(While I will try my best to put all of this in order, much of the night is very weird. Some of the effects had me losing memory and a proper sense of time).
My buddy and I went to some mutual friends to hang out ten days ago. We all planned on tripping acid together, but some unrelated emergency occurred. As a result our mutual friends ended up giving us half a hit each of the "acid" so we can still have a good time without them. Supposedly this came from someone she trusted, and we trusted her judgment, so we took it, and sublingually at that to achieve faster effects.
We quickly drive home and I begin feeling "something." The onset is difficult to place, but slowly builds into an MDMA feeling. My buddy is at first convinced it's just LSD kicking in. I knew it couldn't be MDMA because this drug had to fit on a blotter, but MDMA was the best comparison I could make at the time. A few minutes later I noticed my energy and sociability skyrocketing. It felt as if I'd just done 1000 lines of coke. I challenged my friends to arm wrestling, wanted to spar with another. I was impersonating Alex Jones and everything I did was with the most possible confidence. On several occasions I tried discussing the effects with my trip buddy, but he seemed to be performing mental exercises to calm himself and his heartrate down. At the time I dismissed it, but later would acknowledge he had a better grasp on what was occurring.
My mind was spinning out of control at this point, somewhere between full-blown mania and psychosis. Two of my dickhead friends thought it would be a good idea to take me to the gas station and buy my own drinks/food. I leave the house and enter a friend's car. I notice they seem cold, so I ask them if they are. They respond as if it should be obvious, and that it's freezing outside. I then realize that I didn't notice any temperature change from inside the house all the way to the car. I touch my face, my arms, etc. to ensure I still have basic feelings. All of that seems fine in the moment, so weirdly I just couldn't feel the cold whatsoever. I felt completely normal in that freezing car, as if everything was a constant room temperature.
At the gas station I try to tell my friends that I'm going crazy and that I know I'll be arrested if I go inside. They tell me not to worry, etc., so I enter. Instantly it feels as if everyone in the store is staring at me. I rush to the back and grab some energy drinks, then tell the cashier I want $5 worth of chicken. I'm extremely paranoid at this point, and yet for some reason begin talking to this random guy next to me. I explain to him that I left my phone back at the house and I need to know what time it is. I can hear it in my voice that everything is coming out strangely. I'm beginning to lose a sense of who I am. He answers that it's 12:05 and he slowly steps away, obviously disturbed by the way I asked. I somehow manage to complete the purchase of my items and make it back into the car, and my friends drive me back home.
Inside, and sitting down with my food and drink, I start to really take note of all the effects taking place. I feel my heartrate at what seems like an unrealistically high level; when I point this out to my trip buddy, he says it's probably just me imagining it and that I need to calm down. He's been relatively calm this entire time, so I listen to him. I thought maybe I was just having a bad trip, and I should listen to him. I take a sip of my drink and try to calm down. For a few moments it seems to help, and then all of a sudden my arm jolts around as if I'd been shocked. Every time I tried to cease movement and relax, a random point on my body would involuntarily spasm or feel electrocuted.
So fuck it. If I couldn't rest, I figured I would focus my mind on something so I would stop worrying so much. I tried playing some Guitar Hero, but something immediately felt strange. I had this sense that the game was moving too slowly, that my internal beats per minute were far higher than the game. The concept of time in general seemed offputting and different to me. I tried a few more songs but nothing felt right.
I decided to quit with Guitar Hero and sat on the recliner again. While I wasn't really trying to rest or relax, I was trying to just take in the effects of the drug and analyze things. Suddenly my left arm felt incredible. It was a rush and euphoric as if I'd just shot up a strong dose of hydromorphone. A few moments later and the same thing happened with my right arm. Then more of the "zaps/spasms/jolts" in random parts of my body, all slightly different feeling each time. Finally I had one last wave of euphoria, all-encompassing every inch of my body. During this time I kept thinking how incredible it would be to fuck some chick while feeling like this. This lasted for maybe two or three minutes, and it was the last comfort I would feel for many hours.
The pain in my chest and my rapid heartbeat became my primary focus at this point. I tried feeling for and counting my own heartbeat, but it was extremely irregular. I didn't trust my own evaluation so I had my trip buddy try to measure it. He wasn't in the best state of mind to properly measure, and my other friends had gone to sleep, so I tried my best to dismiss the issue. However, the pounding was so forceful that I couldn't ignore it. I had all the signs of a heart attack, and it just wouldn't stop. This lasted for hours on end.
At this point in the night (about three hours into the effects) I cannot reliably recollect the chronological order of feelings and events. I can only describe symptoms I felt at some point during the morning hours while I desperately tried to calm myself down and get some sleep.
The body zaps continued every single time I attempted to relax my body and mind.
My buddy and I both experienced extreme fear and paranoia when going outside to pee. We imagined shadow people who were trying to murder us. Posters inside the house had a sinister intent, were staring at us, or would slightly transform in the corner of our eyes. Both of us experienced more shadow people in the dark hallway leading to the bedrooms.
At some point during the night, I realized I had no sense of my former self. I knew my name, but literally nothing beyond that to connect my identity. I experienced a complete ego death in which nothing mattered except the present sensations. During this realization I momentarily wondered if things would never go back to "normal," whatever that was. In general I just felt fucking crazy. While I felt I had more of a grasp on reality than at the gas station, this loss of identity made me less confident in everything and more certain that everything was wrong in that moment, that I would end up in a psych ward.
For a brief period of time the inside of my mouth tasted metallic + sharpie.
I experienced some levels of synaesthesia along with some other indescribable sensations. I would see the warmth in the room rather than feel it like temperature. Rather than hearing noise, I would feel the vibrations within my body. The perception of my heart attack would shift from my chest to my feet. It felt as if my brain had been rewired and everything was out of place. I was learning everything from scratch, and it was completely different.
There were several times I was certain I died and was somehow resurrected. There were a few others I was certain I was merely re-living the last moments of my life before I died.
The last several hours of this experience were spent talking through all of my symptoms with my trip buddy. Fortunately he only felt some of these, and none of them to the extent I did. I felt like he didn't understand what I was experiencing, so I was desperate to find a way to force him. Delusional, I attempted to force out telepathic waves and send him my thoughts and feelings.
After several hours of agonizing body zaps along with everything else I have described here, I finally was able to relax for extended minutes without being shocked. With my eyes closed, I internalized my own dreams in an effort to fall asleep. I vividly imagined a colorful dreamscape for what felt like several minutes before I was zapped again, disappointed that it was only now, right before the end that I was having enjoyable hallucinations. This process repeated a few times before I finally fell asleep, almost nine hours into my trip.
There are many, many more things which occurred that night which I cannot properly remember. Of those, I'm certain there are many more "confusing sensations" which don't make sense to tell in this story because I cannot describe them well enough now. Of these, I know a few were pleasurable, some were neutral/strange, and others were downright painful. I distinctly recall extreme pain unrelated to my heart, but I don't remember where or why.
In the future, I'm going to just swallow blotters from the start (as NBOMes are not active when merely swallowed). I'm very confident that if I'd taken the full tab as expected, I would have died that night. Terrifying to imagine.