — that was just the tip of the iceberg. I distinctly sensed that much more was happening in the background. I don’t know exactly what was being done, but I could feel that a great deal was being processed, and that some memories that were no longer necessary were being cleared away.
What We Feed the Brain
Then iboga began showing me images stored in my mind. The scenes were deeply disturbing — graphic violence, bodies torn apart, brutal sexual imagery, war and slaughter. More graphic than most films would ever be allowed to show. The kind of content that would never pass public screening, no matter how many warning labels you added.
The message from iboga was very direct: These are the things you’ve been feeding your brain. Take a look.
I was shocked to realize how much violent, grotesque, and extreme material I had accumulated mentally. Since high school, I had been drawn to B-movies — horror, thrillers, graphic war films, disturbing and taboo content. Especially banned films. At the time, I felt like I needed intensity to stay alive. As if only extreme stimulation could make me feel something.
Ayahuasca had hinted at this before, but in a more symbolic way — less direct, less embodied. This time there was no metaphor. Iboga laid the material out exactly as it was and made me confront it: look at what you’ve been putting into your system, and look at how it affects you.
All I could say was, okay, okay — I get it. I really get it. I don’t want to keep feeding myself this anymore. I was genuinely repulsed. I realized how honest the nervous system is. It records everything. It carries everything.
And almost immediately, there was a disconnect from violent content. It happened suddenly. I used to find it hard to imagine losing interest in that kind of stimulation. I would periodically go back to it to “wake up” my nervous system. After that night, that pull was simply gone.
The Aftermath
When I woke up the next day, I felt incredible. It’s hard to describe — it felt as if someone had thoroughly reorganized the hard drive of my brain. I had seen my fears, memories, fantasies, and delusions laid out, sorted, and filed away, like clearing out years of accumulated clutter. I felt impossibly light, as if a massive weight had been lifted off me.
That day I took a small additional dose, just to help with “integration.” I felt deeply relaxed. The following night I slept straight through, without dreams. The quality of that sleep was unlike anything I had ever experienced in my life. No one standing guard. No background noise. No tension.
Later, I kept thinking that iboga felt like a librarian, a plumber, a cleaner. It unclogged what had been blocked in my nervous system, cleared out what had accumulated, and filed away what had been scattered.
One very concrete change shocked me: my flexibility dramatically improved. Before, my upper body couldn’t reach my legs at all. Suddenly, I could fold completely over. That moment stunned me. I realized how much “locking” in the body is actually neurological. I had always assumed it would take a long time to relax my nervous system. Instead, something had simply opened.
Over the next few days, I noticed more shifts. I was no longer anxious about talking to strangers or making phone calls. At the same time, I became more capable of feeling anger — but in a healthy way. I used to suppress it. Now I could acknowledge, “I’m really angry,” let it move through me, and allow it to finish instead of bottling it up.
Previously, certain triggers would produce strong bodily reactions — a buzzing in my head, racing heart, a kind of nervous system explosion. Those automatic reactions almost disappeared. What remained was just the expectation that they might arise, but my body no longer followed through with the old pattern.
Even more surprising, my dust mite allergy nearly vanished. Most of the time I have no symptoms at all, and only occasionally mild ones. That genuinely shocked me. I had always thought changes in the immune system would take a long time. Seeing how directly the nervous system influences immunity was eye-opening.
Other physical changes followed. A persistent line on my forehead disappeared. My acid reflux — something I had once considered surgery for — was gone. My TMJ resolved; my jaw no longer dislocates when I yawn. My sleep became stable and deep.
After returning to Dali, I noticed my stamina had improved. I used to feel exhausted the day after walking 10,000 steps. Now I recover easily. My energy returns much faster.
The deeper shift, though, was in how I relate to my internal life. I used to be aware of my emotions, but my behavior was still easily carried away by them. Now there is a buffer between feeling and action. They are no longer automatically fused. It’s as if a small gap has opened — enough space to choose.
I can see thoughts forming more quickly — how they loop, what material they use to construct a story. The stickiness between event, thought, narrative, emotion, and behavior has significantly weakened.
It truly feels like a kind of rebirth.
It has been about a month now. Old patterns still occasionally return, but the buffer remains. I see them more clearly, and their pull is much weaker. I’m less likely to get absorbed into a storyline or belief. I’m more tolerant of uncertainty and ambiguity. I no longer feel the urgent need to grab onto a framework as an anchor or to dissect something completely in order to feel safe. Before, I understood “non-attachment” intellectually. Now I know it in my body.
If I had to summarize the experience, it felt like an extremely thorough nervous system deep clean. Many unfinished processes were completed. Much unnecessary material was cleared away. Many overly tight knots were loosened.
It’s not magic. It’s not omnipotent. A month later, I still see old tendencies appear from time to time. The difference is that they no longer feel inevitable. I see them, instead of becoming them. The buffer is still there. The space is still there.
It didn’t live my life for me, and it didn’t hand me a revelation. It simply recalibrated the system to a cleaner, more coherent state.
If there is one core change, it’s this: many reactions we believe are “who we are” are simply neural programs. They can complete. They can soften. They can be released.
And then life continues.