Entering the Dissoverse

[dopamimetic]

Just found that. Very true IMHO. Apologies if it's been posted already.

If I had to choose between dissociatives and psychedelics, I’d pick dissociatives in a heartbeat. I find them to be just as spiritually and philosophically rich as psychedelics, I enjoy their learning curve, and I love their antidepressant quality. I think they are the perfect substances for meditation, and I feel they are a softer teacher than psychedelics (I have never done well with stringency). For that reason, I would consider myself a dissonaught, even though the term is rarely used.

That’s not to say I don’t like psychedelics, I just have a preference.

I recognise that dissociatives do not get the same praise or attention that psychedelics do, which is the main reason I am writing this now. For instance, there is no equivalent text to the famous “PiHKAL” (Psychedelics I know and Love, by Alexander Shulgin and Ann Shulgin).

The people I come across rarely think of dissociatives as having rich psychedelic aspects to them. Even the heavy ketamine users I meet don’t think like this. That’s a shame. I couldn’t disagree with them more, but I understand why they think that. In fact, the reason why people don’t think of them as having psychedelic properties is one of the reasons why I like them so much.

Dissociatives do not feed you
You take a tab of acid and for the next 6–18 hours you are shown perspectives of both yourself and the wider world that you simply cannot ignore. The universe you know and love suddenly becomes a distant memory, with even the most nuanced differences forcing you to reshape your relationship with practically everything. None-the-least your relationship with yourself.

It is unavoidable. This happens every time I take a classical psychedelic. I have never left a trip without some insights; whether those insights hold up against the sobriety of the next few days is another matter. But dissociatives don’t do this. Regardless of the dosage, it is entirely possible to experience them without gaining any noticeable insights whatsoever (and if you don’t know where to look then you may never gain insights).

This is the strict/soft distinction I am trying to make.

A strict teacher (such as LSD/psilocybin) will force your hand and show you something you have either never seen before or that you have been trying your best to avoid.

A soft teacher (such as ketamine, 3-MEO-PCE, nitrous oxide) will only show you something if you explicitly ask to attend the lecture.

When you take a classical psychedelic, the tab or the mushroom acts as your enrollment. When you take a dissociative, your explicit request acts as your enrollment.

I believe this is a testament to the versatility of dissociatives as a drug class. I also find that they hold your hand through your experiences, and I’m not ashamed to say that I enjoy my hand being held when I take an ethereal journey.

The learning curve
I mentioned that it is possible to not have any insights from a dissociative. This is because they have a learning curve.

By learning curve, I mean that there is specific knowledge which needs to be picked up in order to aid the navigation of them. This isn’t the type of knowledge that can be read in a book or an article, but rather knowledge about both yourself and your relationship with the substance. Psychedelics also have a learning curve, but I prefer the learning curve for dissociatives.

For instance, it took until my third LSD trip before I was getting the full psychedelic journey because I didn’t know what my relationship to the drug was.

Dissociatives have this too, but their learning curve is less steep, and the journey to get richer insights is relatively easy to conduct. The biggest thing to learn if you want to squeeze out all the psychedelia from a dissociative is how to unpack the information it passes to you.

(...)

@medium.com

 

[Vastness]

Very interesting perspective... I'm one of those who considers dissociatives as essentially pretend psychedelics at best, even dark, deceptive imitators at worst, but I would not by any means rule out that they have some value, just the road to meaning and insight is far more treacherous... not helped by the physical toxicity of many of the best ones which adds a hard time limit on how long you have to extract these lessons before the substance begins to punish you, for lack of a better metaphor.

Most of my ketamine years I spent sitting on my sofa in a stupor watching TV shows endlessly, now they make my bladder hurt so I can't do them for a long time which is sad but I made my bed, now I have to lie in it, and not surprising how little I got out of them. Towards the end I did try to curb this habit, having got more into meditation and just gaining some kind of more mature insight into my consciousness, I guess, and some of my last few dissociative experiences were truly quite profound. I think it takes a true discipline of mind and, to some extent, innate knowledge of one's self to choose the hidden path in the dissociative world when all around you is an ocean of escapist but illusory bliss... I didn't have either of these things and as such the lessons eluded me. But perhaps there is something of value at the bottom of the class-spanning Hole after all. Perhaps the maze has a solution that is revealed only to the worthy... or the lucky.

I'll have to read this again properly later but it has made me think for sure... thanks for sharing.

 

[dopamimetic]

How long did you use K before it hit your bladder? Was it an instant hit or a slowly progressing thing? Sad to hear that.

I am into dissociatives since my teenage years with DXM and the very first samples of MXE. Having done what I think to be more than 250g of arylcyclohexylamines with no lasting physical side effects, there were some bad ones mentally as well as physically but I admit them to impurities as I couldn't get any relationship between substance and side effect, it was batch related. Also I felt that regular K puts the strongest strain onto the bladder, MXE being second with some distance, and the potent ones (DCK, 3-MeO-PCE etc) feel like nothing at all. Just that tolerance jumps right through the roof when using more potent ones..

Guess I am lucky then. Or will it hit me too at some time in the future? This is what I need to figure out, whether it'll hit anybody at a certain amount of usage or if it's genetically/lifestyle/etc related. For the last, umm 4 years I've been more time on dissociatives than not - they are addictive for sure, yet nowhere as bad as opioids, and even a cure for addiction to them. I agree to what the author writes, to some degree - but also when doing dissociatives over a certain extent, you also can't avoid the insights, just it's very different than with psychedelics. More dream-like, and things suddenly are "just there". But yeah, I've learned so much from them, I'd say more than from psychedelics (granted, I didn't do them much, in early years I've been too scared and then fucking SNRI venlafaxine permanently messed up my brain's ability to trip. Even the arylcyclohexylamines have lost their colors, I only get black/white CEV's and reading others reports makes me pretty jealous.)

Watching TV on disso is fun for sure (minus all the trash and advertising shit, which is why I don't even have a TV anymore but watch over internet, youtube netflix etc). But even so you're able to learn something imho, as it puts you right into the movie. Depends on what sort of show/movie you're watching I guess.

Also for me, dissos aren't exactly escapism. Ethanol/GABAergics or opioids are that. Dissociatives are more like a meta-dimension, where I am able to reflect life without all these little emotional things keeping me from seeing the big picture..

Oh, forgot to ask - did you do other dissociatives than K? My impression is that K is the most anesthetic of all the dissociatives, there was a thread about that long time ago in advanced pharmacology, that K is an agonist at a completely NMDA-unrelated binding site which is made responsible for its narcotic/anesthetic properties and probably most of the RC dissos don't share that (a property which both makes a safety net, as it limits the manic energy of the more powerful ACHs and appears to immobilize anybody but me- but also limits the cognitive insights I guess..)

 

[Vastness]

How long did you use K before it hit your bladder? Was it an instant hit or a slowly progressing thing? Sad to hear that.

I used it on and off for over a decade, although the majority in the past 5 or 6 years when I used, off the top of my head, I estimate maybe 80-100g in total over that time. I wrote a long retrospective about it in the trip report forum if you're interested. It was a slowly progressing thing, still is in fact, I had my first scare after a week long binge where I used, I think, maybe 6 or 7g in 5 days? Then during a combo with 4-AcO-MET I had some urinary retention and it's like I could feel something was off... This was, maybe, 2 years ago.. I did not quit forever, and attempted to come back a few times, even, seemingly, sometimes without symptoms, but the last few times I've done K, or, indeed, any ACH, even 100mg of MXE most recently, I've had an increased bladder awareness for up to a week after - my last K escapade (90 days ago now) I had acute although not unbearable pain while it was wearing off. And I often get urinary retention issues that somewhat spoil the trip now, standing in front of the toilet for half an hour wasting the hole and willing my urethra to open... I believe honestly I have got off lightly and have managed both the acute effects and hopefully mitigated the long term effects with various supplementation which I have written about fairly extensively in the ketamine warning thread in the PD forum... I don't have symptoms now, and I'm optimistic I'll recover, but everything I've read study wise suggests that users who don't listen to their body and take a long break (at least a year, is what I gather) just get increasingly worsening symptoms that come on faster, take longer to go away, and presumably eventually develop into serious scarring and possibly permanent pain and damage... So if I want to be able to keep using ACHs, I MUST STOP. They also seem to be the one class I just cannot trust myself around. Fortunately, I've been coming to believe for a while now that dissociatives are quite deceptive and empty - and they do mostly have a scattering, depressogenic effect on me in the days after - which helped my decision to finally call time on them... for a time.

I am into dissociatives since my teenage years with DXM and the very first samples of MXE. Having done what I think to be more than 250g of arylcyclohexylamines with no lasting physical side effects, there were some bad ones mentally as well as physically but I admit them to impurities as I couldn't get any relationship between substance and side effect, it was batch related. Also I felt that regular K puts the strongest strain onto the bladder, MXE being second with some distance, and the potent ones (DCK, 3-MeO-PCE etc) feel like nothing at all. Just that tolerance jumps right through the roof when using more potent ones..

Weirdly, I had another bladder scare from some DCK, leading me to flush it (which I seriously regret now because it seems to have disappeared). 3-HO-PCP I did a little of recently with no apparent negatives. I agree, I think, that ketamine seems the most taxing, although it's also the least potent by weight, so that would make sense... Over what time period did you do this 250g of ACHs, do you know?

Guess I am lucky then. Or will it hit me too at some time in the future? This is what I need to figure out, whether it'll hit anybody at a certain amount of usage or if it's genetically/lifestyle/etc related.

The jury is still out for sure, although I think there is evidence to suggest by now that ketamine just IS directly toxic to the cells that line the bladder, what's uncertain is what makes some people more resilient to it than others, as with everything I think both genetics and lifestyle will play a part... there's a lot of interesting discussion about this I think again, in the ketamine bladder warning thread in the PD forum, plus a lot of discussion about preventative measures, even if nothing seems wrong, yet.

For the last, umm 4 years I've been more time on dissociatives than not - they are addictive for sure, yet nowhere as bad as opioids, and even a cure for addiction to them. I agree to what the author writes, to some degree - but also when doing dissociatives over a certain extent, you also can't avoid the insights, just it's very different than with psychedelics. More dream-like, and things suddenly are "just there". But yeah, I've learned so much from them, I'd say more than from psychedelics (granted, I didn't do them much, in early years I've been too scared and then fucking SNRI venlafaxine permanently messed up my brain's ability to trip. Even the arylcyclohexylamines have lost their colors, I only get black/white CEV's and reading others reports makes me pretty jealous.)

If you don't mind me asking - could you state, explicitly, some definite lessons you have learned from dissociatives? Myself, although I always felt like I was learning things, when I've been on dissos often my life hasn't really improved and I've started to believe that this was essentially a cognitive hallucination - not that there aren't lessons to learn - just that it's easy to think that you're learning lessons when really you're just acquiring this belief as part of the insidious mechanism by which dissociatives exert their addiction-inducing effects.

Watching TV on disso is fun for sure (minus all the trash and advertising shit, which is why I don't even have a TV anymore but watch over internet, youtube netflix etc). But even so you're able to learn something imho, as it puts you right into the movie. Depends on what sort of show/movie you're watching I guess.

FOR SURE, YES! :D As much as I kind of deride it, I actually do feel like some shows I watched gave me real insights into the nature of reality - I watched Westworld on a lot of K and felt like I gained a real insight into the nature of consciousness (if you've not seen it, very lifelike humanoid AI robots start to become aware of their own sentience beyond their programming)... I watched Altered Carbon (relevant summary - human personalities run on hardware implants, and thus bodies are interchangeable - also allusions to virtual reality indistinguishable from real, ie, "a construct") and felt like I gained the insight that in fact - this is what is already happening - the body is a sleeve - and reality is a construct that washes over and through our essence, but all we can ever control or know is our mind.... I watched the OA (really underrated show - actually I think some 3-MeO-PCP might have been involved here) and at one point suddenly realised wait - I AM THE OA! ie, I am an interdimensional traveller, in this world but not of it, moving from unknown origin to an unknown destination... and this is true for all human beings whether we realise it or not. There's probably more, but, man, yeah, I really fucking enjoyed watching TV on K and sometimes I felt it was like a spiritual experience in itself.

Also for me, dissos aren't exactly escapism. Ethanol/GABAergics or opioids are that. Dissociatives are more like a meta-dimension, where I am able to reflect life without all these little emotional things keeping me from seeing the big picture..

Yeah, I get that, although for me, dissos are escapism because it's hard to have a bad time on them. Psychedelics on the other hand I think are more challenging drugs - dissociatives, as outlined in the article in question may be challenging in a different way, but it's still very very easy to lapse into just forgetting trying to learn anything and just submersing yourself in the otherreality, looking at the pretty pictures and feeling the pretty sensations, expecting something to just be handed to you... They're a far more cerebral escapist option though for sure, I'm on the fence still if they're truly consciousness elevating like the classical psychs but they're definitely worlds away from the blunt consciousness-lowering agents such as the GABAergics and opioids. I also used to always, or almost always, use ketamine and other dissos alone, which for me made them in a way more escapist since I have naturally socially avoidant tendencies, which GABAergics help. Dissociatives on the other hand, in my experience, are just not overly social drugs... although to be fair I probably did always dose too high because I WANTED to hole, or get close to it. I have known people who dose a lot less as a social aid, so in that sense it probably wouldn't be escapist...

Oh, forgot to ask - did you do other dissociatives than K? My impression is that K is the most anesthetic of all the dissociatives, there was a thread about that long time ago in advanced pharmacology, that K is an agonist at a completely NMDA-unrelated binding site which is made responsible for its narcotic/anesthetic properties and probably most of the RC dissos don't share that (a property which both makes a safety net, as it limits the manic energy of the more powerful ACHs and appears to immobilize anybody but me- but also limits the cognitive insights I guess..)

I have done a few yes - I would probably agree with you about ketamine being the most anesthetic, definitely the most sedating. I found DCK on a par with it though I think but have far less experience with this substance. MXE I do find to be somewhat "anaesthetic" as in after an MXE binge it's like my skin is more numb, less sensitive to temperature etc, but it's obviously not immobilising. Not too sure about the PCPs, think they're a bit too insaniac largely for me to have been thinking about anaesthesia. I have basically never been fully immobilised on K though either, even in the very early days I was occasionally capable of interacting with my environment even if very very slowly, if I really tried, although I usually try not to for safety reasons. I have K-holed standing up before also, I seem to have enough autonomic balance that I (fortunatly) stay standing. Not that I'm immune to being totally immobilised for sure, I've over ever snorted and I'm sure a good solid IM/IV dose could knock me out although it's not something I have interest in pursuing.

I much prefer the more immobilising dissos, largely, again, for safety reasons, but also because I find the holes more comfortable and immersive - but, fortunately, I seem to react fairly calmly even to the psychotogenic PCP analogues, I have inadvertently taken very high doses of 3-MeO-PCP and 3-HO-PCP and while I've been totally out of it I seem to generally just sit quietly - in the former case I was outside in a busy city, misjudged the dose, and my friends noticed what was up and got me in an uber... I sobered up on the way back and was told I was clearly completely out of it, couldn't work my phone, could barely communicate, but I calmly followed simple instructions and allowed myself to be guided to safety... I'm grateful for this because I've read stories of really frightening things happening to people on megadoses of the non-sedating dissos, complete blackouts while wreaking havoc... Honestly though I still consider my high doses of both to be a somewhat irresponsible error and don't intend to repeat them. But my point, I guess, if you'll excuse that tangent is just that everyone reacts differently... I guess that's obvious.

 

[dopamimetic]

Well, thinking of it, 250g are probably a conservative guess as during the most heavy times I've ordered 25g DCK every 6-8 weeks, summing up to about 150g in 9 months or so. The majority of arylcyclohexylamines has been during the last 3 years, I went into an endless binge when my relationship split up in the end of 2015. The longest time frame without using dissos since might have been 3 months or so, when I was in rehab and made a desperate attempt to replace my disso habit (oh yeah, they are habit forming for sure. Not physically but very much mentally) with opioid substitution - I went through all three, bupe, methadone and morphine in the hope to satisfy my amygdala but to no avail- I ended up doing both, with potenciated physical danger. Think I went through multiple respiratory depressions where maybe just the neuroprotective effect of NMDA antagonist saved me from real damage.

Strangely I never ever managed it into a real hole. At the attempt to reach it, I went through more than a gram of ketamine in 12h but ended up with just a scattered mind full of white noise but no hole or anesthesia at all. What I get easily is some kind of pre-hole state where I can drift away with eyes closed but always have some remaining memory of my human identity and body and can just open my eyes to be back in our everyday reality. Might have to do with said inability to trip on serotonergics, as my hunch is that high dose dissos might release endogenous DMT (never done DMT yet, it's on my list waiting for the right occasion, hoping for finally a serotonergic trip- but from talking to a friend who's done it multiple times, it might well be)

About the escapism, I don't really disagree with you - there have been huge delusions especially in the beginning, and for sure they make a great time off, yet I'd say they are both - you learn by escaping, or so. Make a great tool to meta-analyze your life from a detached, rational perspective for example. But also you have to want it, as he writes in the article. I guess my subconsciousness just chose to want? It becomes more controllable with time, but a real downside is that it's hard to integrate things into completely sober life- dissociatives always call for more dissociatives. If we just could rule out that nasty physical toxicity, it wouldn't be that of an issue, but until then.. I just have to hope and pray...

Oh yeah, I know Altered Carbon. Was a nice series There was another one on netflix, about an accident in a pharmaceutical company located in the antarctic where they researched some kind of virus and tested it on an isolated island where a weird cult or sect happened - of which I just don't remember the name anymore .. maybe you know which one I mean?

Also the dissociatives are very different when used in low dosages, as you mentioned it, they can make ideal social aids (since I've discovered that, I don't do alcohol anymore- my liver is thankful. Same for benzodiazepines, they now seem to be just dulling sedatives) which are very controllable and even stimulating but only if you don't go too high. Oh, I managed to stay up for 4 days straight by maintaining a low plateau of DCK with no signs of tiredness or sleep deprivation at all. Only real downside was the crash when waking up again after finally falling asleep.

And of course it's very important to listen to the body. Guess the anesthetic ones do mask the body's needs much more than the energetic ones, I remember forgetting to drink on K or MXE, something never'd happen on 2F-DCK (interestingly, 2F-DCK appears to be completely non-anesthetic, while DCK had certain aspects, as did MXE - like you say). Thanks for linking that PD thread, I'll give it a read

 

[somnilicious]

In the article has says pihkal stands for psychedelics I have known and loved but I'm pretty sure the p stands for phenthylamine but I get what he's saying. psychedelics has always been a broad term. A book I had in the 90's called ketamine and MDMA psychadelic but they were very much not what I had come to think of as being classically psychadelic like LSD or shrooms. Only dissoc I have used is k and I have never holed on it. I took 150mg or so of dxm but that sucked.

 

[dopamimetic]

Think you need to do dissociatives more than once to really get to know them, at least with the less powerful ones like K or DXM - which, depending on your metabolism, might even only be remotely alike, and 150mg are too little for sure to get any serious disassociative effects. Regarding PiHKAL you're right. Yet one should write ARIHKAL - arylcyclohexylamines I've known and loved. Maybe that's up to me?

 

[JackARoe]

Question for you all that like dissociatives. Natrally I like to try anything that can affect the consciousness so when I got a vial of ketamine from a vet friend years ago I tried it IM about 15 times from 25 mgs to 150 mgs. First two expriences were profound, after that it just became a hospital drug. Coming out of it was fuzzy and unpeasant. Also at the time I used psychedelics to play guitar and thought ketamine could aid with that like acid did lol. Not so. So I lost interest and didn't finish the vial. So NO2 has been my only dissociative that I will use and like at times.

There have been posts talking about the dissociation from Ibogaine and Salvia as compared to say arylcyclohexylamines. I Love Salvia, used it for 24 years several times a year to reset myself. Plain leaf works now, as I come out of the trance I feel an afterglow for days. I rememer Vortech (RIP) talking about Salvia as a dissociative. I realize only some people like it. But is Salvia in any way relatable to the arylcyclohexylamine class of drugs in any way? The pristine clarity coming out of the Saliva trance seems much different than the foggy headed nauseous after effect of coming out of a ketamine trance. Salvia is like DMT that way. An hour later it is like nothing ever happened where as with ketamine for a day or two I would feel out of sorts.

Just curious about people that like this class of drugs and if there is a possible natural safer alternative. I have read a few people that like arylcyclohexylamines also utilizing Salvia, others not so much. I realize that Salvia and arylcyclohexylamines are different drugs with different modes of action, but I can say as far as dissociation goes there have been times after smoking Salvia that I forgot I was a human being that just smoked Salvia on a couch. Same with DMT. So I know dissociation can cross over between different classe of drugs. But Salvia is self limiting. Certainly not addictive.

I wonder if we will ever find an arylcyclohexylamine in nature. Watching Hamilton's pharmacopeia the one chemist guy says it is totally synthetic and resembles nothing in nature. But who knows, as we explore nature, the terrain, oceans, even space who knows what we will find. I can imagine a self limiting dissociative from nature that is gentle on the bladder.

 

[dopamimetic]

I've tried salvia when it was still legal in Switzerland, but also was young and naive so I jumped too high on an extract and it scared me away very much. But I remember it to have an aura of dissociation for sure. Yet in a very different way to the arylcyclohexylamines, maybe more like DXM or ibogaine (making sense, as both are kappa agonists to some degree). The ACHs - minus ket which as you say, is mostly enjoyable when having no tolerance, as it has additional narcotic effects to which tolerance apparently doesn't increase at the same rate as it does to the searched-for ones. Tiletamine must be even worse in this area, maybe MK-801 too (I've done neither of them, due to scarcity).

The deschlorinated ketamine analogues are much better recreationals imho. Much brighter, euphoric, and cuddly fluffy type of high, without scattered afterglow...

Which isomer of K did you get? Racemate or S(-)?

 

[JackARoe]

Which isomer of K did you get? Racemate or S(-)?

Back in 1990 I don't even think that the notion of R or S Isomer was in discussion. So what I had was a vial of Ketaset from the vet place I worked at. Not sure what that would be. First experience I saw clearly there is no death. I mean I saw that hundreds of times before on psychedelics but this was the wave towards death that I rode over. Pretty profound. I had a few more, but again, that was enough as further experimenting showed it did not have the same effect on music as psychedelics and the head space after was not for me. So that is just my personal opinion. I took what I got and left the rest.

I think if people can stay grounded and intelligent as say Timothy Wyllie (yes I thought he was hip ) then using can be beneficial, especially if someone can convey the experience to others. John C Lilly's The Scientist was a fascinating book. I had heard though that even John C Lilly had a capper, and probably did not use to the extent as some people use today. I think his use was contained to a time period, at least I heard that from one of those friend of friends that seemed to know. I think people assumed he used throughout his life till the end but even in the book it explained there was a stopping point.

Integration is key. I would imagine most people already have a lifetime of experience to further integrate. Digesting, integrating has become more important as I got older.

Salvia is something I visit a few times a year. It really is an ally of mine and treats me well.