DOSE:
500 mg
oral
DXM
(capsule)
BODY WEIGHT:
140 lb
[Erowid Note: Driving while intoxicated, tripping, or extremely sleep deprived is dangerous and irresponsible because it endangers other people. Don't do it!]
Last night I had my first encounter with DXM. Actually, my first encounter with any drug besides marijuana and alcohol. I don't have much framework to base my experiences on because of this, and so I don't really know exactly how to describe what happened. I will try my best.
To begin: my friend J and I got our hands on one 500mg gelcap of pure DXM each. We were driving home from a city about fifty minutes away from J's house (where we were to spend our night), and we took the pills about twenty minutes away from home, to shorten our 'idle time' once we arrived. We were also still feeling pretty good from some marijuana we had smoked earlier in the evening, as well, though that high ended about the time we pulled into his driveway.
We got to his house at about 2:30a or so. I had to urinate badly, and J was taking his sweet time unlocking and opening the door, and so I went around the side of his house to relieve myself in some bushes. I heard in his backyard his dog (which lives in a kennel far from the house, as dictated by J's parents) barking at me, and I heard in that barking a man's voice saying 'Get away from there!' very forcefully. I thought J's father was at the kennel and saw me violating his yard, and I became embarrassed and finished my business promptly. However, there was not a living thing near the kennel save the dog, and no neighbors to speak of. I was a bit confused by this, but didn't think much about it after I told J about it, who had no explanation.
Despite hearing reports of DXM-related nausea, J promptly fixed us two egg-and-cheese Hot Pockets, which he put on a single plate. We were planning to watch the film 'Dazed and Confused,' so I went into his room to get it off his DVD shelf. Before I made it to his bedroom he called me into the bathroom, where he was busy inspecting his eyes. He showed them to me, and I was amazed at how dilated his pupils were; his bright green eyes were now almost entirely black. He said this was a good sign, and I just shrugged, having to take his word for it. J started to act a bit strangely, staring at me, breathing deeply, and taking on a vacant/distant look. I, however, felt nothing at this point, and went into his room to get the movie. As I turned on his light, though, I had my first inkling of what was to come, as hard to describe as it may have been (and continues to be). I turned on the light in his room, and the bulb flickered for a few seconds before staying on.
In those few moments of hesitant flickering, however, I nearly reeled; for my entire vision seemed to me to be an old, scratched film; the blinking light was an old-fashioned reel projector, and the sum of the moment became unreal instantly. My mind even supplied scratches on the 'film,' and things appeared in black-and-white. The vision lasted only the few short moments it took for the light to decide to stay on, but it had a profound and unnerving effect on me, filling me with a very, very short but very deep sense of terror, a vague yet terrible fear of the unreality it seemed was going to be subjected to. As it passed, though, so did the feeling of inebriation and the feeling of fear; and I felt that it had been completely in my own imagination, not fueled by any drug, and I convinced myself I was stone sober (which, in retrospect, I very clearly was not). I told J of this experience as I looked for the movie, which I was unable to locate. He looked too, not commenting on my momentary hallucination, and couldn't find the movie either, so we resigned ourselves to not watching any movie and made our way downstairs with the food.
In the basement, J stretched out on the loveseat and I sat down next to him but on the floor, eating my Hot Pocket with abandon. We had dimmed the lights to a very low level (we had been told partial light was best for DXM), and J (who has done many drugs but never DXM) said he was starting to really feel it and laid down, breathing heavy. He told me he had a video tape of 'trippy visuals' that he called his 'Dennis Leary movie' in his bedroom, and he gave me specific instructions to find it (he was on crutches, having just had extensive knee surgery, and so was in no mood or condition to journey upstairs). I followed his instructions to the letter, entering his room and looking through his small entertainment center.
I found naught but clothing in the cupboard he had told me housed the video, and I started to feel as if I were very drunk on alcohol, and tore the clothing out of the cupboard without reservation, throwing it all around his room- quickly losing most of my control over my motor skills- but finding no video; I returned empty handed to the basement, feeling as if I were sobering up on my way down the stairs, to find J in an almost trance-like state. His eyes were dilated beyond belief, and I just ate the remaining Hot Pocket (J deciding he wasn't hungry after all), the drunken feeling having mostly passed and leaving me feeling as if I were mildly drunk. He kept saying 'oh God, this is going to be big,' and I told him I didn't feel anything save a slight feeling of light-headedness such as I feel after a moderate amount of alcohol, and felt 'gyped.' He said not to worry about it, that I would feel something soon enough. He was quiet for awhile. I was starting to think it would never kick in, that I was just going to feel slightly drunk all night, and stood up to get up on the couch (next to the loveseat, perpeniduclar to it in fact), when I realized that, yes indeed, I was feeling something altogether new- as the bottom of the world seemed to drop out from under me, the room melting for a moment, as my vision struggled to keep up with my eyes.
Standing up felt like it took forever, and it seemed I was swimming up out of myself, and that my body had to catch up to where I was. I wasn't prepared for this and quickly sat down on the couch, disoriented, confused, breathing heavy. 'Hoo-haa. Hoo-haa.' I told J that I wasn't sure that I was entirely sober, an understament to say the least, and he just nodded, his face locked in a grim expression I had seen on him once before, in the middle of an acid trip I once found him on. He told me he was burning up, and I saw that his face was awfully red, and with his light blonde eyebrows I swore up and down to him that he was starting to look like an Oompa Loompa, which confused him and amused me to no end. He wouldn't stop talking about how hot he felt, though, and that he was on fire, and him talking about his high temperature made me notice my own feeling of being very warm. I told him in as coherent a sentence as I could muster (which, in retrospect, wasn't all that coherent) that perhaps the Vicodin he was on for his knee was attributing to his high body temperature, which he seemed to acknowledge and accept. He stopped worrying about 'burning up,' and so I was able to ignore my own high temperature as well- my tactic had worked.
We sat there a while, just looking at each other, but not entirely recognizing each other. This is a hard concept to wrap my head around, even now; for while I knew this was J, and I knew who J was, this person in front of me at the same time wasn't J, and yet I knew he wasn't a threat and acknowledged it must be J after all. He looked as if he were very far away from me, as though I were viewing him from across the room- and at the same time he looked as though he were much too close to me. J asked me to return to the floor next to the loveseat because I was in fact too far away from him, and he didn't want to feel abandoned. I complied, but didn't like the floor for some reason I wasn't entirely sure of and went back to the couch, but without comment or dissent from J.
The one lamp we had turned on in the living room had a dimmer on it, and we had (as stated earlier) put the lamp on a dim level. After returning to the couch, I dimmed the lamp even more, because it seemed to me that it would be a good idea to do so (even though I had no logical reason at the time to think this, other than assuring myself that darkness would 'feel' pleasant at that point in time). After a moment, the light seemed to get brighter by a number of levels on its own accord, and I thought it was perhaps entirely an effect of the drug on my vision or perception, but J suddenly looked to the lamp, and I said 'so you saw it too,' at which he nodded.
Almost immediately the lamp went back to the extremely dim level I had just adjusted it to, and J and I looked at each other, a bit confused and shocked. The lamp settled down and stopped playing with itself, and I was content for the moment and sat in the dark, looking at things and not knowing exactly where I was, as if everything in this room that has been familiar to me since childhood (J being an old friend) was suddenly new and unknown.
I lost all sense of time. I had no benchmarks to gauge time by, and I couldn't read the digital clock on the VCR across the room because when I tried to look at it, my vision became blurry or quaked too much to allow comprehension. What felt like hours must have been mere minutes; in fact at certain points I was certain that whole years and even epochs were passing by us. At times I thought everything was moving in slow motion; at other times I felt as if everything were rushing by me in a blur, while my own body was trapped in an envelope of unmoving time. I am not exactly a foreigner to altered senses of time (I am, even sober, not good at judging intervals of time- and even when inebriated with alcohol I lose much of what little time-sense I have) and yet the complete and utter foreign sense of time in this state was completely unexpected. I think that this complete perversion of the time-sense was perhaps the most interesting aspect of the drug.
There was no noise in the house (we had neglected to put on any music- if I ever do DXM again I will definitely put a CD in the stereo), and yet I recall there being no silence at all; I can remember very few certain sounds, and yet I remember plenty of sounds ringing through my ears. I heard a voice at one point hissing something above my head, sort of a 'Ssssaah, ssssaah' sound, which I took to be an alien language. Oddly enough, I didn't find it unusual to be hearing alien languages streaming to me from vacant space, though I think I tried to mimic the sound for J, unconvincingly.
Soon I started getting very nervous- I was convinced I would never get out of this frame of mind, and I was worried about how I was going to function in life with my head all jumbled up as it was. I started to get very scared, to the point of breaking out in a cold sweat. I didn't want to be like this, especially not for the rest of my life. I wasn't prepared for this journey and realized I was in way over my head, and I started to despair. I then noticed that this was illogical thinking, and I said to myself; 'If you keep thinking like this, you're going to ruin your experience with all this negativity,' so I made myself stop thinking about the end of the experience and just enjoy the now of it, which worked surprisingly well, as I almost immediately felt near-euphorically happy.
Then I noticed that the whole room was rocking, as if we were below decks on a large boat in the ocean. The fact that J's father is an avid deep-sea fisherman and has as a consequence decorated the basement in nautical motifs surely did nothing to defeat this feeling, perhaps even generated it- from the clocks shaped like nautical steering-wheels to a large mounted swordfish on the wall. I told J that we were on a large boat (conveying almost all of my experiences throughout the night to him), or that it felt that way, but he wasn't saying much by this point, just lying with his eyes closed. I hadn't closed my eyes by this point (I realize now that he was probably enjoying the cinema of his mind), and in fact did not close my eyes until much later into the night, and a few times thought- incorrectly- that he had fallen asleep.
The 'boat' went on rocking for a while, and suddenly I told J that I was going to go vomit, and he said he thought that would be a good idea for him, as well. It's an odd thing, knowing that you are going to be sick in a little while, and yet not feeling sick at the moment. And yet I knew that I should vomit, that I would benefit from vomiting, so I made plans to do so in the near future. With this in mind I stood up and started walking towards the bathroom, noticing the peculiar feeling of my body's movement. I felt as if gravity were increased for me, or that I was under deep water pressure. At the same time the movement was intensely pleasurable, and I found I enjoyed just swaying my arms and dancing a bit. I can not even describe how this felt accurately; it was as if my body would move, and then my spirit would catch up to the point in the physical realm to which my body had moved.
Walking to the bathroom was a very difficult maneuver, mainly because my perception of distance was completely and utterly unreliable by this point. Objects a mere foot from me might seem to be a world away, and objects further away seemed to be uncomfortably close. I would take one step and seem to move a mile, and then take another step and seem to go nowhere. Coupled with the fact that I had moments where what I saw through my eyes seemed, to me, to be a movie on a distant screen, I found that walking to a destination seemed at the time to be a wholly remarkable feat of will.
Eventually I made it to my rather unremarkable destination, the tiny basement bathroom, and having finished my nasty spot of business (and J having finished his), we sat in silence in the bright lights of the vanity, looking at the floor and remarking in various sarcastic tones: 'well that was pleasant.' I told him I thought I was all better, that everything was over, and indeed for a few moments I thought that everything was over, that I was sober . . . and then I opened the door to the hallway and it was pitch black, and I looked down the hallway, saw the couch I wanted to sit on, and saw an expanding distance between me and that couch. As I stood there, my head hanging out of the bathroom into the hallway, I watched the living room speed steadily away from me, the hallway stretching and stretching until it looked nearly infinite. At the same time it seemed as if the hallway took on a sharp downward angle, so that I was looking down a nearly infinite pit, and that the living room was something to fall and tumble through a void to.
'Fuck,' I told J, 'I guess I was wrong about that sober thing.' I don't remember the walk back to the couch, or the next bit after I made it to the couch, but after a short while I went and threw up again, and so did J, and again we were in the bathroom, J sitting on the sink and me sitting near on the floor near the toilet, it being much too bright in the room (my sensitivity to light being much like one might have upon being jarred from a deep sleep in the pre-dawn hours by someone turning on their bedroom light), but neither one of us willing to turn off the light for some unspoken and unknown reason.
After a few moments (though we both felt we had been in there for days or weeks or years), I once again opened the door to the hallway. I once again don't remember ANY of the walk back to the couch, but once there J asked if I felt as if I felt we had just been explorers, and remarked that he was amazed we made it so far. I felt the same way, that we had covered immeasurable distances and wrestled with impossible difficulties to get to the living room, and I agreed that we had just been explorers, going through uncharted territory and barely escaping. It seemed that in the short time it must have taken us to get from the bathroom to the couches (being not more than twenty feet apart), we had shared a very real and distinct hallucinatory experience that neither of us could recall except in fragmented, unclear bits of dim memory. I got it in my head, however, that we had just trekked across Mount Everest, and started feeling very, very cold, thinking I must have gotten frostbite on the mountain because I was wearing only slacks and an undershirt. J got me a blanket, and once I had it over me I felt very, very hot. It was better than cold, though, so I just sat there happily smiling at everything, thinking about how nice it was to be alive and how wonderful it was to be on this alien planet, as I was now convinced I was no longer on Earth.
My mood was incredibly positive; everything seemed fine, even though at the same time I was in what I took to be a completely foreign environment. The unknown held no threat for me; it was just a reason to be happy, because everything was fine. I was grinning like an idiot.
J decided it was a good time to turn on the television, though I wasn't so sure of that, my sensitivity to light being what it was. I noticed, too, that on the way back from our second trip to the bathroom that one of us must have turned on the overhead light in the living room, a very bright and harsh light to begin with, an even more harsh light under the circumstances. I remarked to J that it needed to be turned off, now, and it was turned off, though I couldn't recall either one of us getting up to operate the switch. J got up to get the remote for the television, as I started thinking that I was in the acid trip scene from the film 'SLC Punk,' and I was watching the two characters in that scene talk, and I was nodding at what they were saying, even though I wasn't paying attention to them. Then I realized my eyes were closed, so I opened them, and the television was on.
I couldn't keep my eyes on the television; they just simply refused to look at it, and slid downwards so that I was looking at the bottom of the entertainment center that housed the television. I told J I couldn't watch TV, that it hurt my eyes and that I was seeing double, anyways. And indeed I was seeing double of EVERYTHING, and so I just watched J for awhile, both of him, staring at the television, which confused me because the television hurt me- why not him?
I decided to leave J to his television stupor, and turned to watch the column in the room. His living room is, as stated, in the basement, and in the center of the room is a pole used to support, I presume, the upper level of the house. It is wrapped in a blue-and-white striped nylon rope, and the effect is not unlike a red-and-white barber's pole. I had a fun time looking at it, because the swirling pattern seemed to be revolving and melting at the same time, and I just watched it, not telling J about it because it felt as if it was a private show for me. After awhile the melting pole seemed too much to handle, and I took to just closing my eyes and opening them, each time feeling as if I was waking up from an age-long sleep (never actually sleeping, though). I felt as if I was always in that moment of haze upon waking up in the middle of a dream, that smoky, muddy feeling of being half-awake. I was very entertained by this, and was overjoyed by it for awhile. J was flipping through the channels but none of the data flowing from the television was registering with me; though I do remember at one point seeing an actor from 'SLC Punk' in a movie on the TV, which amazed me because just moments before I had been imagining I was in 'SLC Punk.' What coincidence, I thought, but I still had a hard time looking at the television, so I gave up trying and instead spent a considerable amount of time trying to read the VCR's clock, failing horribly.
I kept making J read the time to me, because his vision wasn't as affected as mine was. I spent some time just stretched out on the loveseat, and for a while I felt and saw everything in the room become compressed into a one-dimensional plane, a very convincing and pleasurably unique yet hard-to-relate hallucination that ended much too quickly.
Around 5:00a or so (by J's account; my time-sense was still completely out of whack and I was wondering how it was possible it was even the same day as, let alone mere hours after, the ingestion of the pill) J said it was probably time to go to bed, and I grabbed a sleeping bag and we headed up to his room. I made myself a place to sleep on his floor, and he got up in his bed and fell asleep right away. Not me, though, for now, in his almost entirely dark room, I was seeing what appeared to be geometric patterns composed of pure energy flowing in front of my eyes, forming what looked like electronic circuits and spelling out what I took to be alien alphabets that I could not read but loved for its aesthetic properties all the same (I notice in retrospect that much of my experiences that night I attributed at the time to belonging to an alien, extra-terrestrial source, from the 'alien planet' I thought we were on to the 'alien voice' I heard to the 'alien alphabets' I saw in my visuals in the dark).
I watched these for what seemed to be quite awhile, sometimes with my eyes open, and sometimes with my eyes shut, and sometimes my eyes blinking rapidly or slowly. Then I noticed his window. There was a bit of moonlight streaming in through it, but the curtains were drawn and so it was just an ethereal white square floating in the void. I moved my head around for a good while, watching this white square leave trails of light throughout his room. And then I fell quickly into a deep sleep, around what I estimated at the time was around 5:45a-6:00a, but could have been 5:01a for all I really know.
I woke up at 2:30p, feeling parched and foggy in the head but amazingly happy. I headed home, as J was expecting company. Upon writing down an initial report of my experiences, two hours later, I still felt splendid. Everything seemed a bit unreal for the remainder of the day. . . my head felt a bit fuzzy on the inside, as if I were mildly yet pleasantly hung-over. I fell asleep at 8:30p, slept for a few hours, and awoke feeling completely sober but still very, very happy and refreshed. Friends of mine who I talked to after this kept asking if I was high, such was my giddiness. No, I assured them, I had just had an exciting weekend.
And so my first psychedelic experience was a pleasant and exciting surprise. Despite some initial fear at a totally alien state of mind, and some difficulty coming to terms with the strange inebriation I found myself thrown into, the trip as a whole was interesting, if confusing. I have since been told that 500mg is a 'doozy of a first-time dose,' but I feel it was a fine amount, but on the other hand I had read up on DXM, had talked to people about it, and expected to be overwhelmed, and expected to have to remind myself that I was on a trip so as to avoid fear.
Exp Year: 2002ExpID: 19870 Gender: Male Age at time of experience: Not Given Published: Oct 28, 2006Views: Not Supported [ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
DXM (22) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Glowing Experiences (4), First Times (2) -->