DOSE:

1 hit

buccal

25B-NBOMe

(blotter / tab)

BODY WEIGHT:

95 kg

This spring I felt like I really needed to trip again. Last month I'd tried to buy 2cb and ketamine on the darknet and gotten scammed out of my bitcoins. However then an aquaintance offered me any 25 NBOMe's. I opted for B. The tabs were a couple years old already so maybe lost some potency, which, if this was the case I'm glad about it. It was enough for me.

I'd had some prior experience with psychedelics. I used to be on a scene where I was able to experiment and play with mdma, mda, ketamine, 2c-e, 2c-i, 2c-b, and sample as a one-off 5-meo-DMT, GBL, GHB, nitrous, cocaine, speed, opium and some legal highs. For some reason I'd always been scared of acid and shrooms - schizophrenia in the family and a feeling of a darkness somewhere I didn't want to awaken. But 2c's were somehow no issue, maybe because I'd always loved Shulgin and his writings, having discovered them online age 17.

I'd been a firm believer in doing homework and erring on the side of caution with dosages, preparation and setting. However, I was also always facing major depression way before I started experimenting with drugs. A significant part of myself wanted to kill myself and I'd tapped into that once or twice suddenly without warning, whilst on major psychedelics. So I stopped.

For two years I'd instead been trying a low dose SSRI (10mg Citalopram) which I stopped taking one week prior to this trip. The SSRI had outlived its usefulness, I'd been majorly depressed all winter. It was increase the dosage or stop it. This SSRI withdrawal had been giving me very mild 'brain zaps' and I'd sometimes shout at people for not very good reasons.

For weeks, my diary had been too full to actually have the 2 days I needed to go for the 25b, but suddenly I had some cancellations. Just having a friend come round for a jam in the evening seemed manageable, I knew he would be sympathetic and have good vibes.

On the day itself (yesterday) I had a morning routine, eating a healthy bowl of muesli with fresh fruit and smoking some sativa, cleaning bits of my room and the shared house I live in. Then I decided to take the tab, at around 1PM. I put it under my tongue and as other reports indicated, there was a numb feeling. I didn't swallow my spit for about 10-15 mins. I was chatting with a housemate and good friend all the while, making a great big sativa joint for him which I traded for a massive indica joint, which I kept for later. He showed me a Burning Man video when it kicked in about 20 mins later. It was great at first, then there was too much going on. We went in the garden, mostly him talking while I noticed a waving / breathing 'visual filter' kicking in. The stone wall was slightly waving, the leaves on plants were slightly moving. It was great to sit in the sun.

I told my flatmate that it had just kicked in. We went into the conservatoire at that point, and he said 'is it like acid?' and I said 'the visuals are a bit anyway.' 'What about that bee?' - he pointed to a bee that had gotten lost in the conservatoire throwing itself against the windowpanes of the glass ceiling. 'It's not scary. Just very green.' I got a chair and trapped the bee with a cup and some paper ('Go on! Get angry!'), releasing it outside as part of a well practised bee rescue routine. Then I retreated to my room, hauling the keyboard and amp from last night's gig upstairs for the jam later.

The house where I live is great to trip in. It features a collection of ancient, retro looking carpets and wallpapers, often with floral patterns, which were vibrating and moving. I noticed my heart was racing after carrying gear upstairs but it quickly settled down. I also had to remind myself of my recovering tendonitis in my right elbow - realising I'd need to be careful because right now I felt no pain there at all. It had been months. I put the stretching 'sock' over the arm to protect it in case I forgot and proceeded with setting up gear.

At around T+0:45 the placing of larger items was done no problem but I was tripping too hard to actually plug up the cables. I rolled a sativa joint with minor difficulty.

Rolling the joint I noticed again how with this drug, focussing on something seemed to block out awareness of the wider world as if going into a quiet room with only the object of focus itself present there. Pulling awareness back to the environment / present moment wasn't difficult but always felt like having returned from somewhere.

I'd read trip reports of 25B before taking it, and left one open on my laptop. Throughout the trip I was never worried I might forget I was tripping but left it there as a reminder just in case. Also because it had precise timings which I referred to throughout as a rough guide to what to expect. Most importantly it said something about the tripper's introspection having been done around T+5:00: This gave me confidence I could trip deeply now and be fine when my friend would arrive at around T+6:00.

There were still preparations to be done. Hunting for the right cable to connect the tunes up to the amp I'd carried upstairs was very comical because the cable was sitting right there but just outside a sort of cone of attention appearing to be strictly limited to 2 metres. Now I found myself navigating to the tunes folder on another shared computer AND doing a task I just remembered would be really great to not leave unfinished, which was to electronically sign and return a document to someone as pdf with a thank you note. I completed each step with amusing difficulty thanks to the built in magnifier, hit send and quickly closed the mail app wich was beginning to scare me. Up to now I'd been playing funk and happy, sunny vibes. Now the tripping was coming to a head, I felt. Sitting on the chair was quickly becoming intolerable. (Otherwise there had only been some light nausea but no 'chemical spews'.) I managed to roll another sativa joint. By that point I was feeling as wasted as I ever was, reminded of a heavy mdma body load. With with great effort I put on Pentamerous Metamorphosis by Global Communication, a snap choice / old tripping favourite, then got into bed smoking the joint (which I never do usually).

During that album I got everything I had hoped tripping again would be. A deep personal journey began as I started phasing out more and more whilst smoking the joint. The cannabis definitely influenced the visuals but it also felt like an ally. Seeing the smoke made my vision strobe.

There had been a lot of anger and loneliness in the past few months, and I was able to look at them. A bird's eye view of my life over time appeared whereas I'm usually stuck in a cannabis-dominated present moment. First there was a great avalanche of thoughts which even the day after are hard to collect. Fragments. Thinking about RD Laing's phrase from 'Knots' - 'They are playing a game. The first rule is that this is not a game, this is deadly serious.' I thought I hadn't really understood this one before but now did, and could think of concrete examples in the past of when people had reacted very badly to me treating their social game as game and not deadly serious.

A great many memories of other trips came back, especially things I can't really remember when straight because they happened to a chemically different brain. All the emotional dams which regular heavy weed use helps me build were temporarily absent. I looked at how alone I am, and it was some, but not totally. I thought of the thin connections to the people who I love, who love me, which usually doesn't hurt. Some of the anger I'd recently expressed also hurt thinking about. I took a hard look at my professional life too. I looked at my motivations for quitting the SSRI, and how it had felt taking it, and how it had felt after stopping it: how over one week a hard shell of a feeling had crept in without me noticing.

There was a 'squishy' unpleasant driving feeling that had begun to build. I initially could have taken it for lust, and was about to masturbate to some online porn (I'd actually gotten in a quick wank right after I'd gotten up the stairs, there was incredible, saliva-producing lust and I nearly pooped when I came) but instead decided to embrace this squishy pushing feeling and see what it wanted. (It turned out to be the thing I was after, so it's good I didn't run from it as I was tempted to.) I noticed what thoughts came out of leaning into the feeling. First remembering one therapist who had really helped me, whom I'd also quit. What a rough time it had been. Then my ex girlfriend from last year - we fell out badly. I never cried for her, forgot the feeling of love out of spite. It was coming back now. The woman and myself so far away from each other in terms of our different selves, unable to understand, unable to get along, our insecurities fusing... but she held me, with all my complexities and fears, for one moment… There was a great flowing of tears and mucus. I didn't try to get away from the pain, actually goddamn welcomed the opportunity for it to flow through me instead of having to keep it down all the time. I don't really recommend it or would even call this working on myself but it felt like I was able to let go an amount of pain. Somewhere in the middle there once again the reminder not to forget to keep working with my depression. A therapist. Allowing this feeling to come out in art. Do the really hard thing, work with it. Sometimes in there phrases of how I could describe this state to friends later? 'It was the real headfuck' / 'Everything you expect from a trip' / 'It was all the good stuff' / 'It was face melting' / 'Young man realised energy and matter are really the same. Film at 11' (Bill Hicks) etc. but how to really describe it, after all?

This was ca. T+3:30. I sat up in bed and noticed the final song of the album had just came on. I'd not noticed any songs in between. It seemed to have been a very long time. Maybe it was what I call the timeless space, I sometimes visited it on ketamin before. (I think some Bach pieces speak of it.) I sat up in bed, lit the rest of the joint that was still there, and cried a little more as the last song afforded. But at the same time I was, with some effort, coming back to a lower plateau of tripping. I also did some visualisations like a lotus flower closing on my forehead. I put on some trousers which always gives a more contained feeling.

Finally I lit that indica joint from earlier. So useful. So dependable. That indica had a real grounding feeling after all the sativa.I put on Black Sands by Bonobo and it was exquisite. I started to put finishing touches on tidying my room for my friend's visit later. I visited my Jack Herer plants, looking happy in their soil with their CFLs and their fans humming away. Finally I dared go downstairs into the garden where I sat in the sun mostly enjoying closed eye visuals of finely-etched fractals coming in and out of focus like one of those fancy new camera tricks. Very HD looking.

Finally I decided to eat something - about T+5:00 I made a salad with goats cheese, halloumi, tomatoes and hungrily ate some slices of bread with camembert. All was delicious. I loved eating the little leaves. I ended up eating with my fingers. As I'd eaten very little the day before the trip, I had been hungry, and a negative feeling had been creeping in from the hunger, now replaced with exuberant joy of having eaten. I played 'On a faraway beach' by Brian Eno as a sort of victory song.

At this time I was still tripping, with some visuals, and definitely the focus tunnel thing still happening. I plugged up some old fashioned gear like a casio SH 101 and a Korg digital delay and my new digital piano, but seemed to be scared of making sound. I'd set up speakers seriously left and right and the geometries the delay was suggesting were freaking me out. But at that point able to put tunes on like 'Conversations on Twin Peaks' by Nicolas Jaar which I think would've been way to scary for me before, and doing more cleaning.

T +5:00 until T+9:00 I didn't care a lot for this phase of the trip. My friend visiting me was cool as I'd expected. I did feel a bit awkward after disclosing I was tripping but it was manageable. I would've preferred not to be fraught with the responsibilities of a host while still tripping, but I was able to do a good job of it. I kept going away little bits and during this time things felt closed off, and I felt dumbed down by the trip. Like at that point all the weed that I'd been smoking had been hitting me. My friend introduced some blueberry kush, another nice indica, though. I got ableton setup and soon was recording my friend jamming out on a Roland Juno and myself jamming a little Korg drum machine, which sometimes was quite fucking intense to me, and got about 4 files worth of clips down. My friend was happy with his visit. I'd previously found 2C-B does incredible things with playing music, especially grooves becoming solid enough to touch and hold synaesthesia, but I'm not sure 25B has this component. I haven't listened to the jams yet but it is a hunch.

Finally, after my music friend had left, I did another indica trade with my housemate, enjoying some unusually open conversation before flagging suddenly after the 2nd or 3rd joint.

This morning I don't feel ill after effects. I was pretty annoyed waking up this morning but I usually am and as usual it faded after a joint or two. I'm pretty happy I took the trip. I'm glad I took it spontaneously without working up too much expectations for it. I didn't know what to expect but it was a serious psychedelic. I'm really not unhappy the tab was a bit older and mellower. There were a couple tripping snags I navigated. Probably a good idea to treat this drug with plenty respect.

Exp Year: 2016	ExpID: 108365
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 36
Published: Dec 3, 2018	Views: 2,899
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25B-NBOMe (564) : Combinations (3), Music Discussion (22), Depression (15), First Times (2), Alone (16)