Waking Nightmare: Why Does Pot Affect Me So Profoundly?
In the faint hope that I may better understand the true nature of two horrible trips I've had, I will share as much as I can humanly recall from those experiences. Exploring this topic in depth is pretty painful for me, as the effects I've felt are honestly not anything I would wish upon anyone. I try not to discuss this with people because nobody seems to understand it, without having experienced anything remotely close to what I went through. The aim is to address these emotionally charged personal experiences from a more objective standpoint. It would be nice if I knew the exact strains I had, whether it was more indica or sativa that each trip yielded, what percentage of THC was utilized, and whether or not the stuff I had was sprayed with other chemicals. When I had these experiences and even for years after, I always assumed I got laced stuff, but I also suspected that what happened was that the first time, I simply got WAAAYY too high, and that the second time I had a flashback. I didn't know about strains or purity or depersonalization or even, for that matter, "bad trips."
Including times when I smoked too little for it to have any affect on me and also the one time I took a puff and actually enjoyed myself, I have tried smoking marijuana roughly seven to ten times (yep, that's it!), and of those seven to ten times, only three experiences are worthy of noting because they are the only times I was UNDOUBTEDLY high out of my mind due to the inhalation of cannabis smoke. I am not exaggerating when I say that the first time I got high on pot, of all things, I had the single most unpleasant, most traumatic, most surreal, and most unbelievably perplexing experience of my entire life...until I had what seemed to be either a flashback or the exact same experience a second time. The only word for it is Hell. Saying that a brutal workout or even an intense amount of pain that eventually subsides is "hell", no! Bullshit! I was temporarily in a hell dimension or something.
So this is what happened:
When I was a teenager, I smoked with a regular pot smoker that I hung with occasionally, and when I first felt effects from it, existence sucked beyond beyond belief. Without ever suspecting in my wildest dreams that I would feel like a psychotic zombie whose every little physical movement was too much for it to bear and for whom reality itself would seem to be an unfathomable distance away from one second to the next and for what seemed like the next month but which was actually 30 minutes or so, I took two hits from a bowl fashioned from an empty toilet paper roll and aluminum foil. A steam roller. Seated on a small excuse for a porch in the apartment complex I lived in at the time, I waited until this device was handed to me to take my first hit. It was not until after pulling the smoke deeply into my lungs a second time and launching into an aggressive coughing fit that I got the first short-lived - and most neutral - effects; confusion.
"How do you feel?"
It was like, at some point I realized I was some sort of conscious being that could respond to external stimuli. I must have appeared to an outside observer as though I simply spaced out or went catatonic...
"How do you feel?"
The entirety of existence is but a dream. This is the assumption to operate under. I think someone's talking to me.
"How do you feel?"
I must have been asked how I felt at least twice, but it could have been several times. It sort of looped and I couldn't respond initially. It took me what seemed like ten minutes to get that somebody was asking me a question. Upon realizing I could speak, I gave some reply but I was now deeply confused because I was hearing and somehow feeling A WATERFALL. It was very off-putting and nerve-racking. Like I was the waterfall. [Thought in hindsight] ...is this simply how I perceived having a bloodstream in my body? If so, it'd be disorienting as hell to live like that, and nobody would be able to concentrate on anything. It was VERY invasive and uncomfortable.
A little freaked, I stood up. The plan for the night had been to get high off this stuff this dude just got, and go inside and just play video games while listening to music anyway. But the weirdest thing happened when I started walking. I still didn't really know what anything was anymore, though I had a vague sense that I was capable of moving about and that there was some sort of identity attached to the thing that I was. It wasn't pleasant at all. Everything was too strange, and I didn't feel like I was consciously controlling anything I did or said during any point while I was high. What happened that freaked me out more than perceiving a waterfall out of nowhere, was taking a few steps forward because it gave me the impression that I was in fact moving forward even though my knees were moving backwards. What the fuck?
But I let my friend-at-the-time open the front door to his apartment so that we could go inside and play Street Fighter as planned. (Like that was really going to happen with me in this state.) Within seconds of stepping inside the living room, I deliberately (to an outside observer) banged my head against a wall and asked "Is this real?" Naturally, he was startled and he asked me what I was doing. It should be noted that we lived next door to each other. Being teenagers, the apartments we lived in were not our own. His mother was asleep at that time and normally I would never have done anything like that because not only would I not have the urge to slam my head into a wall at random, but the sound would have woken her up, and if it did, she didn't come out to investigate while I was there. I muttered some response about how I had to go home instantly (which again, was right next door, THANKFULLY, I can't imagine if I had to walk in that state!), and probably rationalizing to myself - to the extent that I could - that I should sleep this horrible "high" off. I think I even asked if the stuff was laced. It should also be noted that this person seemed normal even though he smoked a greater amount than I was willing to, and he wasn't sure what to make of my behavior. Nor was I.
As I walked the ten steps to my mother's apartment door, I noticed that what I would normally identify as a song "stuck in my head" was a bizarre auditory hallucination that haunted me in these loops. It just played and even though I recognized it as a Marilyn Manson song from "Portrait of an American Family" it was a deeply disturbing sound and not the way you'd want to hear a piece of music. Honestly attempting to put any of this into words is challenging and I don't think I can properly convey what any of it was like, but I'm doing the best with adjectives and whatnot.
At first I snuck into my own bedroom so as not to wake up my mother, or any of my siblings, and I slid into my bed, which was the top bunk. I'm not sure how I got up there but I tried to go to sleep and it was just not happening. Doesn't this fucking stuff make some stoners pass out? At this point I was annoyed and infuriated because even something as simple as swallowing saliva was distracting from everything else in the universe. What's more, I could feel my heart beating as though I were inside my chest and the more I swallowed saliva (something that normally goes unnoticed, probably also brought on by the dry mouth from smoking), the more it felt like I was in fact choking to death. Now I was terrified.
I actually woke my mother up and asked her to take me to a hospital, because this couldn't be right, I'd only smoked weed! She reacted in the worst way a person could react to someone in my state, which was with irritation and hostility. She refused to believe that I'd only taken two hits from a device containing just marijuana, and I definitely wasn't going to any hospital. I don't know what they could have done for me anyway, but at the time it felt like only that could help. I spent the remainder of this walking nightmare on the living room of my mom's apartment. I know that I eventually passed out (and by the way, when I woke up the next morning, I was completely sober but I felt like I'd been poisoned and hit by a vehicle or something, very sick and weak and I was physically shaking), but at one point I was bewildered for what I perceived to be a full hour as I looked back and forth from the digital display on the microwave clock, which seemed to be fixed on the same minute for a full hour!
I want to make this clear: this entire trip was extremely dissociative in nature, pretty much the entire time I was high. There was absolutely no body load, and no head buzz to speak of. There were no hallucinations, and there was no desire to sleep or eat or think deep thoughts. I was not simply "paranoid", and there is no way any of it was "all in my head." My brain had been replaced with something alien and sinister. What's a little ironic is how much I would come to enjoy DXM some years later, because in fact when peaking on DXM and being in a dreamy state, it is actually remarkably similar to some aspects of this pot episode. Only, it's fair to say that the dissociation I'd felt because of being stoned on marijuana was several, and I mean SEVERAL orders of magnitude higher than any dissociation I've felt from DXM thus far. And while the dissociation from DXM can creep up on a person...while I could see how it'd be disorienting and unpleasant for some people...this other shit because of a popular plant that almost everyone I've ever known has enjoyed at least once was like INSTANT 4th plateau level creepiness and near-delirium.
I did avoid drug use of any kind for some time after this first experience detailed above. But as I said at the onset, I did get high on pot on two other occasions. On one of those occasions, I found the experience rewarding and I took a nap shortly after ingestion and when I woke up I felt like I'd had the most refreshing sleep a person could get! It was amazing, and I mostly just remember laughing a lot at nothing and it was also sort of like I wasn't 'there' but I was not detached from myself and my surroundings like the first time. Not at all. The experiences were like, night and day. Was this indica?
So the other time I had a bad trip, it was at least five years after my first time getting high (the waking nightmare detailed above), and I believe the second time I got high, too. Why I would even try after it happened to me not once but TWICE, I'll never know, although it could be that I'm remembering wrong. In any case, a joint was involved this time around; I didn't take nearly as big a hit this time. I was even in an agreeable mood and with a different person (set and setting was cool) and much to my chagrin hit number two elicited the exact same 'waking nightmare' response! How could life be so cruel?!
The thing is, I do not know if this is simply the way this particular chemical (the herb) affects me personally in certain amounts, or if the exaggerated coughing that was so intense it was accompanied by lightheadedness is the thing that brought about the flashback the second time around. The second trip was not any more manageable simply because I had experienced something like it before. To the contrary, it was horrifying in the most profound "Not again!" way that is humanly possible. As before, something as simple as taking one step forward was too disorienting. Everything about reality was distant and foreign and even menacing. I felt as though my perception was everywhere except for the place I was standing, while simultaneously feeling as though I was trapped within myself. Experiencing reality from the inside out. I tried to tell myself "maybe it's a mental thing...", BULLSHIT! I attempted to do a few pushups. It made things worse. I tried listening to music, but what I heard from the stereo was not music at all. What garbage.
I ended up taking some Nyquil to knock myself out of it, and fortunately it worked. I remember feeling as though I journeyed through miles of carpet when all I did was move from my living room (the second bad trip was in an apartment I was renting) and into my bedroom. This, before collapsing into bed and feeling as though all of reality were being slowed to a crawl, one frame at a time and at a rate of about every other second. This was the Nyquil kicking in. It was overwhelming both in the sense that it was uncomfortable and annoying and bothersome (like everything about every aspect of being alive in that state) but also in the sense that it was "eating into" my bad trip. Which was good. I welcomed sleep and I didn't care if I did not awaken. As long as I never had to feel the way that fucking plant made me feel twice already, ever again. And I mean, that was really the worst part. Not quite being able to comprehend at all what was occurring but also fearing the possibility that this is how I would be for the rest of my life.
The last bad trip was nearly ten years ago. Since then, I've had ample opportunities to get high for free. I can get a card where I live, and I actually have chronic pain and other issues for which the use of medicinal marijuana might be well-suited. I've also just been curious. But there is absolutely no way I want to risk being in that state again. If I were driving a car and from one moment to the next I was depersonalized on that level again, I would instantly crash. The feeling is not ego loss, although nothing is meaningful and I am unsure about who or what the hell I am in that state. It's horrific. I'm sure there are altered states that one could more or less "work up to", or that one could grow accustomed to over time, but these states I've experienced don't seem that way at all. And keep in mind that I have done 600+ mg of DXM and whatever parts of the trip I didn't deeply enjoy (I'll keep the first three or four hours, the rest, meh...), I was simply thinking "Well, this is a bit much. I kind of want to be sober again, but I can control it." Not the case with the negative reactions I've had to pot.
Sorry for typing what is essentially a trip report. If mods or admins feel this thread would be better-suited in those forums, by all means move it. But for once I'd like to talk to someone who knows exactly what any of this is, because I've read some "bad" or "difficult" trip reports from people who tried cannabis and had unusual or idiosyncratic responses, and some elements that they describe seem to correspond with what I've felt. But in most cases, it's either something that sounds relatively tame for the most part, or it's something that one can talk oneself down from, or in a few rare cases it is something that in some ways seems worse than my experience but unlike what I went through.
How can there be such a dark side to this thing that has brought so much joy to millions of people across the world? Is it possible that I had these reactions more because of the effects of smoking chemicals sprayed on the plant material while high? It seems the answer to that would be moderation with organic strains! (But I don't know if that's what it is - and I also suspect I might want to avoid potent sativas. : < )
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
Anyway, we got a thread for this, and im merging it there (I think it will fit, I read about 1/8th of this before I realized how long it was).