The ritual began around 10 p.m. I drank the liquid and sat on the ground. I kept looking at the fire, which made me very sleepy. About an hour later, the effects of the ayahuasca started to kick in, and the sleepiness faded away. The first urge I had was to vomit. I squatted down and felt the contractions of vomiting, but nothing came out. It was just the motion of vomiting. Still crouching, when I lifted my head, I noticed a tree in front of me. Suddenly, in the silhouette of that tree, I began to see what looked like flashing hieroglyphs, or something similar. When I looked at the grass, it seemed like small beings were moving there. The silhouettes of the trees in the distance also appeared to be moving. I then closed my eyes and started to see colorful 3D spirals. The sounds of the chants from the ritual behind me began to sound different, echoing and distorted. I think the first reaction of my body was to repel the substance. I felt nauseous, had chills, and experienced several physiological sensations, as if signaling that there was something foreign in my body, or something like that. After these initial unpleasant sensations, I sat still in a chair near the fire. Even though we were in Acre, the night was very cold. The hallucinations began to intensify. I saw many patterns and shapes moving on the ground. I started to feel as if I were drunk. I felt more and more the need to move. I noticed some people were talking to themselves. I became a little scared, because some of those signs and symptoms reminded me of a dissociative episode I had. My biggest fear was dissociating, losing control, and not being able to return “to normal.” The hallucinations intensified, and it became harder to control my body. My senses seemed super heightened. My hands and feet were restless, and I began to rub my hand across my face and tap my feet on the ground. I constantly reminded myself to focus on my breath and sing along. The fears began to fade as I started speaking to myself in the third person. To calm myself, I repeated that the hallucinations would pass and that "Higo would return by dawn." I kept watching the group around me move frantically. Some people were talking to themselves, laughing, whispering. At a certain point, I started to perceive their bodies moving as if they were in an AI-generated video, melting or distorting. I got up a few times and vomited only water, very little. I spent most of the time sitting, moving my feet a lot, drawing circular shapes in the sand. I was barefoot, making drawings in the sand that looked like butterflies. I kept tapping my feet on the ground, and when I looked down, I was reminded of cave paintings. I then began drawing just the silhouettes of animals and people. I glanced to the side, and my friend Simone was singing and talking to herself, her eyes covered by a hood. I looked to the opposite side, and there was the wooden house with a thatched roof where we were staying. It looked different, as if it had modernist architecture. After a few seconds, I looked again. Now the house seemed isolated in space, as if it were the only thing that existed. I looked again, and it seemed to be melting like a used candle. I became fixated on the house. After that, whenever I remembered, I would glance at the house, and it seemed different each time. In the distance, in the forest, I saw flickering lanterns. They were the people walking, sometimes talking to themselves, other times walking hand in hand. In the sky, the points of light from the stars seemed to be just one meter above my head. This startled me a bit. I couldn't look for long. My body seemed to freeze with the cold, and I determined in my mind that I couldn’t move away from the fire. If I did, I would die from the cold. But after a few seconds closer to the fire, my body felt like it was on fire, so I moved my chair further away. I kept going back and forth for a while. At one point, I looked at the women chanting, and I could only wonder how they managed to keep singing in such an orderly and correct way. By this time, I was speaking to myself, not just in my mind, but aloud in a whisper. I noticed the people around me moving as if in stop-motion, or as if they were shadows that transcended space and time, disappearing and reappearing further ahead, as if they had taken a leap in space in a very short period. Suddenly, everything became busy and noisy. Some people stopped in front of me and appeared as stretched, elongated, giant beings. I had the feeling of being surrounded. At that moment, fear hit me, but then a flash of lucidity reminded me not to slip into paranoia. I lowered my head and looked at the ground, where there were many footprints that seemed to be moving frantically. I went back to drawing silhouettes of animals. After a while, when I looked up again, everything seemed calmer. I had the sense that the ritual, with many people around a fire, was floating in space. I couldn’t see anything beyond the people; we seemed to be surrounded by infinite darkness, with only a single light source in the center. I looked at my friend Simone beside me and told her that this time the drink had really “hit.” We held hands and started laughing. I thanked her for bringing me to that gathering. At one point, I glanced at the ceremony leader, who was distant, and he appeared to transform into a butterfly, with wings unfolding on his back. My vision was overwhelmed with dots and colorful patterns moving like a veil in my sight. The forms of colorful bubbles were also everywhere I looked. At times, I looked at my hands and feet, shaking them, captivated by their strange movements. I tried to count my fingers, but I often couldn’t complete the count. I remember being surprised when I counted more than five fingers on one hand and had to start over. The clock read around 1 a.m., and I began to worry about how long the hallucinations would last. Until then, the visions had only grown stronger and more vivid. I tried to distract myself, closed my eyes, and saw a swirl of colorful shapes and lines. When I checked the clock again, it felt as though an eternity had passed, but it had only been five minutes. At the peak of the effects of ayahuasca, I had difficulty remembering my name, where I was, and what I had taken. My mind couldn’t focus on anything for more than two seconds; one thought or sensation came, followed by another, and then another. Eventually, I started to notice the effect fading, which made me calmer, allowing me to surrender to the sensations without worrying about losing control. I relaxed my body, slouched in the chair, and closed my eyes, feeling the colorful virtual shapes moving. I returned to the dogs that were always nearby. They appeared twisted, elongated, and skeletal, evoking a painting by Candido Portinari that I couldn’t fully remember but had seen in an exhibition at MASP. I felt a deep sense of compassion for them and, in my mind, decided they were my guardians in that moment. I called one over and spent long minutes petting its head, talking to it softly. By now, the effects had weakened considerably, and the tribe leader kept checking if I was okay. The remaining effects only occurred when I closed my eyes, seeing colorful shapes. The sounds and my sense of control over my body had returned to normal. A deep peace settled over me as I sat still, gazing at the fire for a long time, as if I had returned to myself. While under the hallucinatory effects, I felt like someone else, or something else. Around 5 a.m., I crawled into my hammock, the chants still echoing softly in the background. The next day, when I woke up, I feared forgetting what had happened, so I began jotting down what I remembered. I always carry a small sketchbook on my journeys, so I quickly started doodling figures on its pages. The experience didn’t fade that afternoon, nor in the days that followed—it continued to resonate in my mind.