Ego Trip

DOSE: T+ 0:00 3.0 g oral Syrian Rue (capsule) T+ 0:30 13 mg oral 4-AcO-DMT (liquid) T+ 1:15 5.0 mg insufflated 4-AcO-DMT
T+ 1:15
smoked Cannabis
T+ 0:00 50 mg oral Diphenhydramine

       BODY WEIGHT:
   165 lb
     

My night has proceeded as normal. I went to the gym earlier and lifted weights for about an hour, picked up some groceries then came back to my city apartment with plans to do some reading. A friend calls and asks what I�m doing on New Years Eve. I reply that I�ll probably just go downtown with a few friends and bar hop, nothing special. He wants to know if I�d rather share some of my 4-AcO-DMT with him and a few others. I tell him maybe and that he can use it in any case. I had only used a moderate oral dose (20mgs), and a smallish intramuscular one (8mg) followed by 7mgs oral before. I knew that I wanted to be familiar with every side of this compound before doing it with anyone else so I encapsulated 3 grams of syrian rue and swallowed it. A half hour later I dissolved 13 mgs of 4-AcO-DMT in some caffeine-free soda and gulped it down. I wrote the following as it was happening for posting on a forum where everyone was curious about the effects of this compound in conjunction with an MAOI:

165lb Male

T+0: 3g finely ground Syrian Rue taken in capsules.

T+30: 13mg 4-AcO-DMT taken in Pepsi.

T+5: First alerts

T+10: Walls are wavy, I feel disoriented. Quite ayahuasca like in character but no nausea.

T+15: Still climbing, it�s pretty smooth. My thoughts are still lucid, when the trip interferes with them is just because of the inherent distractions of the visuals etc. Patterning begins. I�m amazed that this kind of rush hasn�t caused any nausea yet.

T+25: It seems to have leveled off. The familiar good feelings are shining through now. Visuals are more ayahuasca like than mushroom like. However they are very similar to the few Syrian Rue/mushroom trips I�ve had, which were also ayahuasca like. The general feeling of the trip is likewise similar.

T+45 Eyes watering quite a bit. The intense patterning is gone. It�s a very sleepy/dreamy state just like ayahuasca. I keep expecting the surges of ayahuasca but the feeling remains constant. Almost indistinguishable really, minus the work and nausea! At this level it is perhaps slightly less immersing. The beauty of the pure chemical is I can just insufflate/swallow more. Theoretically this converts to psilocin in the gut and psilocin has been shown to have extremely low neurotoxicity, less than caffeine by weight and by active dose if I recall correctly. What a gift! Merry Christmas!

I was surprised to find the effects taking a slight decline by 45 minutes after dosing. It seems that while 3 grams of syrian rue most definitely changed 4-AcO-DMT�s qualitative effects, it didn�t provide that significant a boost to its expected quantitative effects for me (though it is possible the dose/response curve grows very steep above 20mgs or greater, I don�t know. I most definitely could have been experiencing tolerance issues as well having used the compound just two days earlier). I listen to some music and do some reading for about an hour before growing dissatisfied with the low intensity experience. This will not properly prepare me to keep my shit together while first-timers are using. I prepare approximately 5mgs for insufflation.

The mothball-like smell is disgusting but the burn is very minor. It takes less than 2 minutes before the trip starts ramping up. I also take 3 or 4 hits from some nuggets. Now that I�m in for the long hall I figure I�ll start up a long movie, �Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King�. During the opening �transformation of Gollum� scenes I ask myself what the hell I�m thinking watching this. I need to take off my headphones and avert my eyes numerous times because the sounds and images seem to vibrate right through my body. After this I grow deeply immersed in the film, there is a very real sense of motion during the camera�s flights over the film�s immense landscapes and an active, story-making component to the trip that gives a richness to the characters and the environments I didn�t experience when I first saw the film� on AMT. By now I can tell that the 5mgs insufflated has increased the effects by about 60%.

It�s about 40 minutes after insufflation and the 5mgs has been plateaued for at least 15 minutes. I feel a tinge of hunger and stop the movie so I can go to the kitchen. The least offensive thing I have in the refrigerator is a piece of pumpkin bread. It is very moist yet I can�t seem to salivate. I put a small amount of milk in my mouth for assistance. As the bread absorbs the milk it expands, it feels alive and begins to tickle me as it crawls across my tongue. The idea that I am eating a piece of pumpkin bread alive is too much. I begin laughing, milk squirts from the corners of my smile and onto the floor. I rush to the sink and let the rest of the milk drain out past the bread. Damn this is fun. It requires all my effort not to choke on the bread while taking gasps of air between manic fits of laughter. It takes over two minutes to finish the first bite. I am oddly proud of myself when I finally finish it all.

I clean up and walk back toward the living room wearing an indelible grin. Something has shifted. I�m not in movie mode any more. Some wondrous feeling is climbing my spine like a fast, flowering ivy. A sudden rush screams through me and I need to brace myself on the corner of the living room partition. I am being transmogrified into gleaming gold. Imagine having never consumed MDMA, and then being dosed with about 8 pills, only without the 105-degree temperature, heart attack, and terrible delirium, that�s what I feel like. An impossibly intense emotional and physical pleasure is searing every cell in my body, each growing molten and radiating light. I suppose I should be afraid, but that thought seems too small to consider now.

I make it to the recliner, but cannot focus on the movie. At this point the trip takes the form of a personal triumph, a ridiculously self-absorbed, self-satisfied affair the likes of which I have never before experienced. For the reader�s sake, I�ll try not to expound on personal details while still trying to communicate a very personal experience accurately.

A deep, intense satisfaction with my life achievements and myself is felt. As a child I was weak, asthmatic, and emotionally sensitive. As a young teenager, I was nothing but normal. At 15 I began using psychedelics, pursuing what I perceived as �fundamental� knowledge, and training my body physically with the goal of strengthening every aspect of my being and living a life I felt was obliged of any person fully free to choose it. I have remained steadily engaged in all these pursuits and have made great progress. I have achieved most everything important I�ve expected of myself and have not quit working at where I�ve failed. Now, in the midst of this experience, I am both a spectator and a participant of that history, not so much as in a narrative montage but as in a series of emotional and votive sensations. There is an overwhelming sense that this intense, guided self-scan is a confirmation of everything I�ve hoped I was doing but never fully believed, an affirmation from the depths of my unconscious that �we� are in harmony.

I feel very still, though my breath is stuttered from this upwell of emotion and my hands are trembling. I have experienced much pleasure in 10 years of drug use�every major psychedelic, numerous �research chemicals�, dissociatives, MDMA, methamphetamine, cocaine, GHB, Oxycontin, and various combinations thereof, including with sex�but it is this pleasure, now, that I can barely contain. Though my past (and more recent) experiences with 4-AcO-DMT were also quite emotionally and physically euphoric, they don�t hold a candle to this. In addition to the phenomenal euphoria, the proceedings of this trip seem intricately and intimately ordered, planned, and purposeful, as though I am somehow orchestrating them myself. .

Suddenly I am very body conscious. I am fully relaxed yet I feel my left shoulder slump as though its sinew�s been snipped. The other muscle groups begin following suit randomly, splashing down in surrender against the walls of my flesh. My head tips backwards and is caught and cradled by the top of the recliner. Whether by some overshadowed fear stemming from this personally unprecedented physical reaction or by the accelerating eruption of ecstasy I can barely stand I start shaking still more violently. This is incredible this is planned. This physiological event is now priming my body to accept some final beatitude, as though it is a sublime reflex penned onto the coil of my DNA by some divinely dizzied recluse, a lost footnote that contains the true climax of my plot.

I lay broken, body and mind in tremulous submission. The final surge is now underway, a state of such perfect bliss I am denied the ability to doubt there can be greater. I am infinitely far from the void even as I lay my hands on it, bracing the brim and denying its thunderclap enclosure around me by sheer force of being. This is an exquisite dream, a supreme love that depends on nothing but the honest exercise of my own principals in my own choices. I recall just a few exclamations from these moments:

�Every second is thrilling!� �There is nothing wrong!� �There is no person I�d rather be!� Strangely all clich�, not at all the poetry expected of this brilliant flash in time, and all said by others and myself in far lesser moments, but it is only now that they are felt with such absolute conviction and certainty.

From the beginning of this strange acceleration of the experience, 20 minutes out of step with the onset of the insufflated 4-AcO-DMT, about 15 minutes have elapsed. But this rocket is now caught in �gravity�s rainbow�. It begins with a mild sickness in my chest. My limbs and eyes grow heavy and my head grows light. I�ve been sick from dehydration in unbearable heat, I�ve been unable to take another step up a Himalayan mountain side, but never have I been so exhausted in every dimension of my being as I am growing now. I try to walk over to the couch so I can lie down but my legs buckle and I crawl. I make it to the couch and lie down. I stretch out and realize, no joke, my testicles are aching. I laugh weakly at this, I guess I really shouldn�t be surprised that an egogic blast-off would be fueled by every last drop of testosterone my body could muster. I begin to feel the depression of a chemical imbalance, not unlike an MDMA crash. The experience has depleted every reserve I had. I�ve never experienced anything like this. I did not expect something so physically demanding from this compound, prior experiences certainly couldn�t have predicted it.

The depression invites my impatient criticality to seep in, until now barred entrance by the experience�s monolithic presence. The first stirs of doubt begin at the periphery of my thoughts. It seems to be a disembodied whisper rather than a product of my own efforts. �Narcissistic, undeserved tripe.� �You�re deluded, self-love is capable of all the deceits of any love, but it�s all the more cunning because its necessary intimacy with self-knowledge means it can capitalize on all the deficits you know you have in your introspective discernment of the truth. It�s no wonder you were so taken by it�.

These attempts to knock down the experience don�t hurt though. In fact they seem both natural and expected. The mania has left me but the impression of purpose and harmony that had given form to that episode remains for me now. There is a strange satisfaction in my exhaustion, sickness, and despondency for being somehow expected, for being a precise prediction that has been realized. The sickness is superficially distressing, but on this deeper level it is consoling. It all seems planned for in advance, not in the manner of a synchronicity but in the manner of a choice made by a knowing but subconscious aspect of myself/ourselves (The results of the tacit activities of which I think we sometimes mistakenly call �synchronicities� simply because we don�t suspect our own mind�s sleight of hand conjurations). Without this intuitive assurance that the experience was in some way intelligently mediated, I would now be thanking whatever god there might be that it didn�t cause a seizure or massive brain damage�better do it just in case.

I continue lying down, contemplating the experience, shifting into new, immensely palliating body positions every time the �sickness� wells up, and thereby remain largely content. There were unique and powerful themes that ran through the experience, but what exactly happened here? I have experienced �rapture� 4 times prior but the experiences were all qualitatively different than this one. While each had its own unique character, they were all far more impersonal in content. In their feelings and imagery they seemed to be an exalted extrapolation of my senses of beauty, mercy, gratitude, and innocence, whereas this experience was dominated by life-conscious harmony and spiritual self-love. Also, though they were all in their own way as blissful and intense as this experience (on some occasions inciting glossolalia and/or minor bodily �possession�), none of them were followed by the emotional and physical exhaustion ensuing from this one. There were no immersing visions here and no tears either, beautiful psychedelic imagery to be sure, but none of the transporting, �supernatural� revelations and exquisitely ethereal emblems that branded each of the others with that particular spectral fire. This wasn�t spiritual rapture it was a kind of self-actualization. This was the �real-time� impression I received during the experience and it�s being fleshed out now in reflection.

It was �true self-actualization�, direct and immediate, the humanist�s wet dream, and might be a personal and �metaphysical� affirmation of their theory if only it weren�t so short lived. A perceived union of who I am at my deepest levels with an actualized self-concept, my body, life, and mind in vitalic fusion, coiled together in a nuclear filament housed in an experiential flash bulb. This was not a union with that archaic notion, the Id, some transgressive self or seething body-animal, but with that thinking, active aspect that splices metaphors into the broken narratives of our dreams and betrays our true feelings through the language of our bodies. It demanded utter surrender, used me as a battery, and borrowed from everything in me. My singed synapses and blown fuse of a body whine for over two hours before they feel recharged. Though the effects are gone by T+9hrs, I am enormously tired, and I take 50mg of diphenhydramine to aid in sleep, I remain unable to sleep until 6 a.m., fully 11 hrs after my initial dose.

Despite the fact that I believe a large, quasi-independent psychological event took place during the trip, it is obvious to me that it would not have been able to occur without the 4-AcO-DMT. I find the dosage regimen employed here very interesting because the only other two times I�ve used it with an extremely similar combination of drugs, syrian rue and mimosa hostilis, resulted in ego death. I begin with a slower acting oral dose, in the case of the ayahuasca by first using a boiled-down, dry, encapsulated mimosa extract that gets absorbed far more slowly into the body than its liquid form. Once those effects plateau, I then re-dose using a method of administration with a faster onset, here insufflation, and in the ayahuasca sessions the oral liquid extract. That, in me, using this dosage regimen with two very similar psychedelics elicited two very different, perhaps even diametrically opposed results�ego death and �ego union��I take as further evidence of intervention by some major psychological event. DMT, 5-MEO-DMT, and the 4 position DMT�s seem more directly tied to ego effects than other psychedelics in my personal experience as well.

Whether the �ego union� interpretation is true, partially true, or some delusion fed by a drug addled, madcap enthusiasm and numerous suggestive coincidences I do not know. I have returned essentially to normal, as normal as one can be with such memories in their head anyway, and have continued with my life in the same manner I had been. I feel grateful and privileged to have been so fortunate as to experience an intensity of self being I�ve no doubt is usually only squeezed out by the grip of death, if even then. Whether I have really been �changed� remains to be seen. It was only four months ago that I last experienced such an intense event and only six months before that one! (two of the prior 4 �rapturous� experiences). After 10 years of psychedelic use, I seem to be growing prone to the beatific and my psyche has thankfully adapted resilience to some common after effects of these things. I haven�t joined any cults, tried starting my own, talked to interdimensional aliens, or made any prophecies. My quotidian existence remains the same except for an occasional revelry regarding the experience I sometimes find myself lost in.

I don�t think I�ll be using this substance for a while, or if I do it will be a low dose. Though I feel emotionally fine and my thoughts are quite clear, my �soul� feels frayed. I will require at least a month to recover fully and be ready for another jaunt with this wondrous compound, most likely in combination with a phenethylamine. My intuitions and my past history of experiences tell me that something particularly like this will not happen again soon, if ever.

Exp Year: 2006ExpID: 58480 Gender: Male Age at time of experience: Not Given Published: Jan 3, 2007Views: Not Supported [ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]

4-AcO-DMT (387), Syrian Rue (45) : Glowing Experiences (4), Combinations (3), Alone (16) -->