DOSE:
repeated
oral
DXM
(liquid)
BODY WEIGHT:
185 lb
I am quite new to DXM, having only used it on 3 occasions previous to this (2 first plateau doses, and 1 2nd plateau dose). I prefer to extract it from cough drops, because eating a few boxes of them doesn't sound fun, and neither does drinking a bunch of syrup. I don't do much of any drug, other than alcohol (though I abstain from alcohol for at least a week before using DXM), and I have no allergies, do not take any medications, an I'm in excellent physical shape. I am 26 years old and about to complete my degree in Electrical Engineering, but for a few years I majored in Psychology, which is now just a sort of hobby of mine.
My background in Psychology is where my interest in DXM comes from, as in many classes we would often discuss how various drugs affect the mind and how brain chemistry can differ from person to person, and this created a profound interest in experiencing some of these 'chemical alterations' for myself. Of course, DXM wasn't one discussed, but after hearing about it and researching as much as possible on many different websites, I felt it was safe enough for me to try, and hearing that it was a possible serotonin catalyst, I was excited that it might satiate some of my rather extreme desires to fully understand certain psychological subjects, alternate levels of consciousness being one of them. The two first plateau doses, taken on separate dates several weeks before, were interesting but not really worth the effort to extract the DXM from the drops, and were primarily to test if I was allergic or intolerant to the chemical in any way. I found no problems and things went as expected; slightly euphoric, somewhat drunk feeling but with much more control, and though I was somewhat tired the next day, I was not sick or irritable in any way.
My first second plateau dose was great. It started off like being high on marijuana, comfortably distant and a little confused, then it rapidly jumped right past that stage to a sort of drunk excitement, difficulty maintaining balance when I stood up, blurry vision, decreased inhibitions, and elated demeanor. Next, I reached an easily recognized and very definite plane of consciousness where anything outside my immediate space did not exist to me. This may be an effect due to the comfort level of my environments, which both times have been at my friends' houses, which I am incredibly comfortable in and the surrounding environment is very familiar. This headspace is where I stayed for quite a few hours. I have been getting accustomed to calling this 'bubble space', because anything outside my own little bubble, for the most part, is not part of my world.
We were having a really good time just talking to each other and listening to Al Green, but then someone sober wanted to go see a movie, and we went along. The car ride was one of the highlights of the trip; it feels like a rollercoaster. We arrived at the theater, and started watching the movie, but all three of us found it to be completely uninteresting. The most interesting thing is that since our eyes were dilated to their fullest, we could see even the smallest amount of light, and all three of us felt as though someone was shining a large spotlight from behind us. I could see everyone in the theater perfectly, and I could see my own shadow being cast on the seat in front of me. We wasted most of the peak on this movie (Life Aquatic), and it was pretty disappointing. Movies and TV are very boring on DXM.
The second time I 'went to the second plateau', I had a bit of a sore throat, and when I drank the mixture it burned, badly. I figured it was probably nothing to worry about and finished the rest. This time I was with 5 other people, and 4 of us reached this plane at the same time, the other one, choosing to use 4 ounces of cough syrup and extracted cough drops for the rest of the 540mg he needed, said he felt he wasn't where we were for most of it and didn't see as much of the things we did, which I found fascinating since the drops and the syrup both have the same active ingredient, but the syrup had other things in it that the rest of us were bypassing; apparently these other items do affect the strength of the DXM. One thing that is interesting about this high is that it creates a very strong desire to be close to people.
We were sitting in a room on couches, and it wasn't long before we had pulled both couches together, facing each other, so we could be close to one another. We started calling it a boat, because that's really what it felt like - the rest of the world was just a huge sea of nothing and this boat comprised the only people on the face of the earth, and we were comfortable with that. There were other people in the house, but unless they came directly up to our boat, we didn't even know they were there. In this configuration, we played a game I'll call 'word circle', where one person starts by saying a word, and then the next person will follow by saying another word that begins with the same letter, and so on in a clockwise or counter-clockwise direction. This quickly made us feel dizzy, as if we were on a merry-go-round, and I could feel the spinning even after we stopped it.
This required us to do it again, but in the opposite direction to counteract the spinning feeling, which we did, but on the second time, more than one of us said they could see a bright ring connecting all of us, right through our stomachs, but only for a second, as someone broke the circle right after it appeared. This was so unbelievable to me because I was one of the people to see it, and I think this was one of the biggest successes we had as a group.
We played other games too. One game was sitting cross-legged in a circle with our knees touching and taking turns drawing shapes on the carpet with our fingers, while the rest of the group members tried to say what it was, a sort of pictionary. The cool thing about this is that you could see the outline that was made for a long, long time, even though there were no lines made in the carpet. Another, completely spur of the moment, was to stand up about arm's length from a television, take a magazine page with a picture on it (in this case it happened to be Warf from Star Trek), look at the picture while placing the page on the TV, then turn around 180 degrees and try to reach around and pick the page up. When we did this, we couldn't grab the page, and when we turned around to see how far away we were, it was a big distance, as if the TV had moved away from us.
Two other games that were just purely for entertainment were sitting upside-down on the couch and looking at each other's feet doing things, and 'funny hands', a classic where one person sits in a chair with a blanket draped over them, and another person behind them puts their hands through and does hand guestures while the sitting person talks. This was so surreal and strange, but it was also completely benevolent, which is probably what made it so funny. The last thing we did was build a fort out of blankets and chairs and hide in it, which for some reason seemed like it would be fun, and it was, but it was the last thing we did because shortly after this, we all came down and just got hungry. You may feel somewhat childish while on this plateau; you'll still be smart and composed, but you will probably feel like you're 8 years old again. It seems to make the world seem new and special again.
An hour later, I was given a ride home and was still fairly dizzy, which happened before and I was fine with because this is when I go home and turn on some old Fleetwood Mac and see what kind of closed-eye stuff I can see. The first time I did this I saw what seemed to me like multi-colored flames, which I could form into 3D shapes, such as houses and fences and trees. The strange thing is that these images are not actually 'seen' and we would normally think of seeing things; it is so mental and abstract that it's hard to actually describe how these images are appearing, but were seen in my mind somehow, and it was rather enjoyable.
On this second time though, at first there was nothing, which disappointed me, so I figured I'd just let Fleetwood play on through and see what happens. Then somewhere towards the start of 'Gold Dust Woman' (which, before, was where some of the coolest things appeared), I saw what looked like a destroyed village; there were planks of wood sticking up everywhere and a dark blue fog, and I didn't like this image at all. Then I thought I saw what seemed to me like hundreds of skulls, laughing. I sat up and took the headphones off, and when I did, I realized that I was having trouble breathing, and was very dizzy. I turned on the light and noticed that my hands were shaking and my legs were twitching. My muscles were tensing up around my stomach, and I was starting to get anxious.
Feeling a little freaked out by this, I called up my friend and told him that something was definitely wrong, but I couldn't figure out what. The only active ingredient was Dextromethorphan Hydrobromide, and we had done nothing different from the first 3 times. It had been about 2 weeks since my first 'second plateau' dose, which might have been to soon for me, and my mindset before, during, and after was comfortable and composed, and I had plenty of rest and enough to drink and eat. He and I decided that I should try to wait it out, that I might just be getting sick and this was a result of it. I knew that I hadn't taken anything that would cause a fatal reaction, and I was somewhat comforted by this fact.
As I waited the feeling got bad, and I started to feel like I was hyperventilating. It was about 11pm at this point, and I started drinking water and gatorade, which helped. Then as the twitching neared a climax, I started to get a sensation of waves washing over me; waves of fire. Then I felt what I can only describe as electric arcs jumping horizontally across my spine and traveling up my back and into the base of my head, at which point they stopped and then a wave of electricity spread out and gleaned the entire surface of my brain, then absorbed into the center of my mind. The arcs were hot, really hot. It felt like fire, and it was quite scary. As I write this and review it, to a scientific person like myself, it all sounds like fantasy, and if you told it to me before this experience I wouldn't have believed it to be possible, but having this happen to me has changed all that.
It was at this point that I noticed that my lips and my tounge were tingling, but when I looked in the mirror I wasn't blue or losing oxygen in any way, my pulse was normal (taken by a friend), but I was cold and sweaty, and the shaking and jerking motions were almost intolerable. My vision was so blurry at the onset of these symptoms that I was unable to read things on the computer and my equilibrium was very messed up as I found I needed to hold the walls to walk properly, but about an hour after the first electric waves started both the blurry vision and the equilibrium problems vanished completely.
I drank some hot tea with a little brandy in it, which calmed me down and made it easier to breathe, but when I tried to sleep it felt like I kept waking up gasping for air, so I stayed up and tried to ride it out. During this ride I could feel intermittent waves radiating all throughout my body. They went in stages, it seemed, picking different parts of my body and flowing from one end of it to another end. The strangest waves were through my tounge. It felt like someone had wrapped a tight rubber band around the back of my tounge until it went numb, and then slowly slid the band forward (with the numbness following it) until it reached the tip of my tounge. This would happen with all of my organs; I felt it distinctly in my head, my stomach, my chest, my lower back and what seemed like my kidneys, and in what felt like the center of my brain.
This whole time, from 1am to about 6am, my back felt like glowing coals, and at many times my eyes felt like they wanted to roll back into my head, which was probably the scariest thing about this whole experience. I often thought I was going to pass out and go into a coma, and I was terrified. I tried to watch TV, but it was just too annoying and made me feel sick. The light made my eyes hurt, and the sounds made me angry. In fact, all sounds where irritating, at any volume level, and I was glad it was so late at night because with all devices off it was very quiet, and I just sat in the dim light, alone, with a blanket around me and twitched and suffered. It was around 3am when I remembered that there was something called serotonin syndrome that could occur any time there was an increase in serotonin levels, and that it had symptoms similar to what I was experiencing. I read that it usually clears up in 24-36 hours as long as any drugs are discontinued, and I felt supported in my choice to just wait, but it was very hard to try and remain calm with all these strange feelings going on.
Around 6am I felt calm enough to sleep, and I did. The sleep was dreamless and uninterrupted until around 4pm when I woke up with my sheets soaked in sweat. Though I had slept for almost 10 hours, when I woke it felt as if I had slept for less than an hour. I was still dizzy and confused, and I could feel myself twitching a bit but not as much. I told my friend I was feeling better and I ate a large leftover taco I had made the day before, but not more than 20 minutes after I had done so I started to feel horribly sick again, and it freaked me out enough to call some numbers.
I called some kind of doctor's hotline, and spoke to a registered nurse that had no clue what dextromethorphan hydrobromide was (and when I told her it was cough medicine she freaked out and basically told me that I was a dirty drug addict), and wanted me to call 911 and gave me the number for poison control. She told me that I might have allergies and seizures after doing this, and I thought that it was quite ignorant and highly presumptuous of her to say such a thing when she didn't even know what DXM was. I skipped 911 and called poison control and they told me that I just had to wait it out, thinking that it was probably a toxicity thing (which it was, but I'm convinced now that it was a neural toxicity, not a physical one).
I waited and suffered. Around 10pm, I felt my entire body starting to get really hot, and the waves started to widen their intervals, both of these feelings felt really good. Then I felt what I can describe as someone pouring water down the middle of your back, right down your spine. It wasn't cold, but it did feel cool, and it definitely felt like water. Not one hour after this, I felt almost perfectly normal. My eyes no longer wanted to roll back into my skull, and the waves completely stopped. It was like having a really high fever and then having all symptoms completely cease; it was amazing. This occurred almost exactly 24 hours after the initial symptoms began. Gatorade seems to help more than water, but I may have already been getting better when I began drinking heavy amounts of fluids.
I slept that night, and though it was still dreamless it was much more comfortable than my previous sleep. The next 4 or 5 days I was a bit emotionally unstable, going through hourly intervals of being very tired and then being very energetic. Sometimes it felt as though I was very excited sexually; I had the strongest desire to have an orgasm about once every 6 hours, and this feeling was extremely hard to ignore, I'd say nearly impossible to ignore. The final revision of this document was completed 7 days after this whole thing happened, and I feel like I'm quite back to normal again.
I greatly value everything that happened to me, even the bad stuff, though I'd very much like to avoid it happening again, if possible. Every experience I've had with DXM is exactly what I was looking for, and I'm very satisfied with all of them. I think I am now one of the few people who can say that they've 'felt their brain', as the spasms and 'firey waves' very clearly enabled me to feel many of my internal organs, though it wasn't under pleasurable circumstances. DXM is a wonderful thing, but it requires a huge amount of respect and care.
Exp Year: 2005ExpID: 39923 Gender: Male Age at time of experience: Not Given Published: Nov 20, 2007Views: Not Supported [ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
DXM (22) : Bad Trips (6), Health Problems (27), Hangover / Days After (46), Retrospective / Summary (11), Not Applicable (38) -->