2-FDCK (total ≥430 mg intranasal) - Experienced - Training blindsight, brainwave attenuation, yogic sleep

[prey]

2-FDCK (total ≥430 mg intranasal) - Experienced - Training blindsight, brainwave attenuation, yogic sleep
22 November, '19​

Yesterday I finally received a shipment that I'd all but written off, which meant that I had 4 surprise grams of 2-FDCK on my hands. I didn't have any plans, so the timing was pretty serendipitous. I kept up with dosage timestamps as long as I could manage (my only intention, wasn't trying to write a full report), then this morning I scratched out notes on two phenomena I experienced.

As such I'm not sure whether this counts as a trip report; might not be in the right place. It seemed too long to put in the B&D, but not focused/unified enough to put in psychedelics (why isn't there a dedicated disso forum again? ). Apologies if I chose poorly!

Dosage timestamps:
805p - 60 mg 2-FDCK intranasal
845p - 60 mg 2-FDCK intranasal
930p - 80 mg 2-FDCK intranasal
10??p - 100 mg 2-FDCK intranasal
12??p - 130 mg 2-FDCK intranasal
probably missed one in there somewhere
≥430 mg 2-FDCK total

1) Spent much time after hole (1.5 hr?) constructing mental model of apartment and navigating my hallways, shelves &c. blindfolded. Controlled, *visual* hallucination of features, updating in realtime as I continually explored and corrected errors. Hard to hold much at once, but it comes back more easily each time. Easier to see broad strokes -- bed here, dresser here, door here. Trying to focus on details would usually cause the visualization to fade into blackness; usually a quick turn of the head in a new direction would give me a fresh "look". Ended up in the closet a couple times — and as a teen I swore I would never go back . Really bizarre feeling when you "see" a door that's really there, but it's not the same door as you thought, and upon the realization, your view of the door & its surrounding walls & floor just sort of evaporates.

Helpful to maintain deliberate doublethink of squinting through an insufficiently opaque blindfold (mine's not translucent, I promise). "Seeing" my own limbs was surprisingly easy, both arms & legs. I could also see the paws on my hands until I took them off.

I've been wanting to try this for a while now. Fucking crazy that it straight-up worked. I certainly couldn't actually perform the tasks I was attempting, but I fucking saw my damn apartment through a blindfold. There's a lot more to practice here. Will experiment with echolocation later & try to hook it up to feed into visualization. It seems like echolocation would be less useful at close range though, since the delay is less pronounced, but I dunno. Apparently, echolocation is a skill that sighted humans *can* legitimately train...? Don't know whether I would be able to use such machinery in a sober state, even if I managed to build it, but it'd be a hell of a party trick.

There's no real immediate utility to this, but it's a really fascinating mental exercise. I've got an asymmetric Rubik's cube where, instead of color, the shuffleable dimension is depth from the opposite side of the cubie (see pic). It's isomorphic to the cube, meaning it's scrambled and solved in exactly the same way, but that difference means it can be solved by touch (without just memorizing initial configuration or move sequence, like the normal 3-layer cube). I've solved this blindfolded sober (once), and I really want to try it with dissonaut goggles on. See if I can exercise my short-term visual memory enough to maintain a persistent imagine of the configuration. I doubt I will be able to visualize a whole cube easily (that's a lot of information!), but I'm willing to be impressed even by marginal success.



2) When trying to go to sleep, experienced odd hyperawareness of some brainwave or other (would really like to pinpoint which one if possible; this seems pretty neurophysiologically grounded). Was sensing it, focused on it, did something or other to mess with it, can't remember what I was trying but it was intentional. Sensed it slow down, beats becoming less frequent, until finally there was no next beat (that I perceived). Instead, I experienced a sudden dropoff in body awareness & muscle tension, in addition to a sudden relaxed shallowness of breathing. This really took me by surprise, as it told me the perception was clearly *somehow* grounded in my physiology. Either I was directly sensing an endogenous process of some kind, or I was sensing an abstraction that my brain had constructed to model some endogenous process. I think.

The changes were consistent with stage N2 of the sleep cycle (the first stage of actual sleep). Doing some research on sleep, brainwaves, &c. today, and I'm thinking I put myself into a state of yoga nidra ("yogic sleep"), where my body was asleep but my mind was lucid. (There are probably lots of other words for the same / similar states of consciousness & this is just one framework for it.) I've been in such a state many times before with dissociatives (and a few times without), though I didn't use that name for it, but it was never with that sharp dropoff feeling or with sensation of the frequency modulation leadup. I'm hesitant to start going on about brainwaves because it's easy to talk out of your ass, but it's hard for me to ignore the explanatory power such a framework would have to contextualize extreme/mixed states of consciousness like this (some waves being suppressed, others functioning normally).

I've often thought that sleep paralysis and sleepwalking are sort of dual conditions. Being really handwavy here, because I'm not very knowledgeable yet, but during sleep, you've got some mechanism for shutting off your awareness (at least during non-REM sleep, which is when sleepwalking happens), and some mechanism for disconnecting control of your body (during I assume both types of phases).

A) Sleepwalking seems to be when awareness / the "consciousness subprocessor" is correctly off, but somehow the body control module was flipped back online;
B) Sleep paralysis seems to be when your awareness / attention manager is on, but someone forgot to hook it up to the body.

The above characterization seems incomplete — point B should include some notion of "but you're not asleep anymore", otherwise one could argue that description B could apply to dreams during REM sleep as well. I need to refine my understanding of the phases & decouple the separate phenomena if possible. Also not sure whether the two mechanisms above correlate neatly to brainwaves. I guess to be fair I already know that the correlation between brainwaves and "consciousness" (let's just say awareness) is a controversial topic, but I'm pretty damn sold on there being *some* heavy correlation. I was resistant to it at first because it seems a little woo-y, but it's a very persuasive (if incomplete) response to the binding problem, and hearing about the studies done on career-monks deep in meditation was a big clue for me. I think beta waves correlate with wakeful activity, and the "SMR" in SMR waves literally stands for sensorimotor, so those are worth looking into. I'd also like to look into those headbands & shit that claim to monitor your brainwaves while you're asleep — what exactly do they quantitatively measure? and surely they'd work perfectly fine while awake, right? =P

If the headbands like Dreem are legit, has anyone ever worn one through a hole?? Holy shit.

 

[Xorkoth]

Interesting thoughts. Dissociatives can be a lot like dreaming. Have you ever done ibogaine? I did a flood dose, the experience seemed to happen on a dream level... basically I was dreaming whether awake or asleep and while I was awake, the dreams were overlaying reality. Physically it was very dissociating, the experience most closely resembled that of dissociatives but it was very unique. I've been wanting to get some more (it was 6 years ago that I took it), to explore moderate states, where I maybe retained more control.

 

[Vastness]

Oh man, what fascinating experiments you indulge in while dissociated, I wish more people would try this kind of thing, all I ever used to do really was lie on my sofa. Would be fascinating to see also if you can demonstrate any enhanced learning or improvement in certain cognitive functions either under the influence or thereafter following practice under the influence - people talk about potential "metaprogramming" and whatnot as a potential usage of dissociatives all the time but usually just in the most vague way... whereas it sounds like what you're doing is pretty deliberate and regimented. Kudos and please do keep us updated with any further experiments and your results!