Flickering
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Apr 11, 2011
- Messages
- 1,118
For my third and last DXM trip, I invited a friend along to observe. Trent has no experience either with taking substances or with trip sitting. He's a Science student interested in studying what happens when someone gets high off their brain. I intended to go to the third plateau, a level that I reasoned did not need supervision, but things didn't work out that way. Thank God for trip sitters, or I might have thought the whole thing literally never happened.
I'm still not sure why the trip went the way it did. At 64kg, 600mg places me at 9.375mg/kg, which by all accounts is the third plateau. But I've since talked about it with another friend who knows his stuff when it comes to DXM, and based on the duration and nature of the trip, I ended up in somethng more like the fourth. To the best of my knowledge, I'm not CYP2D6 deficient, as my first two trips (120mg and 300mg, respectively) turned out normally enough. So, I'm not sure what went wrong.
I downed the 200mL (3mg/mL) cough syrup in one go at 9:40p.m. I spent the next hour briefing Trent on what to do and what not to do while I was under. Poor Trent. I was grateful he was coming along to help out, but neither of us had any idea what was about to happen.
Things kicked off normally. I entered plateau one with dizziness and an unsettled stomach, though I wasn't throwing up as I almost did the first time. Trent and I waited for this phase to pass, as the first plateau has never been particularly interesting for me. He'd been taking down notes by this point, taking my pulse and checking my pupils, and he has five pages of notes compiled from the night which I have yet to read, so I'm not sure what time I entered plateau two. When I did, all sorts of familiar things from my last experience came up. Dissociation from my body, slurred and simplified speech, exaggerated movements. When I reached this point, I sat up in bed and announced, "I'm back." I then explained to Trent, who was on MSN on my computer with his girlfriend, that my other personality, my DXM-self, had taken over again, and that Trent would be trip sitting someone who was basically a different person for the night.
All standard enough so far. I started getting impatient about when, or whether, I would reach the third plateau. Trent asked if agitation was normal on DXM; I said that no, it was just me wanting to see what it was like, as I've never done any substance other than DXM and I was eager for my first experience with true reality-bending. We kept talking for a bit. Trent wanted to test my cognisance as I went deeper in and became less coherent. "I'm still cog'n'sant," I said as I fell back on the sheets, to the curious sensation of suddenly going from upright to lying down. "I'm still with you, Trent..." But by this point I knew I was starting to get silly.
I once again took on a persona alike the mentally impaired clients I care for at my work. I was a bit disappointed at this, because interesting though it was, my goal with drugs is not to just lose my intelligence for a while. Nonetheless, I explained to Trent my theories on spirituality and the afterlife that I only seem to have while high (while sober, I'm an atheist). I got up to write my own notes in my trip journal. By now my body felt like it was on automatic pilot, with me, a cloudy observer who didn't quite exist, watching in the background. I watched as my hand scrawled notes to the effect that I was covering my eyes to see if I'd get closed-eye visuals. And that was the last part of the night I would be able to confidently say happened, until I confirmed it with Trent the next afternoon.
The next thing I remember is like a very faint dream, something like the fever dreams I used to have as a kid with Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. This was the dissociation kicking into a higher gear, a level that until this point, I had no idea was possible on DXM. Reality was no longer real. Everything became faaaar away, distant. What I said or did became not only automatic, but elusive to me - I was having trouble making out what I was doing, let alone Trent. Everything from here on happened in increments without a sense of context. I kept asking Trent "What time... is it?" as I held on to the idea that this had started at 9:40, and I was now therefore two and a bit hours in. Apparently basic addition is a totally automatic function for me.
This part, probably the third plateau, was not exactly unpleasant. We were playing the song Octavarium by Dream Theater through open speakers, and at first the dreamy soundscapes were fitting. I closed my eyes and my vision thrust into some dark rolling portion of inner space. I started talking in a stop-start shifting monotone like a robot, and I announced to Trent that I was GlaDOS. (Later in the trip, I asked if I'd really done this, and when he confirmed it, I moaned and apologised and said I was an idiot.) My head spun rapidly. I asked him to close the computer, as the music was becoming artificial and ugly, and the song, though long at twenty-four minutes, seemed to drag on forever. He did, and I fell back on the bed, and thus concluded the last moments of sanity and anything resembling reality for the night.
From then on, I came to in episodes. I would look around my room in utter confusion. I vaguely recognised this place as 'my room', that this was in a place I lived, but I couldn't grasp the concept - it was just a useless piece of information I found in my head without context. I couldn't understand what I was either. The more I tried to fathom myself as a creature with identity, the more ridiculous it seemed. It was as though my conscious self usually resides inside the body, but now it was floating far away on an ever-thinner string, disconnected from every thought and emotion I'd ever experienced. Sorting through my brain, I realised this was a 'trip', and that it was going to last for another hour or so. I wanted it to end now. I expressed this desire to Trent and mimed shooting myself in the head. I couldn't see the difference between ending the trip and ending my life.
After a few of these awakenings, I withdrew anxiously inside myself. I started to wonder if I'd said or done something horrible. I couldn't remember what that might have been. There was a thought in the back of my mind that I'd fucked up someone's life, someone called Michael. (Who's Michael? Turns out it's me.) I became aware of Trent once again, and thought he might kill me with my own sword. I wondered if that would hurt. Bleakly I realised I would cease to exist at the end of this experience one way or another - not that what I was doing could really be called 'existing'.
I spent the next hour rifling through my head to make sense of things. I saw friends' faces, and their names, but just couldn't fathom that they were real. It seemed so absurd. It's impossible to describe.
The rest of the night was total confusion. Time lapses, a recurring sense of coming into the thinnest form of existence without context, ego fragmented to the corners of my awareness. Both my body and mind were acting on their own accord, and I watched it all through a meta-meta-meta-TV. The degree of dissociation was unbelievable. If not for Trent, I would have been totally lost. He kept talking to me, quiet and contemplative, and his voice annoyed me on a barely-lingual level, but it kept bringing me back out of this haze of absolute disorientation in my head. I didn't believe any of this was real, but I heard myself talking back to him. Heard this guy who I couldn't quite grasp was me, thanking him for being there, saying I was so sorry for dragging him into this, saying things had gone bad and I couldn't understand why. He reminded me continuously that I was having a bad trip, and said it would be over soon. But I believed I was stuck like this forever. It had gone on longer than it was suppoed to and I'd ruined this guy (who was me?!)'s life. Trent assured me I wouldn't end up in an asylum. He went to get me some bread and water.
When he came back in the room, the light from the corridor washed in and made it feel like some videogame cutscene. I can't stress how unreal it seemed. The only thing that gave me the slighest suspicion this was actually happening was Trent, whose actions and words seemed reminiscent of something real and autonomous, not something that only existed in my delirium.
Eventually, Trent left, at my insistence that he should go home and rest. (Again, I was hearing myself say this, but had no control over it or comprehension.) He was reluctant, but as he later told me, it was 3:30a.m. and he was very tired. I popped in and out of existence on the way to the door. Outside, I promised I'd call him in the morning to say I was all right, all the while convinced this wasn't hapening.
I found myself in the bathroom. I struggled to convince myself against all intuition that this was real. My face in the mirror looked like some deranged mime, a mismatch of unrelated features - puffed-out lips, wide but dull eyes, frazzled hair. I staggered back to bed. There, I came to about seven more times, and kept going back and forth between the bathroom. The transition was especially dreamlike - I recall a hand reaching out to grip the door frame, then I was suddenly at the bathroom. This kept happening in deja vu-like fashion. By 5:30a.m., I finally fell asleep.
I woke at 1:30p.m. still coming out of plateau two. Everything remained far away, dissociated and dizzy, but I remembered who I was and that something had gone wrong last night. There was no sign Trent had been here, except for the glasses of water he'd brought for me. Still sure none of my memories of the night had actually taken place, I opened my computer to look for his MSN conversation with his girlfriend. (Normally I would never eavesdrop like that, but I was in a fucked state of mind and it was the first thing I could think of to confirm whether the DXM trip had actually happened.) It wasn't there. I checked iTunes to see what songs had played most recently. The playlist I'd put on had apparently never played. Now I just wanted to know what the fuck had happened. I picked up the phone, called Trent. He didn't answer. I called another friend who knew I was going to trip out that night, and he confirmed Trent had indeed been over. He asked how it went and I said "It was terrible. I'm never touching drugs again. I'm still coming down now." He found this very funny.
I called Trent again. This time he answered. My call had woken him up. I asked what had happened and recounted these unreal memories I had, and one by one he confirmed they were real. I couldn't believe it. I apologised profusely, basically said I owed him my life, and spent the rest of the day in isolated recovery. I was amazed I'd survived and that I wasn't brain-damaged.
Late that afternoon, the last of the trip wore off. I felt like I'd been ground up in the mouth of the substance DXM, and spat out. "Get on with your life, kid," it told me. "You're barking up the wrong tree." While still coming down, I talked online with my friend who's taken DXM some 300 times, and told him I'd been to plateau sigma. This seems funny in retrospect, but I was pretty out of it even then - the keyboard, my fingers, his words were all distant. Later I ammended that it was just a bad plateau three trip, but he said it was plateau four, and that I'd been in no way ready for it, and that was the only reason it had been a disaster. I still don't know why it was such an intense trip at 600mg. Perhaps it interacted badly with my micropsia condition.
A lot of other things happned that I won't recount, to keep some semblence of brevity. There were brief moments of micropsia, a sense of precognition, hallucinations of crazed writing before my eyes, something like an out-of-body experience, and a feeling like I was being dragged backwards rapidly, to name a few. I aimed for the middle section of the pool but ended up in the deep end. It's given me a new perspective and respect for drugs. At first I thought it would be unsafe to continue using any substance, due to my micropsia predisposition. But after some research yesterday, I've discovered my experience was not that uncommon, even at such a moderate dose. I'm not sure though if I will continue with drugs. I need to absorb this experience first, then decide. It taught me a lot, and like a teacher casting out an unworthy student with a harsh lesson, told me to stop dreaming about all these fantasies I've been pursuing in this quest for knowledge and happiness, and just start living. I need to take that in, re-evaluate, and make a choice.
I'm still not sure why the trip went the way it did. At 64kg, 600mg places me at 9.375mg/kg, which by all accounts is the third plateau. But I've since talked about it with another friend who knows his stuff when it comes to DXM, and based on the duration and nature of the trip, I ended up in somethng more like the fourth. To the best of my knowledge, I'm not CYP2D6 deficient, as my first two trips (120mg and 300mg, respectively) turned out normally enough. So, I'm not sure what went wrong.
I downed the 200mL (3mg/mL) cough syrup in one go at 9:40p.m. I spent the next hour briefing Trent on what to do and what not to do while I was under. Poor Trent. I was grateful he was coming along to help out, but neither of us had any idea what was about to happen.
Things kicked off normally. I entered plateau one with dizziness and an unsettled stomach, though I wasn't throwing up as I almost did the first time. Trent and I waited for this phase to pass, as the first plateau has never been particularly interesting for me. He'd been taking down notes by this point, taking my pulse and checking my pupils, and he has five pages of notes compiled from the night which I have yet to read, so I'm not sure what time I entered plateau two. When I did, all sorts of familiar things from my last experience came up. Dissociation from my body, slurred and simplified speech, exaggerated movements. When I reached this point, I sat up in bed and announced, "I'm back." I then explained to Trent, who was on MSN on my computer with his girlfriend, that my other personality, my DXM-self, had taken over again, and that Trent would be trip sitting someone who was basically a different person for the night.
All standard enough so far. I started getting impatient about when, or whether, I would reach the third plateau. Trent asked if agitation was normal on DXM; I said that no, it was just me wanting to see what it was like, as I've never done any substance other than DXM and I was eager for my first experience with true reality-bending. We kept talking for a bit. Trent wanted to test my cognisance as I went deeper in and became less coherent. "I'm still cog'n'sant," I said as I fell back on the sheets, to the curious sensation of suddenly going from upright to lying down. "I'm still with you, Trent..." But by this point I knew I was starting to get silly.
I once again took on a persona alike the mentally impaired clients I care for at my work. I was a bit disappointed at this, because interesting though it was, my goal with drugs is not to just lose my intelligence for a while. Nonetheless, I explained to Trent my theories on spirituality and the afterlife that I only seem to have while high (while sober, I'm an atheist). I got up to write my own notes in my trip journal. By now my body felt like it was on automatic pilot, with me, a cloudy observer who didn't quite exist, watching in the background. I watched as my hand scrawled notes to the effect that I was covering my eyes to see if I'd get closed-eye visuals. And that was the last part of the night I would be able to confidently say happened, until I confirmed it with Trent the next afternoon.
The next thing I remember is like a very faint dream, something like the fever dreams I used to have as a kid with Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. This was the dissociation kicking into a higher gear, a level that until this point, I had no idea was possible on DXM. Reality was no longer real. Everything became faaaar away, distant. What I said or did became not only automatic, but elusive to me - I was having trouble making out what I was doing, let alone Trent. Everything from here on happened in increments without a sense of context. I kept asking Trent "What time... is it?" as I held on to the idea that this had started at 9:40, and I was now therefore two and a bit hours in. Apparently basic addition is a totally automatic function for me.
This part, probably the third plateau, was not exactly unpleasant. We were playing the song Octavarium by Dream Theater through open speakers, and at first the dreamy soundscapes were fitting. I closed my eyes and my vision thrust into some dark rolling portion of inner space. I started talking in a stop-start shifting monotone like a robot, and I announced to Trent that I was GlaDOS. (Later in the trip, I asked if I'd really done this, and when he confirmed it, I moaned and apologised and said I was an idiot.) My head spun rapidly. I asked him to close the computer, as the music was becoming artificial and ugly, and the song, though long at twenty-four minutes, seemed to drag on forever. He did, and I fell back on the bed, and thus concluded the last moments of sanity and anything resembling reality for the night.
From then on, I came to in episodes. I would look around my room in utter confusion. I vaguely recognised this place as 'my room', that this was in a place I lived, but I couldn't grasp the concept - it was just a useless piece of information I found in my head without context. I couldn't understand what I was either. The more I tried to fathom myself as a creature with identity, the more ridiculous it seemed. It was as though my conscious self usually resides inside the body, but now it was floating far away on an ever-thinner string, disconnected from every thought and emotion I'd ever experienced. Sorting through my brain, I realised this was a 'trip', and that it was going to last for another hour or so. I wanted it to end now. I expressed this desire to Trent and mimed shooting myself in the head. I couldn't see the difference between ending the trip and ending my life.
After a few of these awakenings, I withdrew anxiously inside myself. I started to wonder if I'd said or done something horrible. I couldn't remember what that might have been. There was a thought in the back of my mind that I'd fucked up someone's life, someone called Michael. (Who's Michael? Turns out it's me.) I became aware of Trent once again, and thought he might kill me with my own sword. I wondered if that would hurt. Bleakly I realised I would cease to exist at the end of this experience one way or another - not that what I was doing could really be called 'existing'.
I spent the next hour rifling through my head to make sense of things. I saw friends' faces, and their names, but just couldn't fathom that they were real. It seemed so absurd. It's impossible to describe.
The rest of the night was total confusion. Time lapses, a recurring sense of coming into the thinnest form of existence without context, ego fragmented to the corners of my awareness. Both my body and mind were acting on their own accord, and I watched it all through a meta-meta-meta-TV. The degree of dissociation was unbelievable. If not for Trent, I would have been totally lost. He kept talking to me, quiet and contemplative, and his voice annoyed me on a barely-lingual level, but it kept bringing me back out of this haze of absolute disorientation in my head. I didn't believe any of this was real, but I heard myself talking back to him. Heard this guy who I couldn't quite grasp was me, thanking him for being there, saying I was so sorry for dragging him into this, saying things had gone bad and I couldn't understand why. He reminded me continuously that I was having a bad trip, and said it would be over soon. But I believed I was stuck like this forever. It had gone on longer than it was suppoed to and I'd ruined this guy (who was me?!)'s life. Trent assured me I wouldn't end up in an asylum. He went to get me some bread and water.
When he came back in the room, the light from the corridor washed in and made it feel like some videogame cutscene. I can't stress how unreal it seemed. The only thing that gave me the slighest suspicion this was actually happening was Trent, whose actions and words seemed reminiscent of something real and autonomous, not something that only existed in my delirium.
Eventually, Trent left, at my insistence that he should go home and rest. (Again, I was hearing myself say this, but had no control over it or comprehension.) He was reluctant, but as he later told me, it was 3:30a.m. and he was very tired. I popped in and out of existence on the way to the door. Outside, I promised I'd call him in the morning to say I was all right, all the while convinced this wasn't hapening.
I found myself in the bathroom. I struggled to convince myself against all intuition that this was real. My face in the mirror looked like some deranged mime, a mismatch of unrelated features - puffed-out lips, wide but dull eyes, frazzled hair. I staggered back to bed. There, I came to about seven more times, and kept going back and forth between the bathroom. The transition was especially dreamlike - I recall a hand reaching out to grip the door frame, then I was suddenly at the bathroom. This kept happening in deja vu-like fashion. By 5:30a.m., I finally fell asleep.
I woke at 1:30p.m. still coming out of plateau two. Everything remained far away, dissociated and dizzy, but I remembered who I was and that something had gone wrong last night. There was no sign Trent had been here, except for the glasses of water he'd brought for me. Still sure none of my memories of the night had actually taken place, I opened my computer to look for his MSN conversation with his girlfriend. (Normally I would never eavesdrop like that, but I was in a fucked state of mind and it was the first thing I could think of to confirm whether the DXM trip had actually happened.) It wasn't there. I checked iTunes to see what songs had played most recently. The playlist I'd put on had apparently never played. Now I just wanted to know what the fuck had happened. I picked up the phone, called Trent. He didn't answer. I called another friend who knew I was going to trip out that night, and he confirmed Trent had indeed been over. He asked how it went and I said "It was terrible. I'm never touching drugs again. I'm still coming down now." He found this very funny.
I called Trent again. This time he answered. My call had woken him up. I asked what had happened and recounted these unreal memories I had, and one by one he confirmed they were real. I couldn't believe it. I apologised profusely, basically said I owed him my life, and spent the rest of the day in isolated recovery. I was amazed I'd survived and that I wasn't brain-damaged.
Late that afternoon, the last of the trip wore off. I felt like I'd been ground up in the mouth of the substance DXM, and spat out. "Get on with your life, kid," it told me. "You're barking up the wrong tree." While still coming down, I talked online with my friend who's taken DXM some 300 times, and told him I'd been to plateau sigma. This seems funny in retrospect, but I was pretty out of it even then - the keyboard, my fingers, his words were all distant. Later I ammended that it was just a bad plateau three trip, but he said it was plateau four, and that I'd been in no way ready for it, and that was the only reason it had been a disaster. I still don't know why it was such an intense trip at 600mg. Perhaps it interacted badly with my micropsia condition.
A lot of other things happned that I won't recount, to keep some semblence of brevity. There were brief moments of micropsia, a sense of precognition, hallucinations of crazed writing before my eyes, something like an out-of-body experience, and a feeling like I was being dragged backwards rapidly, to name a few. I aimed for the middle section of the pool but ended up in the deep end. It's given me a new perspective and respect for drugs. At first I thought it would be unsafe to continue using any substance, due to my micropsia predisposition. But after some research yesterday, I've discovered my experience was not that uncommon, even at such a moderate dose. I'm not sure though if I will continue with drugs. I need to absorb this experience first, then decide. It taught me a lot, and like a teacher casting out an unworthy student with a harsh lesson, told me to stop dreaming about all these fantasies I've been pursuing in this quest for knowledge and happiness, and just start living. I need to take that in, re-evaluate, and make a choice.
Reading this report almost makes me want to try for that 4th plateau again but when I reached the 3rd I had a terrible experience that resulted in me having to vomit and worse.