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Fourth Plateau Sailing
DXM, Ginkgo biloba & Vitamin (B-Complex)
Citation:   Dextro Durden. "Fourth Plateau Sailing: An Experience with DXM, Ginkgo biloba & Vitamin (B-Complex) (exp70927)". Erowid.org. Sep 18, 2009. erowid.org/exp/70927

 
DOSE:
T+ 0:00
    Vitamins / Supplements  
  T+ 0:00     Ginkgo biloba  
  T+ 0:00 1080 mg oral DXM (liquid)
  T+ 2:00 360 mg oral DXM (liquid)
BODY WEIGHT: 160 lb
A brief little history: I am seventeen years old, a senior in high school. This whole senior year has been all about me demolishing boundaries, social and mental. The mental aspect gets done through my experimentation with psychoactive substances. My best friend, pseudonym Narrator, had been indulging in drugs for a bit longer than I. For some months, he had been open with me about his use and had gently offered to include me on several occasions, all of which I had denied him.

But eventually, something inside me gave in, and in August of ’07 I finally let him smoke me out with some of the finest bud from our green state of Oregon. The mind alteration got me hooked, and in a short time I was moving on to many other substances and surpassing him and nearly everyone else I knew in my intake and confidence with all manner of drugs. I quickly realized that my athletic frame, and whatever other factors, allowed me to consume a considerable amount of whatever substance with no adverse effects. I have been lucky enough to have no real bad trips, and any mildly unpleasant ones I tend to be able to redirect into positive territory.

Through the months, I’ve done many, many varieties of marijuana, played around with Adderall, nutmeg, nitrous, morning glory (with success!), mushrooms, diphenhydramine, dimenhydrinate, Oxycontin, vicodin, crack cocaine, and several others that escape me at the moment. However, few of these substances can hold a candle to my most beloved drug of all, one with which I’ve had incredible success and dozens of truly profound experiences. The drug being, of course, DXM.

This particular substance was introduced to me in February by a very close friend of mine, someone I know and care about like a little sister. She had obtained some Coricidins, had told me what she knew about them and how they made her feel. However, I decided to do my own research, which I do for all substances that catch my interest. Rather quickly, I learned everything there is about DXM, and through many experiences, I developed a prodigal tolerance and wisdom with the drug. Ask any drug user at school, and they will all confirm that I am the authority on DXM, and that they have noticed a drastic change for the better in me. I’m not stupid with the drug, or irresponsible, but I deeply enjoy what it does for me.

I have had tons of trips, most of them in mid to high 3rd plateau doses (which for me means around 800 to 1200 mg). As an experienced DXM user should know, however, is that the elusive 4th plateau can sometimes be very difficult to reach, or to remember after being reached. Fortunately for me, about two weeks ago, I succeeded with flying colors.

The night of the experience: It was a Friday night at my home, the days prior I had spent reading numerous 4th plateau experiences posted by veteran users. On one such report, I encountered a useful piece of advice to help maintain a sort of mental clarity during the experience. A member on a forum said to try using the supplements Vitamin B Complex and Gingko Biloba prior to tripping. He said they would help keep a more defined sense of consciousness about you, and that when employed they would greatly improve your memory during and following the experience. As luck would have it, my mom had both of these supplements in her collection. So I took several of each in the morning, again in the afternoon, and once more before my DXM doses.

I had four bottles of Robitussin Long-Acting syrup in my possession for the experience, each one containing approximately 360 mg of DXM, with no other unpleasant ingredients, of course. At about 7 pm, I drank three of these bottles in quick succession, a total of about 1080 mg. This has always been very easy for me. I have never gotten nauseous from any DXM product, which a lot of my friends marvel at. With those three down, I munched on an apple to neutralize the taste of the syrup on my tongue, and went out to my living room to watch some basketball. The game ended at around 8:30, and at this time I got up and traveled back to my room. I was feeling a very slight buzz from the alcohol contained in those bottles, maybe 3 shots worth. As far as the DXM, I was starting to feel some of the preliminary indicators, but nothing really noteworthy to me.

In my room, I locked my door, turned on my favorite fan and a lamp, opened a decoy book should my mom knock, and rested my eyes while awaiting the bigger effects. By 9 pm, I was feeling a solid 2nd plateau experience, my signal to take the last remaining Robitussin. I downed it, went to my side table drawer and got one of my many drug notebooks, and opened it up to a blank page, prepared to write (something I love to do whenever possible). My 4th plateau trip, as I see it, truly began around 10 pm. By that time, I had turned my lamp off, since it was getting a bit late to have it on and because light hardly seemed necessary once my vision became more inner reality than outer reality. What follows is my memories of my 4th plateau journey:

The Experience: The way I remember realizing I had entered the 4th plateau is this: For about 30 minutes straight or so, I had been laying down with eyes closed, enthralled with the intense third plateau imagery cascading through my mind. As DXM doses go higher and higher for me, the images in my mind begin to gain more and more definition, starting out as mere vivid ideas, gaining substance with that hard to describe mental sight, until closing my eyes feels like teleporting into a new world of shapes, colors, movement, and actual objects or people standing before me. So I had been off in a consciousness of this sort for a good while, when the feeling of my heart beating woke me out of it. I opened my eyes in reaction, and what I saw amazed me.

First of all, the act of opening my eyes had never been so different than this occasion. Opening them was like looking through one of those kaleidoscopic binocular toys and changing the slide on it. It was a drastically choppy and intense experience to open the eyes, not the gentle materializing of reality like normal, but a sudden shift. Once the shift had happened, my eyes focused on my room, which had never looked more bizarre. I have several posters on my wall of basketball players, pictures of waves from different surfing areas, and a few framed records from retro California bands like the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean. The posters and records did not shimmer brilliantly like they often do when I look at them on smaller doses of DXM. Rather, they formed three dimensional frames of themselves, as they were all duplicated many times upon one another. My stereoscopic vision, which allows the eyes to focus on images and to not see double, was in ruins. I was seeing double in many different fields of vision, so that hanging images on my walls were superimposed many times upon themselves and one another, creating an extremely chaotic sense of seeing.

With vision so far removed from its original functions, I blinked several times to try to restore it somewhat. All this did was trigger several other alterations to the things I saw. The posters and records next began to orbit one another in a furious clockwise frenzy. Vision was so utterly crazy, it was very hard to focus the eyes. So I stopped trying. What this did, as I recall, was cause my world around me to begin sinking together into the general middle of my room, like there was a sinkhole on my wall. I decided to try and take inventory of the rest of my room and the changes it had undergone.

Turning my attention away from the alarming wall, I gazed up at my ceiling, which I discovered had also changed shape dramatically. It was pointed like a church steeple, and the weirdest part was the actual point at the top wasn’t visible because it seemed to stretch up into the heavens. Looking towards my closet, I saw that a little section of wall that protrudes by the corner of my closet towards my door had grown considerably, blocking any view of my door. My window, with the blinds slightly open, appeared gnarled and iridescent. My bed itself appeared to have grown more than double its size, so that my body lay in the middle of a mammoth sized mattress that struck me more as a sailboat (hence my report’s title) than anything else.

As I finished taking the scenery of room in, I once again realized that my heart seemed to be beating very fast, similar to how it gets on Adderall rather than DXM. I set to calming it down, by taking in some deep breaths (which I could scarcely feel) and putting my hands upon my chest, trying to soothe it to a more regular beat. Much to my immense shock, when I laid my hands on my chest, I had the distinct sensation of my heart and chest shrinking away to nothingness, until what my hands were on felt like nothing more than a plate. I literally could not feel my heart beat. I tried touching my leg next, and discovered that it too shrank and disappeared from my senses. That’s when I realized that my mind was so disassociated that the feeling coming from my body was more delusion than anything else. It didn’t alarm me, being alarmed was kind of past my mental capacity. Instead, this feeling of detachment from body feeling kind of comforted me. I still had the presence of mind to remember that I had taken DXM and that what I was experiencing was undoubtedly some 4th plateau sensations.

The next thing I remember from this period was the fan operating dependably on the side of the bed. I didn’t actually look at it as movement of the neck was out of the question, but I suddenly became very aware of the noise of it. Only the sounds coming from it no longer resembled what I would associate with a fan at all. Instead, it produced incredible varied and involved guitar like noises, complex and totally alien to me. I still have no explanation as to how I managed to hear such sounds that I have never before heard. Like I said, it sounded similar to a guitar, but like a guitar from another dimension, with bizarre twanging and flanging, many different frequencies and chords if you will. Much later in the night, I recall, the same fan abandoned the music-like sound and instead took to broadcasting the strangest voice-like noises one can imagine. I began to equate it to a radio sending transmissions from outer space entities. Try to imagine that. However, I am grateful for the fan being on all night, because I believe it contributed to me keeping conscious and as alert as possible.

I spent probably an hour or so with my eyes open, observing what I could and trying to extract meaning from my what I saw. Remember, this whole time since I entered the 4th plateau, my mind had taken on a completely different persona. Looking back on it, I was very far removed from the self I know so well. This was actually very fun because it broke down all the barriers in my thinking. Nothing that I thought or imagined seemed based on anything prior to what was happening at that moment. Nothing hinged on predispositions, prejudices, beliefs, or any other inner block that all regularly functioning people carry with them wherever they go. All that I thought seemed in reaction to an outside influence I couldn’t identify. A mind so very free of all restraints, that it wanders lost. In such a state, it can be hard to keep focus with some things. In a way, its like being a newborn baby, where every experience out there seems new and profound and infinitely deep. This results in a short attention span of sorts. I soon found myself back in my mind, in vivid worlds and systems of delusional thinking. Soon, the barrier between inner and outer reality seemed to vanish as the difference between eyes open and closed became irrelevant.

I began to experience what I would later term the “china doll effect”, in which my mind would have an imagination, and within that imagination would form a new, deeper delusion. Within that delusion, I would discover another, even deeper imagination, hallucination, dream, whatever you would like to call it. After enough of these, I would find myself in a deeply multilayered false reality, further removed from true existence than ever in my life. True reality held no consequence, and the realities I experienced, although often rather abstract or otherwise impossible to articulate, seemed infinitely deeper and more eternally preserved than what human existence amounts to. This made me begin to reevaluate the concept of heaven entirely. It seems that most people view heaven as a paradise-like extension of life on Earth, with people walking around with everlasting joy, with all the possessions and sources of joy they have always longed for. However, upon experiencing this deep seeded form of reality in the 4th plateau, I experienced an all-new kind of contentment that I would argue you could easily characterize like heaven. Very hard to put into words, and with good reason. Wouldn’t it be reasonable to think that a state of heaven, nirvana, whatever, would defy description in this way?

I also happen to believe that this sort of state is the one that commonly occurs at the 4th plateau, but that often becomes forgotten when the experience has ended due to its rich complexity. However, the Gingko Biloba, said to heighten mental focus and processing, and the Vitamin B Complex, said to improve vision and similar brain mechanisms, seemed to do the trick in allowing me to retain that part of the experience.

From here, I began to sink into all sorts of dreamscapes and involved delusions, occasionally coming back to reality, where my room would always be altered greatly, and often the delusions would continue out there. For example, I began to feel movement coming from different corners in my bed, like there was something or someone fidgeting around. Interestingly, my body itself still had almost no feeling, and yet I could sense feeling from these other imaginary sources. Very strange.

At one point during the night, I had an out of body experience, which I have had previously with DXM. At the time, I was off in a dream world, when I opened my eyes to discover I was on my ceiling. I looked down to see my catatonic like body laying several feet beneath me. I had the ability to move around in this state if I made the mental effort to, rather than try to physically move. The whole out of body thing has always struck me as fascinating. One could theorize it as evidence of a spirit or soul. Perhaps, when the body and mind are so thoroughly anesthetized, it allows the spirit/soul to emerge from the body, free of earthly restraints. Just a thought.

Anyway, the night from here seems rather blurry to my current recollection. What I do remember, amazingly, was that the night seemed to encompass several days, seriously. I remember waking once and thinking it might have all been a dream, until I noticed the tamper evident rings from the Robitussin bottles I had donned on my thumbs. When I finally regained a sense of permanent consciousness at about 10 am, more than 12 hours later, I discovered I was still experiencing some vivid 2nd plateau effects, such as a very shimmery altered vision and occasional off kilter thoughts I have grown to easily identify as DXM induced. I also found that I was incredible shaky. That persisted for about 3 more hours, although it went undetected by peers. I found the notebook I had opened at the beginning of the night, and saw that I had only managed a small page worth of writing before throwing the notebook aside. One of the lines I had written (in frightening handwriting) was: “I see a man walking free. Walking free out of a pool, out of a planet, out of a brain. This man brings me peace of mind, I admire him greatly.”

Lol, funny stuff. I sat back and reflected on the night for much of that day. I had some great epiphanies and experiences, although some of them have faded into ambiguity with time. But my sense of heavenly “china doll” reality remains, as does some of the craziest hallucinations this side of Diphenhydramine (jk, those suck).

Exp Year: 2008ExpID: 70927
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: 17
Published: Sep 18, 2009Views: 89,657
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DXM (22) : Alone (16), Glowing Experiences (4), General (1)

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