DOSE: T+ 0:00	883 mg	oral	DXM
T+ 1:20	883 mg	oral	DXM
T+ 0:00		smoked	Tobacco - Cigarettes
T+ 6:30		oral	2C-I

BODY WEIGHT:

165 lb

My roommate Rob is abstaining from alcohol. That’s how it started. I would have gone pub-crawling in old town Portsmouth, but I decided to stay home and do drugs with him instead, because I’m a good friend.

His night was a lineup of E, DXM (dex), and 2C-I. I decided to robo-trip. I haven’t robo-tripped in a long time, and I looked forward to a break from psychedelics and an earlier year of cocaine use that I’ve finally gotten out of my system. I’ve had a lot of fun every time I’ve been high on cough syrup, and I felt nostalgic.

During this story, I’ve been awake since noon of the previous day. I’ve noticed a positive correlation between a lack of sleep and the intensity of mind-altering substances. I don’t know if that correlation is scientifically valid or just my experience, but it might be important to note.

I went to Wal-Mart with my unemployed landlord to buy cough syrup. I bought two bottles of Delsym, 883-ish mgs of dextromethorphan polistirex each, and opened the first in the parking lot.

T=0, about 6:50 PM; through T=20, about 7:10 PM. 883 mgs of dextromethophan polistirex consumed.

A friend called me on the way home to see what was up. I told him I was driving around drinking cough syrup. We went back to the house. I nursed the first bottle of cough syrup for half an hour. The effects kicked in much faster than I expected. I was definitely high within an hour of finishing it—probably because my stomach had been empty since that morning.

There were four of us getting high: my landlord Matt, only on spice, toking up periodically; my friend Rob, abstaining from alcohol; and another friend who took some dex, spice, and 2C-I throughout the night. I put off drinking the second bottle because everyone else was relatively sober and I wasn’t comfortable with a big head start.

T=1:20, about 8:10 PM. 883 mgs of dextromethorphan polistirex consumed.

I chugged the second bottle of Delsym. I felt pretty high. We were watching the beginning of Walk Hard, but everyone voted for Fear and Loathing instead.

Early in the movie all of our drugs kicked in nicely. Fear and Loathing is very conducive to drug use. My high was still climbing.

I stepped onto the back porch for a cigarette and got a call from a friend I had talked to earlier in the afternoon, named Fred. He mentioned earlier that he might drop by, but I had forgotten somewhere in that day’s rush of errands and drugs. I was talking to him about whatever, while I mindlessly wandered off the porch and around the house. I saw him walking from his car to my front door. That was the first weird experience of the night. In retrospect, he had obviously called to let me know he was here. I told him to come through the back door, into the living room with me, where our friends were.

We evoked responses equivalent to ‘what the fuck?!’ from our friends. As I said, we were all pretty high at this point. My mind and body felt increasingly disjointed, as I expect from any good robo-trip.

Somebody mentioned munching on something. I excitedly remembered seeing a box of Gushers in the cupboard a day or two ago. I grabbed it and pulled out a handful of Fruit Rollups. I was pissed. I handed the box to somebody and we deduced that it was a variety pack of chewy fruit candy, and someone already ate all the gushers. It was the one roommate absent that night, Jacob. Why would he buy a variety box, when all we want are Gushers for tripping and rolling, and then eat all the Gushers by himself, probably while sober? Asshole.

Somebody proposed a road trip for Gushers, now that we had a sober friend. We left the house and Rob starting ranting about the street sign on our lawn. There’s a long, unrelated story behind our street sign. I’m not going into the back-story. He decided it had to go. He and I pulled it out of the ground, carried it across the street, and heaved it into an empty lot. The five of us were going to pile into our sober friend’s Focus, but those who hadn’t called shotgun had space complaints.

“You’re either on the bus, or you’re off the bus.”

Instead, we took my landlord’s Blazer. Riding in a car was an adventure. I suggested driving to Richmond, over an hour away, now that I was in the mood for a journey. Our sober friend Fred drove around a lot of random streets and in circles on the way to the gas station. I thought we really were going to Richmond. When we got there—to the gas station, not Richmond--the process of buying Gushers was too much for me. Fred drove around aimlessly for a while once again on the way back to the house. Upon our return, Fear and Loathing was still on. Without the time perspective from catching the end of the movie, I would have actually thought we made a three-hour round trip to a gas station in another city in the middle of the night.

After Fear and Loathing we threw in SLC Punk. One of our friends drove back to his house for the night. He said he felt normal, until he texted us that he had no idea how he got home. My landlord Matt went to bed. I got the bright idea to take some 2C-I. I felt like being a cosmonaut. My friends and I have gotten very comfortable with 2C-I after so many trips. Recently I’ve taken to dipping a finger in my 500 mg bag and licking off whatever unknown amount. That’s exactly what I did.

T=6:30, give or take twenty minutes, about 1:20 AM. 20+ mgs of 2C-I consumed.

I was still robo-tripping pretty hard, although the waves were definitely subsiding. I historically enjoy pushing the limits of my psyche, and getting a good story. Maybe I’ve seen Fear and Loathing one too many times, maybe I give in to peer pressure too easily, or maybe I’m just stupid.

“You’re asking whether or not you should take it, which means you want to take it, and you’re going to talk yourself into it either way, so just take it.”

Our sober friend Fred passed out on the couch, and Rob said he was going to attempt sleep as well. Now it’s only me. I knew I wouldn’t be able sleep for a while. I figured I would just climb into bed until I drifted off.

T=7:19, about 2:09 AM. Here’s where things get really weird.

So I sleep naked, and that’s how I went to bed.

Bear with me. It’s difficult to find a starting point for this part of the story. My memory doesn’t have a starting point. In my experience, dissociatives and psychedelics have a very synergetic effect: 2C-I and spice, shrooms and dex, etc. When I went to bed, the medium-to-high level of dex, and the medium-to-high level of 2C-I took hold and ran amok in my head.

My brain reset for the night and I saw big patches of color slowly growing and moving outward, in a spiral, from a beginning, kind of like an upside down cone. That was all I knew about existence. I didn’t know anything about thought, people, bedrooms or the universe. I was a patch of color somewhere in this pattern.

My earliest thoughts were a hope that there was more than this moving pattern. I hoped something would develop. This could have been a closed-eye visual, but my best guess is that these patches of color were abstracts of things in my room, and I was just looking all around. It felt like a very intense salvia trip. My next thought was of a salvia trip, in fact. I’ve experienced many, so I knew all I had to do was relax and let the trip run its course until reality came back. I thought it should only take a couple minutes. I was very wrong.

The patches of color were slowly gaining bits of detail. My memory throughout this part of the trip is patchy, but I remember holding my electric bass up by the head and walking around it in circles. I think this is when that happened.

Until the end of this trip a circular force—a continuation from the crazy abstract beginning--compelled everything I did. My circular motions continued outward throughout my room, trashing it, until I somehow found my way out and started running circles throughout the house—still naked, mind you.

Not only are my memories patchy and fragmented, but they also run from end to beginning. My memories of the things that happened—my actions, mostly--are backwards, but my thoughts during the trip are forward. I’ll try to explain.

I ran naked around the house, but I remember running backwards through the house, undoing random chaos: pulling up broken glasses from the floor and putting them back together in mid-stride, and a few other things as well. Sober, looking back, that obviously doesn’t make any sense.

My roommate Rob lives (well, lived) on his mattress in a 10’x8’ tent in our spare living room. I know it sounds weird, and it kind of is, but we’re all very good friends and it works well. I remember jumping backwards over his tent and pulling it upright. Again, sober, this doesn’t make any sense.

I actually knocked a couple glasses off the counter and broke them on the floor. I actually ran into a doorway and bruised my shoulder. I actually kicked over the hookah in the living room. I actually jumped naked onto my roommate’s tent in the living room while he was trying to sleep, still tripping on dex and 2C-I.

I didn’t decide to do any of this. I was trapped in a vacant, emotionless ego death. I didn’t know who I was, I didn’t know what people were, and I definitely didn’t know what I was and had no concept of decisions. I didn’t know what a house or a living room was, or a tent or a hookah. Friends who had nothing to do with that night popped into my head, as nothing but very unclear and abstract images. I thought of a close friend currently living in Guyana, and then I thought of Guyana and the jungle, and I wondered if things happening had anything to do with the jungle—without having any idea what a jungle is. I thought these crazy goings-on were an extra-detailed part of a salvia trip (note: there was no salvia consumed—or any psychedelics other than 2C-I), and I was just sitting somewhere waiting to come down from a cycle of bizarre hallucinations.

I ran several circuits through the house, making trips to and from my bedroom (as a reminder, at least in my memory, this all happens backwards). During my trip though, every lap through the house was the same lap, being relived on a new level, like a retry. Every lap I fixed one or two things and removed a little more chaos from my surroundings, and became a little more sober. The craziest part of this trip is that while my actions ran backwards and my thoughts ran forward, they match up. In my head, I was running around backwards and fixing things, and becoming more sober as a result. Once again, I didn’t know the object of my trip was actually me. During the most normal part of this trip, I barely understood the concept of ‘self’. I remained ego-dead, but I recognized things being repaired within this trip as good, and I thought it was connected to me becoming sober. I hoped things would continue, because the more correctly things were arranged, the closer I came to reality. Everything that happened was in rewind, but my thoughts matched up with real-time. They include each other too well to be separated, and don’t fit together any other way. I’m trying to explain this as well as I can, but it’s an intense and surreal experience, even in retrospect, and I can’t even make it make sense to myself.

Every lap or so around the house, I sat down in the living room for a minute or so. I’m still naked. I realize this central figure in my trip is naked, but I don’t realize what naked means. I don’t have any associations or frame of reference for nudity. This is also still a hallucination, as far as I know. Being naked is just different. It’s different exactly like I would recognize a tuxedo or a chicken suit to be different. My sober friend woke up at some point. He said things like, “are you Ok?” and “watch out for the broken glass.” He’s the first realization I had of a person, but I didn’t know what that meant. Every time I sat down in the living room, I thought I had backtracked enough, I thought I had mentally repaired enough chaos, I thought I had relived the same cycle around my house enough times to reach the beginning of my trip. And then I wondered why I had been smoking salvia naked (which I only vaguely understood) with a random person (which I only vaguely understood).

He was not a random person. He was my sober friend Fred, but thoughts like that were far beyond me.

I have a tattoo on my right leg, above my knee. Seeing that tattoo was the first clue to myself that the central figure in my trip was actually me. My legs weren’t just flesh-tone geometric shapes. I didn’t know what a tattoo was, but I assumed it was something actively done, and I obviously had it done to myself. A breakthrough! I still didn’t know what being a person entailed, and I didn’t understand anything I had done. I was still inert, forced through a mindlessly destructive circuit throughout my house.

Even during my most real memories of this trip, my vision was pixilated, blurry, shaking, with the brightness turned down.
I don’t remember how many laps I ran. I don’t know how long I wreaked havoc, and I don’t remember most of the havoc I wreaked. In the closing scene of the night, I’m rolling around continuously in my bed, compelled by that circular drug force. With my backwards, very fractured memory, I don’t know if that was actually the beginning or end of my trip. It could have been either or both.

I woke up at three-something in the afternoon. Images and thoughts from the night before came into my head slowly. I remembered a rampage. I hoped it was just a dream, or a pre-sleep hallucination. I sat up in bed and saw my big plastic bottle of protein powder on its side, dented in half. I remembered coming down on it with my knee the night before. I had at least gotten out of bed; I hoped to God I hadn’t left my room. I remembered my roommate’s tent being collapsed and pulling it upright in a backwards leap. Sober, I knew this didn’t happen. If anything, I had jumped on it naked, and I really hoped that didn’t happen.

I lay in bed for a while, thinking, I guess, or just stalling for time, scared to leave my room and overwhelmed by the memories coming back to me. My roommate Jacob, who was absent the night before, opened the bedroom door and tossed my phone onto the bed.

“Someone just called. By the way, when are you gonna come down and clean up your mess?”

I got out of bed, slipped some shorts on, and started cleaning. Rob was gone for the afternoon. I couldn’t stop laughing in spite of the pangs of regret in my stomach. The mess was more extensive than I imagined. Every overturned piece of furniture, every puddle, every pile of clothes or foam packing peanuts, and every new cut, bruise or abrasion I found on my body was an unanswered question. There’s a lot I don’t remember, and I needed to reconcile my warped memory and twisted story with someone else.

In the meantime though, the house was wrecked. Broken glass was scattered across the kitchen and the living room carpet, along with a congealed sludge from several knocked-over glasses and a spilled bong. I cleaned up and straightened things out all afternoon.

I had to cut his tent in half with a pair of scissors and throw it away, because several pole segments were fractured, and I couldn’t get his queen-size mattress through the collapsed tent door by myself.

I uprighted a freestanding rack of Rob’s clothes I had thrown across the living room. Under it I found a book: The Tao of Inner Peace.

Rob came home. I gave him a heartfelt apology and we exchanged stories.

I bumped into his tent on an early pass through his room. He looked out of his little mesh window, saw a flash of my naked ass, and decided he wasn’t in any condition to deal with this new situation. On another pass through his room, I destroyed his tent. He crawled out of his poor, ravaged ecosystem and wandered into the kitchen to gather his bearings. On my next lap, I shoved him out of my way and into a wall without breaking my pace. He walked into the living room next, at a complete loss for what do say or do. He was in my way once again, so I pulled back my arm and punched him in the face. His head bounced off the living room wall and he got a concussion.

Rob walked out the backdoor so he could collect his thoughts and sit down in safety. At this point, Fred was awake, and still the only sober person in the house. He opened the backdoor to check on Rob, but Rob was nowhere to be found, and wouldn’t answer Fred’s calls. After half an hour, he wandered back into the house with no memory of where he went or what he did. He blacked out from head trauma before going on a walk through our sketchy neighborhood in the middle of the night.

Rob was definitely still tripping, and he was worried. They looked up overdose levels for dex as I ran naked laps around the house. Rob thought they might have to call poison control. Stuck in his head was the scene in SLC Punk (warning: spoiler alert!) with Bob dead on the mattress. He thought that was going to be me. I was going to wear myself out, go up to my room, sleep, and I would be dead in the morning. Now he was physically injured, scared, confused, high as shit, and depressed.

In defeat, he walked out to his car for a good night’s sleep. As a public service announcement within this public service announcement, don’t ever go to sleep after getting a concussion. You can slip into a coma. Between the five of us, we did a lot of things this night we probably shouldn’t have.

The combined memories of Rob and myself still don’t complete the narrative. There are missing pieces, so we talked to Fred for his perspective.

He had only just fallen asleep on the couch when he woke up to crash noises. He places this at 2:09 in the morning, which means I couldn’t have been in bed very long at all before everything went to hell.

The first thing he saw was me, stark naked, with a raging erection, running directly at him. I passed by without giving any acknowledgment. The expression on my face was vacant and emotionless. I was obviously in the depths of a psychotic breakdown. I‘d already assaulted Rob. I knocked a couple glasses on the floor and punched the shards. If my brain was processing my actions backwards even as they happened, as I suspect it was, I probably thought I was repairing the glasses and picking them off the ground with my fist. The safest, most logical solution occurring to Fred—caught up in this wildly illogical situation—is to keep me away from poor Rob, whom I probably thought I was un-injuring; stop me if I try to roll around in glass, or do anything else to hurt myself; and prevent me from breaking anything valuable. He understood that eventually these drugs would run their course.

After hearing Fred’s perspective, Rob remembers my inexplicable boner. He said that when I initially tackled him in the kitchen, I was staring at him and running a beeline in his direction. He experienced a moment of terror at the thought of rape by another man. Fortunately, aggression and sexual impulse were far out of my mind, and he only got pushed out of my way as I was just carried along.

Fred tried to verbally keep me in check. He warned me about the broken glass whenever I ran past. He assured me I would be OK, that I was on drugs, and they would wear off. I think some of what Fred told me sunk in, because I remember his assurances as a few of the only rational thoughts in my head during that part of the night.

Once when I sat down in the living room, he sat down next to me, put his arm around my shoulder, and tried to talk me back from whatever psychological ledge I was on.

He asked how I was feeling, if I was going to be OK, things like that. My expression momentarily shifted from vacant to intelligent, and he asked if I felt like myself again. I said, “yes I do,” and then trailed off. He told me I had punched Rob in the face. Confused or indignant or regretful, I’m not sure which, I asked why I would punch Rob in the face. Unfortunately, this was only a brief window into sanity. I got up once again and resumed my drug frenzy.

I made two or three trips between my upstairs bedroom and the rest of the house. The final time, I stayed in my room for the night. I don’t know what happened to me after this. I probably, finally, crawled into bed and slept. Rob had already gone to his car. Fred, relieved that it was over, caught a couple hours of sleep before he had to work. That episode lasted about an hour and a half, according to Fred--an hour and a half, of which I believe my memories only account for a handful of scattered minutes. I don’t know if I came down to reality before I fell asleep, or if I passed out from exhaustion. Remember that at this point, about 3:30 in the morning, I hadn’t slept in about forty hours.

I’m finishing this essay about two days after the incident. I’m still very shaken up. I don’t remember the trip necessarily being bad for me—not like it was bad for poor Rob. Nothing that I did, or otherwise experienced, registered as bad until I woke up sober eleven hours after retreating to my bedroom. I felt terrible the entire afternoon—emotionally, not physically--and it’s only gradually wearing off. Rob and I reconciled as soon as I saw him the night after the intense trip. There are no hard feelings between any of us, but I feel terrible for attacking one of my best friends, destroying his bedroom, and driving him out of the house to sleep in his car. I’m embarrassed by my indecency and irresponsibility. What affects me most is that for the first time in my life, I believe that I truly lost control.

I’ve done very stupid things during heavy alcohol binges, but on some level, at least at the time, even if I blacked out, I probably wanted to make those stupid, drunken mistakes. I’ve had several intense ego losses, on dex, salvia, shrooms, 2C-I, etc., but every other time my consciousness has been that completely broken down, I was stationary; I could just as easily have been asleep and dreaming.

I had no idea a trip like this was possible. I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s very difficult to accept that it actually happened, but it did. The past two days, I keep breaking into spontaneous laughter at the dozens of ridiculous aspects of my pieced-together story, but it scares me at the same time. I don’t ever want that experience again, for myself or for any of my friends.

I don’t recommend that trip to anyone.

I won’t say that I’m swearing off drugs forever, but I’m done for at least awhile. I’m done until this residual stupor fades away.
As bad as things got, I’m thankful they weren’t worse. I could have done a lot more damage to things in the house, to myself, or to poor Rob. I was very lucky to have a relatively levelheaded sober sitter.

I’m submitting this experience because I want people to learn something. Do your research before you experiment with drugs—even if your drug is an over-the-counter cough syrup. Have respect for the chemicals you put into your body. Not all damage is reparable. It’s been years since I read about the dextromethorphan plateaus, and their equivalent doses. I stuck my finger in a bag of 2C-I and licked it off, for Christ’s sake. That’s a powerful psychedelic at 20 mgs. I had at least that much, maybe twice that or more.

Don’t be stupid. If you’re going to be stupid, at least be in the company of somebody who isn’t.

Exp Year: 2009	ExpID: 81704
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 22
Published: Jan 4, 2023	Views: 435
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2C-I (172), DXM (22) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Train Wrecks & Trip Disasters (7), Combinations (3)