This is going to be a description of my first experience with dxm I had a little while ago. I have some questions, but I generally hope it's useful or interesting somehow.
A few weeks ago I decided to try out DXM. This was my first time doing anything strong aside from alcohol, so I did my best to read up on the drug beforehand so that I know what I'm getting into. The descriptions I've read made DXM seem like a great "personal" fit (introspection / dissociation / dismantling of cause & effect etc.).
I was going for a high 2nd plateau because it seemed like that could give me a good taste of what the drug has to offer, and calculated my dosage accordingly using the DXM FAQ figures, my body weight etc.
I should note that in the first hour or so after I downed the pills, I drank something like 1500 ml of grapefruit juice, which was perhaps unwise in the hindsight (vomiting + possible additional effects on the experience?).
The pills took more than hour to kick in, and the trip proper lasted four to five hours. A list of things I distinctly remember:
standing up from the floor (I was sitting on a carpet with my laptop the whole time) felt very weird, like I was weightless, and "gravitated up" instantly.
walking felt weird as if I was jerking my legs forward instead of lifting them up (cf. the way khajiit and argonians walk in TES Morrowind).
when talking to a friend via voice (in noise-cancelling headphones) I had the strange sensation of perfect understanding and being understood without any idea of what I or they were saying. Everything I said or did was symbolic and significant. It also felt as if the whole conversation shed light on some sublime yet horrible truths about the world, and coiled in on itself, or rather consisted of an endless "chain" of questions, jokes, and clarifications (no idea as to exact verbal content though; I'm actually surprised the friend could stand talking to me for as long as they did considering I was mostly saying gibberish from a sober person's perspective).
every moment felt as if any thought or action, anything I said or did, could potentially bring the universe to an end. This is subjectively the weirdest part of the whole trip. I was "scared" of this sensation of every moment being potentially the last, but not only in animalistic "instinctive" sort of way (there was a little of that), but more like out of a general philosophical fear of/unease about a "lack" of existence, because when one is conscious, it is next to impossible to imagine yourself not being conscious (I had a similar fear many times in the past when I tried hard to imagine/contemplate what it's "like" to be dead). I will note here that I managed to remember who I was the whole time and I'm reasonably sure I didn't pass out even for an instant. I could even go to the bathroom all right, and I had the sense to vomit inside the plastic basin thingy I had put nearby for me to vomit into. Vomiting felt like vomiting, nothing special. The decision to drink water, on the other hand, felt to me like a sort of salvation - I felt saved and comforted, as if the act of drinking water, the fact that I managed to stand up and get to the bathroom sink, and drink that water from a glass I had - as if this act had a mystical meaning. I also had some general paranoid ideations about EVERYONE in the world knowing that I was on DXM, and a weird "inkling" that every person I thought about and considered to be "smart" or "interesting" had used DXM too.
visually, my eyes were pretty unfocused at the peak, and I could see the shape of my room distort slightly and become slanted, as in become a parallelogram instead of a rectangle. a map I have on my wall was behaving really wonky, but that happens even when I'm sober. No other OEVs that I remember. when I closed my eyes though, even on the way down after the peak, I could see a whole lot of stuff like revolving shapes covered with constantly changing cryptic symbols, as well as real-world objects that I don't remember now. All of these were distinctly dark-coloured, dimmed-down, and not realistic enough to treat as "almost real". I like to call it the "dream filter", because this is the way color feels during most dreams I remember except for the most vivid, hyper-real of them all, which don't happen too often.
I didn't want to listen to music or watch anything because it seemed like a hassle somehow. I was content with just sitting down and "being there", in addition to texting (yes, I could type a little immediately after I felt like the peak had passed) or talking on voice.
The comedown had its own peculiarities, because I started to feel as if my head was weightless and "empty" with wind blowing straight through it, and as if it extended for miles and miles behind me. At the same time I felt dazed, as if bonked on the head with a huge hammer. The word "narcosis" felt like an eerily appropriate descriptor of what I was experiencing (the sensation did feel extremely "clinical" somehow, too). This sensation faded away gradually but I could feel traces of it for another day or so.
I did go to sleep (about 8-9 hours after ingesting the pills), but I couldn't sleep too well because of a weird pressure in the area of my prostate. It felt sexual and orgasmic, with no pain whatsoever. Being a straight male, I'm not exactly comfortable describing it in detail, but I felt as if muscles around my prostate were constricting intermittently when I was lying down, and while admittedly fun, it was really distracting, not to mention inappropriate (I had the urge to wiggle in my bed as if I was on the receptive end during a sexual act). In the end, it made me get up from the bed and try to masturbate. Masturbation turned out to be several times more pleasant than usual, I felt literally awash in warmth and pleasure, but strangel enough, I couldn't reach an orgasm however hard (heh) I tried.
I slept for six to seven hours and felt what I assumed to be the afterglow (a mildly euphoric, serene sensation) for the whole of the next day and the first half of the day after that. About 14 to 16 hours after dosing (roughly afternoon of the second day) most of the stuff I was reading or hearing or seeing on the Internet felt revelatory, with some unutterably weird, almost Lovecraftian, undercurrent, as if there were some forbidden truths involved. The technology discovery quotes from Civ IV read by Leonard Nimoy felt especially significant somehow (I put on a youtube video of those).
My question will be: which plateau would you consider this to be? Are the plateaus as objective as they are made out to be, generally? Is there a distinct difference between a high 2nd and a low 3rd? Did anyone have these weird comedown effects on sexual function (either the masturbation enhancement with a big stop-sign right where orgasm should be, or the weird, nagging prostate-stimulation thing) in the way I just described?
Note that I also dosed 360mg a few days ago and I had a pretty decent time, and qualitatively a similar experience to the one I just described, with pretty much the same sort of CEVs, and similarly "schizoid"/convoluted and scary thought patterns, but all of this felt toned down a notch so it wasn't nearly as overwhelming.
Thanks.