Psychedelics and nitrous, "jokes on you" effect

[Hilopsilo]

I had done probably hundreds of balloons of nitrous, always dismissed it as a uninteresting rush/buzz for party kids. Basically, no depth and nothing to see there.

Then recently, I took a double balloon while on a MDMA+LSD and daresay I ate my fucking words. I won't get too into that since its a long story and I've typed it out elsewhere (if anyone is interested, I can link them), but I will say it was maybe the most profound experience of my entire life. Even more profound than my experiences with DMT blasting off, seriously. If you haven't tried it, next time you trip, on the tail end of it, lay down somewhere comfortable and take a balloon with 2 cartridges of nitrous and let yourself go. Warning though, your whippits won't be the same after getting the breakthrough, even a sober balloon has a different vibe now.

Anyways, as with most psychedelic experiences where you feel you've "figured it out" on a blast off scenario, it fades away right after and you can't for the life of you remember really what it was. But you do remember the feeling, that it was so damn simple, like OF COURSE it was that! And then its gone.

This past weekend I was doing a few whippits on the tail end of a candyflip, not doing the blastoff double as I didn't feel I was in an environment that I felt comfortable going back to that place again. But, they still felt a bit profound and my friend mentioned something that really resonated with me. He said:

"At the beginning of the whippit, I always get this sort of feeling that I am the butt of some sort of grand joke, not necessarily in a bad way, its rather neutral"

And that is EXACTLY how it feels for me, its not a bad feeling at all, its almost like the universe/people around me are saying "hello, thanks for finally joining us, about time you came around lol...". But the joke seems to sort of be that, there is no joke, and trying to figure or explain the experience is sort of "falling for it". This sort of goes hand in hand with the "ah-ha!" feeling of nitrous I get. The whole experience is circular in that you keep chasing your tail trying to figure out the joke, but in the end the joke is on you since there is no answer and there is no joke.

I know this probably sounds like gibberish, but it always starts to sound that way when I try to explain it. And thats sort of what I'm getting at, it's impossible for us to truly perceive and understand what the experience is. We know it, and then we don't. And you could totally drive yourself mad trying to delve deeper and deeper to figure it out, but the joke is that there is nothing to figure out all along. My second profound experience was utterly terrifying in that it showed me a future in which i became obsessed with my profound experience and lost my mind and everything dear to me trying to figure out the answer that simply was never there to begin with.

Anyways, thought I'd share. After the two very profound experiences I had, I felt I was onto something sort of, but after doing a few lower dose balloons in a similar state I felt I was able to clearly retain the "butt of the joke" feeling that I get from it.

 

[Kaleida]

It doesn't sound like gibberish, it sounds like nitrous. I suspect that most anyone who has "gotten there" with it will understand this post very well and strongly relate to it.

Thanks for sharing.

 

[perpetualdawn]

Well said! I've only had one profound nitrous experience (and it was in combo with a PD), but I feel I can totally relate to what you wrote.

 

[Captain.Heroin]

I took 8 hits of acid, shot DMT and inhaled nitrous on the end of the peak of the DMT shot.

I don't know if I wrote a trip report but it was .... Well, quite intense.

Blacked out and did things I don't remember

I will write a report some time. Maybe.

 

[vortech]

Is it your ego judging itself in a new light?
I can't relate too much your description with nitrous, but it does remind me of a couple salvia experiences.

 

[Kaleida]

^ I actually find the nitrous experience extremely similar to salvia once that point is reached. Below that point they are not similar for me.

 

[Hilopsilo]

^ I actually find the nitrous experience extremely similar to salvia once that point is reached. Below that point they are not similar for me.

I haven't done salvia in many years, but from what I do remember its a similar headspace in how you are CONVINCED of something without a cloud of doubt.

My first blastoff experience with salvia I had a similar feeling of a joke being played on me, I was POSITIVE that my friends had made up the drug salvia they had been telling me about all day and then when I hit it they pressed a "secret lever" to make the chair I was sitting in create the experience for me. Which is completely absurd, but I was so sure of this during the experience or at least the beginning.

Not purely psychedelic being all holistic and earthy like DMT. The visual aspect at lower doses also reminds me of salvia visuals a little bit as well.

I took 8 hits of acid, shot DMT and inhaled nitrous on the end of the peak of the DMT shot.

I don't know if I wrote a trip report but it was .... Well, quite intense.

Blacked out and did things I don't remember

I will write a report some time. Maybe.

When I had my two profound experiences from the double balloon, I guess I sort of blacked out in the sense my eyes were completely open yet I was in another time, place and an entirely different person.

It was so strange, the theme of the trip was that in the beginning I accepted I was god/accepted the answers/meaning of life and relived my life (made the choice to leave my previous life) with this knowledge and therefore grew to become a sort of "perfect" human being that was god, or that we are all god and we just don't know it until we accept it. Accepting it is the ultimate power.

This was all completely out of character for me since I am not religious in any way and am often very skeptical of people who act all "enlightened" from psychs. So needless to say coming out of I could not even speak for like half an hour, all I could say to my friends was "I like, became/am Eric lol" in all seriousness. Eric was this older hippie guy from California we knew in highschool who travelled the world selling and trying psychedelics, just kinda searching for knowledge and overall headiness

 

[Goodwalt]

Do you have to use 2 cartridges or you can get a nice high off only one?

 

[Hilopsilo]

Do you have to use 2 cartridges or you can get a nice high off only one?

one is still great, but for the breakthrough experiences i had, both were from 2 cartridges.

 

[Yeetbeat]

Fantastic OP, thanks! Lost my shit at work when I read this bit

"At the beginning of the whippit, I always get this sort of feeling that I am the butt of some sort of grand joke, not necessarily in a bad way, its rather neutral"

 

[psy997]

I've never done two cartridges and always had breakthroughs with only one while tripping.

 

[Hilopsilo]

I've never done two cartridges and always had breakthroughs with only one while tripping.

Part of it is set and setting I believe, I find it hard to let go if I'm sitting in a circle of people taking turns, the social circumstance is distracting. The random giggles and banter I often mistakenly percieve as part of the "joke" as if everyone around me is "in on it" when thats completely false.

 

[JahSEEuS]

i'm pretty sure everyone is in on it.

 

[Kaleida]

I haven't done salvia in many years, but from what I do remember its a similar headspace in how you are CONVINCED of something without a cloud of doubt.

My first blastoff experience with salvia I had a similar feeling of a joke being played on me, I was POSITIVE that my friends had made up the drug salvia they had been telling me about all day and then when I hit it they pressed a "secret lever" to make the chair I was sitting in create the experience for me. Which is completely absurd, but I was so sure of this during the experience or at least the beginning.

Not purely psychedelic being all holistic and earthy like DMT. The visual aspect at lower doses also reminds me of salvia visuals a little bit as well.

Yep, that's exactly it. I basically feel that nitrous oxide and salvia cause the same type of belief-based head trip at that point, and the specific types of visuals or imaginative imagery that tends to accompany such a state, but I find nitrous to be the much more euphoric and recreational of the two, whereas salvia is a deeper hallucinogen but also has more potential to be confusing and uncomfortable, though it can still provide a beautiful experience if you just accept the experience just like you were saying with nitrous. The nitrous I think just sort of more readily forces acceptance... whereas with salvia people often go down kicking and screaming.

I really don't get many salvia-like effects on lower doses of nitrous myself, but I did just the other day have by far the most salvia-like experience I've ever had on anything other than salvia itself, on a combination of 50 mg of methoxetamine and eight cartridges of nitrous, pretty much cementing in my mind finally that this subjective effects relationship is real. The head trip, the body feeling, the spiral outside of time, patterns unzipping into smiling mouths with teeth made of people with their arms extended.... I definitely would have believed I was on salvia if I didn't know better. Still didn't quite break into another world though, need to go back for more....

 

[Hodor]

There's an older thread on BL where a guy talks about his love affair with "GASCID", i.e. the LSD+nitrous combo. Pretty fascinating read, but also a cautionary tale: after re-kindling his love for LSD by augmenting it with nitrous and having immensely "profound" experiences he gradually progresses to a full-blown nitrous addiction, to the point where he starts experiencing hypoxia, eventually resulting in nerve damage causing chronic neuropathic pain.

Not that I think that the OP is going down this route, but eh... being able to basically force a "++++"-experience seems like it would remove some of LSD's "self-regulating" aspects and put you at risk of problematic usage patterns. But in the end it's "you do you", especially if you only 'flip once every few weeks.

http://www.bluelight.org/vb/threads/445374-(Nitrous-Oxide)-Experienced-Life-Changing-Problems

 

[vortech]

The problem with nitrous IMO is that it only offers a glimpse, like literally one or two breaths worth of time, of this revelation OP speaks of. It isn't enough time to disseminate any meaningful message in most instances, it just leaves more questions than answers, IMO.

 

[spacejunk]

The thing about a lot of these "revelations", is that - in my experience, at least - the feeling of revelation is merely a sensation. There isn't usually much solid, graspable information to be gleaned.
While a lot of psychedelics and dissociatives (DMT, LSD, MXE, 3-MEO-PCP et al) have given me these feelings of some kind of 'secret knowledge', as time wears on, i generally recognise them for what they are; delusions.

 

[ChronWheezy]

Wow I am SOO glad you posted this. I've been having a very similar experience, and find it a bit frustrating to be honest. I agree with the observation that anything happening around me gets incorporated into the joke. However the quality of it is very repetitive and reliably present on nearly every large balloon for me. Here's how mine go:

Coming out of the peak, I get a massive 6th sense feeling as though everyone around me is looking right at me, even if I'm alone I feel people looking at me, for some reason it's often 1 guy and 1 girl. Then as I'm sort of re-congealing I get the sense that everyone's going, "Look! He's like ___" and then they basically preempt my next thought, it's as if they continuously know what I was about to experience and sort of point it out before/as I am thinking it but in a lighthearted way. Of course I always get the feeling that I was about to figure it out before the effects vanish and I just have to laugh as I come back to reality and realize what just happened. Sometimes it puts me in a bit of a strange place in social situations though and if I end up doing a lot of nitrous I find myself kind of starting to distrust the people around me? Which is weird, and a reason I have been avoiding doing a ton of it at certain parties where it's available.

What's interesting is often times it feels like I am somehow trying to explain to them that I just took a hit of nitrous? It's all very hard to explain.

I think it has something to do with the time-perception disruption and the nitrous also somehow altering our social self-awareness. It's definitely fascinating, especially how consistent it seems to be over hundreds of hits.

Once again thanks for sharing as when I've tried to discuss this with other people they didn't really get it (it's obviously super hard to explain) so I'm glad I'm not alone in this feeling!

 

[Xorkoth]

Nitrous on psychedelics, especially tryptamines, always goes a certain way for me. I take the first lungful, and I get the buzz. Then I take the second one and the buzz gets super intense and starts moving me away from my body. Then sometimes I have to take a third one, and sometimes not, but I reach "the place". It's really hard to describe but it is like a cosmic joke, it's this realization of the self-deception we undergo as the universe, as awareness, as this singular awareness at the heart of everyone and everything. It has to do with the incredible irony of life and the desires of our individuated selves and a realization of how wrong something you did or thought was, and how funny/ironic that is when faced with reality. It feels like riding the line between life and death, or being and nonbeing, and the sort of strange infinite dichotomy of the two. I ride this line and then at some point realize I did nitrous and I come out of it like... pfff... wha... *shakes head*... whoa... It happens in seconds but feels like an indeterminate period of time has passed.

I find all these tiny little circumstances are exactly the same coming out of it every time. It's little noises, the way I turn my head, the expression on my face, the way I realize I just did nitrous, and my automatic dialogue with myself. It's really an indescribable and profound experience but you can only ever hang onto a shred of it. I do feel like I can describe it a little better every time I have a night where I get there. But still, no words can do it justice at all. Sometimes it's pretty dark/grim, and sometimes it's joyous and light. Either way I generally want to do it again in a little bit.

When I'm not on psychedelics I have never once gotten there, it's just a really intense, pleasurable buzz.

 

[Hilopsilo]

Wow I am SOO glad you posted this. I've been having a very similar experience, and find it a bit frustrating to be honest. I agree with the observation that anything happening around me gets incorporated into the joke. However the quality of it is very repetitive and reliably present on nearly every large balloon for me. Here's how mine go:

Coming out of the peak, I get a massive 6th sense feeling as though everyone around me is looking right at me, even if I'm alone I feel people looking at me, for some reason it's often 1 guy and 1 girl. Then as I'm sort of re-congealing I get the sense that everyone's going, "Look! He's like ___" and then they basically preempt my next thought, it's as if they continuously know what I was about to experience and sort of point it out before/as I am thinking it but in a lighthearted way. Of course I always get the feeling that I was about to figure it out before the effects vanish and I just have to laugh as I come back to reality and realize what just happened. Sometimes it puts me in a bit of a strange place in social situations though and if I end up doing a lot of nitrous I find myself kind of starting to distrust the people around me? Which is weird, and a reason I have been avoiding doing a ton of it at certain parties where it's available.

What's interesting is often times it feels like I am somehow trying to explain to them that I just took a hit of nitrous? It's all very hard to explain.

I think it has something to do with the time-perception disruption and the nitrous also somehow altering our social self-awareness. It's definitely fascinating, especially how consistent it seems to be over hundreds of hits.

Once again thanks for sharing as when I've tried to discuss this with other people they didn't really get it (it's obviously super hard to explain) so I'm glad I'm not alone in this feeling!

For me the most often time the nitrous comes out is after a show/festival, and everyones still trippy and the nitrous starts getting passed around the hang-out circle. I generally dislike this setting for doing nitrous for that very reason; everyones sort of waiting for their turn, watching you and your reaction, smiling and giggling like the happy trippy people they are. But the nitrous can twist this, and all the attention on me creates a sort of uncomfortable tension that prevents me from "blasting off" and can result in some very self-conscious and disorienting experiences.

You can certainly have good experiences in social settings, so long as the attention is not on you. One time after a show we had like 20+ people in a hotel room all drinking, playing music, chatting and doing their own thing, and it was very fun to do the nitrous and get lost in crazy loops filled with music and broken sentences/phrases that were totally hilarious at the time. For nitrous to work in a social setting there has to be a significant amount of background noise and distractions, everyone sitting around waiting for their turn on the nitrous makes it weird.

I enjoy people around when I'm doing nitrous+psychedelics, but not when we're all sitting up in a circle. My favorite setting is when we're camping, I lay in a hammock and stare straight up through the trees which create beautiful fractals, and if on the second or third hit these fractals completely give way to the beyond.