DOSE:
repeated
insufflated
Ketamine
(powder / crystals)
80 mg
insufflated
DPT
(powder / crystals)
BODY WEIGHT:
143 lb
INTRODUCTION:
This was perhaps the weirdest, most bizarre psychedelic experience I've ever had. Not the most painful or panicked, but definitely the most horrible in many other regards.
I had begun the evening with the casual plan of having a fairly ordinary night with Ketamine. I'm extremely well-versed in the realm of dissocative experience, and on their own they never cause me any major distress. The purely K'd part of the evening was thus fairly uneventful, mainly a process of ambience-construction having to do with the beginning Summer, anticipating its joys and complexities in advance.
My dosage of Ketamine was also ordinary: lines of approx. 50 mg every now and then, up to a total dose of around 300 mg, administered within a period of ~4 hours.
At around 00:57 during a particularly manic phase of my Ketaminated adventure I was suddenly struck with the thought of taking a prepared dose of DPT totaling 80 milligrams - it had been quite a while since my last psychedelic experience, and the indeed quite manic idea seemed to be a wonderful turn of events to the evening. I thus proceeded to administer the serotonergic nasally, while still feeling my last dose of K rising within me, and retired to my bed with some headphones.
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF INSANITY:
I was indeed slightly manic, feeling triumphant over my sudden decision of partaking of the psychedelic, to which I would usually feel such strong aversion. I felt prepared for the ride. Though I've had a rough time with serotonergics several times in the past, my last handful of experiences had been quite controlled and delightful, almost disappointingly so. This trend was utterly broken.
Within 10 minutes of snorting the DPT, something happened. I'm still not quite sure what it was, there was some sort of contradiction or impossibility in my conscious experience: one early event I seem to recall was feeling like there were bits and pieces of vomited meat somewhere in my head, in a place where there should never be a sensation of taste, and as I reached out for my trusty bucket in case I had to actually throw up, I somehow got confused about the temporal order of events. I was overcome with the ridiculous belief that I had actually already thrown up, and was somehow rewinding reality as I reached for the bucket. I'm quite certain that this could have never happened with the DPT alone - manic belief-construction (though usually within the general constraints of reality) is something I associate more with strong dissociative experiences.
From this started my slide into absolute insanity, a model of psychosis. Cognitive and personal anarchy: a complete loss of my sense of reality. I'll attempt to describe the phases of my insanity in as much detail as possible.
THE 'EVENT-INFORMATIONAL SINGULARITY':
In a matter of minutes the situation escalated so that my person, my name, my loved ones and my life in general, had totally lost their meaning. Reality - external reality, or so I thought - collapsed into a vaguely McKennaish event-singularity, in which everything that can happen happens at the same time. The severity of this situation is nearly impossible to comprehend, even to me: in an instant, reality in its totality collapsed into a messy slump of chaotic information.
I looked upon this terrible tear in the fabric of space-time with horror: I was one of billions of separate consciousnesses or souls in this novel space of pure anarchy. I was fully overwhelmed by the belief that this was not just happening to me, this is not myself breaking down, this is consensus-reality itself breaking down.
One soul after another seemed to realize that [I]it[/I] had finally happened, the singularity, and in the midst of this chaos they apparently stopped caring about the upkeeping of this reality. In this newfound belief-model of mine, reality was a construct upkept by the totality of all souls in unison, with each and every separate soul being an essential part of the overall agreement of what the world is and how it is constructed. Now these separate souls seemed to abandon the project altogether, one after another. In the face of this disastrous cataclysm, there seemed, for many, to be no further hope in upholding the consensus.
There were bickering housewives, beer-gulping drunkards, academics; there were the young, and the old, those still in infancy and those on their death-beds - and they were all screaming at each other, blaming each other for what had happened.
I myself was furious: this could not be, no way, I refused to believe that our wonderful, carefully delineated reality with its beautiful structure had been permanently lost. I and many others like me organized an attempt to reconstruct the universe from its beginning. It all began with the Big Bang, indeed a singularity much like the one we had found ourselves in now. The entire history of the universe, just like it had been, was now relived at an astonishing speed, closing in on what had been our carefully planned present - but as the now was reached, the same collapse happened again.
This process was repeated dozens of times, each happening within a second of experience. The Big Bang, the primordial cosmos, the forming of planets, Earth, abiogenesis and, ultimately, human civilization, everything as it had been. But the event-informational-singularity could not be avoided.
As these attempts of complete reconstruction were once again abandoned, a new form of reality altogether was starting to form within the anarchy. Monadic souls formed larger individuals, which desperately attempted to communicate to each other in what seemed to be some form of asiatic neo-languages resembling Japanese, to cling to a shadow of the former life we all had had. These attempts were laughable, vulgar mockeries of the beauty now lost.
I was naturally shattered. I had the vague idea that reality had been something much better. In a moment of brilliance I managed to capture some more fundamental semblance of sanity and opened my eyes.
My bedroom was still there, and somewhat recognizable, but with a slew of anomalies. The edges of objects seemed to hinge loosely at their places, falling out of focus every now and then, and the quantities and positions of objects seemed to arbitrarily vary. From a clothes rack there seemed to hang, at one moment, a vast quantity of extremely fine clothes, beautifully detailed and in pristine condition - and an instant later, just a few rotten drags. The length of walls multiplied as I blinked. If I focused enough, this variance seemed to slightly dissipate.
This led me to believe that although objective reality had indeed collapsed, I could at least do my part in reconstruction via rewinding my own life backwards instead of attempting to build the world again from scratch with the others. This new method brought some hope of salvation, and I began to walk backwards, first out of my room, then down the stairs... but decided not to venture out the door to the streets, a blessed moment of sanity. I thus proceeded to once again fast forward reality, up the stairs, into my bedroom, and into my bed. What I had managed to construct once again collapsed into chaos.
However, the effect of the drug itself was beginning to wane by now. As a result, my belief of the collapse of objective reality was, for the first time, about to be replaced by a fear that it was just my own sanity that was compromised, not reality itself.
FEAR OF INSANITY:
In the first phase of my fear for my own sanity, I had the realization that objective reality itself was probably stable, but my conception of it was and always had been, in a chronic manner, at fault. On this interpretation, my life as I had known it had indeed been a mere illusion, a complex artifact of my own design, built to avert my eyes from the true reality: that I was and had always been insane, possibly an inmate in some ghastly mental institution, drooling catatonically in some padded chamber. I had never grown up to be a sane and functioning adult. The illusion I had created to distract myself from this terrible reality was beginning to fragment, and indeed for a reason: it was the only way I could get better in the real world.
This scenario seemed highly plausible, but indeed grim, and I was understandably reluctant to accept it as the truth. I began to shout obscenities to my bedroom, pacing the space I had created, and cursing to myself:
'No, no, not like this, no...'
'No, no! It wasn't supposed to be like this...'
I, in turn, recognized my own behaviour as matching the memetic, traditional image of insane behaviour, which resulted in a feedback loop of despair. My attempts to fight reality were beginning to seem laughable, childish tantrums against the truth.
I have later recognized this fear of personal insanity to be something I have been afraid of as a very young child - the fear that whatever concept of myself and whatever coherence I had managed to bring into being was a lie. I had a word for it, which I remembered during the trip, an idiologism I had come up with as a child. It began with an S, but I sadly cannot remember it any longer.
At any rate, over time as the effects of the substance wore off further, I was beginning to regain my hope. At around 02:40 I remembered for the first time that I had actually taken DPT, a psychedelic. My fear of my life being an illusion turned into a more acute fear: that although my previous life had, indeed, been real and wonderful, it had now been permanently shattered and thrown to waste by my foolish administration of the drug. This phase lasted only for a short while, and common sense was beginning to triumph over the madness. Every now and then some worry or another began the slide to chaos all over again, but these were brought to a close swiftly and efficiently.
RECOVERY & EPILOGUE:
At around 03:00 I finally recognized myself as what I had been and was once more: I was given back to myself in my entirety, in all my glory, my life was given back to me. The pheonix-like feeling of rebirth, and of gratitude and immense relief, was indescribable, and I wept. I did not fall asleep until around 07:00, but this was hardly a problem after the troubles behind.
Now, this wasn't at all such a tough nut to crack afterwards. What I feel had actually happened was indeed a violent form of ego loss and internal anarchy. What were initially regarded as separate souls in the anarchy of the event-singularity were parts of myself, of my own mind, that had somehow gained at least partial autonomy. This potentially pluralistic conception of the human mind is something that I've held for a long time, and it seems to me to be, both from an experiential and a philosophical point of view, the most natural way to view the human mind as a fundamentally material entity. The human nervous system, and indeed the human being in its entirety, is a whole composed of various hierarchies of potential individuality, which normally lend their autonomy fully to the totality of the system. The solidity of human experience and the very existence of a coherent self and a coherent reality are, indeed, matters of consensus within the system, and between its many parts.
This consensus was shattered by the outlandish impact of the psychedelic, compounded by the somewhat manic and belief-revisionary effects of Ketamine, leading to an inner anarchy. They weren't the billions of souls that make up humanity that abandoned the effort of upholding the totality of reality - they were individuals within myself, parts of myself, that first lost the ball, and then all hope of finding it again. That is, until the consensus-inhibiting effects of the DPT began to wear off.
Many different forms of reality and world-view were attempted. The first one was the mockery of civilization as a whole, with its asiatic neo-languages and such - an attempt that was doomed to failure, since it was not reality or civilization as a whole that needed reconstruction, it was just me. The grim view of chronic psychosis and personal illusion was the second attempt, but it was so hideous and just so wrong that it would have fortunately ended in time anyway, via communication with my loved ones at the latest. The third attempt had the target right: by then I remembered enough of what I had been, and what I had done, to drop the belief in illusion, but without much hope of actually regaining sanity. And finally I got it right, and reconstructed myself as I had been, and as I was supposed to be.
I'm understandably quite nervous about attempting a combination like this in the future. I've never lost my grip on reality like this before, never actually fallen into full-blown psychosis. I can well imagine that a chronic state like what I experienced can be experienced without drugs, and how terrible a spontaneous psychotic episode, especially feelings of relapse after momentary reconstruction of the ego, must be. Internal coherence and the functionality required to operate in our shared world is a blessed gift, and one that shouldn't be tampered with carelessly.
Exp Year: 2013ExpID: 100230 Gender: Male Age at time of experience: Not Given Published: May 21, 2013Views: Not Supported [ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
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