DOSE:

100 mg

oral

Melatonin

(capsule)

BODY WEIGHT:

160 lb

To preface this experience with a background I am a former Marine Infantryman and I saw very heavy combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. I have never used illegal drugs or even tried to use legal ones to get high. I’m a very stoic dependable guy, and have been relied on by other friends to trip-sit for everything from shrooms to DMT, but haven’t ever personally used anything stronger than booze or cigarettes in my life. I have never even smoked weed, never even once. I struggled with alcohol a bit after coming back into civilian life and quit the stuff completely when I was diagnosed with PTSD and Depression. Depression went right away as soon as I stopped drinking, and after a few years the PTSD stuff went away for the most part.

Having come through 6 years of war more or less unscathed I had still developed horrible insomnia. I really wasn’t having flashbacks or bad dreams or anything like that, I just would hit 3 or 4 day periods where I could only sleep a few hours a night and would be totally restless throughout. Well, one day my brother told me melatonin was a really great sleep aid, I told him I didn’t want sleeping pills because I don’t like waking up feeling dopey and drugged, and that I already have some mental predilections towards substance induced depression. He assured me that this stuff was totally not a sleeping pill and that it would simply make my sleep feel more restful without any of the dopey side effect. He gave me a bottle or 50mg capsules and I decided to try them the next time I had an insomnia attack.

So fast forward a few weeks, haven’t slept in two days, and I’m staring at my bleary eyed miserable visage in the mirror when I remember the melatonin sitting inside the drawer next to me. I took two of the 50mg capsules and swallowed them, then lay back on my bed. I was out like a light in about 10 minutes and blasted into what may be the most disturbing night’s sleep of my life. To say I had a bad dream is an understatement, I had the first and most horrid trip of my life and having no prior experience with such phenomenon was totally lost and panicked throughout.

When I fell asleep I was immediately back in Sangin Afghanistan in the loudest most crazy firefight I’ve ever seen. Waves of rotting corpses that were also on fire were ferally clawing and shrieking at me as I unloaded a machine gun into them. The bodies would burst open and maggots would pour out, mortars and rockets shrieked in and detonated with the most terrifying reality I have ever experienced in a dream spraying maggots and still somehow screaming rotten meat everywhere. I was desperately looking around and screaming for the rest of my squad but I was all alone and trapped in a feeling of total and utter isolation. Despite the total reality of the dream I was utterly unable to understand that it was not real. It was 100% lifelike and as far as my brain was concerned was really happening. I tried to run and hide from the waves of screaming burning corpses crawling at me into a house, It was totally dark inside and I didn’t want to go in, but there was nowhere to go. I entered the house and it was totally dark, not just regular darkness, but an utterly black and bottomless abyssal void. Nothing but my racing heart and heavy breath made any sound as I crept through the impenetrable darkness.

Then I began to hear somebody whispering in Pashto and began to panic. It seemed to be all around me and no matter how I tried to blindly run or crawl it was always getting closer. I could smell burning flesh and the voices whispering in Pashto were talking about capturing me and cutting my head off on the news so my family could watch me die like an infidel pig (I speak fluent Pashto, and the reality of the dream was so great that the voices hunting me did too.) A wet hand with flesh hanging off in ribbons plunged out of the dark and clamped around my ankle, I tried to fire my weapon but it just fell apart in my hands, then I began to scream as it dragged me at great speed with tremendous strength into the void.

My wife woke me up and I reflexively punched her in the face knocking her off the bed. She told me that I had started shrieking bloody murder out of nowhere and thrashing around like I was having a seizure. I was bathed in sweat and my throat was hoarse for 3 days from the screaming I had been doing. I was able to settle down and get my wife’s sore jaw some ice and ibuprofen before collapsing back into a restless sleep full of formless nightmares where reality was shattering and collapsing in crystalline crashing waves of vibrating lines. I have no personal psychedelic experiences to compare that nights dreams to, but frankly I think that what I had was more of a psychedelic experience than anything else.

For the rest of the next day life felt really weird and surreal, like I might still be dreaming and not know it or that reality was slightly and subtly disjointed. My wife wrote off my panicked right-hook to her face as a night terror because she’s an awesome lady, and I did some bleary eyed research the next day on my laptop while she made jokes about quitting her job to become an MMA fighter. I discovered that I had taken a MASSIVE dose of Melatonin, 10 to 100 times what people normally take for regular sleep supplementation. My working theory is that between the abnormally high dose I took, my PTSD, and the 3 blast related brain injuries I have sustained that I triggered something far more crazy inside my poor abused noggin than most people will experience with melatonin.

Exp Year: 2018	ExpID: 111803
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 27
Published: Jan 28, 2022	Views: 767
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
Dreams (85), Melatonin (94) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Therapeutic Intent or Outcome (49), Difficult Experiences (5), First Times (2)