ErgotFiend
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Aug 11, 2022
- Messages
- 54
Last July, I was tremendously startled by the synergy between DMT and Salvia. While it wasn’t my first time taking the combination, it was by far my highest dosage. I haven’t heard of anyone else taking it as far as I did. I plunged straight into the deep end and sent myself into total shock. DMT at the peak of LSD never came close to the total absolution that enveloped me. I was left with a lingering imposter syndrome.
A few weeks later, I went traveling with my very dysfunctional family. Thanks to perpetual arguing, and never ending passive aggression, I felt my empathy shrivel up. I began to behave like them, assuming hostile perspectives while omitting the low level philosophies behind them. I became so hateful and depressed. So, in backlash, I decided to shut my family out of my life. The last month of summer, before college, was consumed by this vacation and its after effects. Despite my girlfriend’s and my bond reaching new depths, thanks to meditation and psychedelics, moving back to college, and with it transitioning to a long distance relationship, made me give up hope.
During the first week of school, I felt the level of exhaustion usually reserved for the last few days of a particularly bad semester. I needed psychedelics to help me face my shadow and heal my emotional state. I needed to go deep again, and this time come back fearless. That weekend, yesterday at the time of writing this, I finally took 5-meo-DMT.
On Friday evening, I went for a run, then meditated. I like using Salvia to clear my mind, the night before big trips. It’s such a hostile, though at times comedic and endearing, compound that it serves as an excellent radar for the clever ways my shadow may choose to reveal itself when I embark on my main quest.
I turned off my phone’s ringer and put on rain-ambience. Only a few crumbs of the 80x extract were placed between the zig-zagging, acrylic paint and clear glass of the pipe my girlfriend painted. Starting slow is the way to go. Twenty seconds after the acrid smoke filled my lungs, I felt a strong presence of lists, stairs, and sequences, all structures built from incrementation. My train of thought became more conversational.
I loaded up a thicker dose. Despite the initial pain, the feeling of Salvia smoke in my lungs is warm and fuzzy. I held it in, already fighting off the attempts of my brain to act sober. I’ve learned to reject any question or doubt at its inception. As it came on, a deep pit in my stomach coalesced from my personal variety of reservations and anxieties. It had a mind of its own. I tried to cheer up a personified version of that fearful pit. After all, in Sally Space, feedback loops are very dangerous. Allowing negativity even once might send you into a death-spiral.
Suddenly, everything is so familiar. I find myself in a haze of nostalgic delusion - a place of congealed time. All my previous and future Salvia trips exist there simultaneously. Things became more tangible. Three men formed a line with my astral form. A female energy chastised us from the top of my vision. It seemed to be a scene straight out of Mike Judge’s King of the Hill. “Yes, now it’s clear that I am in a cartoon world with suburban Texans living the good life of beer and a fence to lean against,” I think to myself. This female energy, Peggy Hill, was hostile and itchy. Even in the thick of it, I had some awareness that all these characters were just me. I am so negative. My default reaction to everything is mild hatred, it’s been a lifelong struggle. I held off the hostility until things calmed down a bit. I spoke in a nonsensical, alien tongue, with Dale, Bill, and Boomhauer. I guess that made me Hank? Like one of my many chase nightmares, Peggy is gaining on us, navigating through houses and rooms. Inevitably, she will reach us. Thankfully for the gang of middle aged men, I snapped out of it. The fog cleared. It took a while.
I sat there thinking about my pessimism. I finally realized that I can’t accept people unless they are just like me. It’s such a self destructive, irrational trait. Even if I’m an extrovert with good social skills, the way I view others has held me back. I told myself, “it’s not fair to expect everyone to be as perfect as I am, it’s not realistic.”
I wanted to go again. But, I warned myself before starting that I mustn't compulsively redose a gargantuan quantity - that’s what went wrong in July.
Thankfully, I had the self control to only repeat the same amount as a few minutes ago. I took in the smoke, equipped with a new layer of acceptance. I re-entered the time singularity, finding the intensity of my fear decimated. I was calm. Rows of pastel pink buildings began extruding from the sides of my vision. Some male energy chatted with me about the minutiae of the world around me. It’s called, “Cartoon World.” Terrifically generic, but refreshingly positive. People walk the sidewalks, cars drive the streets, birds circle overhead. I panned forward through the city block, until I saw twin peaks with a glorious sunset behind them. There was a pervasive sense of peace on top of my underlying fear and mental tangles. This vista too began to fade. I texted my girlfriend goodnight.
After strange dreams of climbing through walls with tremendous speed and exhilarating agility (Salvia always disrupts my sleep), I awakened to an awareness of my obligation. Today, I will take LSD, at its peak, 5-meo-DMT, and lastly, three tokes of nn-DMT. I wanted a total mental reset. I knew I could live life so much better.
I weight-trained immediately. I am too weak to go into these experiences without clearing my mind, so I worked in silence. The gym was nearly empty. I went for multiple walks. I decided that I should avoid YouTube until after my voyage. I was so scared. I had a deep feeling for weeks that my experience would mirror the horror of my awful summer trip with Salvia and DMT. Despite never trying 5-meo-DMT even once, I just knew it would. But, was I right?
Well, first we need to actually examine how that nightmare transpired. Two months ago, when I had the house to myself for the Fourth of July, I planned for my usual routine. I would smoke Sally, then do Acid and Deems the next day. I had this idea that, once under the influence, I should disregard all negative thoughts. While this sounds smart at face value, one must remember that apprehension is equal in importance to motivation.
After dipping my toes in the water, I took my first serious hit. Per usual, I felt the advent had returned me to the realm I had visited an innumerable number of times, but always forgot. As the visuals began, my girlfriend’s and my playthrough of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time surfaced. I found myself in some sort of fantastical video game level. I saw a two-dimensional row of medieval-style buildings on a sloped road. Flailing out of the window of each, an NPC relayed quest advice and facts about the items they sold. Knights walked the sidewalks. I thought about how uninteresting childish plots like this are, but that’s Salvia for you. That is, both one finding it all to be familiarly mundane and the prominence of cartoonish plots.
In the midst of this fantastical environment, I thought to myself about what it really meant to ignore negativity. Salvia surrounds me with so much hate, that I figured it was best to turn a blind eye. I took that to the extreme.
After thinking about how cool DMT visuals would be, I ignored my brain’s genuine warning that I should wait until the day after. While talking aloud to myself, with a strong sense of rhythm, and an alien presence surrounding me, I loaded my other pipe full of DMT. I heard one more time a severe warning from whatever sober part of me still existed - “don’t do it.” I didn’t listen.
The first toke was normal, but the second was interrupted by a sudden barrage of hallucinations. The pipe, and everything for that matter, turned into squares. I wasn’t even capable of thought during the third one. Traveling along a hallway covered in rudimentary floral designs in which a robed man observed me from behind are all that I remember before shutting down all together.
Now, so that you may place yourself in my shoes, forget everything. I mean literally everything, down to what a thing even is. In total loss, I felt limitless peace and euphoria. There was nothing. Time had stopped.
Then, traveling from left to right, orbs of light containing ideas and concepts floated by and began fitting themselves together. Very basic rules were now in place. Though I missed nothingness, there was incredible beauty to the simple logic. There was a pervasive aura of eroticism. I was shocked by the very notion of existence. I should mention that, I don’t know whether I saw, heard, tasted, or felt what I’m describing. I didn’t have any clear senses.
All of a sudden, things accelerated. Exponentially wouldn’t even begin to describe the pace at which the universe rematerialized. My awareness grew dysphorically precise. A faint awareness that there are entities other than me turned into a grand knowledge of the unstoppable progression of evolution carrying across lengths of time beyond my comprehension. In a desperate panic, thoughts ping-ponged across my mind,
“I am just one individual out of eight-billion people? I am a human with an animal body. All we truly desire is to make more of ourselves! I only exist because I can reproduce. I only exist out of an ecological niche for a predator with advanced communication skills! We are from the savanna? How horrifying, oh my God, it gets worse. Most people live in squalor. Most people live in inhumane conditions. I am white collar, but there are people with far more power and money than I will ever have. I have only one chance?”
That last concept sent me over the edge. I remembered that I had only worked maybe 10 hours total in the past week. I was blowing it. I started sobbing. All of these thoughts were incredibly visual. With each, I saw visions of myself working, people starving, people copulating, the rich taking for granted leisures, which require tremendous human labor. I was disgusted by the universe and the beings inhabiting it. I had rejected existence. I didn’t even know my own name.
Frankly, to the layman, this sounds incredibly self important. But you have to understand; I had true Jamais-Vu. Every single detail out of the billions I've absorbed in my entire lifetime was now totally foreign.
My vision started reforming. I saw a television appear out of the blurry void. Some sort of alien TV show played on it. The room around me started piecing itself together like a quilted blanket. Colors were blindingly intense. All I could think was, “I’m so scared.”
I finally remembered I was on drugs, I yakked to myself like a lunatic, self soothing. My face was covered in tears. I was back, but I didn’t know how to feel normal again. I felt primal fear. I couldn’t decide whether that was the most orgasmic or terrifying ten minutes of my life. It felt like it had been eons since I had been in my bedroom. I wanted to sleep as soon as possible, I felt mentally exhausted. All plans to trip the day after vanished. I held my dog for a good ten minutes, trying to ground myself.
I felt weird for the next week. I was susceptible to some pretty delusional thinking. I had a panic attack one night before bed. I just knew this was a simulation taking place inside a universe I was forced to forget. There were judgemental beings watching me suffer and fail. For a time, unfalsifiable beliefs were a minefield. I felt like I was gonna be sucked back into the trip again. I didn’t touch any drugs between then and yesterday.
Though I eventually regained normal cognitive function, I was incredibly disappointed in myself. I had been humbled.
So, the solution was obviously to take another insane combination of drugs, right? Trial by fire, baby! After my meditations, and a delivery from the grocery store, I readied my 5-meo-DMT dose. I loaded one third of how much nn-DMT I usually consume in three tokes. It’s thrice as potent after all.
The two-hundred and fifty micrograms of LSD accompanied me into the shower as I began navigating the usual come up anxieties. The time I spent on long walks and my dance with Sally paid off. I could handwave any intricacy of my shadow. I knew to stick to the plan, and trust what I had laid out for myself while sober. I came out of the shower in good spirits.
The day before, I had spent some time trying to repair the only hole in my psychedelic armor. I was very prone to an intense burst of fear accompanied with the thought, “oh my God, I can’t believe this is happening.” I understand that it’s a delusional thought. Fear is surprise, with undertones of physical harm. Surprise is when you expect a particular stimulus, but receive something else. What else was I expecting? What else is there, but reality? How else could it be?
The LSD’s influence became noticeable while I worked in my sketchbook. I passed the time by thinking about my favorite video games, Portal 2 and Majora’s Mask. I, for a time, refused to think about anything negative. But after a while, I pondered how judgemental I was. For once, thinking about my weaknesses didn’t spiral me into a bad trip. I felt as though I could freely explore my mind. After all, I only wanted to become a better person. I perceived just how much value every person has. I felt my brain rewiring itself to form deeper empathy.
While this trip was tranquil and calm, taking the same dosage while in public has sent me to strange places. The walls were geometric and patterned, and perspective felt very wonky, but I was grounded and safe.
Eventually, the sounds of rain emitting from my phone ceased. I had set a timer for two hours. I removed the sketchbook and pencils from my bed. I breathed. Picked up the lighter - breathed some more. My apprehension was insatiable. Never before had I been this nervous before taking regular DMT while on Acid. I remembered the words, “with the right chemical key, despite their reservations, a curious psychonaut can seize the opportunity for learning.” It was from one of my favorite trip reports. I knew I must follow in their footsteps, pushing past the fear.
Finally, I held a lighter to the end of the machine. The smoke was no more painful than with nn-DMT, though certainly less floral in taste. I took two hits. The first didn't produce much smoke. The second allowed the heat to reach the white powder and I exhaled a thick translucent cloud. I set the pipe down. I began slowing down and falling apart. My face sank into the pillows. I stopped thinking much at all. Without realizing, I closed my eyes. My senses numbed. Only a faint interwoven pattern was left. I saw almost pure black. But, I felt no fear. The hallucinations were incredibly gentle on the backs of my eyelids. I, for a moment, felt a tremendous weight on my chest, but it quickly dissipated. Things just got quieter and quieter. I felt as though I was gently rocking in a hammock. It was incredibly pleasant and peaceful. This was a spa day for my brain. I remembered how Terrance Mckenna saw 5-meo-DMT’s lack of visuals as a downside. I disagreed. This was a silence, deeper than sleeping. What little thoughts I had left circumscribed the void of endless nothing gaping in front of me. I opened my eyes and looked at the ceiling. It was a ruffled blanket with colorful troughs. I deemed this a normal occurrence at the time. I questioned how deep the rabbit hole would go. Like clockwork, the drug grew stronger. Both my reality and perception became as heavy as lead. I fell into the gap between the left side of my face and shoulders. I saw a large golden spiral. I had the same thought, “time has stopped,” over and over. It was like entering and exiting a coma. I felt so safe and relaxed. The trip peaked.
When I came too, I rolled out a bed in search of my next interdimensional gateway. “Just making a quick pit-stop,” I joked, finding comedy in the surreal nature of using crack pipes and colorful dust to visit realities beyond human language. It’s hard for me to determine how intoxicated I was, because I didn’t try to act sober. I felt as though I was on Jupiter. The visuals of the LSD became more intricate, with lots of scenery slicing. I loaded the shallow pipe to the brim with the golden nn-DMT powder. I’m surprised I didn’t spill any with how wonky my movements were.
I then, once again, held the lighter to the machine and took three hits. Strangely, instead of the usual mind-bending kaleidoscopic wonder of the first moments of a breakthrough DMT dose, things just abstracted. The complex relations with intricate connections and logical dependencies native to the human mind became simple category theory. Now, there were only a couple of objects, presumably in my visual field, and vague pointers between them. It was like I just had a stroke. It was quite difficult to place the machine in a safe place before blasting off, something I’ve never struggled with before. On reflection, maybe I didn’t evaporate most of the 5-meo-DMT during my first trial, because that certainly would explain the following events.
I can best describe what I saw next as a wireframe, simplicial complex with luminous walls. It was like a mirror maze or web of data points. What I perceived can’t exist in the three-dimensional Euclidean Space that we use to describe the world around us. So, I struggle to find the right words.
Now, there was nostalgic imagery present, with my parent’s bathroom tangentially connected to the realm I found myself in. I communicated with three familial beings. Our conversations were euphoric and fascinating, but I don’t remember what was said. We shifted between dimensions and traveled through an endless sequence of rooms littered with children’s toys, with each bringing the universe asymptotically closer to its shadowy annihilation. This was a larger infinity than the one perceived in my July trip. I had no physical form here. There was a divine aura to everything. A ritual was taking place. At this point all that really existed were vague memories of falling endlessly and spiraling inward. At some points, all I recall is seeing yellow.
Then, time stopped. The universe ended. There was infinite peace and tranquility. The whole universe could fit inside a child’s playset. I found myself in a playroom, chatting with entities. I remark on how calm I am. I talk about how I’m not even scared. Then, it’s brought to my attention that I don’t even know what I should be afraid of.
It’s around this moment that reality started to reform. It took much longer than in July. This is the single most overwhelming thing I have ever gone through. Prolonged, wouldn’t even begin to describe how slowly the world pieced itself back together. There were distinct phases to the reconstruction process.
Phase 1) Denial.
I am told by the entities that the universe exists. I won’t believe it. I reject there’s anything other than the nothing I spent all of eternity surrounded by. This information sounds fantastical and absurd. I feel as though a practical joke is being played on me. Faint reverberations are barely perceivable in the void.
Phase 2) Looming threat.
It is incredibly disquieting when the warnings of the beings around me are proven correct. It is now presumed that if a universe exists, then I must return to it. Indeed, there are very basic logical concepts now. Each and every one of which is incredibly overwhelming and alien. I endlessly enter then exit a junction of progressively greater complexity. It gives me whiplash, like being ejected out of Gabriel’s Horn. My senses begin receiving external input. I don’t belong here. I want to go back. It hurts.
Phase 3) Unspeakable Horror.
All of reality has shown up by now, but it doesn’t make any sense. It’s no different than TV-static. “Apparently, we are meat people,” I postulate. The same awful realizations from July return, but in a far less coherent manner. I keep getting so tangled. I can ask what things are, but not what the words I’m using to describe them mean. There is a total severance between the memories of this world and my ego. I am an interloper. Total confusion. I keep talking to the entities from before, but their presence grows ever more faint. I feel the fabric again and see another being staring straight at me with the most horrifying facial expression I have ever seen. Their face keeps glitching out, turning pitch-black, turning old, turning young. I quickly turn away and bury my own into the bed and start sobbing like a scared child.
Phase 4) Sudden elation.
For a brief moment I reconnect with my memories and feel like myself again. I sit up wildly and start laughing uncontrollably. I touch my body. I start yelling, “I’m back, I’m back!” I am amazed to have a body again - that I survived the trip. I feel like a time-traveling mad scientist. I start crying while repeating, “I am so lucky I don’t have schizophrenia, that was so scary.”
Phase 5) How else could it be?
A wave of fear hits me like how a hurricane rips apart a boat house. I feel, for the first time of many to come, a panic greater than or equal to that of being chased by a knife wielding lunatic. I return to the empty, hollow ego from my eternity of darkness. “I can’t believe I exist, It makes no sense- this can’t be real,” I say. “This isn’t correct,” I mutter, implying the existence of some alternative laws of physics separate from our own. Everything is just too absurd to believe. Total unreality. Thinking about anything specific scares the daylights out of me. I shove my face back into the blanket and sob again. This repeated ad nauseam.
The following, final phase lasted for about two hours, unlike the previous which were no longer than ten minutes each. Seeking nurturing comfort, I pulled out my phone to call my girlfriend. I could act normal, no problem. I knew what words to say, but I felt so fundamentally wrong. I found it so weird that humans, like many animals, pair bond. She said that we would call in four hours. I told her that I love her and had a really cool experience. But, I’m not sure if that was an accurate description of the circumstances. I hung up. I felt my waves of panic worsening. I pretended to be myself again. “I need to calm down, I am going to get in trouble,” I say aloud to the man in the mirror. I remembered that there is a structure of violence in the world in which I live. “Drug users are at the receiving end of it - don’t get out of line.” I needed to stop. So, I tried to be more logical. I kept asking what a thing is, what happy is, and what sad is. But eventually, I became aware that questioning the building blocks of cognition is a fruitless path with no clear answers. I say,
“I can’t ask stuff like that, but I think I can ask yes or no questions.
Alright, is my name Quentin? Yes.
Am I in college for mathematics? Yes.”
I kept talking to myself in the mirror at the foot of my bed. Depending on the moment, I forgot I had a body. Sometimes, I think my whole reality is just a disembodied head or face, floating above an incomprehensible sea of geometry. My vision divides into strips and each slice slides back and forth. I looked straight out of a Cubist Picasso painting. I doubted the validity of all my memories. I wondered if I had just lost my mind. I doubted that I would ever be sober again. I remembered a post online from a man who smoked DMT every day for a whole week and was exhibiting delusional agitation. “Clearly,” I reckoned, “too much of this level of intensity will push the brain over the edge.” I left my bed and started pacing around the room while talking to myself like a caged, rabid animal. I decided to go for a walk outside. I figured nature is what the brain wants after all.
I started to get dressed in my confused stupor. The “I can’t believe I exist” delusion kept showing up. It’s a lot of effort to pretend to be a human. I started panicking again. I was disturbed by the strange, juvenile, rebel philosophy I apparently had. I shout, “I’m pulling a one-eighty on everything I believe, I was so stupid!” “I should’ve listened to Jordan Peterson, he warned me of this, but I disregarded his advice,” I continued. I felt I had made a dire mistake, that this trip had broken me permanently. I got enough clothes on my body to go outside. I remembered that the way one styles their hair communicates to others how they feel. I’m freaked out by that detail for some reason. I was incredibly disorganized.
Thankfully, I decided at the last minute to stay in. I kept switching between horror and whimsical joy. I was planning on watching YouTube videos and doodling, but all I wanted was to feel normal again. And so, I spent the next hour staring at the two mirrors in my room while arguing with myself. I needed a lot of time in thought if I wanted reintegration into objective reality.
Along the way, I watched my face in the mirror. My eyes, mouth, and nose floated on top of my face and took on different impossible angles and perspectives, shifting between beauty and horror. One moment, my jaw looked photoshopped to perfection, the next I received a jumpscare. Each feature of my face, my eyes, nose, mouth, et cetera, were portals into alternate dimensions. It was like watching the security panel at a shopping mall - each a window into separate worlds, moving like close-ups of insects in nature documentaries. They wriggled independently of each other, ignoring perspective. I kept talking to the man in the mirror as though he was another person, like a dog barking at their reflection. I was angry at him. At one point, I looked down and was very surprised to see I had a body. I thought I was just a face on the wall. My extremities were massive too.
After an hour, either due to the drug wearing off or my profoundly naive, self-directed argument, I felt normal enough to leave my room. I still needed to narrate everything if I wanted to remain calm. I cooked and ate some eggs. I started doing household chores. Physical activity felt very comforting and reconnected me to the world. My mood drastically improved. The imposter syndrome became manageable.
I even tried some Topology homework. It went surprisingly well and I only stopped so I could call my girlfriend.
At first, there was some disconnect between us. Long distance isn’t natural. The transition leaves a tender spot in the bond between partners. But, we both wanted to heal that wound. I talked about my experience from start to finish. Though I thought I had recovered, the truth is, recollecting it nearly put me into a panic attack. Periodically, I had to pause and focus on my breathing.
Next, our conversation became about personality types and how the differences in our perception of the world determine our interactions. I said, “I can easily imagine having reformed into another’s mind, it was so arbitrary; the combination of attributes of my mind is one of many.” I told her how happy I was that she was so much smarter than me. Yet, I claimed my people skills had utility to her too. We were each other's compliment. She begrudgingly agreed. I expressed how my rebirth made me realize how incidental my traits are. I was such a fool for ever wanting my friends to be exactly like me. “The only reason why I am the way I am is through coincidence; it is only because I tried Acid at fourteen that I don’t drink; it is only because of the YouTube algorithm that I don’t share my parent’s religion,” I articulated. Things that don’t affect me on a personal level, but I still care about are arbitrary. They are me giving subjective meaning to my life. It wasn’t that it was unfair to expect everyone to be as perfect as me. No I’m not perfect, I’m just particular, like everyone else. I finally realized how often that sort of thinking had caused me pain. I got very political in front of a friend earlier in the week. They were peeved. I felt immediate shame and regret. It became clear that they had a radically different worldview from me, but that’s fine. I have my girlfriend for really low level, personal conversations, I don’t need that from everyone. Even my family should be allowed a role in my life, despite their idiosyncrasies. This conversation broke the ice. We opened up to each other again. I sensed a change in her tone. Our discourse became progressively more joyous as the night went on. The vibes were heavenly.
Before bed, I finally admitted how scared I was of sleeping. She said that she would be there for me if I needed to call. I nearly took her up on that offer. Sleeping was truly horrifying. Each time I started to doze off, a wave of that “I can’t believe I exist’ panic hit me. I still felt misplaced.
Thankfully though, I woke up this morning having slept the whole night. In fact, I feel well rested, emotionally recovered, and excited to get back to work this week. In the end, the trip was very healing, but there is still clear room for improvement. Next time, I must reaccept the universe with open arms and overcome my fear of rebirth.
A few weeks later, I went traveling with my very dysfunctional family. Thanks to perpetual arguing, and never ending passive aggression, I felt my empathy shrivel up. I began to behave like them, assuming hostile perspectives while omitting the low level philosophies behind them. I became so hateful and depressed. So, in backlash, I decided to shut my family out of my life. The last month of summer, before college, was consumed by this vacation and its after effects. Despite my girlfriend’s and my bond reaching new depths, thanks to meditation and psychedelics, moving back to college, and with it transitioning to a long distance relationship, made me give up hope.
During the first week of school, I felt the level of exhaustion usually reserved for the last few days of a particularly bad semester. I needed psychedelics to help me face my shadow and heal my emotional state. I needed to go deep again, and this time come back fearless. That weekend, yesterday at the time of writing this, I finally took 5-meo-DMT.
On Friday evening, I went for a run, then meditated. I like using Salvia to clear my mind, the night before big trips. It’s such a hostile, though at times comedic and endearing, compound that it serves as an excellent radar for the clever ways my shadow may choose to reveal itself when I embark on my main quest.
I turned off my phone’s ringer and put on rain-ambience. Only a few crumbs of the 80x extract were placed between the zig-zagging, acrylic paint and clear glass of the pipe my girlfriend painted. Starting slow is the way to go. Twenty seconds after the acrid smoke filled my lungs, I felt a strong presence of lists, stairs, and sequences, all structures built from incrementation. My train of thought became more conversational.
I loaded up a thicker dose. Despite the initial pain, the feeling of Salvia smoke in my lungs is warm and fuzzy. I held it in, already fighting off the attempts of my brain to act sober. I’ve learned to reject any question or doubt at its inception. As it came on, a deep pit in my stomach coalesced from my personal variety of reservations and anxieties. It had a mind of its own. I tried to cheer up a personified version of that fearful pit. After all, in Sally Space, feedback loops are very dangerous. Allowing negativity even once might send you into a death-spiral.
Suddenly, everything is so familiar. I find myself in a haze of nostalgic delusion - a place of congealed time. All my previous and future Salvia trips exist there simultaneously. Things became more tangible. Three men formed a line with my astral form. A female energy chastised us from the top of my vision. It seemed to be a scene straight out of Mike Judge’s King of the Hill. “Yes, now it’s clear that I am in a cartoon world with suburban Texans living the good life of beer and a fence to lean against,” I think to myself. This female energy, Peggy Hill, was hostile and itchy. Even in the thick of it, I had some awareness that all these characters were just me. I am so negative. My default reaction to everything is mild hatred, it’s been a lifelong struggle. I held off the hostility until things calmed down a bit. I spoke in a nonsensical, alien tongue, with Dale, Bill, and Boomhauer. I guess that made me Hank? Like one of my many chase nightmares, Peggy is gaining on us, navigating through houses and rooms. Inevitably, she will reach us. Thankfully for the gang of middle aged men, I snapped out of it. The fog cleared. It took a while.
I sat there thinking about my pessimism. I finally realized that I can’t accept people unless they are just like me. It’s such a self destructive, irrational trait. Even if I’m an extrovert with good social skills, the way I view others has held me back. I told myself, “it’s not fair to expect everyone to be as perfect as I am, it’s not realistic.”
I wanted to go again. But, I warned myself before starting that I mustn't compulsively redose a gargantuan quantity - that’s what went wrong in July.
Thankfully, I had the self control to only repeat the same amount as a few minutes ago. I took in the smoke, equipped with a new layer of acceptance. I re-entered the time singularity, finding the intensity of my fear decimated. I was calm. Rows of pastel pink buildings began extruding from the sides of my vision. Some male energy chatted with me about the minutiae of the world around me. It’s called, “Cartoon World.” Terrifically generic, but refreshingly positive. People walk the sidewalks, cars drive the streets, birds circle overhead. I panned forward through the city block, until I saw twin peaks with a glorious sunset behind them. There was a pervasive sense of peace on top of my underlying fear and mental tangles. This vista too began to fade. I texted my girlfriend goodnight.
After strange dreams of climbing through walls with tremendous speed and exhilarating agility (Salvia always disrupts my sleep), I awakened to an awareness of my obligation. Today, I will take LSD, at its peak, 5-meo-DMT, and lastly, three tokes of nn-DMT. I wanted a total mental reset. I knew I could live life so much better.
I weight-trained immediately. I am too weak to go into these experiences without clearing my mind, so I worked in silence. The gym was nearly empty. I went for multiple walks. I decided that I should avoid YouTube until after my voyage. I was so scared. I had a deep feeling for weeks that my experience would mirror the horror of my awful summer trip with Salvia and DMT. Despite never trying 5-meo-DMT even once, I just knew it would. But, was I right?
Well, first we need to actually examine how that nightmare transpired. Two months ago, when I had the house to myself for the Fourth of July, I planned for my usual routine. I would smoke Sally, then do Acid and Deems the next day. I had this idea that, once under the influence, I should disregard all negative thoughts. While this sounds smart at face value, one must remember that apprehension is equal in importance to motivation.
After dipping my toes in the water, I took my first serious hit. Per usual, I felt the advent had returned me to the realm I had visited an innumerable number of times, but always forgot. As the visuals began, my girlfriend’s and my playthrough of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time surfaced. I found myself in some sort of fantastical video game level. I saw a two-dimensional row of medieval-style buildings on a sloped road. Flailing out of the window of each, an NPC relayed quest advice and facts about the items they sold. Knights walked the sidewalks. I thought about how uninteresting childish plots like this are, but that’s Salvia for you. That is, both one finding it all to be familiarly mundane and the prominence of cartoonish plots.
In the midst of this fantastical environment, I thought to myself about what it really meant to ignore negativity. Salvia surrounds me with so much hate, that I figured it was best to turn a blind eye. I took that to the extreme.
After thinking about how cool DMT visuals would be, I ignored my brain’s genuine warning that I should wait until the day after. While talking aloud to myself, with a strong sense of rhythm, and an alien presence surrounding me, I loaded my other pipe full of DMT. I heard one more time a severe warning from whatever sober part of me still existed - “don’t do it.” I didn’t listen.
The first toke was normal, but the second was interrupted by a sudden barrage of hallucinations. The pipe, and everything for that matter, turned into squares. I wasn’t even capable of thought during the third one. Traveling along a hallway covered in rudimentary floral designs in which a robed man observed me from behind are all that I remember before shutting down all together.
Now, so that you may place yourself in my shoes, forget everything. I mean literally everything, down to what a thing even is. In total loss, I felt limitless peace and euphoria. There was nothing. Time had stopped.
Then, traveling from left to right, orbs of light containing ideas and concepts floated by and began fitting themselves together. Very basic rules were now in place. Though I missed nothingness, there was incredible beauty to the simple logic. There was a pervasive aura of eroticism. I was shocked by the very notion of existence. I should mention that, I don’t know whether I saw, heard, tasted, or felt what I’m describing. I didn’t have any clear senses.
All of a sudden, things accelerated. Exponentially wouldn’t even begin to describe the pace at which the universe rematerialized. My awareness grew dysphorically precise. A faint awareness that there are entities other than me turned into a grand knowledge of the unstoppable progression of evolution carrying across lengths of time beyond my comprehension. In a desperate panic, thoughts ping-ponged across my mind,
“I am just one individual out of eight-billion people? I am a human with an animal body. All we truly desire is to make more of ourselves! I only exist because I can reproduce. I only exist out of an ecological niche for a predator with advanced communication skills! We are from the savanna? How horrifying, oh my God, it gets worse. Most people live in squalor. Most people live in inhumane conditions. I am white collar, but there are people with far more power and money than I will ever have. I have only one chance?”
That last concept sent me over the edge. I remembered that I had only worked maybe 10 hours total in the past week. I was blowing it. I started sobbing. All of these thoughts were incredibly visual. With each, I saw visions of myself working, people starving, people copulating, the rich taking for granted leisures, which require tremendous human labor. I was disgusted by the universe and the beings inhabiting it. I had rejected existence. I didn’t even know my own name.
Frankly, to the layman, this sounds incredibly self important. But you have to understand; I had true Jamais-Vu. Every single detail out of the billions I've absorbed in my entire lifetime was now totally foreign.
My vision started reforming. I saw a television appear out of the blurry void. Some sort of alien TV show played on it. The room around me started piecing itself together like a quilted blanket. Colors were blindingly intense. All I could think was, “I’m so scared.”
I finally remembered I was on drugs, I yakked to myself like a lunatic, self soothing. My face was covered in tears. I was back, but I didn’t know how to feel normal again. I felt primal fear. I couldn’t decide whether that was the most orgasmic or terrifying ten minutes of my life. It felt like it had been eons since I had been in my bedroom. I wanted to sleep as soon as possible, I felt mentally exhausted. All plans to trip the day after vanished. I held my dog for a good ten minutes, trying to ground myself.
I felt weird for the next week. I was susceptible to some pretty delusional thinking. I had a panic attack one night before bed. I just knew this was a simulation taking place inside a universe I was forced to forget. There were judgemental beings watching me suffer and fail. For a time, unfalsifiable beliefs were a minefield. I felt like I was gonna be sucked back into the trip again. I didn’t touch any drugs between then and yesterday.
Though I eventually regained normal cognitive function, I was incredibly disappointed in myself. I had been humbled.
So, the solution was obviously to take another insane combination of drugs, right? Trial by fire, baby! After my meditations, and a delivery from the grocery store, I readied my 5-meo-DMT dose. I loaded one third of how much nn-DMT I usually consume in three tokes. It’s thrice as potent after all.
The two-hundred and fifty micrograms of LSD accompanied me into the shower as I began navigating the usual come up anxieties. The time I spent on long walks and my dance with Sally paid off. I could handwave any intricacy of my shadow. I knew to stick to the plan, and trust what I had laid out for myself while sober. I came out of the shower in good spirits.
The day before, I had spent some time trying to repair the only hole in my psychedelic armor. I was very prone to an intense burst of fear accompanied with the thought, “oh my God, I can’t believe this is happening.” I understand that it’s a delusional thought. Fear is surprise, with undertones of physical harm. Surprise is when you expect a particular stimulus, but receive something else. What else was I expecting? What else is there, but reality? How else could it be?
The LSD’s influence became noticeable while I worked in my sketchbook. I passed the time by thinking about my favorite video games, Portal 2 and Majora’s Mask. I, for a time, refused to think about anything negative. But after a while, I pondered how judgemental I was. For once, thinking about my weaknesses didn’t spiral me into a bad trip. I felt as though I could freely explore my mind. After all, I only wanted to become a better person. I perceived just how much value every person has. I felt my brain rewiring itself to form deeper empathy.
While this trip was tranquil and calm, taking the same dosage while in public has sent me to strange places. The walls were geometric and patterned, and perspective felt very wonky, but I was grounded and safe.
Eventually, the sounds of rain emitting from my phone ceased. I had set a timer for two hours. I removed the sketchbook and pencils from my bed. I breathed. Picked up the lighter - breathed some more. My apprehension was insatiable. Never before had I been this nervous before taking regular DMT while on Acid. I remembered the words, “with the right chemical key, despite their reservations, a curious psychonaut can seize the opportunity for learning.” It was from one of my favorite trip reports. I knew I must follow in their footsteps, pushing past the fear.
Finally, I held a lighter to the end of the machine. The smoke was no more painful than with nn-DMT, though certainly less floral in taste. I took two hits. The first didn't produce much smoke. The second allowed the heat to reach the white powder and I exhaled a thick translucent cloud. I set the pipe down. I began slowing down and falling apart. My face sank into the pillows. I stopped thinking much at all. Without realizing, I closed my eyes. My senses numbed. Only a faint interwoven pattern was left. I saw almost pure black. But, I felt no fear. The hallucinations were incredibly gentle on the backs of my eyelids. I, for a moment, felt a tremendous weight on my chest, but it quickly dissipated. Things just got quieter and quieter. I felt as though I was gently rocking in a hammock. It was incredibly pleasant and peaceful. This was a spa day for my brain. I remembered how Terrance Mckenna saw 5-meo-DMT’s lack of visuals as a downside. I disagreed. This was a silence, deeper than sleeping. What little thoughts I had left circumscribed the void of endless nothing gaping in front of me. I opened my eyes and looked at the ceiling. It was a ruffled blanket with colorful troughs. I deemed this a normal occurrence at the time. I questioned how deep the rabbit hole would go. Like clockwork, the drug grew stronger. Both my reality and perception became as heavy as lead. I fell into the gap between the left side of my face and shoulders. I saw a large golden spiral. I had the same thought, “time has stopped,” over and over. It was like entering and exiting a coma. I felt so safe and relaxed. The trip peaked.
When I came too, I rolled out a bed in search of my next interdimensional gateway. “Just making a quick pit-stop,” I joked, finding comedy in the surreal nature of using crack pipes and colorful dust to visit realities beyond human language. It’s hard for me to determine how intoxicated I was, because I didn’t try to act sober. I felt as though I was on Jupiter. The visuals of the LSD became more intricate, with lots of scenery slicing. I loaded the shallow pipe to the brim with the golden nn-DMT powder. I’m surprised I didn’t spill any with how wonky my movements were.
I then, once again, held the lighter to the machine and took three hits. Strangely, instead of the usual mind-bending kaleidoscopic wonder of the first moments of a breakthrough DMT dose, things just abstracted. The complex relations with intricate connections and logical dependencies native to the human mind became simple category theory. Now, there were only a couple of objects, presumably in my visual field, and vague pointers between them. It was like I just had a stroke. It was quite difficult to place the machine in a safe place before blasting off, something I’ve never struggled with before. On reflection, maybe I didn’t evaporate most of the 5-meo-DMT during my first trial, because that certainly would explain the following events.
I can best describe what I saw next as a wireframe, simplicial complex with luminous walls. It was like a mirror maze or web of data points. What I perceived can’t exist in the three-dimensional Euclidean Space that we use to describe the world around us. So, I struggle to find the right words.
Now, there was nostalgic imagery present, with my parent’s bathroom tangentially connected to the realm I found myself in. I communicated with three familial beings. Our conversations were euphoric and fascinating, but I don’t remember what was said. We shifted between dimensions and traveled through an endless sequence of rooms littered with children’s toys, with each bringing the universe asymptotically closer to its shadowy annihilation. This was a larger infinity than the one perceived in my July trip. I had no physical form here. There was a divine aura to everything. A ritual was taking place. At this point all that really existed were vague memories of falling endlessly and spiraling inward. At some points, all I recall is seeing yellow.
Then, time stopped. The universe ended. There was infinite peace and tranquility. The whole universe could fit inside a child’s playset. I found myself in a playroom, chatting with entities. I remark on how calm I am. I talk about how I’m not even scared. Then, it’s brought to my attention that I don’t even know what I should be afraid of.
It’s around this moment that reality started to reform. It took much longer than in July. This is the single most overwhelming thing I have ever gone through. Prolonged, wouldn’t even begin to describe how slowly the world pieced itself back together. There were distinct phases to the reconstruction process.
Phase 1) Denial.
I am told by the entities that the universe exists. I won’t believe it. I reject there’s anything other than the nothing I spent all of eternity surrounded by. This information sounds fantastical and absurd. I feel as though a practical joke is being played on me. Faint reverberations are barely perceivable in the void.
Phase 2) Looming threat.
It is incredibly disquieting when the warnings of the beings around me are proven correct. It is now presumed that if a universe exists, then I must return to it. Indeed, there are very basic logical concepts now. Each and every one of which is incredibly overwhelming and alien. I endlessly enter then exit a junction of progressively greater complexity. It gives me whiplash, like being ejected out of Gabriel’s Horn. My senses begin receiving external input. I don’t belong here. I want to go back. It hurts.
Phase 3) Unspeakable Horror.
All of reality has shown up by now, but it doesn’t make any sense. It’s no different than TV-static. “Apparently, we are meat people,” I postulate. The same awful realizations from July return, but in a far less coherent manner. I keep getting so tangled. I can ask what things are, but not what the words I’m using to describe them mean. There is a total severance between the memories of this world and my ego. I am an interloper. Total confusion. I keep talking to the entities from before, but their presence grows ever more faint. I feel the fabric again and see another being staring straight at me with the most horrifying facial expression I have ever seen. Their face keeps glitching out, turning pitch-black, turning old, turning young. I quickly turn away and bury my own into the bed and start sobbing like a scared child.
Phase 4) Sudden elation.
For a brief moment I reconnect with my memories and feel like myself again. I sit up wildly and start laughing uncontrollably. I touch my body. I start yelling, “I’m back, I’m back!” I am amazed to have a body again - that I survived the trip. I feel like a time-traveling mad scientist. I start crying while repeating, “I am so lucky I don’t have schizophrenia, that was so scary.”
Phase 5) How else could it be?
A wave of fear hits me like how a hurricane rips apart a boat house. I feel, for the first time of many to come, a panic greater than or equal to that of being chased by a knife wielding lunatic. I return to the empty, hollow ego from my eternity of darkness. “I can’t believe I exist, It makes no sense- this can’t be real,” I say. “This isn’t correct,” I mutter, implying the existence of some alternative laws of physics separate from our own. Everything is just too absurd to believe. Total unreality. Thinking about anything specific scares the daylights out of me. I shove my face back into the blanket and sob again. This repeated ad nauseam.
The following, final phase lasted for about two hours, unlike the previous which were no longer than ten minutes each. Seeking nurturing comfort, I pulled out my phone to call my girlfriend. I could act normal, no problem. I knew what words to say, but I felt so fundamentally wrong. I found it so weird that humans, like many animals, pair bond. She said that we would call in four hours. I told her that I love her and had a really cool experience. But, I’m not sure if that was an accurate description of the circumstances. I hung up. I felt my waves of panic worsening. I pretended to be myself again. “I need to calm down, I am going to get in trouble,” I say aloud to the man in the mirror. I remembered that there is a structure of violence in the world in which I live. “Drug users are at the receiving end of it - don’t get out of line.” I needed to stop. So, I tried to be more logical. I kept asking what a thing is, what happy is, and what sad is. But eventually, I became aware that questioning the building blocks of cognition is a fruitless path with no clear answers. I say,
“I can’t ask stuff like that, but I think I can ask yes or no questions.
Alright, is my name Quentin? Yes.
Am I in college for mathematics? Yes.”
I kept talking to myself in the mirror at the foot of my bed. Depending on the moment, I forgot I had a body. Sometimes, I think my whole reality is just a disembodied head or face, floating above an incomprehensible sea of geometry. My vision divides into strips and each slice slides back and forth. I looked straight out of a Cubist Picasso painting. I doubted the validity of all my memories. I wondered if I had just lost my mind. I doubted that I would ever be sober again. I remembered a post online from a man who smoked DMT every day for a whole week and was exhibiting delusional agitation. “Clearly,” I reckoned, “too much of this level of intensity will push the brain over the edge.” I left my bed and started pacing around the room while talking to myself like a caged, rabid animal. I decided to go for a walk outside. I figured nature is what the brain wants after all.
I started to get dressed in my confused stupor. The “I can’t believe I exist” delusion kept showing up. It’s a lot of effort to pretend to be a human. I started panicking again. I was disturbed by the strange, juvenile, rebel philosophy I apparently had. I shout, “I’m pulling a one-eighty on everything I believe, I was so stupid!” “I should’ve listened to Jordan Peterson, he warned me of this, but I disregarded his advice,” I continued. I felt I had made a dire mistake, that this trip had broken me permanently. I got enough clothes on my body to go outside. I remembered that the way one styles their hair communicates to others how they feel. I’m freaked out by that detail for some reason. I was incredibly disorganized.
Thankfully, I decided at the last minute to stay in. I kept switching between horror and whimsical joy. I was planning on watching YouTube videos and doodling, but all I wanted was to feel normal again. And so, I spent the next hour staring at the two mirrors in my room while arguing with myself. I needed a lot of time in thought if I wanted reintegration into objective reality.
Along the way, I watched my face in the mirror. My eyes, mouth, and nose floated on top of my face and took on different impossible angles and perspectives, shifting between beauty and horror. One moment, my jaw looked photoshopped to perfection, the next I received a jumpscare. Each feature of my face, my eyes, nose, mouth, et cetera, were portals into alternate dimensions. It was like watching the security panel at a shopping mall - each a window into separate worlds, moving like close-ups of insects in nature documentaries. They wriggled independently of each other, ignoring perspective. I kept talking to the man in the mirror as though he was another person, like a dog barking at their reflection. I was angry at him. At one point, I looked down and was very surprised to see I had a body. I thought I was just a face on the wall. My extremities were massive too.
After an hour, either due to the drug wearing off or my profoundly naive, self-directed argument, I felt normal enough to leave my room. I still needed to narrate everything if I wanted to remain calm. I cooked and ate some eggs. I started doing household chores. Physical activity felt very comforting and reconnected me to the world. My mood drastically improved. The imposter syndrome became manageable.
I even tried some Topology homework. It went surprisingly well and I only stopped so I could call my girlfriend.
At first, there was some disconnect between us. Long distance isn’t natural. The transition leaves a tender spot in the bond between partners. But, we both wanted to heal that wound. I talked about my experience from start to finish. Though I thought I had recovered, the truth is, recollecting it nearly put me into a panic attack. Periodically, I had to pause and focus on my breathing.
Next, our conversation became about personality types and how the differences in our perception of the world determine our interactions. I said, “I can easily imagine having reformed into another’s mind, it was so arbitrary; the combination of attributes of my mind is one of many.” I told her how happy I was that she was so much smarter than me. Yet, I claimed my people skills had utility to her too. We were each other's compliment. She begrudgingly agreed. I expressed how my rebirth made me realize how incidental my traits are. I was such a fool for ever wanting my friends to be exactly like me. “The only reason why I am the way I am is through coincidence; it is only because I tried Acid at fourteen that I don’t drink; it is only because of the YouTube algorithm that I don’t share my parent’s religion,” I articulated. Things that don’t affect me on a personal level, but I still care about are arbitrary. They are me giving subjective meaning to my life. It wasn’t that it was unfair to expect everyone to be as perfect as me. No I’m not perfect, I’m just particular, like everyone else. I finally realized how often that sort of thinking had caused me pain. I got very political in front of a friend earlier in the week. They were peeved. I felt immediate shame and regret. It became clear that they had a radically different worldview from me, but that’s fine. I have my girlfriend for really low level, personal conversations, I don’t need that from everyone. Even my family should be allowed a role in my life, despite their idiosyncrasies. This conversation broke the ice. We opened up to each other again. I sensed a change in her tone. Our discourse became progressively more joyous as the night went on. The vibes were heavenly.
Before bed, I finally admitted how scared I was of sleeping. She said that she would be there for me if I needed to call. I nearly took her up on that offer. Sleeping was truly horrifying. Each time I started to doze off, a wave of that “I can’t believe I exist’ panic hit me. I still felt misplaced.
Thankfully though, I woke up this morning having slept the whole night. In fact, I feel well rested, emotionally recovered, and excited to get back to work this week. In the end, the trip was very healing, but there is still clear room for improvement. Next time, I must reaccept the universe with open arms and overcome my fear of rebirth.
