Vastness
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Mar 10, 2006
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Ketamine is a substance that for better or worse has had a place of some prominence in my life for some time now - it hasn’t been the source of my most profound drug experiences, it’s not the most reliably enjoyable substance, it’s not the most social drug, it’s not even the safest drug - something which is becoming more and more clear recently compared to when I started doing it - but it might still be one of the most interesting substances I’ve ever done. I hope in writing this that I can convey some of my fascination with this substance, and some of the otherworldly magic as best I can through this medium - I know many people have shared experiences of this “magic”, and so hopefully some can identify.
When I started writing this document about a year ago, my introductory paragraph was as follows:
Needless to say, perhaps, I did not make that my last bag ever - I honestly can’t remember now if I did even achieve a 6 month hiatus - I believe I did make it a few months at least, even though during this time I experimented with other dissociatives (2-OxO-PCM, 2F-DCK, Ephenidine) eventually concluding that none of them really held a candle to good old ketamine. 2-OxO-PCM / DCK came pretty close - in fact probably the closest - but this gave me a bladder scare which really put me off it, and the long, trailing comedown and day-after unsteadiness was not something I enjoyed. If it hadn’t been for these effects I would actually say 2-OxO-PCM was superior to ketamine, essentially the same “Hole Space”, but a longer duration and more potent.
Ketamine as I have said, and do say often, is a very interesting and in some ways a very beautiful drug to me - but, unfortunately, one that I have come to believe is not nearly as profound as it pretends to be. It’s seductive depths, in my experience, are ultimately quite devoid of meaning, and the more I’ve used the more I find that the inscrutable, alien realms found within Hole Space are just empty mazes, an unsolvable puzzle with no cosmic treasure to be found at the center, indeed, probably no center at all.
However the thing that I enjoy the most about Ketamine, unlike any other substance I’ve done, is that it has the capacity to truly transport you to somewhere else - not just an altered version of the place you were before dosing (although it has this ability as well), but somewhere different entirely.
I first used Ketamine in 2006 at a festival - I used a fairly low dose compared to what I would use now, and split a very small bag with 3 friends. I remember at this stage the effects were very much external, perceptual effects on the world - but although there were no obvious visual alterations, things did look different. I was no doubt experiencing dissociation but did not have the experience or understanding to recognise it for what it was, and being a fairly anxious and introverted teenager I experienced the dissociation as loss of social inhibitions, and an additional, fun, floaty feeling on top of the few beers that I had no doubt had as well.
A distinct memory I have during this trip is that I was standing inside our fairly large tent with my friends, it was night time and raining outside, and one of my friends suddenly said, hey, we’re on a train! And suddenly we could all see what he meant, the inside of the tent had some ropes or something hanging from the roof and we all held onto these and went along with the illusion, easily feeling the sensation of movement, and the noise of rain outside transforming into the noise of an engine - the outside world beyond what we could see easily disappeared from our consideration, even if only temporarily.
As far as I can recall, I only did a single dose this time - I estimate the dosage to be 50mg or less - I may have done it a few more times that night but if I did the dosage was low enough and the experiences unremarkable enough - or lost in the haze of other substances, namely alcohol and cannabis - that I do not recall.
After this I probably did not do K again for a couple of months more. When I came back to it it was during a period that I was drinking heavily, and therefore I used K for its anxiolytic effects and removal of social inhibitions, at parties or out drinking. However I was irresponsible with my usage, constantly dosing more to chase the disinhibiting effects - and given that at this time in my life I was still battling a lot of social anxieties, although slightly older, I could never quite disinhibit myself enough - and several times ended up accidentally K-holing in inappropriate places, a few times being quite literally carried home by my long suffering flatmate who did not do any drugs, but only drank (it goes without saying I was very lucky to have such a friend of course, and I am very grateful for it, although at the time I’m not proud to say I didn’t always appreciate this as I should have).
My memory of K during this time is purely as a “party drug”, a potentiator of the sloppiness and intoxication induced by alcohol - I have practically no memory of ever experiencing any psychedelic effects, in fact I have very little memory at all of a lot of this period of my life, no doubt mostly due to alcohol - but I do have one bizarre half dream of moving through crowds of cardboard cut-out people, like I was a human block in some bizarre game of tetris - which I believe now may have been an experience of coming back to semi-consciousness while being half carried, half dragged through a crowd of people by my flatmate in the major city which we lived at the time.
These messy and irresponsible times were while I was at university, and although I did not use K for the psychedelic effects, or seek them out, as someone with a lifelong interest in drugs, particularly psychedelics I was aware of the effects that ketamine could have, used in a different setting, and in a different way. I will note briefly that I do not really consider ketamine, or any dissociative, for the most part, to be a “true” psychedelic now - but at the time I did not have enough knowledge or experience to appreciate the distinction, and of course there is some overlap between the dissociative and psychedelic headspace, although how much overlap is very much up for debate.
In any case, one time that I made a point of saving some ketamine when I went home for the summer - and cut out 2 fat lines at night, in my room at my parent’s house, and then laid down on my bed in silence and darkness, with the intention to hole for the first time. In actual fact it was no doubt not the first time, but it would be my first conscious hole, that did not happen accidentally and did not result in total memory loss from concomitant alcohol use.
This probably was and remains my most lucid and moving K-hole to date - I remember being totally in awe and blown away by the lucidity of the experience, which involved not only being transported to different places, but remaining mentally quite lucid throughout, and at points interaction with and communication with what I perceived to be entities of some kind.
It’s hard for me now to remember everything chronologically, but will try to describe the hole as best I can, which is basically split into various scenes which would spontaneously shift and dissolve.
The hole began, as so many would afterwards, with a feeling of acceleration and movement despite the fact that I was lying down - as well as a sound, characteristic of a rushing, electronic buzz - at the time, the noise did not stand out to me, the physical sensations were far more prominent. But, for whatever reason, in future holes this background buzz has become a more and more noticeable and familiar indication that I am on the way to somewhere else.
Suddenly I was moving, disembodied, through crowds of people in a rainy city, and I remember wondering can they see me? Or can I just see them? Presumably, they could not see me, or if they could they did not react, as I glided like a ghost through thick crowds of fairly uncheerful faces, umbrellas, and driving rain.
Then - I was in some kind of wooden ferris wheel which was in fact some kind of otherworldly pub, sitting at a wooden table in one of the large carriages on the wheel as it rotated, with several other large figures whose exact features of nature I cannot remember, but I’m pretty sure they were all large, burly looking, and wearing large coats or robes of brown and grey. These characters were drinking and joking with each other while looking at me and talking about me, although I did not know what they were saying. I did not feel in any danger however and did not believe these entities to mean me any harm. I was not sure what was happening so eventually I asked one of them “what should I do now?” and they answered amusedly, but kindly, “You need to find that out for yourself.”.... The scene then shifted.
At one point, coming back to awareness, I opened my eyes and found myself to be on a hospital bed in a large darkened hospital with many other beds lined up next to mine, and nurses wandering around the room with red torches… one of them seemed to notice me and shone the torch directly at me, and the scene shifted… I realised later that the red light had probably been the LED on a digital clock next to me, as I had come partially back to consciousness, opened my eyes, but could not yet discern reality. Beyond a certain dose I find that on ketamine I cannot properly control the movement of my eyes, if I am still trying to focus on something I will get double vision - no doubt this contributes to some of the visual distortions of high but sub-hole dosages - but at the time of this trip, I had no understanding of this effect.
I’m sure there were a few other of these experiences in this disparate voyage but these are the ones that stick in my mind. I remember afterwards being absolutely in awe for weeks and when telling friends I would almost get a little choked up, such was the power of the experience - although I cannot put my finger exactly on any particular aspect that caused this feeling, I think it was just the whole experience of having travelled through different realities - and not only that, but the persistent feeling that these realms had some kind of objective reality themselves. This, unfortunately, also remains the only hole in which I have had any sort of entity contact, or, at least entities that I could communicate with in some fashion.
After this period which spanned until about 2008, I do not believe I did any K again for another 5 years or so. During the above period I would estimate I did only 10g total at most over roughly a 2 year period.
Five years later in 2013 I was introduced to Ketamine for a second time by my girlfriend at the time, who I will call Z, and also introduced to a different way of doing it - not as a social drug or as an occasional, rare voyage, but as a drug to binge on over an evening, day, weekend or longer, taking multiple huge, K-hole inducing doses, with the explicit purpose of dissociating continuously from reality, and as completely as possible.
At first (at least, this is the lie that I told myself) we only used Ketamine to come down from cocaine binges, but the Ketamine itself quickly became the focal point of our weekends, the cocaine being just the introductory act, a nice sideshow, if it was around. I only ever insufflated, generally only in the same small room of my girlfriend’s university accommodation, and I have no doubt that to an outside observer our dissociated escapades would have looked quite degenerate, dull even, 2 people dosing to incapacitation, past the point of being able to communicate, travelling together on quite separate, externally silent journeys - occasionally syncing up with our returns to some kind of objective reality, briefly reminiscing through a dissociated haze, before dosing again, plunging back down the rabbit hole.
Given that I am writing this retrospectively, and about multiple journeys, the details of many, unavoidably, have been lost in the haze, I won’t be able to recount any one trip from start to finish, but I will just try to highlight significant moments that I remember most.
I believe my first introduction to this way of doing K, my second “conscious hole” in fact, I experienced again the feeling of being a disembodied spirit - this time soaring over landscapes, towering cliffs, before coming back to consciousness again with a sense of awe and wonder at what I had experienced and where I had been. Unfortunately this sense of awe and wonder has faded, in fact it is entirely gone from my more recent experiences, which is interesting to recall as I write this now.
I had many very interesting experiences just teetering on the edge of the hole also - almost totally dissociated but still quite aware of my body and conscious. One experience in particular stands out - I was on a rollercoaster carriage, moving quickly through a vast jungle. I had no idea how I had got there. Suddenly I saw another carriage in the distance - it was a mutual friend of Z and I who was also in the room we were in at the time. The carriages stopped next to each other and I asked - “where are we?” and she informed me we were in Z’s flat. I wondered at this in amazement before the rollercoaster started moving again and I was absolutely gone again.
At one point I got up from the floor I was sat down on, and was suddenly unable to understand how gravity worked. I ended up leaning at a weird angle on the wall - asking “which way is down?” - throughout these despite the major discoordination I was never really concerned - just serene and content.
Multiple other trips followed. The room and the windows turned into a dystopian cityscape with impossible metal structures and shapes moving through the air. The room was full of phantoms, phantom objects that made even walking 2 feet from one chair to another impossible. I would often snort huge lines, stand up, and unexpectedly hole where I was standing, and end up forgetting or feeling it was just best not to try to move while I could not interpret the reality around me.
I imagined the dimmed lights morphing into some bizarro club, and hearing Z saying my name. I couldn’t figure out where she was saying it from so I said "wait - I’m going to call you", and got my phone out - I either could not remember my unlock code, or just not understand the interface - and eventually gave up. Shortly after this the room materialised again around me (Z was sitting right in front of me on the bed, and yet I could not see her - she was pretty distressed by this, and for some reason annoyed with me - quite unfairly I thought - and it was an uncomfortable re-emergence because of this).
Sitting catatonic and droopy eyed in a corner, or lying down on the bed, I would float around the town that we were in in boxy and arcane machines. People would pass me, and look at me, and at some points I would wonder if I really was where it looked like I was - and genuinely think, “fuck - I’m outside reality now. I’ve broken the matrix. Figured out some cheat code for life - what should I do? Will I be here forever?”
I have been on a gleaming white cylindrical secret bullet train, constructed with and possessing hyper-advanced technologies, invisible, but permeating the world. On it are rows and rows of stormtrooper style soldiers with white suits, black visors and weapons. They observe me silently as the train roars through the landscape through cities and mountains and forests, and I believe they are somehow the hidden movers behind reality, influencing and shaping our fates to the desires and aims of an unfathomable being.
I witnessed fields of columns of cosmic light, reaching from the ground to a sky thick with stars, and I knew it to be the realm of the gods.
At one point I locked myself in a toilet for an hour or so until Z came to find me and told me how to open the door. During this time however, again, I was quite sure I was in a furniture train, and the toilet was a show toilet, so I of course shouldn’t use it, and I was patiently sat on the floor waiting for the train to stop and someone to get me out of there.
During this time, I noticed my holes starting to develop a decidedly religious flavour, and I believed I was starting to gain witness to real hidden places and beings reflecting some kind of cosmic battle between good and evil. I am not usually religious, even effectively atheist although I prefer to call myself agnostic, but I began to question if there could be realms of such unfathomable beauty without gods to create them - and what of the entities? Usually silent, their presence felt more than seen, but present more and more.
In our less deep trips, we would just watch Family Guy and similar cartoons endlessly, and the small screen would fly around the room, the stories adopt a bizarre and comical depth that they didn’t seem to have usually.
Anyway, things didn’t work out between Z and myself, no doubt partly because of all the drugs, and no doubt I am partly to blame as despite being the one to be introduced to K as a newbie, I did become an enabler of sorts and would show up with 10g bags for a weekend of locking ourselves in a room and traversing the astral planes rather than the real world.
After that however I didn’t do any more ketamine for just over 2 years.
In the period above I estimate I took about 50g during a period of about 4 months, perhaps taking 2-5 grams of more, over 2 days or so almost every week (may be a slight overestimate as I am writing from memory but - I also feel I might have a bias to under-report or under-remember, so am trying to compensate for that).
Perhaps 2 years later I moved out from my parent’s house into my own place. Cue celebrations of having the privacy to truly indulge my weird hobby...
When I began to do ketamine again - this time largely on my own, although just as often in an effort to come down from the alcohol and cocaine binges I might go on from time to time with a few friends. In this latter use case, I found myself often looking forward more to the end of the night when I could go back to my flat and start doing ketamine alone! Obviously I did not feel too great after these post stimulant binge dissociative binges into the early morning the next day instead of sleeping, rehydrating and eating, but while they happened they were pretty incredible.
Initially I did not seek out the hole so much after my resumption of ketamine use, the deep, more intense trips I did not so much desire. I would set aside days to veg out, watch good TV shows that made you think, dose low bumps of K just to the point I could still focus, and just bliss out. Watching TV or film on ketamine, for the most part, is incredible. It was like I could truly insert myself into that reality, as if the screen WAS a window into that reality somewhere, and truly identify with the characters as if they were real people.
I feel like some of these shows, and it might be retrospective wishful thinking on my part, actually gave me some insights that could be applied to my life. I watched Westworld and was just fascinated by the evolution of consciousness in the AI hosts. I watched Altered Carbon, and it occurred to me that the “sleeving”, insertion of consciousness into any human body, some people living multiple different “sleeves” throughout their lives - was not too different to what happens not, within our own life.
Ultimately we are all passengers in life, carried by the programming of the universe, or the gods… Sometimes, I was actually part of that reality, I would understand this was the world I really inhabited, the characters were talking to me, I would intermittently believe I WAS one of the characters...
I still had profound experiences on ketamine even when I didn’t fully hole. At one point I started to believe I was the avatar of some interdimensional being, on a secret mission here on Earth which would reveal itself to me when the time was right.
Perhaps influenced by the above experiences, I formed the insight that in actual fact, we ARE all entities of unknown origin and unknown destination, inserted into sudden, overwhelming consciousness, with pre-encoded memories, and an expectation of a somewhat autonomous future… This present moment is all we really have, experience of consciousness all we know. Imagine for a moment that you are an alien, a traveller from another place, another world, suddenly inserted into your body, at this exact moment, with all your memories, and no memory of where or who you were before... What would be the difference to what you are already experiencing right now? In case it is not clear, or obvious - there is none.
I believe this incident has really helped me to be more calm and accepting of my life, and to let go of unhelpful regret, or ruminations of the past, and to live presently and in the moment.
From my early days doing this however, it seems like the novelty wore off to some extent, and my cognitive ability to follow storylines began to decay - I would often get distracted midway through a show in weird thoughts inside my head, or watch almost an entire series of something and realise I just had no clue what had happened and would have to watch it again…
I did not this time get a recurrence of the religion themes that had begun to seep in from my previous experiences. But I did retain the incredible visions of moving though places in different realities. Still mostly just sitting on my sofa, initially trying to watch some interesting TV shows, sometimes just skirting the edge of the hole, sometimes diving right in - in the latter case I would usually just turn off the lights and lie in the dark, sometimes with some music playing.
Again, I would find myself moving invisibly, silently, through a bizarro world version of the town around me. The rollercoaster would return, this time moving through incredibly more futuristic cityscapes - and I understood it this time not be a rollercoaster but a transport mechanism of the otherworld I found myself in. Sometimes it would soar into space - at which point the scene would inevitably fade, dissolve, in an explosion of light - and I was left with a somewhat disappointed feeling of having been snatched away from enlightenment at the last moment.
Sometimes I would be moving through incredible, complex factories - at times I appeared to be playing some kind of active role - at least, I understood myself to be a person with some responsibility for maintaining these machines, but I couldn’t remember what they were for or what I had to do with them. I hoped that when I had known, I would have ensured that nothing bad could happen to me until I remembered, or was back to wherever I was before this.
The styxian transport units and trains returned, often times more cramped, sometimes underground this time, additionally with units around me I recognised - my laptop, my phone, various items of furniture, and it felt like a film set - like I was playing a role. Again, I was a little confused at point what exactly the role had been - and who was taking me wherever I was going now, but I sat back and waited for someone to come and explain it to me. Of course - no-one ever did.
Once, a golden orb, or an ornate locomotive designed by an insane god from gilded gold and silver, as always in a train of similar orbs or carriages, moving along frictionless and sometimes invisible tracks through landscapes unknown stopped on a snowy mountain. At this point, somewhat degenerately, or perhaps just because I could feel a breeze against me, when the door slid open, I stepped out. I was standing in a frozen wilderness, no other forms of life around me, the train silent and motionless behind me. A relentless breeze blew on me, and I sat down somewhat unsteadily, not knowing what to do or, hopefully, with some semblance of understanding that I SHOULD probably not move, given the slight possibility I wasn’t where I thought I was i carefully sat down in the snow (in case it isn’t obvious, I was just on the floor of my flat, in front of the sofa). How am I going to get back? I thought. Surely whoever took me here wouldn’t just leave me here? Of course as ever, familiar things started to materialise around me, until I began to understand I was home... and the breeze, in fact, was my fan I had set up pre-hole to cool me down (it had been a hot day/night).
Another time, I found myself in a Japanese style room with paper sliding doors. I was alone, and a faint evening light filtered through the thin doors in front of me. I pushed through them, finding myself on a bizarre wooden complex overlooking a dried up riverbank, with, as ever, a futuristic cityscape in the far distance. The architecture was older Japanese or Asian of some kind, and other flats seemed to dot around the shell shaped wooden balcony that sloped off before me. As ever, having no clue where I was or how I had got here - again feeling quite vulnerable as I was not fully clothed, just in my boxers, I elected to sit down again and figure things out.
I looked across to the balcony next to me - it was my friends! Or was it? Two good friends of mine, K and T were standing up chatting quietly to each other. I couldn’t hear what they were saying so I shouted across to them - where are we? Honestly. I cannot really remember their exact reply, who spoke, but suffice to say it did not do anything to lessen my confusion. Sometime later I realised they were gone I called out across the gap to the balconies opposite - “HELLO - WHERE AM I?” - no one answered. Shortly after this I found myself sitting on the floor in my bedroom, a load of junk spread around me - I was alone and had been the entire time.
An interesting phenomenon began to occur during this period of doing ketamine use. I began to get confused about who was in the room with me - I would imagine whole scenarios between other people, both people I knew and entirely fabricated characters, occuring in the social space around me (again, completely solitary experiences) - and sometimes suddenly the “virtual conversation” unfolding in my mind would leak into reality, I’d speak to nonexistent people and snap back to awareness, wondering what in the fuck I was doing speaking to people who weren’t there. Once I have called out into my empty flat - “hello?!?” - just to verify that no-one is really there.
This would generally happen more towards the “re-emergence” - while I was in the hole I would travel - although the journeys began to feel less profound, and more confusing. They were still nice though, as my plain-ish room transformed into a modular unit in a spaceship, a vast hall stretching into the distance, with passages around corners I would wait patiently for beings to emerge from to explain to me where I was - was this reality now, and the other world an illusion? I would slide and shift through subspace until gently teleporting/landing/descending back onto my sofa. Often it was misjudging the timing of a hole when I got into trouble - I would sniff, then decide I’ll just do this - get water, go to the toilet, check something on my computer.
My tiny kitchen became a maze, the glasses toy sized chalices in my vast giant hands, or themselves vast pitchers just about fitting into my small spindly alien hands. I would come to sitting on the floor looking at my washing machine, having just been wandering through a police station from the 1900s, a cottage from a cartoon kid’s book, or a boat on a somewhat rough sea.
I would hole standing up in front of the toilet and stand there for 20 minutes as silhouetted figures moved around me, and I appeared to be alternately in a queue in a public restroom, with people either queueing or around me, talking amongst themselves, or myself having a telepathic conversation with my toilet about it’s life, hopes and dreams.
My computer would become an indecipherable space console - I would become fixated on figuring out how to do what I planned, while forgetting the most basic operations. Passwords would be temporarily inaccessible from my memory, or finger coordination would be insufficient to type them. I’d forget the objective and concoct a nonsensical fantasy inside my own head, sitting catatonic or dumbly clicking buttons to no effect endlessly.
I have combined ketamine with a fair amount of other substances, so because of this, I will comment briefly on the effects of such combinations. I had used ketamine many times to come down from cocaine binges - and sometimes even in overlap. In my experience this is just a great combination, smooths out the sometimes negative, anxiogenic effects of cocaine, and the cocaine counters some of the sluggish discoordination of the ketaine. I’m sure it’s actually terrible for you though - it’s worth noting most studies of ketamine and brain damage occur in polydrug users - I don’t believe cocaine specifically has been studied, but many other stimulants have and they DID increase neurological damage. The cocaine also acts as a somewhat spicy decongestant, as ketamine itself of course can clog the nose if you insufflate too much of it.
If I dosed my final Hole-dose too close to the final cocaine line, the experience could also be pretty magical. I had a sensation of being a small drone-like robot, working with exotic tools on the surface of a vast, megascale black construct hanging in space, plunging from the distant void into the heart of bright star, and could feel the pulsing of energy beneath me as I worked, and feel the presence of my brothers, all of us the same, in constant communion and communication, and working towards the same goal with absolute focus, clarity, and dedication (what this goal was, I cannot say, but I understood the construct to be an energy conduit of some sort).
In any case - as a few grams spread over a few months become 1-2 grams every other weekend, and I began to notice more negative aftereffects. I would be wiped out and depressed the next day. Sleep never came easily after a K binge, and I would stretch evening sessions into the early morning, the next day, spend my weekends in a daze and be unable to function or work properly at work (fortunately I am lucky enough to be somewhat self employed so could get away with occasional absences or off days). I tried to moderate my usage at this point, and for the most part succeeded, trying on a few occasions to quite entirely - I would get a gram bag every few months, do half and flush the rest. Every 6 months to a year I would allow myself a deeper binge - but I would end it when it stopped being fun rather than binge until my nose bled and the psychedelic aspect had given way completely to disorientation and confusion.
I still continued to have profound experiences though. I combined K with 4-AcO-DMT, 4-HO-MET, Mephedrone, LSD, 2C-B and gabaergics like alcohol and benzos. I will briefly list the experiences I had:
During these multi-day psycho-dissociative binges, in fact, I believe, during a slightly lower dose of 4-AcO-DMT, I experienced for the first time some urinary issues, urine retention, urination frequency, that started during the trip and persisted in a milder manner for a few weeks afterwards. This scared me away and I quit ketamine entirely for a while. The next year, I did a lot less, but sure enough came back to it perhaps 6 moments later, with the odd gram here and there at first, again primarily after cocaine… That Christmas I had another binge however, this time of about 7g in maybe 8 or 9 days, including 5g in 5 days plus some DCK, probably the largest continuous session I have had to date.
For some reason the DCK especially was especially punishing on my bladder, and this time I actually felt a slight discomfort sitting down. Again, fortunately, this eventually faded, although it precipitated another 6 month or so break from this seductive substance.
My return this time did not last long, it was another combined trip, I believe 4-HO-MET and mephedrone - this time I was just feeling a bit down about some things in life, and mid trip, feeling it was a mistake that I had started doing ketamine again, I flushed about a gram I had left and managed another 6 month break or so. I usually do my best not to flush drugs ON drugs, for obvious reasons, but this particular incidence I believe the insight was an accurate and helpful one and I do not regret it.
When I returned just recently, I have attempted to take a slightly different approach. I have been more dedicated with my meditative practices since my last dabblings - usually not on ketamine, but sometimes during - although I realise this is of debatable benefit as far the meditation practice goes, it is pretty magical.
I am also, I guess, just a little older and (hopefully!) wiser. Several times recently, rather than watching TV, I have simply sat and meditated, and I must say this has truly brought some magic states. The act of observing your own consciousness, I find, can precipitate some profound experiences at lower doses than I would have previously used. The act of observing your mind beginning to piece itself back together again, I believe can give some real, first hand insight into the mechanism of consciousness (sober meditation can too of course, arguably this is one of the primary uses of it).
A common theme during those first few lines is like a faint electricity has begun to permeate the air, and when slipping into K-space in silence or even just quietude and faint music, the ascent is accompanied with an ever deepening buzz until I feel part of the fabric of human existence, like I can feel the presence of the multitude of humans that came before me in everything around me, the labourers than built my house - the engineers and scientists that provided us with technology - and every man, woman, child and everything in between that struggled and fought to exist and stay alive and propagate in the fierce and brutal dawn of man, and life on Earth… I find when treating K more gently, the profound, psychedelic-like sensations can be eked out more clearly - compared to the “obliteration dose” which is often just far too confusing… although I still chase the unknowable gem of cosmic truth at the bottom of the unsolvable K-maze on occasion, for old time’s sake.
Occasionally - probably more often recently, than in the past - I have somewhat frightening experiences - the voices get too numerous and confusing, something happens that panics me. Just yesterday on a longer binge than usual, I was walking past my oven and suddenly got the impression it was on, very hot, and about to explode. I opened my front door and was feeling the oven, hoping it didn’t explode in my face, looking at the incomprehensible dials which all seemed off but not wanting to risk turning them to experiment - as I stood at my open door, almost ready to run into the street, I somehow managed to calm myself, stay standing there, and eventually closed the door and looked at the oven with a more critical, lucid eye… it wasn’t on, or even hot… I breathed a sigh of relief and went to sit down again. In my experience too many frightening experiences like this are usually a sign of overuse, although overuse probably creeps up more quickly than it did in the past.
All this said - as much as I do love ketamine and it has had a special place in my life for some time - I would really like to not use it any more, the bladder dangers are just not ignorable, although I’ve been quite lucky in this regard - and I have found it for a while to be in many ways quite empty… despite that as of yet, it keeps on sucking me back. I also worry about the psychological long term effects which may be more significant than most of us like to believe... At the moment, I am not overly concerned however, or at least, am allowing myself to relax about it a bit, despite having tried to give up forever a few times.
I guess I will just keep on using occasionally for now until I have a good reason not to - although I’d be kidding myself if I said I was really expecting to get anything else profound out it - again, it’s a drug that’s largely a hedonistic one for me. I try to remember that it is really only the first ascent up to the Hole that is the most enjoyable, usually proceeding through a sudden deep existential happiness, contentment and sensation that everything is exactly how it’s supposed to be, followed by, if I’m in luck, a lucid and memorable trip, not always with lasting insights but usually pretty wondrous. Everything after coming down from that though, is less and less pleasant, memorable, more confusing, and just prolonging the negative aftereffects. I often have to take valium or 2 (10-20mg) just to sleep after, now, which I do not particularly enjoy due to next day grogginess - I do not remember this being the case when I first started.
As far as bladder effects, I know these are no joke, but since resuming after my bladder scares I have always taken a supplement of 650mg ECGC green tea polyphenols, and 300mg oral hyalyuronic acid, then the same the next day (sometimes only 325mg ECGC this time due to potential liver issues with high doses, IIRC, and dubious benefit above a certain threshold). I also intemittently take 1000mg D-Mannose throughout the experience, and 1 pill of a cranberry extract. This is based on various scientific studies I have read, and while it’s not certain it’s doing anything, I have not experienced any bladder issues of note since - I also make sure to stay well hydrated, and basically never go over 2 days of binging, or usually 500mg / day (just recently I did 900mg - today in fact - but this was an anomaly and one I plan not to repeat for a while).
If I avoid binging, my tolerance does not build significantly, although admittedly there is probably a lifetime tolerance I have seen people mention elsewhere, where the immediate tolerance builds up quickly after the first few lines - this may be a likely reason for the declining fun and inclining confusion of multiple successive doses. Typically I will weight out 250-300mg, split into 25-30mg lines, and dose every 10 mins or so, sometimes 2 to start, sometime with accelerating frequency if I feel like holing. 250mg+ will usually Hole me on day 1 or 2, but I have holed from 150mg or less on rare occasions, perhaps after long breaks.
I have semi-frequent private liver, kidney and organ function tests and make dietary or supplemental changes accordingly (I take a whole bunch of other supplements). I eat a low carb diet, maintain a low body fat percentage, and remain in good shape overall despite the odd lapse (eg, 14inch pizza and a tub of ice cream today to recover from a small drug binge yesterday...). So far liver and kidneys all seem in good shape despite the admitted punishing I have probably given them over the years. I mention this to point out that on the whole I do keep an eye on myself and luckily I believe this has gone some way to helping me avoid development of a significant habit or significant physical health problems, despite maintaining an on/off love affair with ketamine for some time now. Of course, I am still concerned there could be damage happening on some level that can't yet be measured, and maybe in some sense my usage could still be considered less than ideal.
Reflecting on my experiences, I could interpret them in many ways - I have many times toyed with the idea that these realities have an objective existence themselves, and the entities I feel or become are either real spirits, or shadows of other realities leaking through, or perhaps future or past incarnations of myself, or others... I also believe of course it quite possible that all this originates entirely within my own mind, but perhaps this distinction is not as important as some might think. Abstaining for some length, I will note, does tend me towards the latter option, and the converse, as might be expected. But I like to consider both options, although the meaningful relevance of either is perhaps hard to discern...
I would like to write more, and surely could, but this report is probably long enough already, I have been working on it on and off for a while, and I think it’s a hopefully detailed enough outline of my experience with this most bizarre drug. I hope some of you enjoy reading and can identify.
I may come back to spell check or proof-read again also, as it is a little late where I am.
Peace and love, as ever.
Tagged by Xorkoth
substancecode_ketamine
substancecode_achs
substancecode_dissociatives
explevel_veryexperienced
explevel_retrospective
exptype_positive
exptype_glowing
exptype_addiction
roacode_nasal
When I started writing this document about a year ago, my introductory paragraph was as follows:
I just flushed the last couple hundred milligrams of a bag of ketamine that I plan to make my last bag for a very long time, ever if I can help it - but at least for a good 6 months. I have a pretty good idea of the amount of K I’ve done in my life, which I estimate to be about ~90g over an 11 year period (from 2006 to 2018) but the majority (about ~70g) in the past 5 years. I have worked out that this averages out to about 30mg / day, which is a low amount but still basically a threshold dose every day. I don’t think that I can feel any negative effects but I do wonder if that kind of dose is likely to still lead to some long term personality changes.
Needless to say, perhaps, I did not make that my last bag ever - I honestly can’t remember now if I did even achieve a 6 month hiatus - I believe I did make it a few months at least, even though during this time I experimented with other dissociatives (2-OxO-PCM, 2F-DCK, Ephenidine) eventually concluding that none of them really held a candle to good old ketamine. 2-OxO-PCM / DCK came pretty close - in fact probably the closest - but this gave me a bladder scare which really put me off it, and the long, trailing comedown and day-after unsteadiness was not something I enjoyed. If it hadn’t been for these effects I would actually say 2-OxO-PCM was superior to ketamine, essentially the same “Hole Space”, but a longer duration and more potent.
Ketamine as I have said, and do say often, is a very interesting and in some ways a very beautiful drug to me - but, unfortunately, one that I have come to believe is not nearly as profound as it pretends to be. It’s seductive depths, in my experience, are ultimately quite devoid of meaning, and the more I’ve used the more I find that the inscrutable, alien realms found within Hole Space are just empty mazes, an unsolvable puzzle with no cosmic treasure to be found at the center, indeed, probably no center at all.
However the thing that I enjoy the most about Ketamine, unlike any other substance I’ve done, is that it has the capacity to truly transport you to somewhere else - not just an altered version of the place you were before dosing (although it has this ability as well), but somewhere different entirely.
First introduction and early years
I first used Ketamine in 2006 at a festival - I used a fairly low dose compared to what I would use now, and split a very small bag with 3 friends. I remember at this stage the effects were very much external, perceptual effects on the world - but although there were no obvious visual alterations, things did look different. I was no doubt experiencing dissociation but did not have the experience or understanding to recognise it for what it was, and being a fairly anxious and introverted teenager I experienced the dissociation as loss of social inhibitions, and an additional, fun, floaty feeling on top of the few beers that I had no doubt had as well.
A distinct memory I have during this trip is that I was standing inside our fairly large tent with my friends, it was night time and raining outside, and one of my friends suddenly said, hey, we’re on a train! And suddenly we could all see what he meant, the inside of the tent had some ropes or something hanging from the roof and we all held onto these and went along with the illusion, easily feeling the sensation of movement, and the noise of rain outside transforming into the noise of an engine - the outside world beyond what we could see easily disappeared from our consideration, even if only temporarily.
As far as I can recall, I only did a single dose this time - I estimate the dosage to be 50mg or less - I may have done it a few more times that night but if I did the dosage was low enough and the experiences unremarkable enough - or lost in the haze of other substances, namely alcohol and cannabis - that I do not recall.
After this I probably did not do K again for a couple of months more. When I came back to it it was during a period that I was drinking heavily, and therefore I used K for its anxiolytic effects and removal of social inhibitions, at parties or out drinking. However I was irresponsible with my usage, constantly dosing more to chase the disinhibiting effects - and given that at this time in my life I was still battling a lot of social anxieties, although slightly older, I could never quite disinhibit myself enough - and several times ended up accidentally K-holing in inappropriate places, a few times being quite literally carried home by my long suffering flatmate who did not do any drugs, but only drank (it goes without saying I was very lucky to have such a friend of course, and I am very grateful for it, although at the time I’m not proud to say I didn’t always appreciate this as I should have).
My memory of K during this time is purely as a “party drug”, a potentiator of the sloppiness and intoxication induced by alcohol - I have practically no memory of ever experiencing any psychedelic effects, in fact I have very little memory at all of a lot of this period of my life, no doubt mostly due to alcohol - but I do have one bizarre half dream of moving through crowds of cardboard cut-out people, like I was a human block in some bizarre game of tetris - which I believe now may have been an experience of coming back to semi-consciousness while being half carried, half dragged through a crowd of people by my flatmate in the major city which we lived at the time.
These messy and irresponsible times were while I was at university, and although I did not use K for the psychedelic effects, or seek them out, as someone with a lifelong interest in drugs, particularly psychedelics I was aware of the effects that ketamine could have, used in a different setting, and in a different way. I will note briefly that I do not really consider ketamine, or any dissociative, for the most part, to be a “true” psychedelic now - but at the time I did not have enough knowledge or experience to appreciate the distinction, and of course there is some overlap between the dissociative and psychedelic headspace, although how much overlap is very much up for debate.
In any case, one time that I made a point of saving some ketamine when I went home for the summer - and cut out 2 fat lines at night, in my room at my parent’s house, and then laid down on my bed in silence and darkness, with the intention to hole for the first time. In actual fact it was no doubt not the first time, but it would be my first conscious hole, that did not happen accidentally and did not result in total memory loss from concomitant alcohol use.
This probably was and remains my most lucid and moving K-hole to date - I remember being totally in awe and blown away by the lucidity of the experience, which involved not only being transported to different places, but remaining mentally quite lucid throughout, and at points interaction with and communication with what I perceived to be entities of some kind.
It’s hard for me now to remember everything chronologically, but will try to describe the hole as best I can, which is basically split into various scenes which would spontaneously shift and dissolve.
The hole began, as so many would afterwards, with a feeling of acceleration and movement despite the fact that I was lying down - as well as a sound, characteristic of a rushing, electronic buzz - at the time, the noise did not stand out to me, the physical sensations were far more prominent. But, for whatever reason, in future holes this background buzz has become a more and more noticeable and familiar indication that I am on the way to somewhere else.
Suddenly I was moving, disembodied, through crowds of people in a rainy city, and I remember wondering can they see me? Or can I just see them? Presumably, they could not see me, or if they could they did not react, as I glided like a ghost through thick crowds of fairly uncheerful faces, umbrellas, and driving rain.
Then - I was in some kind of wooden ferris wheel which was in fact some kind of otherworldly pub, sitting at a wooden table in one of the large carriages on the wheel as it rotated, with several other large figures whose exact features of nature I cannot remember, but I’m pretty sure they were all large, burly looking, and wearing large coats or robes of brown and grey. These characters were drinking and joking with each other while looking at me and talking about me, although I did not know what they were saying. I did not feel in any danger however and did not believe these entities to mean me any harm. I was not sure what was happening so eventually I asked one of them “what should I do now?” and they answered amusedly, but kindly, “You need to find that out for yourself.”.... The scene then shifted.
At one point, coming back to awareness, I opened my eyes and found myself to be on a hospital bed in a large darkened hospital with many other beds lined up next to mine, and nurses wandering around the room with red torches… one of them seemed to notice me and shone the torch directly at me, and the scene shifted… I realised later that the red light had probably been the LED on a digital clock next to me, as I had come partially back to consciousness, opened my eyes, but could not yet discern reality. Beyond a certain dose I find that on ketamine I cannot properly control the movement of my eyes, if I am still trying to focus on something I will get double vision - no doubt this contributes to some of the visual distortions of high but sub-hole dosages - but at the time of this trip, I had no understanding of this effect.
I’m sure there were a few other of these experiences in this disparate voyage but these are the ones that stick in my mind. I remember afterwards being absolutely in awe for weeks and when telling friends I would almost get a little choked up, such was the power of the experience - although I cannot put my finger exactly on any particular aspect that caused this feeling, I think it was just the whole experience of having travelled through different realities - and not only that, but the persistent feeling that these realms had some kind of objective reality themselves. This, unfortunately, also remains the only hole in which I have had any sort of entity contact, or, at least entities that I could communicate with in some fashion.
After this period which spanned until about 2008, I do not believe I did any K again for another 5 years or so. During the above period I would estimate I did only 10g total at most over roughly a 2 year period.
Second introduction - “honeymoon”
Five years later in 2013 I was introduced to Ketamine for a second time by my girlfriend at the time, who I will call Z, and also introduced to a different way of doing it - not as a social drug or as an occasional, rare voyage, but as a drug to binge on over an evening, day, weekend or longer, taking multiple huge, K-hole inducing doses, with the explicit purpose of dissociating continuously from reality, and as completely as possible.
At first (at least, this is the lie that I told myself) we only used Ketamine to come down from cocaine binges, but the Ketamine itself quickly became the focal point of our weekends, the cocaine being just the introductory act, a nice sideshow, if it was around. I only ever insufflated, generally only in the same small room of my girlfriend’s university accommodation, and I have no doubt that to an outside observer our dissociated escapades would have looked quite degenerate, dull even, 2 people dosing to incapacitation, past the point of being able to communicate, travelling together on quite separate, externally silent journeys - occasionally syncing up with our returns to some kind of objective reality, briefly reminiscing through a dissociated haze, before dosing again, plunging back down the rabbit hole.
Given that I am writing this retrospectively, and about multiple journeys, the details of many, unavoidably, have been lost in the haze, I won’t be able to recount any one trip from start to finish, but I will just try to highlight significant moments that I remember most.
I believe my first introduction to this way of doing K, my second “conscious hole” in fact, I experienced again the feeling of being a disembodied spirit - this time soaring over landscapes, towering cliffs, before coming back to consciousness again with a sense of awe and wonder at what I had experienced and where I had been. Unfortunately this sense of awe and wonder has faded, in fact it is entirely gone from my more recent experiences, which is interesting to recall as I write this now.
I had many very interesting experiences just teetering on the edge of the hole also - almost totally dissociated but still quite aware of my body and conscious. One experience in particular stands out - I was on a rollercoaster carriage, moving quickly through a vast jungle. I had no idea how I had got there. Suddenly I saw another carriage in the distance - it was a mutual friend of Z and I who was also in the room we were in at the time. The carriages stopped next to each other and I asked - “where are we?” and she informed me we were in Z’s flat. I wondered at this in amazement before the rollercoaster started moving again and I was absolutely gone again.
At one point I got up from the floor I was sat down on, and was suddenly unable to understand how gravity worked. I ended up leaning at a weird angle on the wall - asking “which way is down?” - throughout these despite the major discoordination I was never really concerned - just serene and content.
Multiple other trips followed. The room and the windows turned into a dystopian cityscape with impossible metal structures and shapes moving through the air. The room was full of phantoms, phantom objects that made even walking 2 feet from one chair to another impossible. I would often snort huge lines, stand up, and unexpectedly hole where I was standing, and end up forgetting or feeling it was just best not to try to move while I could not interpret the reality around me.
I imagined the dimmed lights morphing into some bizarro club, and hearing Z saying my name. I couldn’t figure out where she was saying it from so I said "wait - I’m going to call you", and got my phone out - I either could not remember my unlock code, or just not understand the interface - and eventually gave up. Shortly after this the room materialised again around me (Z was sitting right in front of me on the bed, and yet I could not see her - she was pretty distressed by this, and for some reason annoyed with me - quite unfairly I thought - and it was an uncomfortable re-emergence because of this).
Sitting catatonic and droopy eyed in a corner, or lying down on the bed, I would float around the town that we were in in boxy and arcane machines. People would pass me, and look at me, and at some points I would wonder if I really was where it looked like I was - and genuinely think, “fuck - I’m outside reality now. I’ve broken the matrix. Figured out some cheat code for life - what should I do? Will I be here forever?”
I have been on a gleaming white cylindrical secret bullet train, constructed with and possessing hyper-advanced technologies, invisible, but permeating the world. On it are rows and rows of stormtrooper style soldiers with white suits, black visors and weapons. They observe me silently as the train roars through the landscape through cities and mountains and forests, and I believe they are somehow the hidden movers behind reality, influencing and shaping our fates to the desires and aims of an unfathomable being.
I witnessed fields of columns of cosmic light, reaching from the ground to a sky thick with stars, and I knew it to be the realm of the gods.
At one point I locked myself in a toilet for an hour or so until Z came to find me and told me how to open the door. During this time however, again, I was quite sure I was in a furniture train, and the toilet was a show toilet, so I of course shouldn’t use it, and I was patiently sat on the floor waiting for the train to stop and someone to get me out of there.
During this time, I noticed my holes starting to develop a decidedly religious flavour, and I believed I was starting to gain witness to real hidden places and beings reflecting some kind of cosmic battle between good and evil. I am not usually religious, even effectively atheist although I prefer to call myself agnostic, but I began to question if there could be realms of such unfathomable beauty without gods to create them - and what of the entities? Usually silent, their presence felt more than seen, but present more and more.
In our less deep trips, we would just watch Family Guy and similar cartoons endlessly, and the small screen would fly around the room, the stories adopt a bizarre and comical depth that they didn’t seem to have usually.
Anyway, things didn’t work out between Z and myself, no doubt partly because of all the drugs, and no doubt I am partly to blame as despite being the one to be introduced to K as a newbie, I did become an enabler of sorts and would show up with 10g bags for a weekend of locking ourselves in a room and traversing the astral planes rather than the real world.
After that however I didn’t do any more ketamine for just over 2 years.
In the period above I estimate I took about 50g during a period of about 4 months, perhaps taking 2-5 grams of more, over 2 days or so almost every week (may be a slight overestimate as I am writing from memory but - I also feel I might have a bias to under-report or under-remember, so am trying to compensate for that).
Third iteration - freedom and solitude
Perhaps 2 years later I moved out from my parent’s house into my own place. Cue celebrations of having the privacy to truly indulge my weird hobby...
When I began to do ketamine again - this time largely on my own, although just as often in an effort to come down from the alcohol and cocaine binges I might go on from time to time with a few friends. In this latter use case, I found myself often looking forward more to the end of the night when I could go back to my flat and start doing ketamine alone! Obviously I did not feel too great after these post stimulant binge dissociative binges into the early morning the next day instead of sleeping, rehydrating and eating, but while they happened they were pretty incredible.
Initially I did not seek out the hole so much after my resumption of ketamine use, the deep, more intense trips I did not so much desire. I would set aside days to veg out, watch good TV shows that made you think, dose low bumps of K just to the point I could still focus, and just bliss out. Watching TV or film on ketamine, for the most part, is incredible. It was like I could truly insert myself into that reality, as if the screen WAS a window into that reality somewhere, and truly identify with the characters as if they were real people.
I feel like some of these shows, and it might be retrospective wishful thinking on my part, actually gave me some insights that could be applied to my life. I watched Westworld and was just fascinated by the evolution of consciousness in the AI hosts. I watched Altered Carbon, and it occurred to me that the “sleeving”, insertion of consciousness into any human body, some people living multiple different “sleeves” throughout their lives - was not too different to what happens not, within our own life.
Ultimately we are all passengers in life, carried by the programming of the universe, or the gods… Sometimes, I was actually part of that reality, I would understand this was the world I really inhabited, the characters were talking to me, I would intermittently believe I WAS one of the characters...
I still had profound experiences on ketamine even when I didn’t fully hole. At one point I started to believe I was the avatar of some interdimensional being, on a secret mission here on Earth which would reveal itself to me when the time was right.
Perhaps influenced by the above experiences, I formed the insight that in actual fact, we ARE all entities of unknown origin and unknown destination, inserted into sudden, overwhelming consciousness, with pre-encoded memories, and an expectation of a somewhat autonomous future… This present moment is all we really have, experience of consciousness all we know. Imagine for a moment that you are an alien, a traveller from another place, another world, suddenly inserted into your body, at this exact moment, with all your memories, and no memory of where or who you were before... What would be the difference to what you are already experiencing right now? In case it is not clear, or obvious - there is none.
I believe this incident has really helped me to be more calm and accepting of my life, and to let go of unhelpful regret, or ruminations of the past, and to live presently and in the moment.
From my early days doing this however, it seems like the novelty wore off to some extent, and my cognitive ability to follow storylines began to decay - I would often get distracted midway through a show in weird thoughts inside my head, or watch almost an entire series of something and realise I just had no clue what had happened and would have to watch it again…
I did not this time get a recurrence of the religion themes that had begun to seep in from my previous experiences. But I did retain the incredible visions of moving though places in different realities. Still mostly just sitting on my sofa, initially trying to watch some interesting TV shows, sometimes just skirting the edge of the hole, sometimes diving right in - in the latter case I would usually just turn off the lights and lie in the dark, sometimes with some music playing.
Again, I would find myself moving invisibly, silently, through a bizarro world version of the town around me. The rollercoaster would return, this time moving through incredibly more futuristic cityscapes - and I understood it this time not be a rollercoaster but a transport mechanism of the otherworld I found myself in. Sometimes it would soar into space - at which point the scene would inevitably fade, dissolve, in an explosion of light - and I was left with a somewhat disappointed feeling of having been snatched away from enlightenment at the last moment.
Sometimes I would be moving through incredible, complex factories - at times I appeared to be playing some kind of active role - at least, I understood myself to be a person with some responsibility for maintaining these machines, but I couldn’t remember what they were for or what I had to do with them. I hoped that when I had known, I would have ensured that nothing bad could happen to me until I remembered, or was back to wherever I was before this.
The styxian transport units and trains returned, often times more cramped, sometimes underground this time, additionally with units around me I recognised - my laptop, my phone, various items of furniture, and it felt like a film set - like I was playing a role. Again, I was a little confused at point what exactly the role had been - and who was taking me wherever I was going now, but I sat back and waited for someone to come and explain it to me. Of course - no-one ever did.
Once, a golden orb, or an ornate locomotive designed by an insane god from gilded gold and silver, as always in a train of similar orbs or carriages, moving along frictionless and sometimes invisible tracks through landscapes unknown stopped on a snowy mountain. At this point, somewhat degenerately, or perhaps just because I could feel a breeze against me, when the door slid open, I stepped out. I was standing in a frozen wilderness, no other forms of life around me, the train silent and motionless behind me. A relentless breeze blew on me, and I sat down somewhat unsteadily, not knowing what to do or, hopefully, with some semblance of understanding that I SHOULD probably not move, given the slight possibility I wasn’t where I thought I was i carefully sat down in the snow (in case it isn’t obvious, I was just on the floor of my flat, in front of the sofa). How am I going to get back? I thought. Surely whoever took me here wouldn’t just leave me here? Of course as ever, familiar things started to materialise around me, until I began to understand I was home... and the breeze, in fact, was my fan I had set up pre-hole to cool me down (it had been a hot day/night).
Another time, I found myself in a Japanese style room with paper sliding doors. I was alone, and a faint evening light filtered through the thin doors in front of me. I pushed through them, finding myself on a bizarre wooden complex overlooking a dried up riverbank, with, as ever, a futuristic cityscape in the far distance. The architecture was older Japanese or Asian of some kind, and other flats seemed to dot around the shell shaped wooden balcony that sloped off before me. As ever, having no clue where I was or how I had got here - again feeling quite vulnerable as I was not fully clothed, just in my boxers, I elected to sit down again and figure things out.
I looked across to the balcony next to me - it was my friends! Or was it? Two good friends of mine, K and T were standing up chatting quietly to each other. I couldn’t hear what they were saying so I shouted across to them - where are we? Honestly. I cannot really remember their exact reply, who spoke, but suffice to say it did not do anything to lessen my confusion. Sometime later I realised they were gone I called out across the gap to the balconies opposite - “HELLO - WHERE AM I?” - no one answered. Shortly after this I found myself sitting on the floor in my bedroom, a load of junk spread around me - I was alone and had been the entire time.
An interesting phenomenon began to occur during this period of doing ketamine use. I began to get confused about who was in the room with me - I would imagine whole scenarios between other people, both people I knew and entirely fabricated characters, occuring in the social space around me (again, completely solitary experiences) - and sometimes suddenly the “virtual conversation” unfolding in my mind would leak into reality, I’d speak to nonexistent people and snap back to awareness, wondering what in the fuck I was doing speaking to people who weren’t there. Once I have called out into my empty flat - “hello?!?” - just to verify that no-one is really there.
This would generally happen more towards the “re-emergence” - while I was in the hole I would travel - although the journeys began to feel less profound, and more confusing. They were still nice though, as my plain-ish room transformed into a modular unit in a spaceship, a vast hall stretching into the distance, with passages around corners I would wait patiently for beings to emerge from to explain to me where I was - was this reality now, and the other world an illusion? I would slide and shift through subspace until gently teleporting/landing/descending back onto my sofa. Often it was misjudging the timing of a hole when I got into trouble - I would sniff, then decide I’ll just do this - get water, go to the toilet, check something on my computer.
My tiny kitchen became a maze, the glasses toy sized chalices in my vast giant hands, or themselves vast pitchers just about fitting into my small spindly alien hands. I would come to sitting on the floor looking at my washing machine, having just been wandering through a police station from the 1900s, a cottage from a cartoon kid’s book, or a boat on a somewhat rough sea.
I would hole standing up in front of the toilet and stand there for 20 minutes as silhouetted figures moved around me, and I appeared to be alternately in a queue in a public restroom, with people either queueing or around me, talking amongst themselves, or myself having a telepathic conversation with my toilet about it’s life, hopes and dreams.
My computer would become an indecipherable space console - I would become fixated on figuring out how to do what I planned, while forgetting the most basic operations. Passwords would be temporarily inaccessible from my memory, or finger coordination would be insufficient to type them. I’d forget the objective and concoct a nonsensical fantasy inside my own head, sitting catatonic or dumbly clicking buttons to no effect endlessly.
I have combined ketamine with a fair amount of other substances, so because of this, I will comment briefly on the effects of such combinations. I had used ketamine many times to come down from cocaine binges - and sometimes even in overlap. In my experience this is just a great combination, smooths out the sometimes negative, anxiogenic effects of cocaine, and the cocaine counters some of the sluggish discoordination of the ketaine. I’m sure it’s actually terrible for you though - it’s worth noting most studies of ketamine and brain damage occur in polydrug users - I don’t believe cocaine specifically has been studied, but many other stimulants have and they DID increase neurological damage. The cocaine also acts as a somewhat spicy decongestant, as ketamine itself of course can clog the nose if you insufflate too much of it.
If I dosed my final Hole-dose too close to the final cocaine line, the experience could also be pretty magical. I had a sensation of being a small drone-like robot, working with exotic tools on the surface of a vast, megascale black construct hanging in space, plunging from the distant void into the heart of bright star, and could feel the pulsing of energy beneath me as I worked, and feel the presence of my brothers, all of us the same, in constant communion and communication, and working towards the same goal with absolute focus, clarity, and dedication (what this goal was, I cannot say, but I understood the construct to be an energy conduit of some sort).
In any case - as a few grams spread over a few months become 1-2 grams every other weekend, and I began to notice more negative aftereffects. I would be wiped out and depressed the next day. Sleep never came easily after a K binge, and I would stretch evening sessions into the early morning, the next day, spend my weekends in a daze and be unable to function or work properly at work (fortunately I am lucky enough to be somewhat self employed so could get away with occasional absences or off days). I tried to moderate my usage at this point, and for the most part succeeded, trying on a few occasions to quite entirely - I would get a gram bag every few months, do half and flush the rest. Every 6 months to a year I would allow myself a deeper binge - but I would end it when it stopped being fun rather than binge until my nose bled and the psychedelic aspect had given way completely to disorientation and confusion.
I still continued to have profound experiences though. I combined K with 4-AcO-DMT, 4-HO-MET, Mephedrone, LSD, 2C-B and gabaergics like alcohol and benzos. I will briefly list the experiences I had:
4-AcO-DMT: An unrecorded amount of ketamine (likely 300-500mg over a few hours) and 30mg A-Aco-DMT with unspecified psilocin impurity. Felt like I was in the presence of God in my LED lightbulb in a spherical, halo lampshade above, thanked him/her/it tearfully for granting me everything I had, and asked him to please look after my family and all my friends. One of my most profound experiences to date.
4-HO-MET: In fact I found ketamine quite the potentiator of divine presence when combined with 4-HO-MET too, although this was a messy experience with the complication of being on many other drugs at the time as well.
LSD: My experience with LSD was quite a high dose of the latter - so the ketamine was overwhelmed somewhat, but retrospectively, I did also feel a godlike presence at times, and like reality was about to disintegrate, the ineffable glow of infinity beginning to seep through the cracks… at the time I attributed this to the LSD only I had almost forgotten about the low dose of K.
2C-B: 2C-B and K was nice, I only did low doses of each, I would say it eased some minor anxiety I felt on the comeup, maybe the main body of the trip too, but besides that I can’t yet note anything more specific. I will note also I have not yet done 2C-B alone so cannot properly compare.
During these multi-day psycho-dissociative binges, in fact, I believe, during a slightly lower dose of 4-AcO-DMT, I experienced for the first time some urinary issues, urine retention, urination frequency, that started during the trip and persisted in a milder manner for a few weeks afterwards. This scared me away and I quit ketamine entirely for a while. The next year, I did a lot less, but sure enough came back to it perhaps 6 moments later, with the odd gram here and there at first, again primarily after cocaine… That Christmas I had another binge however, this time of about 7g in maybe 8 or 9 days, including 5g in 5 days plus some DCK, probably the largest continuous session I have had to date.
For some reason the DCK especially was especially punishing on my bladder, and this time I actually felt a slight discomfort sitting down. Again, fortunately, this eventually faded, although it precipitated another 6 month or so break from this seductive substance.
My return this time did not last long, it was another combined trip, I believe 4-HO-MET and mephedrone - this time I was just feeling a bit down about some things in life, and mid trip, feeling it was a mistake that I had started doing ketamine again, I flushed about a gram I had left and managed another 6 month break or so. I usually do my best not to flush drugs ON drugs, for obvious reasons, but this particular incidence I believe the insight was an accurate and helpful one and I do not regret it.
When I returned just recently, I have attempted to take a slightly different approach. I have been more dedicated with my meditative practices since my last dabblings - usually not on ketamine, but sometimes during - although I realise this is of debatable benefit as far the meditation practice goes, it is pretty magical.
I am also, I guess, just a little older and (hopefully!) wiser. Several times recently, rather than watching TV, I have simply sat and meditated, and I must say this has truly brought some magic states. The act of observing your own consciousness, I find, can precipitate some profound experiences at lower doses than I would have previously used. The act of observing your mind beginning to piece itself back together again, I believe can give some real, first hand insight into the mechanism of consciousness (sober meditation can too of course, arguably this is one of the primary uses of it).
A common theme during those first few lines is like a faint electricity has begun to permeate the air, and when slipping into K-space in silence or even just quietude and faint music, the ascent is accompanied with an ever deepening buzz until I feel part of the fabric of human existence, like I can feel the presence of the multitude of humans that came before me in everything around me, the labourers than built my house - the engineers and scientists that provided us with technology - and every man, woman, child and everything in between that struggled and fought to exist and stay alive and propagate in the fierce and brutal dawn of man, and life on Earth… I find when treating K more gently, the profound, psychedelic-like sensations can be eked out more clearly - compared to the “obliteration dose” which is often just far too confusing… although I still chase the unknowable gem of cosmic truth at the bottom of the unsolvable K-maze on occasion, for old time’s sake.
Occasionally - probably more often recently, than in the past - I have somewhat frightening experiences - the voices get too numerous and confusing, something happens that panics me. Just yesterday on a longer binge than usual, I was walking past my oven and suddenly got the impression it was on, very hot, and about to explode. I opened my front door and was feeling the oven, hoping it didn’t explode in my face, looking at the incomprehensible dials which all seemed off but not wanting to risk turning them to experiment - as I stood at my open door, almost ready to run into the street, I somehow managed to calm myself, stay standing there, and eventually closed the door and looked at the oven with a more critical, lucid eye… it wasn’t on, or even hot… I breathed a sigh of relief and went to sit down again. In my experience too many frightening experiences like this are usually a sign of overuse, although overuse probably creeps up more quickly than it did in the past.
Afterword, afterthoughts…
All this said - as much as I do love ketamine and it has had a special place in my life for some time - I would really like to not use it any more, the bladder dangers are just not ignorable, although I’ve been quite lucky in this regard - and I have found it for a while to be in many ways quite empty… despite that as of yet, it keeps on sucking me back. I also worry about the psychological long term effects which may be more significant than most of us like to believe... At the moment, I am not overly concerned however, or at least, am allowing myself to relax about it a bit, despite having tried to give up forever a few times.
I guess I will just keep on using occasionally for now until I have a good reason not to - although I’d be kidding myself if I said I was really expecting to get anything else profound out it - again, it’s a drug that’s largely a hedonistic one for me. I try to remember that it is really only the first ascent up to the Hole that is the most enjoyable, usually proceeding through a sudden deep existential happiness, contentment and sensation that everything is exactly how it’s supposed to be, followed by, if I’m in luck, a lucid and memorable trip, not always with lasting insights but usually pretty wondrous. Everything after coming down from that though, is less and less pleasant, memorable, more confusing, and just prolonging the negative aftereffects. I often have to take valium or 2 (10-20mg) just to sleep after, now, which I do not particularly enjoy due to next day grogginess - I do not remember this being the case when I first started.
As far as bladder effects, I know these are no joke, but since resuming after my bladder scares I have always taken a supplement of 650mg ECGC green tea polyphenols, and 300mg oral hyalyuronic acid, then the same the next day (sometimes only 325mg ECGC this time due to potential liver issues with high doses, IIRC, and dubious benefit above a certain threshold). I also intemittently take 1000mg D-Mannose throughout the experience, and 1 pill of a cranberry extract. This is based on various scientific studies I have read, and while it’s not certain it’s doing anything, I have not experienced any bladder issues of note since - I also make sure to stay well hydrated, and basically never go over 2 days of binging, or usually 500mg / day (just recently I did 900mg - today in fact - but this was an anomaly and one I plan not to repeat for a while).
If I avoid binging, my tolerance does not build significantly, although admittedly there is probably a lifetime tolerance I have seen people mention elsewhere, where the immediate tolerance builds up quickly after the first few lines - this may be a likely reason for the declining fun and inclining confusion of multiple successive doses. Typically I will weight out 250-300mg, split into 25-30mg lines, and dose every 10 mins or so, sometimes 2 to start, sometime with accelerating frequency if I feel like holing. 250mg+ will usually Hole me on day 1 or 2, but I have holed from 150mg or less on rare occasions, perhaps after long breaks.
I have semi-frequent private liver, kidney and organ function tests and make dietary or supplemental changes accordingly (I take a whole bunch of other supplements). I eat a low carb diet, maintain a low body fat percentage, and remain in good shape overall despite the odd lapse (eg, 14inch pizza and a tub of ice cream today to recover from a small drug binge yesterday...). So far liver and kidneys all seem in good shape despite the admitted punishing I have probably given them over the years. I mention this to point out that on the whole I do keep an eye on myself and luckily I believe this has gone some way to helping me avoid development of a significant habit or significant physical health problems, despite maintaining an on/off love affair with ketamine for some time now. Of course, I am still concerned there could be damage happening on some level that can't yet be measured, and maybe in some sense my usage could still be considered less than ideal.
Reflecting on my experiences, I could interpret them in many ways - I have many times toyed with the idea that these realities have an objective existence themselves, and the entities I feel or become are either real spirits, or shadows of other realities leaking through, or perhaps future or past incarnations of myself, or others... I also believe of course it quite possible that all this originates entirely within my own mind, but perhaps this distinction is not as important as some might think. Abstaining for some length, I will note, does tend me towards the latter option, and the converse, as might be expected. But I like to consider both options, although the meaningful relevance of either is perhaps hard to discern...
I would like to write more, and surely could, but this report is probably long enough already, I have been working on it on and off for a while, and I think it’s a hopefully detailed enough outline of my experience with this most bizarre drug. I hope some of you enjoy reading and can identify.
I may come back to spell check or proof-read again also, as it is a little late where I am.
Peace and love, as ever.
Tagged by Xorkoth
substancecode_ketamine
substancecode_achs
substancecode_dissociatives
explevel_veryexperienced
explevel_retrospective
exptype_positive
exptype_glowing
exptype_addiction
roacode_nasal
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