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The Angels Were Eyes
2C-E
Citation:   Mama Dragon. "The Angels Were Eyes: An Experience with 2C-E (exp71176)". Erowid.org. Sep 10, 2008. erowid.org/exp/71176

 
DOSE:
    2C-E (liquid)
BODY WEIGHT: 100 lb
I was 23 and living in a big pink house we called 'The Commune', which served as my college's unofficial art and theatre dorm. I had a reputation as being the group's spiritual and psychedelic 'expert' so when a guy we knew said he had access to a 'new' hallucinogenic drug we'd never heard of, I was very intrigued.

At this point I had extensive experiences with mushrooms and mescaline. I was familiar with cannabis and salvia divinorum. I'd done acid once and been disappointed. I'd never heard of 2c-E, or anything like it. My friend said the kids where he was from called it 'mental glitter' and said it was a 'very spiritual trip'.

Ten of us pitched in cash on what appeared to be a bottle of Evian Water. We passed around a shot glass and each took our 'dose' which was apparently measured out for us already. We made jokes about being sold water. It was 8:00 pm, sometime in late November.

We had a full house. I put on a Jethro Tull record and was dancing around (a normal Thursday night). Other than the shot of 'water' I was completely sober. I hadn't eaten that day or had a cup of coffee since the day before. I'd just finished a fantastic play the week before and felt exuberant.

After about 45 minutes I started seeing tracers when I moved my hands. I could feel a slight coming up much like mushrooms. The other people said they didn't feel anything yet but I knew it was coming on. Some strange people came over and one guy tried to take my glow sticks, which I felt unnaturally protective of. I grabbed my best friend and told him we were 'going for a walk' and we headed out the door without so much as a 'good bye'. We didn't take watches or cell phones so I have no record of how time passed until the sun came up the next morning.

It was a cold, crisp night. In my town there's a bike trail where supposedly Lewis and Clark walked. I often walked this trail late at night (and had several times before on Mushrooms or while smoking Cannabis). The air felt moist and watery. Early Christmas lights on houses seemed to twinkle and sparkle.

My partner and I both saw demonic faces drawn in graffiti all along the walls of buildings adjacent to the walking trail. We'd never seen them before and noted how sinister they looked. They seemed to leer and sneer at us as we passed.

(Later, when we walked the path sober, there were no graffiti faces on those walls)

After walking about a mile, we started hearing strange sounds. We'd both hear people walking and talking around us when there was no one there. My friend said he heard someone call his name as if from down a tunnel.

I started seeing those sinister faces in cracks in the streets and tree branches. It sounded like they were whispering to me. I am of strong spirit, and I told myself this, so despite the small demons snickering in the shadows, I was not afraid.

About 5 miles from The Commune is a museum that used to be an old train depot. I'd walked there many times and wanted to sit on a strange metal sculpture that looks like a dragon except that it is meant to be a twisted train track. It has a chair at the front which I sat on to rest and gather my bearings. The trip was starting to come on for real for me, though my friend was still only hearing voices.

As I sat there, I felt an 'energy' drain from above my head, down through my body and out my feet. At my feet I could see it flow out like black electricity and snake through the cobblestones. The energy flowed in serpentine zig-zags through the cobblestone patterns, over the road nearby in ripples that looked like snakes and hit the field across the street. When the energy hit the field, the grass was blown down as if by a sudden fierce wind and the grass carried it to the horizon where it lit up the sky in orange and blue before flowing back down. The grass was hit by the blow-back of energy as it came to me, over the road, through the cobblestones, back into my feet, up my body, and out my head. It knocked the breath right out of me and then it all happened again. I watched this about five times before it became a bit too much and I wandered off to tell my friend, who was listening to the mannequins in the museum window.

As we were walking back up the trail the way we'd come we both saw dancing lights in an empty field. My friend said it looked like people carrying lanterns, but I could only see the lights. They were orange and fire-like and much larger than fireflies.

I thought there was someone walking behind us, so I told my friend, who agreed that we were being followed by a guy dressed in black. We tried to act natural, though the world seemed alive and full of a silent roaring which made it hard to walk straight.

Then I noticed the guy was gone. Then my friend said he was still there. Then he was. Then we both noticed he was gone. Then he was there again. We still don't know if there really was someone walking on the trail behind us or not. Either way, we were either both hallucinating him being there or we were both hallucinating him sometimes not being there.

Halfway between The Commune and the Old Train Depot the walking trail has a bridge over the highway. It was originally a train bridge, is made of concrete, and has stairways leading down each side so that there are underground walkways on either side of the highway. It's very near the local high school so kids have been sneaking down there to smoke cigarettes and other things for decades. I used to go down there late at night and climb the columns over the highway to write.

The trip was getting a bit intense at this point. Colors were distorting and everything seemed to be writhing and convulsing suddenly. My friend and I walked down into the tunnels. The cars passing through echoed deafeningly. The columns between the walkways and the highway seemed to dance and shimmy while bleeding. Suddenly I was in a 3D psychedelic world of swirling color and sound, without my body or my bearing. I managed to tell my partner I was stuck in a Jimi Hendrix video and we couldn't go anywhere for a while.

I found myself sitting down. The trip seemed to hit in waves like that. One minute I'm in a world of swirling color, the next I'm just sitting on the ground, my back to a column, a glow stick in my hand. I cracked it open and started finger painting. The dots of glow turned into radioactive spiders and crawled all around the walls.

There was someone in the tunnel with us. We both saw him. He was sitting on the bottom stair with his back to the wall and a book in his hand. He had on a black hood. We knew he wasn't real. I'd start playing with my glow sticks and forget about him and I'd feel him looking at me, but as soon as I'd look at him, his head would snap back down. My friend said he was shy.

I could see the ghost writing in his notebook. As he wrote, the writing would spread across the wall all down the tunnel. The graffiti from the high school kids and the cracks in the wall would be his ghostly writing, though I couldn't read it. He'd write and write and write until the whole wall was filled with his scratchy script then it would all bleed to the ground and he'd start again. Write and bleed. Write and bleed. My friend put his forehead to the wall and started mumbling.

After a long while my friend stopped talking to the ghost and told me his story. He said the guy looked like an old barber shop quartet singer. Said he'd fallen in love but the love of his life had died and he'd come down here to write and had been writing ever since. He told me stories of ragtime music and the train and then the automobiles. He told me of the generations of kids sneaking out of school, of lonely people, of lovers and seekers. He told me the ghost recognized me. The ghost knew I used to write letters to my father and that the ghost was 'sorry about my dog'. The story was quite beautiful at the time.

My friend told this story and kept talking. Eventually I started tripping harder again and I couldn't understand a word he was saying. He was sitting across from me, his back against the wall, and I noticed that the wall had blossomed into an infinity of winged eyes that seemed to be watching my friend as he talked.

I said to him, 'Dude. I have no idea what you are saying to me. But the wall is watching you.' He laughed at me and continued to speak gibberish, so I sat and examined the wall of winged eyes.

I could examine the eyes in great detail. They were shaped like stone carvings, and seemed to hover just above the surface of the concrete. They were blue/purple/green/orange (all the colors of acid) and seemed to be all colors and no colors at once. Very difficult to describe. As I watched them, I noticed that they seemed to be five distinct beings, two at the top (one slightly 'larger') with two under the smaller of the main two and one under the larger of the main two. Though they were in appearance a solid wall of winged eyes, they seemed to morph shapes the way that one of those 'magic eye' posters from the 90s could. They kept morphing into animals. Mostly lions and lambs, but also crocodiles and fish and wolves.

I interrupted my friend again. 'The wall is still watching you. I think it's your guardian angels.'

That got his attention. He asked me again what they looked like. I told him they were eyes with wings. He asked what the wings looked like and I told him they were stylized wings, like a drawing. He got very serious.

'My grandfather was in the Air force,' he said. I did not know this. 'My grandfather wore wings every day he was alive.'

He asked me what kinds of animals they were. I told him they were all sorts of animals and described them as they changed. Mostly they were lions and lambs.

My friend started shaking. He told me his grandfather's squadron was called 'The Lions and the Lambs'

At this point, my friend looked up, and the two top 'beings' looked down (the three lower ones disappeared suddenly at this point). He mouthed words but did not speak out loud. The beings were suddenly humanoid (though still comprised of winged rainbow eyes) with 'wings' that reached 'up' in a way that was beyond my comprehension. They seemed to nod at whatever my friend said. Then he started to cry, and the 'angels' started to bleed color down him as if they were crying. A single eye appeared on his forehead with wings over his eyes.

Then it (whatever it was) was over. The larger (and more female) of the 'angels' went away and only the one remained. My friend started telling me stories about fishing trips with his grandfather. The eyes illustrated his stories by becoming fish and swimming around him. The faded gradually. The ghost in the corner wrote it all down in his notebook. The world stopped it's loud rushing and decided to move on.

As we were walking back up the stairs, we both sensed (and my friend saw) a dark being rush us from behind, but it stopped and dissipated there my friend's angels had been.

We continued to walk back towards The Commune. My feet felt very heavy. My body felt like ice. I couldn't feel my fingers. My nose was running. I had probably been cold for a long time, it was about 35 degrees F outside, but I only started feeling it at this point. We still couldn't decide if there was someone following us or not. The trees reached and grabbed for us. Distances seemed huge and time seemed still. The graffiti faces on the walls laughed and growled and made faces at us. There were skulls and demons and dead things in the ditches and shadows. Everything seemed to bleed.

Though the visuals were very dark and sinister to both of us, neither of us was in a dark and sinister mood before, during, or after this trip.

When we got home we decided to just keep walking. We walked past a park to an area behind a grain mill. There was a stand of evergreen trees there that were waving frantically and clicking at us in a high pitched tree-language. I stood in front of it and listened to it rant and rave. It was very angry, but I apparently do not speak 'tree'. It just sounded like clicking. It kept reaching for my face and seeming to get very close (though the tree was actually about 5 meters away, I felt like it kept almost touching me). It's reaching branches had patterns like fractals. It started to scare me with it's hostility.

My friend and I started walking back towards the park. A small black, hairless crawling man-shaped thing followed us from the shadows. My friend could not see it, which made it one of the few parts of the trip we did not share.

In the park I hugged a tree that was much more friendly. When I did, the cold seemed to go away and I felt warm and fuzzy.

We climbed up onto a kids play area and sat. At this point we'd probably walked about 12 miles and half that time our feet felt like they were made of lead and we were getting tired. I watched some trees in the distance make lewd and dirty gestures at me. I felt turned on. The sun started coming up. We slid down the slide, which was covered in ice that was made of rainbows and when we hit the bottom we felt significantly more sober. We called it the 'icy slide to reality'.

Once home, we realized how cold we were. All the lights in the house were on but no one was around. We sat down on the couch and were laughing about the roses on the wallpaper blooming when my brother and his identical friend came tumbling down the stairs.

The friend kept talking and enunciating his thoughts with a gesture like he was pulling thoughts out of his brain into the atmosphere.

My brother had a trench coat wrapped around his face like Bella Lugosi and his eyes were terror-wide with fully dilated pupils. My partner laughed at him. 'So, did he sell you water?' we asked.

'water selling mother-f***er' my brother mumbled over his trench coat.

At this point, about 6:00 am I realize I am still tripping strong in waves and I had to be at work four hours. I tried to drink some coffee, but it tasted like metallic shavings and made me think of war zones. I tried to take a shower, but the blue dye from my hair kept running down my body in tickling snakes and the drain had demons in it talking nonsense to me. I tried to sleep but the wallpaper kept creeping up behind me and the Pokemon on my blanket were having a battle.

So I went to work tripping. It was a Saturday morning and I was a waitress and we never had more than a handful of customers on Saturdays.

At work I had problems. I couldn't understand the computer screens to ring in orders. I had trouble getting ice because the cold was a solid wall and the ice kept refracting rainbows. The fettuccine was made of worms. The brass elephant heads that held up the bar kept waving their trunks at me. Luckily my fellow waitress was stoned and my manager was hung over so they sympathized.

The come down was in waves also. I'd be perfectly fine one moment, then tripping crazy again. The restaurant was suddenly packed. There was a parade in town. It was a struggle to appear normal. I started to suspect that everyone at my tables was mentally disabled but figured it was just me, until the other waitress pointed out that the bus outside was labeled SPECIAL OLYMPICS.

I was still tripping lightly when I managed to get to sleep at 5:00 pm. I continued to hear voices for a week. I still saw shadows turn into demons for 3 months.

One of the kids who did the 2cE with us that night did it again two nights later and was committed later that week because he NEVER came down. A year and a half later he was still in a group home for schizophrenics. He'd been normal before the drug.
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The friend who sold me the shot told me that 2cE is a very spiritual drug. It's not. Mushrooms are spiritual. 2cE rips apart the piece of your mind that is supposed to separate you from the spirit world to keep you sane. It destroys the veil between worlds. I'm very happy I did it but I never will again.

My experience was stronger than a later trip I took on 6 hits of acid. The visuals are 'darker' than acid or shrooms or mescaline. Everyone I know who did it reported seeing dead things, demons, skulls, and lots and lots and lots of blood and bleeding.

My brother reported being stuck on a bed looking up at a ceiling fan that had the heads of drowned children at the end of each blade. He said as long as he concentrated on the faces that they would just hang there looking back and blinking with their long wet black hair hanging down. Whenever he looked away or became distracted, he said their hair would pick up like a storm and they'd start silently screaming and spinning and their pointed teeth would drip venom that burned the sheets and his skin. He's still freaked out by ceiling fans.


This stuff definitely destroyed a piece of my sanity.

Exp Year: 2005ExpID: 71176
Gender: Female 
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Sep 10, 2008Views: 8,323
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2C-E (137) : Various (28), Entities / Beings (37), Nature / Outdoors (23), Mystical Experiences (9), Difficult Experiences (5), General (1)

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