DOSE:	7 glasses	oral	Alcohol - Beer/Wine
	600 mg	oral	DXM	(pill / tablet)
	3 glasses	oral	Alcohol - Beer/Wine

BODY WEIGHT:

155 lb

I am a recovering alcoholic and have abused prescription drugs as well. I have a history of depression, anxiety, ADHD, and executive functioning issues. This was probably my fifth experience tripping on DXM over the course of about six years. DXM is the only hallucinogen I’ve ever done. My dosage on my previous trips ranged from about 200 to 400 mg, and I never went beyond the second plateau.

This DXM trip, like all my previous trips, occurred during an alcohol relapse during which I was in a fairly negative mindset. Since I am used to being in control of my experiences, DXM both scares and fascinates me. Alcohol helps get me into a relaxed mindset before tripping. Unlike in previous experiences, I spend much of this trip with the lights on. Normally, I’m a bit worried about having intense visual hallucinations and believe that any hallucinations will be milder if it’s dark.

The day of the trip, I wake up late with a hangover and a general sense of malaise, as I have the previous several days. I have about 3/4 of a bottle of wine left from the previous day and begin drinking at around 4:00 p.m. At 6:30 p.m. I buy two more bottles of wine. An hour or so later, I go to the pharmacy to pick up some stuff and then get takeout. While I’m in the pharmacy, I think, “Eh, fuck it,” and decide to buy two 20-count bottles of 15 mg DXM Tussin capsules (600 mg in total). I get home and around 11:00 p.m. take the DXM capsules over the course of 30 minutes. I’ve consumed seven glasses of wine by then. I am alone essentially throughout the trip, as I have been during all previous DXM trips.

T+0:00 to T+0:30. I take the capsules. I am a bit drunk and in a bad mood while arguing with my girlfriend on the phone. The argument is about the fact that I relapsed on alcohol. In my drunkenness, I also acknowledge that I’ve been having some trouble shaking residual feelings I have for a friend I broke off contact with several months earlier due to said feelings, which tend to come out when I am drunk. I also mention that I’ve taken some over-the-counter recreational drugs. I am binge-watching the TV show “Friday Night Lights,” which proves relevant. In my experience, DXM takes a long time to hit me, so I’m not really thinking about it at all. I do not have any particular expectations of the trip.

T+0:30 to T+5:00. My time is spent lying on the couch, divided between watching “Friday Night Lights” and surfing the Internet. Over the course of this period, I consume another two or three glasses of wine. A few hours in, I start thinking about the DXM and wondering whether it’s kicked in/ why it hasn’t. The delayed onset of perceptible DXM effects may be attributable to my alcohol intoxication.

I spend some time reading about DXM on the internet. I’m trying to get a better sense of what to expect. 600 mg is far more than I’ve ever taken. I’m feeling a combination of mild nervousness and excitement. For me, hallmarks of DXM intoxication include a virtual inability to read due to blurriness in my near vision and closed-eye visualizations (CEVs). I pull up an online copy of The Great Gatsby to test out my reading vision. I sense little to no impairment. No CEVs either.

I tell myself I need to resolve things with my girlfriend and forget about this former friend once and for all. I decide that the “theme” of my DXM trip will be forgetting about this other girl and redirecting those feelings into affection for my girlfriend. I think I got this “theme” idea from my first DXM trip, when I got into a repetitive thought loop that is difficult to remember/articulate.

T+5:00 to T+7:00. I find myself pausing “Friday Night Lights” frequently. I’ve largely lost interest in/the ability to focus on it and spend most of my mental energy trying to monitor DXM effects, still wondering if it’s really kicked in. Each time I pause the show, I get lost in thought. I’m not subjectively aware of strong effects and feel disappointed/like nothing much is going to happen.

T+7:00 to T+12:00. I peak during this period. I find that reading is blurrier, and I start to notice CEVs. I play music on my phone. For reasons I still don’t understand, no matter how many times I hit the next song button, my music app cycles among only three songs: “Sweet Jane” by Velvet Underground, “Sweet Dreams” by Eurythmics, and “Sweet Caroline” by Neil Diamond. The music is vivid and immersive, and I feel as though I live inside the songs. I listen to these songs repeatedly, particularly “Sweet Jane” (which I have always found trippy and associate with DXM), and find the music endlessly fascinating. Time is extraordinarily difficult to quantify. I keep checking the time but each time have trouble remembering what time it was the last time I checked. Minutes feel like hours. It’s very possible I only cycled through the songs a few times.

As is typical for me with DXM, every object in my surroundings takes on a human/living creature quality. Nothing is talking to me, and the shapes don’t really change or anything, I just sense they are animate. There are a bunch of objects and bottles on the coffee table in front of me. They seem like some sort of audience. I find myself standing in front of the paused TV, like it’s a projector with a PowerPoint or game film or something. I take on the persona of Eric Taylor from “Friday Night Lights” (the head football coach). I’m speaking in his authoritative Southern accent, which to me at least sounds spot on (I normally have a standard American accent). I can be pretty good at accents, but this is too spot on. I wonder if it’s actually me speaking. I don’t remember what I talked about, but I am in front of the TV lecturing the bottles and objects scattered on the coffee table in front of me. It’s some sort of game-planning/ strategy speech, but I’m quite sure it has nothing to do with football. I keep using the word “we” as though we are all part of some team or unit.

Next thing I know I’m in this blurry, yellowish environment. My vision is flanging. The environment is filled with flat, equally spaced hexagonal objects. Again, I feel as though I’m leading a strategy meeting. My best guess is I’m in the sort of war situation room you’d see in a movie, speaking to military leaders. Nothing about my physical environment looks like a situation room, it’s just an intuition. My sense of objects and scenarios is vague, malleable, and incoherent.

I feel flat and dissociated from my emotions, which is typical for me on DXM. It’s the opposite of feeling drunk. I’m not at all buzzed, woozy, or dizzy. There is no sense of warmth or connectedness. My eyes just feel glazed over like I’ve been staring at a computer screen too long. I say out loud (multiple times) something like: “Everything is so normal. Too normal. So normal that it’s weird.” I say it partially to reassure myself I’m not totally losing it, partially because I feel so flat and dull.

I have a weird feeling that there is something behind me, both part of and separate from me. I realize that I’m actually sitting on the toilet naked in my bathroom taking a shit. The hexagonal objects are the floor tiles, which are vaguely yellowish. This comes to me as an amazing insight. “You’re/ it’s just a guy taking a shit,” I say to myself out loud repeatedly. I recognize a character from the situation room fantasy as my shirt lying wrinkled on the floor. My mind loops back and forth between the situation room fantasy and the guy taking a shit reality. This process goes on for what feels like hours.

I’m aware I’m very fucked up on DXM, so I worry that in my haphazard state I haven’t wiped my ass properly and/ or have shit on the floor or something. I keep checking to make sure my ass is clean (I think it just felt weird because I was sweating profusely in that area) and there is no shit on the floor. Eventually I stumble out of the bathroom back to the couch in a sort of heavy-footed mummy walk, using the walls for balance. With each step, my vision alternates frames between pitch black and the floor in front of me, almost like I’m cycling between sleep and wakefulness.

Back on the couch my vision is wavy, and things appear in twos and threes. It’s hard to keep my eyes open, and I cycle between the external environment, CEVs, and what feel like periods of lost time with my eyes closed. I suspect the periods of lost time are actually CEVs and associated thought loops rather than sleep. I have control over my CEVs in that I can imagine something I want to think about and the CEVs adapt to some degree. My CEVs come in a variety of colors and always start with the colorful pattern of the rug on my floor before evolving into something else. I try to incorporate the “theme” I mentioned earlier into my CEVs. I’m not sure it had much effect, but I remember thinking about my girlfriend a lot.

When my mind is on the external environment, I keep focusing on my legs at the other end of the couch. I feel as though different parts of my body are different beings. I keep talking about “us” and then remind myself that what I’m looking at is a unified person. I know this person is me, but it feels like “he,” as I keep calling him, is someone else.

T+12:00 to T+17:00. By about T+14:00, I’m ready for the trip to be over. It feels as though it’s been hours and hours (which it has), if not days. I spend most of this period in my bed trying to sleep, but CEVs make that pretty much impossible. I drift in and out of awareness. I talk to my girlfriend on the phone a few times, which helps me chill. I’m still worried that I shit on the floor, and I walk to the bathroom several times to make sure it’s clean. Every time I get near the bathroom, I perceive an intense shit smell, more like dog shit than human shit (I don’t have pets), and get paranoid that I shit somewhere and am just too fucked up to find it. I never find any shit. I later learn that DXM can intensify your sense of smell, and I think I was picking up on some slight non-shit smell and interpreting it as intensely shitty.

T+17:00: I take a walk for an hour or so on the nature trail by my place. The fresh air and outdoors make me feel so much better. My psychomotor coordination is pretty much back to normal. It feels as though the nature walk has cast away any residual DXM effects.

T+21:00. I have a three-hour drive to make. I’m exhausted, but I’m totally clearheaded and fit to drive. It’s hard to keep my eyes open, but I have no perceptual disturbances. However, I must concentrate hard to avoid spacing out. It’s dark out, and I have the sense that if I let myself space out, the open road might create some interesting visual distortions. If I weren’t in the driver’s seat, I would test out this theory. I have the sense that if I closed my eyes for a little while, I might have some CEVs. I talk to my girlfriend on the phone for much of the drive to ensure I remain tethered to reality. I listen to some music, and it’s amazing. I never fully appreciated DXM’s effects on music until now. I listen to Lana Del Rey’s “Venice Bitch,” which has long trippy stretches of instrumentals. I feel absorbed in every note. The guitar plucks are so rich.

[Erowid Note: Driving while intoxicated, tripping, or extremely sleep deprived is dangerous and irresponsible because it endangers other people. Don't do it!]
T+24:00. I arrive at my destination, my girlfriend’s place. I ask her to take over for the 20-minute drive to the place we’re staying because I’m so tired. I’ve hardly eaten during the DXM trip because DXM kills my appetite in large part because food tastes bland. I eat some when we get to my place, but the food is bland and unsatisfying.

T+25:00. We go to bed. I want to sleep, but I find that when I close my eyes the CEVs have returned. They don’t lead me into any sort of dissociative trance-like state as they did earlier. I see beautiful patterns of blue and green: grass, mountains, sky, and water. I describe my CEVs to my girlfriend as they are happening, and she finds them interesting. I tell her she would like them.

I finally fall asleep and sleep for maybe 12 hours. I feel fresh and rested when I wake up. My sense of taste comes back, and I enjoy eating lots of delicious food throughout the day. The experience was more positive than negative and highly memorable. I enjoyed the experience overall, though I would have liked it to end much sooner. However, since anything other than total abstinence from mind-altering substances causes problems for me, I don’t intend to do it again.

Exp Year: 2022	ExpID: 116245
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 34
Published: Feb 26, 2025	Views: Not Supported
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