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Animalism
DOC
Citation:   Fenrir. "Animalism: An Experience with DOC (exp62182)". Erowid.org. Apr 16, 2007. erowid.org/exp/62182

 
DOSE:
3.0 mg oral DOC (liquid)
BODY WEIGHT: 70 kg
General data: 20 year old male, previous experience with LSD, various tryptamines and PEA's, dissociatives. No previous experience with DOC.

It was on a sunny day which couldn't decide whether it wanted to be warm or cold, that I decided to try DOC for the first time. I was hanging around, shooting the shit with my friends Andra and Mihai in A's apartment in the city, where we had arrived from our camping spot on the beach, and Andra and I took out the DOC. We both measured ourselves 2.5 mg with a syringe from a vodka solution of 1mg / ml and then I decided for another 0.5mg to really get the feel of this compound. After half an hour or so I was beginning to feel the amphetamine buzz and noticed that I had better coordination. Mihai was to be our sober trip sitter and chauffeur (he had just come down from a DOC trip the day before).

T+30: We went out and headed into the city just as the DOC was beginning to make itself known. We drove down to a small harbor for yachts and fishing boats, hanging from the end of the peninsula on which the old town was built. Tourists and people from the city were walking on the promenade, among restaurants and cafes, with the beach line stretching out to the horizon across the harbor, with the city standing on the cliff above it. The evening light had taken a slightly surreal quality, brighter than usual, and reality was already slightly vibrating with the buzz of the DOC.

T+1:We climbed over the 12-foot concrete wall that protected the promenade from the sea and then down onto the 10-foot concrete Tetris blocks stacked chaotically on top of each other to break the waves. We rolled up a spliff as we were joined by some friends and smoked it there, watching the people walking on the promenade. By this time we were on a fucked-up stimulated high where we were laughing like Beavis and Butt-head and mocking everything in sight. A guy was walking on the promenade like a gander, with a sober and superior pose, his chest puffed out and his hands behind his back, his wife and kid following behind like a goose and chick.

I was already feeling the cold that plagues almost all my psychedelic trips. There was no nausea (I do not eat for at least 4 hrs before taking any psychedelic substance, and I've only felt nausea from 2C-T-7) The come-up was gentle and gradual, unlike higher doses of some PEA's, and I didn't have the sexual stimulation common with the latter.

T+2: I made some half-joking half-insulting comments to a guy I didn't know and then we headed out to the park uptown (we figured it would be nice to play in the kids' amusement park). The trip was taking hold and slowly distorting reality, exaggerating my thoughts. The trip was rather psychological than emotional, I was in a pretty stable light cheerful vibe, but my thoughts were wandering in all directions. I became overly conscious of our look. We were coming from the beach where we had camped and we didn’t have the cleanest or best-looking outfits, standing out among the well-dressed people walking in the park. Unfortunately the kids'park was closing so we headed to some Roman ruins to hang out. As the night fell, we crossed an old and run-down part of the peninsula and descended to an isolated dark little park with old stone relics scattered throughout. I looked through the windows of the old Roman building turned into a museum and I tripped a motion detector that lit up a floodlight.

By this time I was pretty fucked up and couldn't decide whether it was a motion detector or someone had noticed us and decided to play with us. I was beginning to fall into my standard dissociative bad trip concerning the fractal universe and the endless futility of life, which lasted throughout the trip and which I won't detail here. We climbed onto the museum terrace to see the sight and the night watchman started yelling at us. We debated whether to give him some money for him to buy himself a pack of cigarettes and leave us alone, or just walk away. We did the latter, and Mihai, who was sober, suggested we should go eat something.

T+5: We went back to the promenade and to a seafood restaurant. I was very apprehensive as usual about being too conspicuous in my tripped-out state, but I quickly became assured that everyone in the restaurant was minding his own trip, not giving a shit about the people at other tables. We only paused our manic giggling when the waitresses came to our table, but even they avoided looking into our huge pupils. We ordered a plate of breaded frog legs and some French fries. Mihai was digging into them like a sober person would, as I was wrestling futilely with a single pair of legs. It was taking me a quarter of an hour just to finish one and I was conscious of the uselessness of my effort. I tried to tear strips of flesh off the bones, but sincere pity was preventing me from pulling too hard, and once I had a piece of meat in my hand I didn't quite know what to do with it. Andra had taken off the bread trousers off a poor frog's legs and she was hanging them in the air in a literal rendition of Naked Lunch. Suddenly the frog wasn't looking so tough anymore, but skinny and lame. She ate the meat off the bones and then dutifully put the trousers back on. Mihai made some makeshift arms from a pair of bones and we started dancing on the plate with the reconstructed skeletons. (Mihai's had a really good groove).

T+6: We left the restaurant and headed back to our tent on the beach about an hour's drive away from the city. By this time I was really tripping, my mind was reeling, my eyes were bouncing every which way and time was really dilated. I tended to be pretty stressed out and overestimate the speed of the car and the danger of driving. Mihai was tripping me out by turning the car lights off for a few seconds at a time, leaving us driving at 50mph on the empty roads in pitch darkness and me bracing myself white-knuckled. Andra and I continued our flight of ideas, hotly debating philosophical, surreal and random ideas, all while concomitantly making fun of each other and our ideas and laughing maniacally.

T+7: We reached the deserted beach and that's when I noticed the visuals for the first time. There was nobody on a 3-mile radius, and the beach was stretching around us to the horizon. The scenery around us looked primordial, with the amorphous black sea crashing against the land in a regular, but never identical pattern, like it had done for aeons, the sharp and penetrating wind was chilling our bodies and our souls, and a barren land was stretching out from the sea, with puny and withered grassy plants trying to survive. It was a place where life was struggling against the hostile elements. When I looked up to the sky, it was like a giant chandelier of light blue dots, held together by unseen strings against the black velvet of space. Stars were continually appearing, moving and dying out, and blue and red lights of airplanes were slowly floating across.

We decided to make a fire and Mihai turned on his head-mounted flashlight. Suddenly the world became dark and only his beam of light cut a swath of reality in the amorphous darkness around. I felt like we were explorers on a barren planet and I started joking about being wary of alien eggs. Mihai, who was sober, and Andra, who had taken 2.5 mg, were gathering sticks, but I wasn't quite up to it. I knew what I had to do, but when I had to do it, my hundreds of thoughts were wandering off. We made a small fire that was more of an illusion of warmth then we tried to huddle in what cover we had and get warm enough to sleep. Andra showed me some little animals that were hopping around on the beach and I became paranoid about her trying to trip me out about some nonexistent animals. Were they real? Were they just the shadows cast by waves? (the next day we did see foxes and rabbits in the area).

As I desperately tried to escape the coldness that was passing right through my body into my soul, I became an animal. I read a trip report from a guy that felt a reptilian consciousness in his DOC trip. I would venture to guess that the guy lives in a desert environment. I went into a bear trip, I was a bear trying to hibernate through the cold and barren winter, knowing that the only way to survive through was to cut off from the outside world and fall into torpor, slow his life so that his life warmth is conserved, but maintain a trickle of energy flowing so that it would not stop forever.

In the piercing cold of the wind and sea, I shed all notions of safety and comfort that civilization had made me take for granted. I saw life as animals and the first humans saw it, a constant struggle where death is always here, real, a coldness threatening to envelop you, the coldness of the wind, the coldness of hunger seeping away the energy from your muscles, the coldness of the gaze of a predator enveloping you and coming to nullify you and absorb you into itself. And the hope of life, the neverending struggle to find some warmth to push death away for a minute, some food to pump some energy through your veins and through your mind, to find a sheltered spot to escape the impersonal and hostile wind, some safety to allow you to plan for a tomorrow and to hope for some good times, times when the sun is shining through your body and soul, when your stomach is full and you can hope for a new life, when the fear of death subsides and in its place the lust of life starts shining like a bright bulb, looking for another brightness to unite with it and give birth to a new life. Good times that end as they came, leaving behind a fading memory of light and violently pushing you back into the struggle, running from the coldness that encroaches into your soul and always towards the light.

My imagination and planning capacity were shut down and I was trying to learn like an animal would, by trial and error. I was utterly incapable of pulling the zipper of my sleeping bag, so I was trying to pull the material around me to shield me against the outside world. I had no idea what to do, I acted randomly and then tried to remember those actions that made me warm and repeat them, and remember those actions that made me cold, and avoid them. I was trying to curl into a ball and make a shell around me, but the bag was constantly falling and I had to permanently pull it back on, in a part-sleeping part-awake state, like a bear awakening from his slumber and shifting his position. I remembered a story about a bear I had read when I was a kid, a bear who went to sleep in the Russian taiga one autumn and as he slumbered, humans came and built a power plant on his home. And the bear awoke one spring morning, went out his burrow, opened a door and found himself under the flickering sterile neon light of a corridor in the plant.

I finally managed to sleep (it was about T+9) and I awakened in the morning (T+15). I lay on the sand looking at the sky, waiting for the others to wake up. It was a mellow, calm, sunny vibe, like the amphetamine buzz had left only a faint echo. I looked at the sun through almost-closed eyelids, shaping and molding flares and refraction patterns through my eyes, splitting the sunbeams into rivers and spreading them across spheres, taking apart the white light into its separate colors and across the fields of dots and circles on the surface of my eye. It was a calm day of returning to reality, and somewhere at about T+20 I was back to baseline, with only the standard PEA blankness remaining together with a trace of amphetamine stimulation. I felt removed from the comforts of civilization and imagined what would become of us if it were to suddenly disappear: our clothes would slowly tear away, hanging on us like rags and then being shed and replaced with animal skins, our bodies would become thin, scrawny and tough, like a skeleton pulled by steel cables, and the memory of culture, of science, of the dreams and creations of mankind would slowly turn from reality to a distant legend to tell our children around the fire.

This was a very inhuman, scary trip, the sort of which I haven't had with other PEA's. It was a pretty traumatic experience that I am still integrating. It reminded me of the fragility of our affluence and of the brutal struggle for survival we escaped a short time ago on an evolutionary timeframe and in which we could again fall. I would characterize DOC as having the same potential for cosmic, inhuman abstraction as 2C-E, but even more impersonal and emotionally dissociated, together with a strong and silent, implacable amphetamine push. For me it wasn't warm and emotional like 2C-T-7 or crystal clear like LSD, it was removed and impersonal. It was also one of the longest days of my life, that went on and on and never seemed to stop. This seems like a substance I would like to DO something on, not have a meditative trip. At the time it seemed like an epoch rather than a day. Andra, who has taken it three times, reports 2-2.5mg as the threshold between stimulation and drifting off into psychedelia. I plan to repeat it, but under completely different circumstances. Probably in the mountains, and on a warm day.

Exp Year: 2007ExpID: 62182
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Apr 16, 2007Views: 23,718
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DOC (357) : General (1), Bad Trips (6), Various (28)

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