psood0nym
Bluelighter
It’s a fairly sober and sunny Sunday afternoon in the apartment like most any other, but in my brightest intentions and most thought out plans I’ve something dark and wild in store.
The wish is to recreate the conditions of the plus ++++ experience I had had in the past, when I had last successfully mixed DMT and mescaline. All attempts succeeding that one—wherein I manically thought: “my sensorium is a sun-rapt field—fox fur fine and silk sheets sensual—that I’m being lovingly dragged through by a ballistic missile”—had been frustratingly lacking due to unpredictable mimosa timing and effectiveness, or involuntarily aborted in an eruption of too-soon green cactus barf. Reaching it again has consumed me spiritually.
But I have it figured it out now. I will eat far less cactus by using syrian rue (an herbal MAOI), and eat it slowly too. Then I’ll inject synthetic DMT intramuscularly, thereby avoiding the inconsistencies of DMT digestion. There’s no fucking that up.
T+0
After swallowing 3g of ground syrian rue, I begin the marathon pill eating session of 30g of dried green T. Peruvianus flesh; ~60 pills over and hour and a half. I have done more than this before and it worked out fine. I begin to feel the mescaline about an hour after swallowing the first cap of the ground up flesh. A half-hour after this—trying desperately to ignore the feeling by watching a Mr. Show DVD—I am undeniably nauseous. So much so that exhaling at any speed beyond cautiously slow causes my stomach to rhythmically spasm.
Thankfully I had thought ahead and was keeping a plastic bag by my side, because there was no way I would’ve made it to the toilet in that condition…
T+2
The result of all that work, nausea, and vomit is a mescaline buzz that I know doesn’t have nearly the vital power to provide the DMT with the necessary escape velocity to guide me to that skyward realm of endlessly accelerating beauty that the combo’s parabolic trajectory rocketed me through before. It isn’t a bad buzz, perhaps a low ++, but it isn’t enough.
I decide to inject (IM) 3mg of 2C-E—enough to prop up the mescaline launch pad without necessitating redesign to accommodate its own specs, I think. And I’m right. Within an hour I am at a solid ++, a warm and sensuous phenethylamine enclosure whose predominantly emotional architecture is, as predicted, mostly mescaline-inspired.
T+3
I dissolve 10mg of 4-AcO-DMT in juice and drink it down. I’m hoping to mimic a long lasting mimohuasca*
T+4
Within an hour of imbibing the 4-AcO-DMT, the tripartite combo is humming along nicely, though strangely still lacking in intensity. Despite taking the 4-AcO-DMT on top of syrian rue it did not feel like the addition of a mimohuasca high to the established trip, but rather the combinatory effects of it with the other two chemicals created a kind of sweet n’ mild psychedelic euphoria, entirely pleasant in one respect but falling far short of the presumptive synergistic potential of all these psychedelic Titans in another… vexing respect.
During this hour I spend my time priming my mind for the DMT dose with images of roses. Their aesthetic is one of fantastically lush and vibrant bounty. There is a mathematical elegance inherent to the most healthful forms of the species that engages both the cerebral side and the artistic heart. It was that mixture of precision and fecundity that embodied that last trip—a deific scream of evermore quickly unfurling reams of eidetic art, projected directly into my mind from the luminous visions of mad seraphic geniuses. The rose, I deem, is my hopeful vision incarnate. Now I’m ready for the
DMT. **
I knew from a past experience that 50mg of DMT intramuscularly injected would come on almost fully within 6 minutes and by itself produce a +++ level of intensity. Though I had combined mimohuasca with small doses of every psychedelic involved in this trip to good effect in the past, I had never used this specific combo before, nor had I ever used DMT intramuscularly with a MAOI. I therefore decide to start with 25mg.
T+5
I do so. I listen to a couple of songs containing especially high levels of harmony and markedly florid compositions to further tune my mind to the desired frequencies. When they’re finished eight minutes have passed. Past experiences tell me I should be peaking yet the trip is only lightly colored by DMT at this point and there are no indications that the intensity is increasing.
T+5:09
I inject the remaining 25mg. Within three minutes the DMT increases in intensity six-fold. I’m here—this place, that before the great experience this one hoped to model was my conception of heaven: a heterodox hell of endlessly accelerating beauty and creative substance so great and unrelenting I cannot will myself from it, and thus can never escape it; but in whose fugacious beholding is inspired a tremulous, soul-buckling gratitude and staggering awe. For about a minute and a half my DMT addition is a success. I am precisely where I want to be.
I open my eyes but I can hardly see a thing. Hot, histemic tears bathe my face as I fumble manically with my headphones. *** Now I want desperately to be lying down and listening to music. I need a rhythm. I finally hit play—I don’t even know what I will be listening to—and don my tear-speckled headphones before collapsing prostrate onto my mattress. As soon as I lay back a slippery gulp of hot, watery mucus slides down my throat; the flow of mucus from here on is constant.
T+~5:15
My throat is suddenly parched, doubtless a symptom of the massive water draw this pseudo-allergic reaction is causing. If there’s a cup of water nearby I’ll never find it in this condition. I must make it to the bathroom sink. I sit up in bed and stare through cascading tears into the torrent of visuals before me. But this lachrymose sight is also a feeling: one of having gone too far.
I am strongly disoriented and my head feels hot. I am the heat ripples radiating from the forehead that houses the febrile dream of a blessedly-mad mental patient. Major ego-tectonic activity being registered here… shit. My psycho-strata are shifting like alternating layers of clear hot oil and ice, creating isolated bubbles of immiscible thoughts and sensations, though all transparent to each other and growing evermore fluid.
On my way to the bathroom I need to defend myself from an ambush by my treacherous walls and open closet doors. Fuckers come at me the three-hundred-and-sixty-first degree of lateral planer rotation, which I didn’t expect. Making my defense is quite an ordeal because my hands are still four feet behind me. But I finally pull through and make it to the bathroom.
With what will be my last fully successful effort at purposeful movement for over an hour, I fill a cup with water at the bathroom sink and hastily gulp it down. I allow my shaking legs to buckle and I drop to the floor. Soon my proprioception is shred to ribbons and thrown to a riot of winds where it thrashes about violently in twisted currents. I can feel pressures and textures but cannot discern where they are in relation to any part of my body, so I must deduce the positions of my limbs from the pressures and textures they encounter and cross-reference that with my memory of the layout and material composition of my bathroom fixtures; I remain, surprisingly, detached and rational.
My limbs are so weak. A kind of strange mixture of numbness and exhaustion seems to permeate their muscles. I am about to find this feeling is a result of neither of these descriptors, but rather that my limbs’ loyalty to me is surreptitiously being relinquished to some mysterious, imperious menace.
Suddenly—teeth gritted and fists balled—I am wrenched into the fetal position by a spastic reflex. This is accompanied by a viciously energetic surge of profound disorientation and nausea. My face is soaked in tears and spattered by constant trickles and bursts of mucus from my nose and mouth. My hair and body become soaked with sweat alarmingly fast.
I will not lie in my own vomit too.
I feel out the toilet, as opening my eyes to find it is futile, and just barely raise my head over the bowl. I look down at the water, which appears to be directly below me, but the proprioceptive impression I receive from my hands is that I am actually too far away to make it into the bowl. My trembling arms are about to give out, and so I must hook my chin on the rim for support before I can vomit, trusting from the pressure on my neck that I am indeed over the bowl.
The sensation of vomiting is horrendous and unrelenting. I think the retching has been stretched to its most miserable limits, and then, in a feat of gastrointestinal contortionism, curling like the fetid petal-edges of a rotten flower, my esophageal sphincter suddenly feels as though it blows inside out. It comes with a wet pop and a grotesque, synaesthetic vision that’s rancid to the core, infected by bilious colors and violently visceral dynamism.
After approximately a minute of this convulsive, un-breathing hell I fall back to the floor and drop my head onto a slippery dollop of snot I had ejected earlier and gasp for air, my lungs slurping in fluid from my throat and reflexively sputtering out coughs in rapid-fire succession. This is could be bad. **** I know from previous experiences that, when it’s used intramuscularly, the peak of DMT only lasts 15 minutes before a noticeable decline, and I’m about due to start noticing that decline. But it doesn’t come.
Another surge throttles me and I fold inward, clenching my gut while digging my nails into my palms. Jesus, what’s happening to me? Now my right shoulder is irresistibly being brought to the side of my head, and my left arm has been stretched at full extension towards my hip, all against my will! I’ve experience quite elaborate, drug-mediated, extra-volitional body contortions or “idiomotor effects” in the past on 4-AcO-DMT and 2C-E—these effects have accompanied most of the most rapturous of my psychedelic experiences—but there they were ordered, purposeful, ecstatic, and ultimately resistible (resistible in such a way as one can resist a yawn). This experience though is of being maliciously tied in knots to satisfy a sadistic puppeteer that his power has been indelibly demonstrated. Attempts to move outside his dictates are met with increased limb numbness, disorientation, and nausea.
The surges are an ear popping, ego-concussing kind of electrochemical ramp up that turns every nerve terminal molten before finally subsiding and leaving me frozen in a state of wide-eyed shock. They’re mostly physical, at least insofar as my emotional and cerebral reaction to them remains sober, and so during all this, despite their overwhelming power, my thoughts stay coherent.
I snap up a quick, deep breath—the air is saturated with the acid-stink of vomit—and begin to hum. I hold and repeat the tone that reverberates most strongly in my chest plate. Towards the end of my breath I aspirate “shhh” in a progressively thinning staccato rhythm, over my tongue-tip and through my teeth, like a Diamondback’s fast-diminishing rattle. I need the steady vibration and distinct tactile sensations of this exercise to coil and compose myself around. I need something constant. This instinctual mantra will be with me often throughout the remainder of the experience.
I need to vomit again. This time it’s worse. ~30 seconds of convulsions are followed by another 30 of coughing on the floor after I choke on fluid again. I haven’t taken a breath. My eyes are closed yet even the darkness seems to go in and out of focus. I’m losing grip on even the most basic concept of symmetry. My mantra is silent. If I pass out now after all this exertion, continue convulsing and breath in vomit or significantly more fluid, I could really be in trouble. Worst of all this is a concern that I know from these atypical circumstances isn’t something that I can tell myself that, upon later sober reflection, I will see as just panic stricken and irrational; this isn’t just a threat to my future mental stability, but to my immediate being and mere existence. ***** Then, at the crumbling edge of consciousness, another surge hits, but it’s accompanied this time by a fiercely mortal fear that savagely tears me from the rapidly sealing envelope of unconsciousness.
With frantic grasps I claw my way over the edge of oblivion and tumble into the field of brittle ontic shards that comprise the world. I’m breathing. I regain my mantra. But now the fear lurks between breaths. I consider shoving my fingers down my throat to purge the remaining liquid in my stomach so it can’t choke me if I pass out, but I don’t. This is now a trial. It is important that I face it as such.
Upon this determined thought my body twists me over onto my stomach. My face is being forced into the floor. My teeth saw across the tile in a serrated rhythm that reverberates deep into my jaw. My arms and legs are being irresistibly stretched to their full vertical extentions.
“What the fuck is this!” I demand to know out loud in a tone that quavers between indignation and a whimper.
“Stop!”
My right hand is driven into the outer edge of the bath and cannot extend any farther. At this limitation my wrist cramps painfully and I’m flooded with images of deformed growth. The visions impart that what is happening is a kind of egoic metamorphosis inextricably bound up with the movements of my body, such that each movement is a direct and integral manifestation of the metamorphic process. Staunching the flow of these movements now will cause an aberration in the assemblage of what will be my reformed ego. I give myself a burn on my bathroom carpet and scrape my ankle on the unfinished bottom of the sink cabinet while moving my legs out of the door—the door that has to be there somewhere—so that they can be fully extended, but I do it. I have to do it.
This drug can’t possibly last any longer, though I suspect I’m already far past the point when past experiences tell me I should be down (and I’m right, this is different). But another surge is nevertheless working its way up.
This time the convulsions are harder and last even longer. When I can open my mouth to breath I immediately gag on the acrid air and expend all received relief. I crumple from the toilet to the ground, vomiting swallowed mucus on the floor next to me. I’m being held underwater. My vision begins to blur again. This is happening NOW. Questioning, analysis, any distancing from its demands is wholly impossible. There is nothing else in my mind. I am in my most desperate, most silent moment…
Will I call out to my mother; make a plea to a past love; burn my last breath screaming for help to any nearby neighbors? Will this hour of desperation culminate in a moment of revelation when an anthropomorphized interventionist god, at my tortured supplication, bestows His mercy and delivers me from this demonic tryptamine’s possession?
For reasons I don’t fully understand, and at first to my own self-estrangement, but then with briefly stuttering, lonely-but-resolute allegiance, I choose the forms of the sublime—their being, their memory, and their mere potential to exist, as abstract and impersonal as that sounds—as the hope of my deliverance.
Soon it is evident that I’ve made the right choice.
The pounding waves of distortion and caustic washes of physical misery begin slowly drawing into a whirling form. At the moment it is just a glint, the liminal edge of some terrible resplendence descried through the haze of perceptual bombardment and wavering consciousness; but the rose, apotheosized, is its manifest form.
Those earlier images, that precious 90 seconds, I can feel their phenomenal echo casting out from my memory. I can trace it back to its inviolate source within me.
I begin to do just this, and in doing so I come full circle to the rose: an exquisite crucible where these ragged tendrils of my psyche can be poured and alloyed, recast with grafts from its supple textures, and re-braided in the whirling wake of its spiraling convolutions.
For a moment I revel in absolution, but am soon disturbed by a strange force hurdling up from below me.
I am struck with great urgency that this, this immanent fusion of psychology and form, this ego-entrainment with the sublime, is far too important to be met passively. With pain and bitter effort, working against the spastic compulsions of the DMT, I roll flat onto my back. Shakily I bend my arms at right angles to the floor, ball my fists, and focus on these feelings of balance and symmetry I’ve so difficultly wrought. It is painful but it is good. It is the feeling of interjecting marshaled will into a wild, vicious conflict, of forming the beginnings of a promising trialogue with my seditious body and the scattered ranks of my subconscious mind. The resulting mixture of beauty and pain, reined by deft volition, evokes sensuously symbolic images of silk spooling around broken glass, and shapes into mind graceful forms hewn of battered iron.
I reflect on why I choose sublimity as my salvation over a personal god or interpersonal love. It might have something to do with a recent re-scan of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, where he speaks of the sublime as free and transcendent, but I think it has much more to do with self-determination. Because it does not matter to me that Kant’s theories have since fallen into some disrepute. What matters to me is that what is most important to me, revealed by mortal fear as honest and at the core of my being, is a self-formed ideal, one that I choose to believe—its ontological status being secondary—to be free and transcendent, to be unassailable, to be non-contingent. And most crucially, most centrally, that I have it in my ability to choose such an aspect of myself consciously and with a total permeation of my being. It is evidence against self-doubt, evidence that these thoughts to me are ultimately not mere self-delusions and rationalizations that hide the fearful truth that environmental machinations and my own self-interested power schemes subconsciously and fully define me (thoughts that other powerful but less weighty psychedelic experiences have taunted me with in the past). It confirms that my spiritual proclamations, when their content is made phenomenologically transparent, are not devotionally reducible to lip service, but are inextricable from what I am.
My recent experiences in coming to understand an active, intelligent, and quasi-autonomous subconscious aspect of myself through psychedelics also makes me wonder to what degree this aspect might be implicated in this experience. The way this experience has unfolded is a little too tight—and punctuated by too many strange and idiosyncratic happenings; things seem, in ways, plotted to fall together. I think not that this is mere grasping for sense in the wake of a senseless trauma, but that perhaps I was never in real danger and the central proceedings of the trip unfolded as they did though a purposeful subconscious mediation.
It’s as though that subconscious self, with understanding, has seized this opportunity to temper my conscious mind in mortal fear, and through this fundamental life experience it brings to full awareness a deeper order within myself, and thus expands the scope of my self-awareness. It’s happened to erase self-doubt and to bring my conscious self more fully in league with my deepest passions. This process serves to bring about a self-determined spiritual evolution, an evolution effectively expedited through the unique properties of psychedelic drugs. If this sort of radically accelerated, subconsciously mediated spiritual evolution really occurs, it just has.
By the end of these reflections the DMT has faded in intensity enough for me to walk. Visuals are still swirling around my alarm clock as I verify that it has been over one-and-a-half hours since I injected the DMT (it didn’t just seem longer). When I drink ayahuasca—as opposed to dehydrating and encapsulating it—the trip will usually last about 50 minutes, so for intramuscularly injected DMT to last this long, with or without an MAOI, is exceptional. It’s another half hour before the DMT fades into relative insignificance, bringing the total time of its influence to over two hours. The trip from the other drugs has been extremely blunted by its comparative timidity to the DMT and by my own exhaustion. Moreover I am simply reluctant to endure them. I go into a dreamless sleep, and when I wake up a couple of hours later I feel only a slight afterglow.
Though I am excited by the potential implications of this experience my life has not greatly changed. I am grateful for the long-needed humbling, but long ago I reached the essential limits of what the perspectives afforded to me by psychedelics could do to correct my overt flaws and improve my life “out in the world”. The majority of my best experiences with them have nevertheless, and counter intuitively, occurred after this realization. The value of these latter trips is only made apparent to me deep in thought, and in certain charged moments that vibrate with impossible vigor and affirmation, quiet quakes whose bottomless faults I know now to open through my core. These most elevated moments require no justification; they are free and transcendent, and I choose them.
* The problem with intramuscular DMT is that it’s so damned short; for me it will last only 40 minutes start to finish, or so I figure from past experiences absent syrian rue that is. In the experience I was modeling this one after I had used a boiled-down-to-powder-and-encapsulated mimosa extract. The result was two and a half hours of DMT powered bliss. I wanted to emulate that. A past experience with syrian rue and 4-AcO-DMT had been remarkably similar to the effects of the just mentioned mimohuasca form (which for me is slower and smoother in effect than its liquid form), and so that is why I used it here.
**I am fully aware of the perceived futility (a justified perception) of trying to recreate a ++++ experience by deferring to exacting mimetic practices; nevertheless, three of my six ++++ experiences in a decade of psychedelics use have occurred in the past 10 months, and this recent “rapture-proneness” makes the idea that the state can be significantly affected in me through these means seem more probable.
***That this is a histamine reaction is unknown, but I simply don’t know what else would mediate a reaction like this.
****Even despite the numerous psychedelic elements in play during the trip I believe the overwhelming reaction I had was due almost entirely to the syrian rue and intramuscularly injected DMT. The only drug in the mix I have not combined mimohuasca with is 4-AcO-DMT, though I have used it with mushrooms, which are of course closely related chemically. In fact I’ve even combined mimohuasca (at a +++ level, the same level 50mg DMT (IM) without an MAOI takes me to) with Peruvian Torch and 2C-E in the past, as well as these latter two with 4-AcO-DMT, all without troubles, giving me confidence it the relative safety of their combination here. More strange still is the delayed reaction of the DMT. I had used 50mg doses of DMT (IM) alone twice prior to this excursion and both times I was peaked in a lucid and manageable trip in less than 6 minutes, and COMPLETELY down by the 40-minute mark. Yet at 8 minutes into this trip I barely even felt the first 25-milligram make-sure-the-MAOI-doesn’t-intensify-it-that-much dose. Also, my impression was that MAO levels in the blood were not so concentrated that their inhibition would cause a profound increase in the intensity and duration of an IM dose; my hardly affected experiences with IM DPT—which is quite susceptible to an MAOI orally—in conjunction with syrian rue certainly support this impression. It’s abundantly clear now that even though I think I know my body’s reactions to drugs based on numerous past experiences, and that there is reason to believe most all of the drugs involved, at the small dosages taken are fairly safe, when dealing with powerful psychedelics no amount of precaution and past experience can truly guarantee safe passage.
*****I’m fairly certain that the DMT isn’t doing any metabolic damage here directly, but I never expected and never read of such violent or bizarre physical symptoms. Death or lasting harm affected by lack of oxygen from choking while unconscious (or from some fatal idiosyncratic or unforeseen contraindicative reaction) didn’t, and doesn’t seem out of the question under these conditions.
The wish is to recreate the conditions of the plus ++++ experience I had had in the past, when I had last successfully mixed DMT and mescaline. All attempts succeeding that one—wherein I manically thought: “my sensorium is a sun-rapt field—fox fur fine and silk sheets sensual—that I’m being lovingly dragged through by a ballistic missile”—had been frustratingly lacking due to unpredictable mimosa timing and effectiveness, or involuntarily aborted in an eruption of too-soon green cactus barf. Reaching it again has consumed me spiritually.
But I have it figured it out now. I will eat far less cactus by using syrian rue (an herbal MAOI), and eat it slowly too. Then I’ll inject synthetic DMT intramuscularly, thereby avoiding the inconsistencies of DMT digestion. There’s no fucking that up.
T+0
After swallowing 3g of ground syrian rue, I begin the marathon pill eating session of 30g of dried green T. Peruvianus flesh; ~60 pills over and hour and a half. I have done more than this before and it worked out fine. I begin to feel the mescaline about an hour after swallowing the first cap of the ground up flesh. A half-hour after this—trying desperately to ignore the feeling by watching a Mr. Show DVD—I am undeniably nauseous. So much so that exhaling at any speed beyond cautiously slow causes my stomach to rhythmically spasm.
Thankfully I had thought ahead and was keeping a plastic bag by my side, because there was no way I would’ve made it to the toilet in that condition…
T+2
The result of all that work, nausea, and vomit is a mescaline buzz that I know doesn’t have nearly the vital power to provide the DMT with the necessary escape velocity to guide me to that skyward realm of endlessly accelerating beauty that the combo’s parabolic trajectory rocketed me through before. It isn’t a bad buzz, perhaps a low ++, but it isn’t enough.
I decide to inject (IM) 3mg of 2C-E—enough to prop up the mescaline launch pad without necessitating redesign to accommodate its own specs, I think. And I’m right. Within an hour I am at a solid ++, a warm and sensuous phenethylamine enclosure whose predominantly emotional architecture is, as predicted, mostly mescaline-inspired.
T+3
I dissolve 10mg of 4-AcO-DMT in juice and drink it down. I’m hoping to mimic a long lasting mimohuasca*
T+4
Within an hour of imbibing the 4-AcO-DMT, the tripartite combo is humming along nicely, though strangely still lacking in intensity. Despite taking the 4-AcO-DMT on top of syrian rue it did not feel like the addition of a mimohuasca high to the established trip, but rather the combinatory effects of it with the other two chemicals created a kind of sweet n’ mild psychedelic euphoria, entirely pleasant in one respect but falling far short of the presumptive synergistic potential of all these psychedelic Titans in another… vexing respect.
During this hour I spend my time priming my mind for the DMT dose with images of roses. Their aesthetic is one of fantastically lush and vibrant bounty. There is a mathematical elegance inherent to the most healthful forms of the species that engages both the cerebral side and the artistic heart. It was that mixture of precision and fecundity that embodied that last trip—a deific scream of evermore quickly unfurling reams of eidetic art, projected directly into my mind from the luminous visions of mad seraphic geniuses. The rose, I deem, is my hopeful vision incarnate. Now I’m ready for the
DMT. **
I knew from a past experience that 50mg of DMT intramuscularly injected would come on almost fully within 6 minutes and by itself produce a +++ level of intensity. Though I had combined mimohuasca with small doses of every psychedelic involved in this trip to good effect in the past, I had never used this specific combo before, nor had I ever used DMT intramuscularly with a MAOI. I therefore decide to start with 25mg.
T+5
I do so. I listen to a couple of songs containing especially high levels of harmony and markedly florid compositions to further tune my mind to the desired frequencies. When they’re finished eight minutes have passed. Past experiences tell me I should be peaking yet the trip is only lightly colored by DMT at this point and there are no indications that the intensity is increasing.
T+5:09
I inject the remaining 25mg. Within three minutes the DMT increases in intensity six-fold. I’m here—this place, that before the great experience this one hoped to model was my conception of heaven: a heterodox hell of endlessly accelerating beauty and creative substance so great and unrelenting I cannot will myself from it, and thus can never escape it; but in whose fugacious beholding is inspired a tremulous, soul-buckling gratitude and staggering awe. For about a minute and a half my DMT addition is a success. I am precisely where I want to be.
I open my eyes but I can hardly see a thing. Hot, histemic tears bathe my face as I fumble manically with my headphones. *** Now I want desperately to be lying down and listening to music. I need a rhythm. I finally hit play—I don’t even know what I will be listening to—and don my tear-speckled headphones before collapsing prostrate onto my mattress. As soon as I lay back a slippery gulp of hot, watery mucus slides down my throat; the flow of mucus from here on is constant.
T+~5:15
My throat is suddenly parched, doubtless a symptom of the massive water draw this pseudo-allergic reaction is causing. If there’s a cup of water nearby I’ll never find it in this condition. I must make it to the bathroom sink. I sit up in bed and stare through cascading tears into the torrent of visuals before me. But this lachrymose sight is also a feeling: one of having gone too far.
I am strongly disoriented and my head feels hot. I am the heat ripples radiating from the forehead that houses the febrile dream of a blessedly-mad mental patient. Major ego-tectonic activity being registered here… shit. My psycho-strata are shifting like alternating layers of clear hot oil and ice, creating isolated bubbles of immiscible thoughts and sensations, though all transparent to each other and growing evermore fluid.
On my way to the bathroom I need to defend myself from an ambush by my treacherous walls and open closet doors. Fuckers come at me the three-hundred-and-sixty-first degree of lateral planer rotation, which I didn’t expect. Making my defense is quite an ordeal because my hands are still four feet behind me. But I finally pull through and make it to the bathroom.
With what will be my last fully successful effort at purposeful movement for over an hour, I fill a cup with water at the bathroom sink and hastily gulp it down. I allow my shaking legs to buckle and I drop to the floor. Soon my proprioception is shred to ribbons and thrown to a riot of winds where it thrashes about violently in twisted currents. I can feel pressures and textures but cannot discern where they are in relation to any part of my body, so I must deduce the positions of my limbs from the pressures and textures they encounter and cross-reference that with my memory of the layout and material composition of my bathroom fixtures; I remain, surprisingly, detached and rational.
My limbs are so weak. A kind of strange mixture of numbness and exhaustion seems to permeate their muscles. I am about to find this feeling is a result of neither of these descriptors, but rather that my limbs’ loyalty to me is surreptitiously being relinquished to some mysterious, imperious menace.
Suddenly—teeth gritted and fists balled—I am wrenched into the fetal position by a spastic reflex. This is accompanied by a viciously energetic surge of profound disorientation and nausea. My face is soaked in tears and spattered by constant trickles and bursts of mucus from my nose and mouth. My hair and body become soaked with sweat alarmingly fast.
I will not lie in my own vomit too.
I feel out the toilet, as opening my eyes to find it is futile, and just barely raise my head over the bowl. I look down at the water, which appears to be directly below me, but the proprioceptive impression I receive from my hands is that I am actually too far away to make it into the bowl. My trembling arms are about to give out, and so I must hook my chin on the rim for support before I can vomit, trusting from the pressure on my neck that I am indeed over the bowl.
The sensation of vomiting is horrendous and unrelenting. I think the retching has been stretched to its most miserable limits, and then, in a feat of gastrointestinal contortionism, curling like the fetid petal-edges of a rotten flower, my esophageal sphincter suddenly feels as though it blows inside out. It comes with a wet pop and a grotesque, synaesthetic vision that’s rancid to the core, infected by bilious colors and violently visceral dynamism.
After approximately a minute of this convulsive, un-breathing hell I fall back to the floor and drop my head onto a slippery dollop of snot I had ejected earlier and gasp for air, my lungs slurping in fluid from my throat and reflexively sputtering out coughs in rapid-fire succession. This is could be bad. **** I know from previous experiences that, when it’s used intramuscularly, the peak of DMT only lasts 15 minutes before a noticeable decline, and I’m about due to start noticing that decline. But it doesn’t come.
Another surge throttles me and I fold inward, clenching my gut while digging my nails into my palms. Jesus, what’s happening to me? Now my right shoulder is irresistibly being brought to the side of my head, and my left arm has been stretched at full extension towards my hip, all against my will! I’ve experience quite elaborate, drug-mediated, extra-volitional body contortions or “idiomotor effects” in the past on 4-AcO-DMT and 2C-E—these effects have accompanied most of the most rapturous of my psychedelic experiences—but there they were ordered, purposeful, ecstatic, and ultimately resistible (resistible in such a way as one can resist a yawn). This experience though is of being maliciously tied in knots to satisfy a sadistic puppeteer that his power has been indelibly demonstrated. Attempts to move outside his dictates are met with increased limb numbness, disorientation, and nausea.
The surges are an ear popping, ego-concussing kind of electrochemical ramp up that turns every nerve terminal molten before finally subsiding and leaving me frozen in a state of wide-eyed shock. They’re mostly physical, at least insofar as my emotional and cerebral reaction to them remains sober, and so during all this, despite their overwhelming power, my thoughts stay coherent.
I snap up a quick, deep breath—the air is saturated with the acid-stink of vomit—and begin to hum. I hold and repeat the tone that reverberates most strongly in my chest plate. Towards the end of my breath I aspirate “shhh” in a progressively thinning staccato rhythm, over my tongue-tip and through my teeth, like a Diamondback’s fast-diminishing rattle. I need the steady vibration and distinct tactile sensations of this exercise to coil and compose myself around. I need something constant. This instinctual mantra will be with me often throughout the remainder of the experience.
I need to vomit again. This time it’s worse. ~30 seconds of convulsions are followed by another 30 of coughing on the floor after I choke on fluid again. I haven’t taken a breath. My eyes are closed yet even the darkness seems to go in and out of focus. I’m losing grip on even the most basic concept of symmetry. My mantra is silent. If I pass out now after all this exertion, continue convulsing and breath in vomit or significantly more fluid, I could really be in trouble. Worst of all this is a concern that I know from these atypical circumstances isn’t something that I can tell myself that, upon later sober reflection, I will see as just panic stricken and irrational; this isn’t just a threat to my future mental stability, but to my immediate being and mere existence. ***** Then, at the crumbling edge of consciousness, another surge hits, but it’s accompanied this time by a fiercely mortal fear that savagely tears me from the rapidly sealing envelope of unconsciousness.
With frantic grasps I claw my way over the edge of oblivion and tumble into the field of brittle ontic shards that comprise the world. I’m breathing. I regain my mantra. But now the fear lurks between breaths. I consider shoving my fingers down my throat to purge the remaining liquid in my stomach so it can’t choke me if I pass out, but I don’t. This is now a trial. It is important that I face it as such.
Upon this determined thought my body twists me over onto my stomach. My face is being forced into the floor. My teeth saw across the tile in a serrated rhythm that reverberates deep into my jaw. My arms and legs are being irresistibly stretched to their full vertical extentions.
“What the fuck is this!” I demand to know out loud in a tone that quavers between indignation and a whimper.
“Stop!”
My right hand is driven into the outer edge of the bath and cannot extend any farther. At this limitation my wrist cramps painfully and I’m flooded with images of deformed growth. The visions impart that what is happening is a kind of egoic metamorphosis inextricably bound up with the movements of my body, such that each movement is a direct and integral manifestation of the metamorphic process. Staunching the flow of these movements now will cause an aberration in the assemblage of what will be my reformed ego. I give myself a burn on my bathroom carpet and scrape my ankle on the unfinished bottom of the sink cabinet while moving my legs out of the door—the door that has to be there somewhere—so that they can be fully extended, but I do it. I have to do it.
This drug can’t possibly last any longer, though I suspect I’m already far past the point when past experiences tell me I should be down (and I’m right, this is different). But another surge is nevertheless working its way up.
This time the convulsions are harder and last even longer. When I can open my mouth to breath I immediately gag on the acrid air and expend all received relief. I crumple from the toilet to the ground, vomiting swallowed mucus on the floor next to me. I’m being held underwater. My vision begins to blur again. This is happening NOW. Questioning, analysis, any distancing from its demands is wholly impossible. There is nothing else in my mind. I am in my most desperate, most silent moment…
Will I call out to my mother; make a plea to a past love; burn my last breath screaming for help to any nearby neighbors? Will this hour of desperation culminate in a moment of revelation when an anthropomorphized interventionist god, at my tortured supplication, bestows His mercy and delivers me from this demonic tryptamine’s possession?
For reasons I don’t fully understand, and at first to my own self-estrangement, but then with briefly stuttering, lonely-but-resolute allegiance, I choose the forms of the sublime—their being, their memory, and their mere potential to exist, as abstract and impersonal as that sounds—as the hope of my deliverance.
Soon it is evident that I’ve made the right choice.
The pounding waves of distortion and caustic washes of physical misery begin slowly drawing into a whirling form. At the moment it is just a glint, the liminal edge of some terrible resplendence descried through the haze of perceptual bombardment and wavering consciousness; but the rose, apotheosized, is its manifest form.
Those earlier images, that precious 90 seconds, I can feel their phenomenal echo casting out from my memory. I can trace it back to its inviolate source within me.
I begin to do just this, and in doing so I come full circle to the rose: an exquisite crucible where these ragged tendrils of my psyche can be poured and alloyed, recast with grafts from its supple textures, and re-braided in the whirling wake of its spiraling convolutions.
For a moment I revel in absolution, but am soon disturbed by a strange force hurdling up from below me.
I am struck with great urgency that this, this immanent fusion of psychology and form, this ego-entrainment with the sublime, is far too important to be met passively. With pain and bitter effort, working against the spastic compulsions of the DMT, I roll flat onto my back. Shakily I bend my arms at right angles to the floor, ball my fists, and focus on these feelings of balance and symmetry I’ve so difficultly wrought. It is painful but it is good. It is the feeling of interjecting marshaled will into a wild, vicious conflict, of forming the beginnings of a promising trialogue with my seditious body and the scattered ranks of my subconscious mind. The resulting mixture of beauty and pain, reined by deft volition, evokes sensuously symbolic images of silk spooling around broken glass, and shapes into mind graceful forms hewn of battered iron.
I reflect on why I choose sublimity as my salvation over a personal god or interpersonal love. It might have something to do with a recent re-scan of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, where he speaks of the sublime as free and transcendent, but I think it has much more to do with self-determination. Because it does not matter to me that Kant’s theories have since fallen into some disrepute. What matters to me is that what is most important to me, revealed by mortal fear as honest and at the core of my being, is a self-formed ideal, one that I choose to believe—its ontological status being secondary—to be free and transcendent, to be unassailable, to be non-contingent. And most crucially, most centrally, that I have it in my ability to choose such an aspect of myself consciously and with a total permeation of my being. It is evidence against self-doubt, evidence that these thoughts to me are ultimately not mere self-delusions and rationalizations that hide the fearful truth that environmental machinations and my own self-interested power schemes subconsciously and fully define me (thoughts that other powerful but less weighty psychedelic experiences have taunted me with in the past). It confirms that my spiritual proclamations, when their content is made phenomenologically transparent, are not devotionally reducible to lip service, but are inextricable from what I am.
My recent experiences in coming to understand an active, intelligent, and quasi-autonomous subconscious aspect of myself through psychedelics also makes me wonder to what degree this aspect might be implicated in this experience. The way this experience has unfolded is a little too tight—and punctuated by too many strange and idiosyncratic happenings; things seem, in ways, plotted to fall together. I think not that this is mere grasping for sense in the wake of a senseless trauma, but that perhaps I was never in real danger and the central proceedings of the trip unfolded as they did though a purposeful subconscious mediation.
It’s as though that subconscious self, with understanding, has seized this opportunity to temper my conscious mind in mortal fear, and through this fundamental life experience it brings to full awareness a deeper order within myself, and thus expands the scope of my self-awareness. It’s happened to erase self-doubt and to bring my conscious self more fully in league with my deepest passions. This process serves to bring about a self-determined spiritual evolution, an evolution effectively expedited through the unique properties of psychedelic drugs. If this sort of radically accelerated, subconsciously mediated spiritual evolution really occurs, it just has.
By the end of these reflections the DMT has faded in intensity enough for me to walk. Visuals are still swirling around my alarm clock as I verify that it has been over one-and-a-half hours since I injected the DMT (it didn’t just seem longer). When I drink ayahuasca—as opposed to dehydrating and encapsulating it—the trip will usually last about 50 minutes, so for intramuscularly injected DMT to last this long, with or without an MAOI, is exceptional. It’s another half hour before the DMT fades into relative insignificance, bringing the total time of its influence to over two hours. The trip from the other drugs has been extremely blunted by its comparative timidity to the DMT and by my own exhaustion. Moreover I am simply reluctant to endure them. I go into a dreamless sleep, and when I wake up a couple of hours later I feel only a slight afterglow.
Though I am excited by the potential implications of this experience my life has not greatly changed. I am grateful for the long-needed humbling, but long ago I reached the essential limits of what the perspectives afforded to me by psychedelics could do to correct my overt flaws and improve my life “out in the world”. The majority of my best experiences with them have nevertheless, and counter intuitively, occurred after this realization. The value of these latter trips is only made apparent to me deep in thought, and in certain charged moments that vibrate with impossible vigor and affirmation, quiet quakes whose bottomless faults I know now to open through my core. These most elevated moments require no justification; they are free and transcendent, and I choose them.
* The problem with intramuscular DMT is that it’s so damned short; for me it will last only 40 minutes start to finish, or so I figure from past experiences absent syrian rue that is. In the experience I was modeling this one after I had used a boiled-down-to-powder-and-encapsulated mimosa extract. The result was two and a half hours of DMT powered bliss. I wanted to emulate that. A past experience with syrian rue and 4-AcO-DMT had been remarkably similar to the effects of the just mentioned mimohuasca form (which for me is slower and smoother in effect than its liquid form), and so that is why I used it here.
**I am fully aware of the perceived futility (a justified perception) of trying to recreate a ++++ experience by deferring to exacting mimetic practices; nevertheless, three of my six ++++ experiences in a decade of psychedelics use have occurred in the past 10 months, and this recent “rapture-proneness” makes the idea that the state can be significantly affected in me through these means seem more probable.
***That this is a histamine reaction is unknown, but I simply don’t know what else would mediate a reaction like this.
****Even despite the numerous psychedelic elements in play during the trip I believe the overwhelming reaction I had was due almost entirely to the syrian rue and intramuscularly injected DMT. The only drug in the mix I have not combined mimohuasca with is 4-AcO-DMT, though I have used it with mushrooms, which are of course closely related chemically. In fact I’ve even combined mimohuasca (at a +++ level, the same level 50mg DMT (IM) without an MAOI takes me to) with Peruvian Torch and 2C-E in the past, as well as these latter two with 4-AcO-DMT, all without troubles, giving me confidence it the relative safety of their combination here. More strange still is the delayed reaction of the DMT. I had used 50mg doses of DMT (IM) alone twice prior to this excursion and both times I was peaked in a lucid and manageable trip in less than 6 minutes, and COMPLETELY down by the 40-minute mark. Yet at 8 minutes into this trip I barely even felt the first 25-milligram make-sure-the-MAOI-doesn’t-intensify-it-that-much dose. Also, my impression was that MAO levels in the blood were not so concentrated that their inhibition would cause a profound increase in the intensity and duration of an IM dose; my hardly affected experiences with IM DPT—which is quite susceptible to an MAOI orally—in conjunction with syrian rue certainly support this impression. It’s abundantly clear now that even though I think I know my body’s reactions to drugs based on numerous past experiences, and that there is reason to believe most all of the drugs involved, at the small dosages taken are fairly safe, when dealing with powerful psychedelics no amount of precaution and past experience can truly guarantee safe passage.
*****I’m fairly certain that the DMT isn’t doing any metabolic damage here directly, but I never expected and never read of such violent or bizarre physical symptoms. Death or lasting harm affected by lack of oxygen from choking while unconscious (or from some fatal idiosyncratic or unforeseen contraindicative reaction) didn’t, and doesn’t seem out of the question under these conditions.
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![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
