DOSE:

1

oral

Cannabis

(edible / food)

BODY WEIGHT:

170 lb

Long Lasting, Highly Dissociative Experience

For about a year, I had been becoming increasingly interested in psychedelics, and while not highly interested in marijuana, I had an opportunity to get some edibles through a friend. I figured weed would be a pretty safe place to start my journey and that not much of interest would happen.

I grossly underestimated the power of edibles.

I had four cookies, and the guy I got them from told me to eat one, and then if I wanted to continue the high, to eat another after two hours. It turned out that he was messing with me and I later found out that a better starting dose would have been 1/4th of a cookie based on how potent they were. (I later gave one to a friend who is experienced with marijuana, and he almost suffered a panic attack from 1/2 of a cookie.)

Now, I figured that I'd just be relaxed and would want to chill, talk with my roommates, and maybe listen to some music or watch some psychedelic videos. So I ate the cookie and sat down in front of my computer to play Rocket League.

About 30 minutes later, while in the middle of a match, I lost touch with reality. I felt my face go numb, ringing in my ears, and a sensation of falling away from reality into my chair. I could sort of will myself out of that state though or allow myself to sink deeper into it.

After about ten minutes of wavering back and forth, I got up from my chair and walked into our kitchen where my roommate was cooking chicken. I noticed that when I got to the kitchen it felt as if it had taken hours to walk the 20 feet from my room. A few minutes later I couldn't remember how I had gotten to the kitchen. It was almost as if the kitchen had become my only reality.

Time had almost come to a stop, but was also filled with gaps. There was very little continuity. I pulled out my phone to start the stopwatch to see if the seconds looked like they were passing normally. I had my phone out in front of me with the clock app open, but I was frozen. I couldn't make myself press the start button and had to have my friend do it. The seconds appeared normal but each minute took forever to pass.

I also lost some of my sense of spatial awareness. Whatever I focused on became all that there was, so if I stared at the floor it became the wall and I was standing out of it. It felt as if the raw visual data was being sent to my brain without being interpreted in order to orient myself the right way corresponding to it.

My friend being a genius, asked me if I wanted to see how it felt to try to lift weights or do pull ups. The weights all felt super light, and I was able to do more than twice the pull ups I normally would feel comfortable doing.

I went back to my room to lie down as I was not feeling that great, but got up later to listen to music. I was able to type in the username/password to my Spotify account, but I froze again and could not click the login button, or the button to start playing the songs. The music took up much more of my awareness and the songs lasted forever.

A little while later after finishing with the music, I started to get sick and threw up. My friend tried to get me to do some yoga breathing exercises or something, but I couldn't figure out how to breathe the right way...

During this entire time, I never panicked or freaked out. I ate the cookie at 5:45pm on a Friday, and finally went to bed a little after midnight at which point I had recovered slightly.

The scary thing is that the next day I was still a little bit high, and my perception of time and space were still not back to normal . My sense of normal time returned by Monday, but my sense of spatial orientation was not fully recovered until 8 days later. Fortunately this didn't cause any difficulty with balance or performing day-to-day tasks.

Expanding on that a bit, the main differences from a mental point of view were:
1. Alteration of time
2. Alteration of perceptual awareness
3. Difficulty in imposing my will on my body

===Alteration of Time===
Time was very slow, and each action took immense amounts of preparation and effort. There was also no continuity between actions, and I was not entirely sure how I had gotten to the places where I was. If I walked into one room, it at first seemed to have taken an eternity to get there, then after a while, seemed as if I had always been there. I was unable to remember all of the events that took place while I was high, but remembered more later when discussing it with my friends.

===Alteration of Perceptual Awareness===
Whatever I focused my awareness on became all of reality and I oriented myself toward it spatially. Normally, if I am standing up and staring at a wall, I feel as if I am standing on the floor. If I then stare at the floor, I am looking at the floor at the same angle as I was the wall, but I still feel as if I was standing on the floor. When I stared at the floor, it felt as if it had become the wall and I was standing out of it.

When I was in our kitchen, it felt as if the kitchen was my only reality. It was all that existed and I’d always been there. I knew this wasn’t the case at the time, but that’s what it felt like. I believe that my visual data was being processed less than it normally is. I was experiencing things raw without context being applied (context in space, in time, in relation to other states that came before or might come after).

===Difficulty Moving Body===
Every physical movement took what felt like 15 minutes of mental preparation. It was not easy to do anything. Just reaching up to grab the water on my table took everything I had. I described it at the time as feeling as if I was trapped behind a screen and had to push through it before I could interact with my body.

Thoughts seemed to be fairly normal. I was able to think about things without noticing anything different. Closing my eyes was much more pleasant because of the difficulty in coping with all of the raw visual input.

So yeah, marijuana can be scary when using way too much edibles as a first time user. ;)

Exp Year: 2018	ExpID: 113216
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 24
Published: Jul 23, 2019	Views: 3,071
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
Cannabis (1) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Hangover / Days After (46), First Times (2)