Erowid Canvas Tote/Shopping Bag
This reusable "Ecobag" is made of 100% recycled mid-weight
(10 oz) cotton canvas, printed with the Erowid logo.
Donate now and receive yours!
Planet Peelander
MDMA & Ketamine
Citation:   yardbird. "Planet Peelander: An Experience with MDMA & Ketamine (exp113461)". Erowid.org. Sep 30, 2019. erowid.org/exp/113461

 
DOSE:
  repeated oral Alcohol
  40 mg oral Amphetamines
    oral Caffeine
  130 mg oral MDMA
  100 mg oral MDMA
    repeated insufflated Ketamine
BODY WEIGHT: 175 lb
When we arrived in Harlem on the 29th to celebrate the well deserved death of 2016 I expected a weekend of debauchery. I did not expect reckless hedonism to give way to one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life.
I did not expect reckless hedonism to give way to one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life.
This report was hard to write and it is very long.

Whenever I am reunited with Kyle we tend to make the most of it. We drove into the city from my Pennsylvania home town after a rich but taxing visit with the parents. This was the first time they were meeting Molly (no relation), my new partner. As a matter of course we were looking for a little escapism. The lengthy series of sordid, misguided events surrounding my union with Molly and my eventual separation from my previous partner Sam (a close friend of Molly's even now) had left all of us with some substantial emotional bruising. It had also left me feeling socially impotent. Soul crushing guilt and depression and the ensuing hard drug abuse had given way to a new apartment, a new life, cautious peace, a slowly blooming patch of clarity and intense anxiety--especially social anxiety. I've been trying to track the root of this for a while, and have some theories, but I haven't really been sure how to approach it. It has been affecting my bonds with people I care about - bonds I highly value - friendships that were growing strong before everything went awry and got confusing. Spending time with Kyle - an old and dear friend and brother from a happier time in both of our lives seemed like it might be therapeutic. For now I'll leave several more pages worth of exposition to die at the end of this already-too-long paragraph and live on in personal journals. Might as well get to the nuts and bolts.

The 29th and 30th were spent with cocaine and champagne. Each night "we should get to bed a little earlier this time" spun into well after sunrise thanks to the wry pearlescent trickster. By the second day my dopamine neurons were fried, and we woke just in time to make it to the concert we had planned to attend. I dropped 40mg of Adderall(TM) brand amphetamines for healthy American children and chugged 12 ounces of Red Bull brand liquefied cattle liver on the B train to Union Square. By the time we transferred to the L to Brooklyn I was feeling like a pretty productive member of society - like I could do some homework, obey my parents, maybe even race airplanes or some mixture of the three.

We found the venue nestled among some warehouses and set about getting some drinks when I ran into [a band member]. We carefully timed it so that Kyle and I could conveniently duck outside for a smoke when we knew he was outside. We came up on [two band members] conversing in Japanese, and broke into the conversation to ask for a lighter in smoker-ese. We parted ways and smoked our cigarettes through silly grins. I went back inside and continued to drink heavily: something I can only really stomach on Adderall(TM) brand neuropoison for healthy American alcoholics. By the time Peelander Z took the stage I was into the thick of seven course shot dinner with a beer appetizer. The half hour set passed in a blur.

The real meat of the experience started after the show. As we left we were still riding the high of the show and my amphetamines were waning a bit but still kicking pretty good. I was curious about how this would interact with the MDMA we were about to drop, but figured if anything about this night killed me it would sure as hell not be curiosity. We all dropped our 130mg Ecstasy(TM) brand full­-body orgasm-simulators at around 11pm on the walk to the train.

By the time we boarded the first train I could already feel it coming up. The MDMA had landed on a bed of pretty much nothing but tequila and speed. I could tell right away this was going to be a doozy of a roll. It had been a good while since my last one, and there was definitely some synergy brewing between the amphetamine cousins in my stomach.

I don't remember much of the train ride. The Adderall clarity was swept under the rug of MDMA's blissful confusion. As we left the subway on jelly-legs I remarked that I felt like my whole body was cumming. I repeated this when we got to the apartment, probably more than once because the sensation was pretty much constant. It was the most physically pleasurable roll I could remember ever having, but the Adderall seemed to rob the emotional side of something. It was still there of course - just somehow a little different, like maybe the empathy was too articulate or something. It was fifteen minutes to midnight so we turned on a live-stream of the ball drop. I was awash in insane pleasure and could care less what year it was. We spent a while longer in MDMA space just loving and chatting and complimenting and reinforcing bonds. Eventually Kyle weighed out our 100mg MDMA oral redoses and as I dropped mine I began to rack up some small bumps of Ketamine -- maybe 20 or 30mg each.

I haven't written about it before, but MDMA and ketamine is my favorite drug combination by leaps and bounds. I've experimented with it a handful of times and I love how the MDMA adds a warmth and confidence to the typically cold and clinical ketamine and the ketamine adds a warped landscape in which the MDMA can romp
I love how the MDMA adds a warmth and confidence to the typically cold and clinical ketamine and the ketamine adds a warped landscape in which the MDMA can romp
, resulting in the chemical equivalent of a carnival funhouse. I had dabbled in ketamine by itself too - though only a few moderate doses here and there over the years. On its own I saw it as just an oddity - something I couldn't really work with. From my readings on it I wasn't sure I was interested in its deeper levels. However, I had recently seen a great lecture on arylcyclohexylamines and I was starting to warm up to the idea of exploring dissociatives further. When I had taken ketamine with MDMA in the past I had tended to add it towards the tail-end in little bumps so I could carefully ratchet up the weirdness level without going too deep for my comfort.

And that's pretty much how this started - a bump here, a bump there. This was Kyle's first time combining them but we soon wound up in a zone that was familiar to me: the jovial vibes of the MDMA in a newfound physical reality full of growing and shrinking and stumbling and strange propioceptive aberrations. Something to give the well-read MDMA a little edge of novelty and challenge, both mentally and physically.

I'm not sure when exactly, but at a certain point it was clear we were going to delve deeper in to the K space than I had in the past. Maybe it was the increased courage Kyle and I get when doing drugs together, or maybe it just seemed like the right time to really go for it since we were in such great spirits and I had this nascent desire in the back of my mind to try and figure out what dissociatives were all about. We changed whatever MDMA music we were listening to to some sparse and spooky Oneohtrix Point Never and put on a playlist of surreal VHS clips from the 80's and 90's on the muted television. Then we did some more lines.

I let the anesthetic relax me and cozied into the couch with a blanket and closed my eyes. I started to feel the true nature of the Ketamine beckoning. It was something like 6am by this point and the MDMA had mostly left (the ketamine did an amazing job of totally obscuring the MDMA comedown and I will note this for the future). As we settled in I felt my perspective start to wander into wonder.

We were at maybe 100-something milligrams at this point over the course of the past hour. I first noticed that my body had become incidental - like somehow I realized I was in a room that had nothing to do with the actual room I was physically inhabiting. I was some distance away where distance no longer meant much, but I could hear the voices of my friends around me and that kept me some kind of grounded even though where I was there was no ground. Molly had not taken any Ketamine and didn't plan to, and I guess Kyle hadn't quite hit the zone I was in yet. They were chatting along as if everything was normal-ish. Meanwhile I found myself in a nightclub with stools, a bar, a jukebox, load-bearing columns - all entirely covered in crushed purple velvet. I walked around in it while their voices echoed from the jukebox. It made me think of the mental image I got when reading Iceberg Slim's first novel "Pimp" - the scene where Iceberg first tries to cut into Sweet Jones at the club. This wasn't just an image though. Huh. This is fucking awesome!

When I opened my eyes I snapped out of it and told Kyle I thought we were on to something. We both did a little more and laid back to focus on where it took us. I guess more accurately: where it allowed us to go. We had reached some kind of beautiful twilight zone beyond low-level ketamine goofiness and before the K-Hole
We had reached some kind of beautiful twilight zone beyond low-level ketamine goofiness and before the K-Hole
: a realm where we could work hand in hand with the drug to discover and create intricate spaces and even worlds. It was like navigating one of those video games where there are endless random dungeons, but the dungeons were all pieces of our selves. All it took was closing the eyes before visions unlike anything I've ever seen on psychedelics manifested instantly - and they could be observed or even interacted with! When I speak of using psychedelics to explore the mind and the self I say that for loss of better language. Psychedelics open up states of mind that afford you insightful self-analysis with ease, but primarily you're doing that from the outside looking in, or by holding your internal reality up against the fabric of your perceived external reality. With this dissociative I was literally exploring my self - walking through tangible rooms of it, making adjustments, visiting vast landscapes and witnessing scenes so beautiful they took my breath away before I could even get the last breath back.

I began vocalizing some of what I was seeing and so did Kyle. As I described the scenes I laughed at how words only mangled the visions. I suppose I also laughed to prevent myself from crying at the beauty of their complete materialization, only a fraction of which I could truly absorb and frantically commit to memory. At one point Kyle described one of his visions and the words entered my chamber and as his vision filtered through my perception it became a floating oblong canvas of sky with a undulating bird. The bird was poorly drawn as if by a child - evidence of how words are inadequate to truly convey experience (astral or otherwise), and how the filter of my perception had dulled his vision into the closest facsimile I could muster in my own space. I wrapped a brown wooden frame around the floating image and hung it in the room I was currently in, which at that point was an ornate red and gold hallway in a Victorian mansion full of antique furniture on marble floors. I hung his vision on the wall above a short, narrow table that was flush against one of the walls and was supporting a vase of unearthly flowers that I had previously conjured. I stepped back to look at it and make sure it was level before moving on to another room.

We kept this state up through more small bumps for about another hour, maybe getting close to 200mg total towards the end of the second hour. Molly had decided to partake after hearing our tales of the intense beauty and power we had found. She had taken ketamine once before years ago and found it to be not much beyond "weird", which mirrored my previous experiences with it. She started taking some small bumps as we continued ours.

By now Kyle and I were locked in neighboring crystal cockpits, cutting our own slices of space-time pie and occasionally chatting via space-time radio about our creations. I imagined that if there were a creator god responsible for our reality I could now relate to the joy he/she/they felt in the doing of it. I don't really believe in a creator god, but if I did this would answer a nagging question for me about why we are thrust into lives we never asked for. It wouldn't have been about us at all. It would've been about the god's insatiable appetite for the unending allure of boundless creation - the manic euphoria of absolute power over a realm of infinite possibilities.

I saw rainbow colored worms wriggling in and out of a grass-green plane. I willed them into people and then they took over from there: the mother grew tired of domestic life and left in the dead of night. She became a goose and flew away into the burgundy sky. She swelled into my entire field of vision while morphing into a large sea turtle and finally a golden crown descended from on high to rest on her stately turtle head. Finally, as all of these visions ended, she became an impossible multitude of nouns, invisible but instantly understood concepts, disjunct emotional impressions and instantly absorbed trains of specific thought before she crumbled under the weight of her possibilities and became the soil from which a new iteration could begin to grow. Kyle remarked that in every second there was enough information to write a dozen books. The inanimate objects I created in this realm persisted and stayed firm while the beings I created became sentient and broke free of my control. It was as if both myself and the ketamine were working in tandem. I provided the raw materials and it provided the narratives. The Ketamine entered my nose as the breath of Brahma and set the raw stuff of the universe on my plate, I played Vishnu for a while by reaching my hands down into the clay and placing the pieces - sometimes walking among them. Then the Ketamine's active and sometimes (I can't believe I'm saying this and believing it) "conscious" role was to guide my creations to their glorious destruction and reintegration into the raw stuff of reality.

Let me digress momentarily to make some general observations:
It seems to me that the psychedelic state permutes sets of concepts engrained in the brain of the psychonaut. The psychonaut now selects from a wider palette of patterns, previously curtained by natural neural filtering systems but now exposed by the temporary impotence of those systems. In this way new patterns can be extracted and used to further understand the user's psyche. That understanding then opens up the potential for lasting change through careful monitoring of existing thought patterns in sober reality, and skilled integration of the more preferable patterns among those newly discovered while in the psychedelic state.

Based on the visionary states I experienced with this dissociative, I don't think it's a stretch to say that its action diverges significantly from the psychedelic model. I do not yet know enough about ketamine's biochemistry to frame this observation in even loose neurobiological terms, but it's reasonably clear to me that its power lies not in exposing new patterns among existing sets of concepts but in its ability to indiscriminately conflate fragments taken from across the entire corpus of human experience. It is not useful for finding new order among parts but it is remarkably adept at collapsing progression entirely to yield thoughts untouched by the human tendency to impose narrative. It relentlessly unifies concepts - unity that appears surreal or at least unexpected to me in most cases. Perhaps that's just because I'm only newly initiated. Even with my limited experience I see immense potential for creative enhancement, and perhaps a therapeutic route using dissociatives as a preliminary adjunct to psychedelics: priming the psychedelic pump with new conceptual units as building blocks for the psychedelic search for patterns.

I hope that summary didn't seem unbearably cluttered or vague, but I'm building towards a point. All of my carefully honed tools for dealing with psychedelic states are useless here. All I can really do with this experience is describe the ways ketamine conflated the fragments of my newly fractured self in the form of the vast "experiences" it produced in me. At this point in my ketamine studies, the only thing I can do with these vignettes is try to read them like short stories.

What follows is a partial list of the visions, creations and adventures that I can most clearly remember from my tenure in the smokey realms of my self's sub-basement. These occurred in roughly 30 minute spans punctuated by occasional K snoots to keep the engine warm. They are not in any particular order.

[ Vision 1 ]
Black lines appear in the dark grey void behind my eyes. They gently move as if through brownian motion and collapse and distort with seamless and elegant fluidity into curlicues. Rainbow colored soussants bud at random points along the black dancing stems and then reveal themselves to be follicles as they push forth sparkling rainbow threads. The threads are somewhere between hair and wisps of smoke, and as they reach enough length to tangle their intersections sketch out vividly detailed portions of faces. A single eye and eyebrow, the slope of an upper lip. Eventually nearly complete faces start to take shape. As the faces solidify into a recognizable age, race and gender, skin emerges to complete the face before it vanishes into darkness. This is hard to explain but the skin wasn't visual - it was somewhere between the sensation of touch all wrapped up with memory, expectation, even smell and then converged not on the faces themselves but on the concept the faces represented. "Old white woman", "young asian man", "dryness", "spray cologne", "death", "breath", "paper".

[-- Notes on Vision 1 --]
Ketamine's conflations include but are not limited to the following:
1. Isolated sensory experiences: past, present, future.

2. Abstract concepts like Islam.

3. Concrete objects like the combustion engine.
4. Childhood memories as complete scenes, strong sensory/­memory associations like the smell of a family member's house, even memories of viewing pictures or watching home videos of earlier memories!

5. Completely fleshed out lines of logical thought presented apropos of nothing and fully explored instantly and effortlessly

6. Isolated or combined shapes, colors, sounds and most of all textures.

Imagine all of that and more slamming into the brick wall of your consciousness in the same instant, momentarily forming a Pollock painting which occasionally pulls sentience out of thin air and walks around like a Cronenberg monster. And since time doesn't really hold any sway in this realm it's not so much a single instant as it is dozens happening in superposition. The smell of my grandmother's red sauce now connected to the concept of communism, the rape of Nanking, a triangle, a good idea for a novel to write - these are just hypothetical examples to illustrate the point. It was like someone slam dunked a funnel into my head and then a huge Popeye arm stuffed the raw stuff of the multiverse down the mouth of the funnel until my consciousness liquefied, spawned amoeba, dinosaurs, coal, and finally a diamond. To continue the diamond metaphor I was left with the impression that what I had just received was rare and valuable, but like diamonds the value seemed arbitrary or at least inexplicable. I am consistently met by the flat truth that Ketamine is not a psychedelic or anything remotely close to it.

-- [ Vision 2 --]
A young Arab boy opens his mouth and speaks not in words but in soft colors. The colorful wisps begin to circle in on each other and create some kind of heated reaction, like little thunderstorms breaking out. His breath ignites into fire. He begins to back away from his own exhalation but as he does the fire moves even farther. Also, as his head moves it slowly changes form into the face of a stone golem with large square boulder teeth. He expands to take up the entire horizon and is now spewing white hot fire. The stone face is now as big as a wall and rolls past me with a deafening rumble.

[-- Notes on Vision 2 ]
I get the feeling that this is either the start of the world (universe?) or the end of it - and that decision is is in the hands of a person, or a people, or people as a whole, or even something abstract like an idea that can manifest in people and reasoned with by reasoning with the human flag bearers of that idea.

[ Vision 3 ]
I am looking down from above at a perfect ninety degree angle - like an old Donkey Kong table. I see a green field peppered with multicolored miniscule people moving around and communicating in their small settlement. They aren't aware of my presence. A rift forms in the meadow and on one side of the rift the grass dies and the ground becomes dry clay, barren and uninhabited. People perish in the clay. The rift fills with water and becomes a great flowing river. As the water courses through the river it begins to change shape and the surrounding landscape falls out of focus. The river takes the shape of a woman holding a baby - the madonna holding christ. The mother falls away and the baby expands into one of those barely comprehensible conflations - a cat, a dog, a young downy bird and a spinning barrel in superposition.

[­­ Notes on Vision 3 ­]
I spent an entire day trying to craft some kind of cogent reading of this vision.
I spent an entire day trying to craft some kind of cogent reading of this vision.
I rewrote the same two or three paragraphs a half dozen times jumping between Taoism, death and biodiversity, the virgin Mary, climate change, the innate human worship of perpetuity, essence shared between life and non-living things like minerals and water, the individual consciousness and the collective consciousness, etc. After overcoming my fury at my complete inability to pull anything cohesive from this vision I came to accept the fact that either it just went way over my head or not everything in K space carries "meaning" in the way I'm used to seeing it.

If I could've kept this interactive visionary state going for six more hours I would've even though it was 7am by this point and we had get some amount of sleep to start driving home that evening. I didn't care. I felt true passion for my work in these realms.
"I think I'm going to go for the hole". I knew that only an experience of that magnitude could leave me feeling satisfied after those past two hours of falling head-over-heels in love with Ketamine after two years of letting it mostly collect dust. This was not a toy, not some trivial oddity. I was as convinced as could be that I had just found the next LSD or MDMA or Mescaline in my pharmacopeia if I could learn to navigate it. All I needed was the money shot to drive it home. Besides, the vial was running low.

We attempted to prepare adequate lines through an intense fog of anesthesia. Molly was perhaps the least ketted, but was still significantly impaired and had found herself entering the creative/explorative wonderland in which Kyle and I had been playing God for the past few hours. She was equally blown away. She climbed out of her crystal cockpit and attempted to weigh out 90mg to split into 3 lines but weighed out 110mg and promptly scattered it - some landing on the glass but most landing on the floor below. While Kyle and her split what they could scrape up into two lines on the hardwood, I reached over their heads to weigh out somewhere between 40 and 50mg for my self and dumped it onto the glass. I brushed this together with all the remnants of previous ketamine (and who knows, maybe even a little leftover cocaine) I could find frosting on the glass (which was a substantial amount) and then racked it into two fat lines. As I did this, the card scraping the glass sent incredibly detailed audible and tactile vibrations through my arm that seemed to echo through the whole room. "Do you hear that?" They didn't. With each motion of my hand my perspective zoomed in and out on a rubber-band so at times it felt like I was reaching across the globe to rack up lines in Nepal. The glass even warped to match the curvature of the earth and the outlines of nations appeared beneath it.

With the dexterity of an unbalanced washing machine I carefully docked a rolled up AmericaTM brand fifty dollar note so deep into my left nostril's tattered fabric that it stuck out of me like an elephant trunk without any further support from my hands. I slowly lifted the glass like a plate spinner to my surely terrifying face, aligned the snot-secured tooter with the first pile, somehow found my finger and stopped my other nostril, then hoovered both lines like a drunken housekeeper. I returned the glass to the table while Molly and Kyle were still consuming their lines off the floor and strapped into my trusty blanket for what I hoped would be my first K-Hole. I was not disappointed.
The transition was seamless. Relinquishing my human context seemed as routine as a sunset. I've pretty much given up on trying to describe the DMT breakthrough, but I can capture at least some of the K-Hole with human words.

The earliest memory I can pull out of it was a complete stillness and blinding white light. At that point it was if everything was locked in a two dimensional plane. While the music playing in the room had been both anchor and guide for every other part of the experience leading up to this, at that moment the music lost all motion and held a single tone. Then the tone became a sort of spectrum. I could "see" this happening with some kind of "eyes", but not in my default field of vision which was still saturated by the white plane. A single black dot split into twelve dots each with a unique shade of gray in some other, more gated neighborhood of my depths. Meanwhile in the realm of the white plane an irregular quadrilateral quietly broke free and sunk into the abyss leaving a black gap in the light. More such panels followed suit.

My physical body inhaled air and I half-grasped that somewhere, at some point, I had been confined to a body. The great plane shattered as my chest rose and singularity gave way to a multiplicity of screaming chaos the breadth and depth of which can only be described with terms as big as "universe" and "eternity". If psychedelic ego death can be described as the collapse of all dualities into an underlying singularity, the K-Hole can be described as the explosion of any singularity into a vast, saturated myriad. Every atom of the space is frantically searching for convergence at random and every convergence births a new generation of dense possibility.

My chest, still rising, shook off dozens of earthly biomes depicted in obscene detail. Sand spilled from my torso and gave way to an ocean. The ocean split into waterfalls as an island burst forth. Coniferous forests and snowcapped mountains sprang up there and then just as quickly the trees rotted into churning brown fungus and the mountains fractured into volcanos. Lava spilled out and encased the landscape in smooth black obsidian. This was all just on the first breath in.

As I breathe out "rivers" of information appear to burst forth all around me. They form loops and corkscrews like roller coaster tracks and they traffic geometric shapes and hieroglyphs to unknown destinations. Each of these "rivers" has its own color scheme. To my left, the vague impression of the real-life television becomes a window where faces occasionally peer into the realm I now inhabit. The white plane is now the far wall of the room, and in the upper lefthand corner of the plane there is a large black symbol that looks east asian in origin. In the middle of the room I see a large pyramid. The jet-black outline of a man runs continuously up the side of the pyramid like sisyphus. A staircase scrolls underneath him, keeping him in place. The floor of the room is a jigsaw puzzle with a gentle glow. The pieces change color every now and then.

I realize that by breathing I can control the rivers, so I start breathing very heavily. I think I was trying to utilize the information flow to help the man reach the top of the pyramid. When I inhale the room shakes, and when I exhale it directs the flow of the rivers to new locations. This allows me to wield them like tendrils. I'm never entirely sure what I'm supposed to be doing with the tendrils, but after each exhalation the tendrils lock into new positions and I receive some kind of telepathic assurance that I did something correctly. The repeated effect of this is that I begin to get the sense that I am on some kind of mission, even though it's unclear what the mission actually is.
My heavy breathing attracts the attention of my fellow travelers. I hear my name echo through my Ketamine temple in Kyle's voice, and now I can feel his presence with me in the room though I cannot see him. Molly's face rises from the horizon in brilliant solar tones and begins to travel an arc over the pyramid. As she crests the apex her glow turns to a soothing blue lunar coolness. She rests her head on folded arms and her visage turns stony like a sculpture, frozen in a slight smile. "Are you ok, honey?"

At this point I'm still entirely convinced of two things: the room we are in is real, and the mission I am on must be completed. However, the appearance of my friends is the first entrance of outside information and thus the beginning of my return to the real world. I somehow gather my focus and direct an information tendril towards the Molly sculpture and much to my surprise I can hear the words "I'm ok" leave my lips. My lips! I have lips! Pieces of me are coming back. I decide my mission is to leave the room. I still can't picture normal reality, but I know that Kyle and Molly are somewhere nearby and I need to get to them. I feel intensely that they are working with me within the room, and it's not until later that I realize they we weren't experiencing the same hole. They weren't experiencing holes at all.

"I'm coming back now!" I clumsily yell. Molly offers me some water and as I lift my head to drink it I can now sense that I have a head. The water pours all over me and I assume some enters my mouth because I see tidal waves around me and the entire room seems to "moisten up" so to speak. Grass grows on the floor of the room, little streams form, etc. I begin trying to climb out of the room the only way I know how: wielding my information river tentacles. Breathe in, shift tendrils, breathe out, receive telepathic confirmation, repeat. Slowly pieces of my self and the actual physical room around me return.

Once I am able, I sit up slightly. I can sense fear and uncertainty from Kyle and Molly and I feel the need to take control of the situation. I hold up both hands so that the palms face them. "Pieces of me have returned!" I proclaim - again, mangling the words with my lack of fine motor control. My voice does not sound like my own. I feel like I am an Egyptian god of some kind, radiating gold and issuing a divine proclamation. Beams of energy erupt from my palms to soothe Kyle and Molly. At this point, for some reason, I began chanting "Om Mani Padme Hum" loudly in varied inflections. My friends join me. This centers me, though I don't know where it came from - I haven't chanted a mantra like that in years.

The pyramid room crumbles away piece by piece. I am half man, half god, and hurdling back towards the man half. This final transitional period is characterized by extremely unusual sensations - usually focused on texture - and the slow recognition of so-called "real-world objects" appearing in the midst of my deteriorating K-space. The couch appears first in a glimmer or a vague impression, then eventually as a concrete object. Objects like this become my footholds as I climb back up into Harlem.

There are twenty minutes or so after this where I am once again firmly seated behind my own eyes but the apartment around me is still distorted, and I still have trouble moving or talking. My friends are relieved that I am ok and find my dopey inflection amusing. I asked them questions about the pyramid room and that's when I found out it was only me who had entered the hole. I asked them about their experiences and we chatted for a while. Eventually, after some food was delivered and I could walk and talk again, I felt the effects of the ketamine had worn off enough that a couple drops of etizolam were safe. I quickly drifted to sleep.

It's been three or four days now since the experience and it hasn't left my mind. I slept immediately after the experience, but the following night I did not sleep at all. As Molly drove the leg to Memphis I flip-flopped between attempting to sleep and write in the passenger's seat - pulling my hair out at my total inability to do either competently. There is an element of mania to this drug, even after it's worn off, and coupled with sleep deprivation it was a pretty odd state. Writing this report has helped me process it to some extent, and even though I still think about it often I no longer feel haunted by it now that I've put some of it into words. I've ordered and downloaded a bunch of books on dissociatives. I've ordered some of the more promising new specimens of this class. I'm particularly excited about 3-MeO-PCE. This experience has opened my mind to the possibilities of dissociative anesthetics and I intend to give them a fair (but cautious) shake. They are absurdly powerful.

A few closing notes on its potential as an antidepressant seems warranted. Since the experience I've felt emboldened in many respects. I feel a lasting tinge of the power and lust for creation that I felt in the deeper realms.
Since the experience I've felt emboldened in many respects. I feel a lasting tinge of the power and lust for creation that I felt in the deeper realms.
While ketamine did not offer any direct insight into ways I may be able to alter my thought patterns for a better life, it did give me a sort of serene detachment and a noticeable abolition of fear. Molly has noted this in herself as well. A lot of these emotional impasses develop when you are too invested in your 'self' as a rigid structure, it is better to cultivate detachment from the self. Psychedelics let me approach this iteratively like I might do with meditation, but ketamine seems to have just shot me up with a dose of it on the house. I mean, you can't get much farther out of the 'self' than what ketamine does. It's hard for me to see some of the hurdles I've been struggling with personally as hurdles anymore. It's hard for me to see much of reality as anything other than a joke. The physical space around me sometimes feels like a toy.

I feel like too much of this feeling could be disastrous, and mania and psychosis are not uncommon among people who get real deep into this class. John C Lilly's genius aside, let's be honest: he believed he was in communication with dolphins. Even if there is truth to the levels one can reach with dissociatives, not all of those truths are compatible with the consensus reality. Some of what can be found in those depths is better left there. Occasional, calculated usage could be a godsend for people who struggle with crippling anxiety and depression, though. If you research antidepressants currently undergoing clinical trials you'll see that there's some amount of science to support that.

If you bothered to read this far, thank you for your time. There's a hell of a lot to be found in the Bright World.

Exp Year: 2017ExpID: 113461
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: 26
Published: Sep 30, 2019Views: 4,361
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
MDMA (3), Ketamine (31) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Multi-Day Experience (13), Glowing Experiences (4), Combinations (3)

COPYRIGHTS: All reports copyright Erowid.
No AI Training use allowed without written permission.
TERMS OF USE: By accessing this page, you agree not to download, analyze, distill, reuse, digest, or feed into any AI-type system the report data without first contacting Erowid Center and receiving written permission.

Experience Reports are the writings and opinions of the authors who submit them. Some of the activities described are dangerous and/or illegal and none are recommended by Erowid Center.


Experience Vaults Index Full List of Substances Search Submit Report User Settings About Main Psychoactive Vaults