DOSE:

35 mg

4-AcO-DMT

BODY WEIGHT:

144 lb

I consider myself relatively experienced with mind-altering substances (acid, many times, MDMA, methylone, ethylphenedate and of course THC) but this one threw me for a loop, as it were.

Having heard 4-AcO-DMT acts on the same receptors as LSD and being relatively tolerant to the latter, I took a generous 35mg of the former at 7:15pm, along with my girlfriend and three other friends. I had music, comfortable clothes and people I trusted. I felt the familiar 'I've taken something' feeling within minutes, but it took perhaps 45 minutes to come up. I was surprised at the rapidity with which the high came on; I felt a rising, rushing feeling not dissimilar to MDMA, as the brightly painted walls began to look hypersaturated. The music (Daft Punk, I believe) lent a spacey, otherworldly air to the room. I noticed that my sense of spatial awareness was playing a few tricks on me, as the few inches between myself and my neighbor felt like several feet at times. I had no trouble moving or balancing, though.

At around 8:30, the conversation and bright colors left me feeling a little overwhelmed and my girlfriend and I decided to move to my room. I was momentarily entranced by the patterns of wood grain on my bed, which hovered tantalizingly close to my touch, before joining my girlfriend on my bed, wrapped in a fuzzy blanket. I lie down and start to slip into powerful but abstract dreams and we touch and kiss, the contact feeling excellent but not particularly sexual. My body image is starting to waver a little, and the boundaries between my skin and hers are not so clear cut. I lose track of whose hand is whose as they're clasped together between us. Overall, I'm enjoying the experience; I'm well into the trip at this point.

It's difficult to estimate times from this point onwards, as it ceased to have meaning at what I would guess to be 9pm, but I will do my best. Around this point, I begin to fall inwards towards some great, private truth. I whisper the last two words as my consciousness descends past brilliant fractals and streamers of light. I become aware of the fact that I am on a journey somewhere and my mind splits into two; one level, consciously analyzing the experience that the second, deeper level is formulating as it delves deeper. I occasionally whisper words like 'meta.' A few subjective hours into this - time having dilated somewhat - the upper level of my consciousness becomes aware that it is aware and my mind shatters into an infinite number of sub-levels, each noticing a pattern to the experiences had by the level below. I'm aware of the fact that I've repeated some phrases and questions aloud, even noting the fact that I was looping.

I'm going to stop using the pronoun 'I' temporarily, as it seems inappropriate to this part of the trip. I apologize if it is a little hard to follow, but I think it more accurately reflects my mindset, such as it was, at the time.

It's lost all structure to its thought and is a being of pure consciousness. It has no self and cannot remember its own name without some effort. It has no past; that's dissolved away into the rush of sensation. Powerful synaesthesia has overcome it. All senses and states are wrapped up into the present and processed in real time. It has to remember to breathe and occasionally chokes out a laugh, feeling helpless against the undertow of unstructured existence. It repeats 'help me' in a stacatto whisper for a moment.

Fortunately, my girlfriend was tripping less hard than I was and was partway down at this point, and was able to keep me more or less sane. I asked how people formed memories or thought, being unsure of how to do either of those things. I remembered my name, birthday, her name, the drug I had taken, time, dosage and even the mantra 'You've taken something. It will stop.' The problem was that even though I told myself these things, I didn't believe them. I had no reason to believe I had an existence outside of the present. Memories seemed falsified; I didn't question reality, I had already assumed it to be false, the upper level of my mind, now having coalesced into two, trying to impress existence onto the lower level. I sit up occasionally, hoping that the wavering, colored fractals that were once walls and the snow outside would remind me that there was, in fact, a reality outside my head.

At around 10pm my psyche and ego have more or less re-emerged. My girlfriend, now more or less down, grabs my computer and plays cartoons. The distraction helps a lot and I start to recover, huddled around a pillow. At the same time, an urge to cause some harm to myself in the hopes it would snap me fully back to reality manifests, and I let my girlfriend know so she won't leave me alone. Fortunately, this urge passes within 15 minutes or so, though I see on my arm there are several marks where I had sunk my nails in.

At 11pm, after talking through some of my experiences, I'm back to a normal mental state. I feel surprisingly awake and clearheaded, not at all the worse for wear, short of an incredible amount of tension in my throat, jaw and abdomen. At the time of writing this (2am) these have all more or less subsided.

I am overall entirely unsure how to categorize my experience. The words pleasant or unpleasant don't really apply when all structure is removed from one's thought. At the very least, I now am aware of the vast ocean of consciousness that exists unbounded from reason. It could have been much, much worse if someone hadn't been there for me. In the future, I'll be a little more careful.

Exp Year: 2014	ExpID: 102625
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 20
Published: Aug 6, 2017	Views: 6,373
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4-AcO-DMT (387) : First Times (2), Small Group (2-9) (17)