DOSE:	600 mg	oral	DXM	(extract)
	0.5 joints/cigs	smoked	Cannabis	(plant material)

BODY WEIGHT:

120 lb

I drank the extracted powder in a series of tense sips. Immediately, my heart began pounding. I’d been gung ho about this planned mental vacation for days, but upon ingesting the substance, I began suffering the dread that always accompanies the come on. This time it was more severe than ever. I began to think I’d done too much and was in for a hell-ride at the very least. My fears seemed to be confirmed as the swoon came over me, a sort of clean alcohol-like intoxication. There was a fiery buzz which felt like my brain-cells burning. It wasn’t supposed to be this hot. My hands started tingling, then my body became totally numb. Then I slipped into the semi-lucid delirium. This wasn’t supposed to happen for hours. Fuck.

My thoughts quickly spiraled into a negative feedback loop. I flushed my mind down the toilet of my soul into the dark, grimy, internal plumbing of my sadomasochistic psyche. Shite! I was nothing and I was everything. Everything was nothing, a rotting stinking nothing, a scab-maroon/sucrets-crimson alpha and a black suicide omega, all of no consequence. I’d created all perception through my being, and now I was going to destroy that being, I was going to be the God that failed, I was manufacturing meaning, and the meaning was: This is it. The truth. The absurdity, first hand. It was a glimpse of limits, ugly jagged contours, and hard edges.

Then the voice started talking to me. “You have to face this truth in order to be enlightened.” I didn’t want to face anything, but I didn’t want to run back into my hidey-hole of delusion either, not after being thrust out of orbit and twisted into a new spin resonance.

Stepping outside into the cool fresh air (and escaping the reek of the sucrets smoothie) helped for a while, but the panic eventually invaded this sanctuary. I went back inside and called a friend. She’d been my savior in unholy hubristic schemes before. “Gretchen, are you there? It’s me, Faust. I’ve gotten myself into a bit of a mindfuck again. I’m on the wagon. Or is that off? And where is the destination? And is there really a wagon, anyway? Oh crap, I don’t know what the prepositional matrix is here, or there, or anywhere.”

Gretchen calmed me enough to keep me out of the sewers of my mind, but I felt her presence was needed. She came over and kept me distracted from the existential inferno. I agreed it would be a good idea to smoke a joint, so I took a few tokes. This immediately reversed the polarity of the trip from negative to positive, while intensifying the disorientation.

There was substantial visual distortion. Everything jittered, staggered, jerked away from focus in a taunting smear. Double-vision, triple-vision, morpho-vision, strobe-vision. Field of view as skewed texture. Two-dimensional depth-condensation. Two-headed Gretchen in a flowing, flowering split. Googly-eyed. Becker, my cat on top of a cart, bouncing up into view again and again, boing boing boing. Spinning, looking down, seeing alien continents in the kitchen floor, linoleum tile coastlines. I was a brobdignagian towering above creation. Prepositions scrambled, inverted, flanged, fused. Holding my computer mouse, I noticed that my left and right hands felt inverted. There was no ambiguity about this feeling. Although I moved normally, the sensation persisted. Mixed-signals to limbs alternated with complete anesthesia. Body felt spring-loaded, all actions were sweeping arcs – supermotion. I often felt too tall, and sometimes floating – like a ghost. Sound was difficult to describe. Distant, disconnected. Time alternately dilated and condensed. There were episodes of slow motion. I heard myself stretching out syllables for ages but in a normal tone of voice in a normal delivery attempt.

Then came the fugue state. Mental polyphony. Multiple “voices” in my head – not literal voices, but lines of thought, forming cognitive counterpoint and divergent mind’s eye visual streams. A highly artistic flange. A multi-dimensional synesthetic music video. This coalesced into the form of ink-rendered hallucinations. “My visions” – motific mental imagery sprouting from the fractal seed of the artwork I’d been drawing the last few weeks. The infinitely-regressing pen-scratched biomechanical landscapes gave way to a fluorescent spinning circuit – a torus cave half-fused with a rapid counterclockwise circumnavigation of the first-floor interior of my house. In the cerebral extract of this information, I sensed profundity in and of itself – importance as purity – something deep, and yet, negatively charged. The green tidepool – the fornicating fountain – the finite flow. Something to face? Or something to get past?

In this blur, it was hard to find the edges of good and evil. I was near a state of debauchery. Euphoria and dysphoria blended into a singular emotional intensity. I’d been rocked to both extremes until the emotional waves superimposed and neutralized. I was flooded with alien intuition, inanimate insights under cartoon cover, set to a soundtrack, out of the black, slowly squeezing into my mind, agents of the static, shrouded in the light. I made some attempts at dragging my pseudo-satanic tripmate into the vortex of nihilism I'd torn in the fabric of reality, for company in the semantic tidepool of finity (sic), but she was on an angular plane. The bisection was “hunter s. thompson crazy”. Ah yes, I remember. Gonzo perfecto. A fishjump. A Neil Armstrong step. Staggering crystalline confusion with mashed-potatoes of cliched expression and a gravy of novelty.

I was being given a tour of a future initiation, overseen by an inner entity – the me that is the dark half of reality. I was being shown a stark and terrible, yet noble and beautiful truth – but I couldn’t fully comprehend it, because I had already declined to face it when the delirium came on. My inner entity accepted that I wasn’t ready, and would not force the vision on me. But the sense I got from that oblique imagery with its non-local semantic attachment was that existence is profoundly finite – there is no me, and there is ONLY me – I am all that is, and when I end there will be NOTHING. A few hours later, still riding the storm, in a surprisingly lucid transcription, I wrote down the Nietszche quote: “When you look into the void, the void looks into you”. If I was a psychological reductionist, I would say that this was an amplification of my obsessive fears over death.

I work easy - I slack hard.

Faust shrugged. Mephistopheles had his cake and ate it too, with a fork too long for the damned to use. He was a moving gravity well of hell, bending the rules to his will.

I was right, it was to be edited, and this is it. The packaging of the memory – the wrapping of the all-purpose void – the vacuum seal – the surface. To be put under the tree and not opened until judgement day when my old pal Mephistopheles comes to tempt me once again – will I have the nerve to accept? To indulge indulgence itself, to sacrifice to the revelry, to summon Satan and complete the trip? To face the finite?

Here’s what I wrote while in the grip of the trip:

“I'll never be able to explain this night. It was crazy. It defied the laws of metaphysics AND physics. It defied EVERYTHING just for the hell of it! It was DEFYNITION COGNITION. It was another tango with the universe. Damn, I can't explain. It was set to a Mahler Symphony. It watched over Gretchen and me. Ham, and honey-mustard sauce on the side. It is uncredible. IneKlieneMichteMuszike. It is a ridiculous catharsis with headphones on. It will be edited. It is it. What do I write? Fugue collapsed. State vector decayed. Lime pile of pulsating limonide dream contours plagellated nicely onward forward. Flow. Flow. Flow. Low. Drip. Dripe. Type. Tip. Tripe. I’ve broken through. To the afterglow plateau. I’ve got a chestnut in my hand. I’ve seen what I will eventually have to FACE. Emerging from the haze - I don't know what to say. I was elsewhere. I got the prototype. I saw things. Hung around with a real hallucination. I'm still reeling. Can't articulate properly. Jesus. This is a sigma aftermath. Still roiling in Dextro's ripple. Higher than I'd thought. Oh my God, was all I could say. There's something I'll have to face one day. My visions. Everyone's got their own. It's a preparation for death, just like the gurus say.”

Gretchen left after a reasonable interlude of supervision. I walked around in a daze, whispering words of rumored rapture until sufficiently fatigued to climb into bed. I remained high as a space-kite. I wondered if I would ever come down. I closed my eyes, but I would not sleep. Instead, I entered a perfectly benign, half-sleeping state in which visual nirvana filled the cracks in consciousness. It was the music video I remembered from my first DXM experience – a rolling consonant collage of alien sounds and whirling, writhing textures. The voice was gone, and I knew I no longer had to think. There were no associated insights, just a soothing, grooving, washing stimulus – retirement for my overworked brain – the beatific end to this dextro-universe – this microcosm.

What do I make of this?

I read what I wrote during the rave, when dressed in the emperor’s new clothes (fractionally-phenomenal garments inversely spun of an old deja-thread.) I sensed sincerity in the often-nonsensical sentences. It was an honest transcription of the chaotic convergence.

I maintain that dextromethorphan is my friend, though an enigmatic ally, and one to be called upon rarely. I find that dextro is best mediated with my more stable pharmacological partner, cannabis. I’m sure all three of us will meet again, but not soon. I’ve got to give it some time.

Exp Year: 2002	ExpID: 18361
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jul 13, 2008	Views: 63,105
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
DXM (22) : General (1), Mystical Experiences (9), Alone (16)