Am I Human?
DXM
Citation:   piledhope. "Am I Human?: An Experience with DXM (exp7955)". Erowid.org. Oct 6, 2020. erowid.org/exp/7955

 
DOSE:
530 mg oral DXM (liquid)
BODY WEIGHT: 150 lb
I sat at home, kind of annoyed that my friend with drug connections was not going to deliver the acid I had asked him for. He hated me 'using' him for drugs, and I guess I don't blame him. At that moment, though, I was just annoyed and disappointed. I wanted some kind of trip and had no way to get it. I remember on the net seeing something about dramamine and diphenhydramine being able to give some pretty intense trips. I opened up the dramamine FAQ and after reading it, promptly decided I wasn't gonna get anywhere near the stuff. Somewhere however it mentioned DXM. I proceeded to the DXM FAQ and was enthralled.

I decided to try a second plateau trip first, so the next day I went to the store and purchased a four ounce bottle of Robitussin (making sure DXM was the only active ingredient). I had an interesting time and the next night decided to increase my dose and perhaps make it to the third plateau. For this I purchased two four ounce bottles. I drank all of the first one. It tasted noticeably worse than the night before. I then drank half the second one and poured the rest out. (I had to pour out the rest because when on drugs I have no self-control, having once gone through twelve hits of MDMA in a twelve hour period.)

At first I was disappointed, it seemed to be taking longer to take effect this time. At T+2:00 I was barely feeling anything. I was getting 'eye-rolls' very reminiscent of MDMA, but very little else. I conversed with my friends on ICQ for a while, and was able to keep up with the conversations without any problem. Somewhere around T+2:30, I started to feel something like nausea. I say 'something like' nausea because though it felt a lot like normal nausea, I didn't think I was in any danger of actually puking.

Halfway through typing a message to a friend, I suddenly felt as though I were being tossed back and forth thirty degrees from vertical on each side, violently. I closed my eyes and I could feel my hands holding on to my computer desk, but I still felt like I was being tossed back and forth. The combined sensations gave me the queer feeling that my brain was being tossed back and forth in my skull. I'm sure some people would have found this, accompanied with the nausea, to be extremely unpleasant. All I could think was, 'Now we're going to have some fun!'

The tossing passed in a moment or two, but the nausea increased significantly. I started to wrap up the conversations I had going on. My judgment must have been skewed because I asked my friend if he had done ketamine (and indeed he had) and I told him I was on DXM and mentioned they might have similar effects.

I disconnected from my ISP and thought about what I should do next. I think it was about T+3:00 at this point, but I'm not really sure. I had intended to keep notes about the experience, trying to write something every half hour if possible, but after T+2:30 I either forgot or decided it wasn't worth the effort. I dimmed the lights. The trance I had playing was getting to be a little overwhelming, and I didn't feel like I was up to picking something else out, so I just shut off the music and lay down on my bed.

Unfortunately, my memory gets fuzzy here (I had taken some DMAE ahead of time, in the hope that it might help me remember more, but it didn't seem to help much.) . I remember regretting taking the DXM a little, but I wasn't ever scared. At some point, complete dissociation set in, and this is where my memory picks up again. My eyes were closed, I think. I was seeing waving geometric patterns ( *very* reminiscent of random dot stereograms of sine waves except with simple patterns instead of random dots) and I felt like I was flying. This went on for some time.

After a while, I must have forgotten I was human. That is the only way I can describe what happened next. I began to wonder what I was. Not who, but what. I struggled with this thought for a while, still flying about in space with wavy geometric patterns in the background. After much struggle, my mind managed to unearth 'what' I was: I remembered my name. I repeated it over and over several times, trying to figure out what it meant to be a ''. I opened my eyes and saw my room about me. The first odd thing that struck me was the bed.

'What is this for?' I asked. The word 'sleep' appeared to me. I remembered what sleep was. I didn't believe it, simply could not believe it. It seemed so illogical that for half of my existence I would lie on a bed and wait for unconsciousness to come. Next, more images came to me about what my human life was about: images of getting up out of bed, images of getting in my car, images of being at work. I couldn't make sense of the whole 3d space thing, so the fact that I had to drive to work every day struck me as absurd.

But then the strangest, most wondrous fact occurred to me. I realized that there was a time that I couldn't really remember very well, and this time was known as school (specifically elementary school). Scrolling words drove out my visions of waving patterns: 1st grade, 2nd grade, 3rd grade, child. I wondered briefly if I was a child now. My next source of puzzlement was what I had done before I was a child. Again text scrolled: 1900's, 1800's, 1700's, 1600's, 1500's, Rome, Socrates, Aristotle. The idea of there being a time that I didn't exist struck me as an obvious logical impossibility. Then I imagined places where I was not, but I couldn't mentally differentiate between times I had not existed and places I was not at. Images of maps of Europe and colonial America puzzled me for several minutes.

I could write about how I further struggled with the concepts of humanity and mortality, but I've already written quite a bit. What was it that eventually convinced me I was one of those funny looking human being things whose images populated my memory banks? Thirst.
What was it that eventually convinced me I was one of those funny looking human being things whose images populated my memory banks? Thirst.
It either became strong enough to break through the wall of DXM, or the dissociative effects were beginning to taper off. At first, I just finished off the little bit of water I had within arm's reach and went back to being puzzled about what I am, but the thirst came back quickly. I realized that indeed I *might* be human, and that whatever I was, drinking some water was going to make me feel a whole lot better.

I couldn't stand. Or at least I thought I couldn't. I imagined myself several feet above the ground, held up by only these jointed and spindly appendages. I decided crawling was my best bet. Crawling felt strange. My arms and legs seemed 'detached' in some sense. Not physically detached, but they seemed extra somehow. It was like 'I' was just my head and chest, and the rest of me was just kind of tacked on.

In a moment of lucidity that lasted about as long as it took me to get across the room to the water, I remembered a line from a DXM trip report I had read. It was bad trip report, and the person had highlighted how bad it was because she had had to crawl to the bathroom, and that she hadn't *had* to crawl in many years and how awful the feeling was to have to crawl. "What's so bad about this?' I thought as I crawled to the other end of the room.

I had expected the quenching of my thirst to be pleasurable, as it normally is for me when I drink when I'm really thirsty, but instead it just made the awful feeling of being thirsty go away. I crawled back to bed, attempting to stand once on the way. I only got as far as kneeling before I chickened out. The clock indicated it was T+6:00. I lay on the bed and noticed then that I was pretty much completely numb. I tried touching myself several places, and though I could feel the impact (perhaps kinesthetic sense?) I couldn't feel anything at the skin level.

My skin was covered in sweat, and my t-shirt was soaked. My heart rate was *high*. How high, I couldn't figure out. The beats seemed to echo a little, and really the idea of counting past five seemed pretty intimidating. I was little nervous at the rate it was going. I think I would have been really scared at that point, but I had done a lot of ephedrine as a kid, so I knew how incredibly fast my heart could beat without me dying.

From there, what I remember of the trip was fairly uneventful. My heart calmed down in about half an hour. For the next few hours I drifted in and out of what can best be described as waking dreams. Of these I remember very little, except that I thought they were pretty cool at the time.

About T+9:00 I fell asleep. When I awoke, I discovered that the blanket I had slept on was wet. I don't know whether I spilled water on it, or if I really did sweat that much. I wonder if the high heart rate and diaphoresis might have been caused by celexa that was in my system. I had taken just one 15 mg tablet of Celexa five days before. I had read of the possibility of seratonin syndrome when combining DXM with SSRI's, but had figured five days was enough for 15 mg to be out of my system. I should have looked up the half-life of celexa before taking the DXM.

Another possibility is that some DXM (or DXO, a DXM metabolite) was still in my system from the night before. Right before I drank the cough syrup, I remember thinking that my tongue was still a little numb and that I might have some still in my system. Over all, I must rate the trip a positive experience, though the effect it had on my heart makes me leery to try that a high a dose again.

Exp Year: 2001ExpID: 7955
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Oct 6, 2020Views: 9,054
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DXM (22) : Alone (16), Glowing Experiences (4), Health Problems (27), First Times (2), General (1)

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