DOSE: T+ 0:00		inhaled	Xenon	(gas)
T+ 0:20		inhaled	Xenon	(gas)

BODY WEIGHT:

150 lb

I had the opportunity to try xenon gas for science and personal curiosity, and so ended up with a full balloon. I meditated for about 30 min beforehand, warming up all of the ways I knew that my experience could feel harmonious and blissful. As I put it to a friend at the time, I was going for the all time hedons (unit of pleasure) per second world record, so I was going in with preparation. I also decided to rebreathe one time and pass the balloon off to a friend so they could save some of the gas, which is brutally expensive, for later.

After prep and with a 4 liter balloon in hand, I put on some heavy earmuffs and got ready to lay down in a dark room with a pillow beneath my head. Music was playing lightly in the background, which was nice but slightly distracting, and something that mildly annoyed me later in the trip. I did a quick few breaths to get as much oxygen into my lungs as possible, exhaled the air, then inhaled as much xenon as I could. Then I waited for maybe ten seconds, breathed back into the balloon, and took a second inhale of xenon.

At this point all of my experience was reverberating pretty heavily and my sense of location and bodily solidity was dropping fast, so I exhaled as much xenon as I could into the balloon and handed it to my friend. This was quite the curious operation, as I was so far gone that intentions seemed quite unlikely to cohere enough to actually execute, but I managed to do it anyway. I had the vague sense that I had the mental capacity of my 7 year old self or so and was doing my best to follow some novel, complex instructions as I did my best to just pinch the head of the balloon so I could hand it off for my friend to tie.

I managed the handoff, which resulted in a great sense of relief that was amplified by the reverberation in the nitrous (sic?), and I laid back onto my pillow with the sense of having accomplished some great feat. At this point, my memory of the past few seconds was fading fast, and what remained was a very abstract impression of what had occurred. It was like the process of abstraction was happening many times faster than normal, so memories of a few seconds ago that would have been crisp and concrete were instead fuzzy, almost metaphorical.

As I noticed this, I did my best to check my memory by memorizing some numbers that were on the wall, and I did manage to encode that a certain piece of plywood was sold or something like that in 2022, and that the number 09 was somehow relevant there as well. After I was satisfied there, I pretty much just let everything go, and my mind drifted around, thinking about atoms in empty space composing into stars.

I feel that is a semantic reflection of the dynamics of my experience at the time, it was as if every microscopic speck of experiential stuff was just gravitating together into a uniform mass and humming nicely. Usually there is a sort of fractal structure to the way experiential stuff conglomerates into objects and complex thoughts, but here stuff was super flat and uniform. This also came with the sense that almost all of experience, save for some little tiny bits, was just empty space, similar to a physical star.

About 5 minutes after humming along in a bliss so uniform and empty of solidity that episodic memory was basically nonfunctional, stuff started to recohere and the reverb became less intense , and I pretty much just chilled in a dark room for 20 minutes. The most interesting bits were probably done in about 5 minutes, and the somewhat semantically loaded stuff like the star analogy was done in perhaps another 5. Overall, I would say that this is just a better version of nitrous, but not really a qualitative leap, just smoother and nicer on a few axes.

After getting up and chatting a little about the experience, I tried rebreathing what was left, and it was actually quite effective still! I immediately tried to move my hand, and I got some of the strangest tracer-type effects I have ever seen. It was like I was both uncertain of where my hand was in space and where my perspective was in time, so the sense of this was that the region of consciousness that was my hand and the rest of everything that was tracking time were trying to mutually communicate and clarify their positions, and the end result of this process was a long moving blur, but a blur that seemed sharp whenever a particular snapshot of it was taken.

I also tried tracking projectile motion and got a similar effect here; I would say this is roughly similar to how dreams sometimes don’t render their narratives linearly, but rather become coherent from every point in their timeline at once, even as physical time is still linear. This is not a xenon-specific effect though as far as I can see, it was just especially obvious to me at this time. If I was looking correctly while on nitrous I am pretty sure I would see this there, too.

Unfortunately, I did not break the hedons per second world record; a good formless concentration state (Jhana) tops this in quality and sometimes intensity as well, and fully lights-out cessation wins by a landslide in quality and often quantity too, as judged by the aftereffects. Overall, this was a worthy experience for science and satisfaction of personal curiosity, but definitely not something that my wallet wants to repeat.

Exp Year: 2024	ExpID: 118351
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 21
Published: Jul 16, 2025	Views: Not Supported
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Xenon (220) : General (1), First Times (2), Small Group (2-9) (17)