Memantine

Age: 21

Weight: 120 lbs

Dosage: 150 mg oral

Setting: My apartment

T0:00-Fifteen 10 mg memantine pills ingested. A quick shower was taken.

T0:30-First notes arise, a very slight feeling of dissociation and dizziness melding with a sense of joviality and euphoria. I feel giggly and excited, perhaps from the slight nibble of feeling I have contracted, or perhaps from some deeper chemical enhancement.

 T0:40-The dissociation now manifests as cold, clinical, and clean. It’s a very pure detachment, with numbness in my extremities and a sense of distance relative to my surroundings, both on a physical and cognitive level. The comeup has been very gradual, like I am slowly sinking into a sterile icy pool.

T1:00-Visuals begin to appear. They come in the form of an all-consuming array of spots and dots overlaid on every surface I gaze upon, little concentric circles of rainbow colors. Otherwise, the experience is fairly lucid and stimulating so far, in contrast to some other dissociatives that rush in like a paralytic flash flood. The progressive numbing of my extremities seems to be creeping towards its apex while my sense of proprioception collapses and dissolves. It feels as though my consciousness is in a balloon that is slowly rising from my body as it expands, lifted by a vestigial bastion of warmth in my core. Cognitively, a slight touch of deeper emotion, empathogenesis, and euphoria trickles in. It’s not quite to the effect of other drugs like MDMA, but is definitely greater relative to other dissociatives.

T1:30-I am very very dissociated, and the burgeoning experience shows no signs of slowing down or letting up. The dissociation is heavily mental, with a feeling of detachment from language, semiotics, cultural constucts, and other societal essences of humanity. I feel mechanical and icy, like a chilly golem. This difficulty understanding words and sentences is coupled with a faltering short term memory, making conversation difficult. Physically, I am still functional, I can get up and walk and carry things with no issue. Thus, it is in no way a ‘hole’ experience yet. I am slightly nauseous and am rapidly alternating between feeling too warm or too cold. The visuals begin to appear as patterns, still composed of dots, like a pointillist painting. These dots are distributed in orderly and harmonious configurations, seemingly dictated by some underlying mathematical arrangement. Blocky shapes in this meticulous order also begin to appear.

T2:00-I am dissociated to the point where typing is difficult, and closing my eyes leads to a total loss of coordination and sense of bodily presence. If I focus, I can snap out of it briefly and poke my head above the surface, but with my mind at rest, my thoughts begin to wander exponentially into the distance, blurring to sheer static nothing. It feels almost psychedelic in that the visuals have kicked up to the point of uncontrollably interrupting my perceptions. It is very difficult to focus on one thing for long, leaving me in that default state of my mind drifting off into the abyss.  My short term memory has been compromised further, rendering conversation near impossible. The bodily feel that was shifting randomly between hot and cold has finally settled on cold, with a sterile frost shuddering through me.

T2:40-I smoke a joint. I feel like I am floating a few inches above my head, and that there are curtains of red and green cellophane draped around the room, creating blocks of altered color in my vision. Every time my focus breaks and my mind wanders, I am not only drifting into the distance and fading away, but now I am being entombed, sequestered into a little bubble or chamber that provides a sort of tangible separation between myself and the rest of existence. Reading is very difficult, especially due to the fact that the words and letters seem to be hovering an inch off of the screen at random. My body feels like it is folding along angular lines, forming into some sort of prism.

T3:00-Still feeling cold, I retreat to my bedroom to grab a sweater but decide to stay up there for a bit to ride out the raging peak of this trip alone. The orderly visuals adorn every surface, dancing and pulsing in calculated, mechanistic unison. It appears as though everything is lit from below by a purple light with no discernible source, everything appears futuristic, shiny, and weird. My thoughts are disorganized and arbitrary, and they often wither before they can fully develop, leaving me feeling a state of total flat neutrality, my cognitive processes reduced to impotent static. I feel like a cold city skyline at night, seen from a great distance. When I close my eyes I am hit with a ghost image of the room that appears to be composed of a collage of numbers, letters, and other odd symbols. If I lie down with my eyes closed long enough, this dissolves into a great black and purple swath of something or nothing. Eventually this scene becomes occupied by characters, odd blocky humanoid figures composed of dense sections of random numbers, moving jerkily and going about their seemingly normal everyday activities, such as sitting at a laptop, or walking around their plane aimlessly. These beings do not really present in any discernible way- not good, or evil, benevolent, kind, caring, not even indifferent, they simply exist, like I am watching them through a screen, witness to them but entirely separated. I do not care about them, and they do not care about me, and it is alright. I return downstairs to find myself further physically impaired, with my sense of momentum and proprioception heavily compromised. Talking has now become difficult due to being unable to feel my mouth, and thus being unaware of how to properly use it to form phonetic sounds. I am pulsing like a jellyfish and my field of vision is being sliced into blocks that begin to separate from each other and form into 3-d cubes.

T3:20-The open eyed visuals peaked around now, with complex 3-dimensional patterns appearing on surfaces with mottled textures. Most notable were squiggly fractal patterns that resembled bone sutures or ammonitic sutures that begin to very clearly spawn on my ceiling. I found myself with my head lazily thrown back, slack jaw hanging open staring aimlessly at the ceiling. These patterns were not even moving or breathing or shifting, they were simply there, static and bold. Moving my eyes around left tessellated rainbow afterimages of everything, their forms fringed by this same squiggly suture pattern. It feels like everything is covered in spiderwebs and when I move I am disturbing some tentative stringy connection with everything else in the room. That I am anchored in some way to every surface and I feel a slight elastic resistance to every movement, as if the drug is gently but sternly suggesting that I remain still, static, slack and frozen.

T5:30-Continue to hang out and smoke more weed. I mostly just feel stoned at this point.

T8:45-Smoke even more. This time however, it seems like I have really stirred up the dust. I feel like I am suddenly and rapidly being drawn away from myself.

T9:00-Now, 9 hours into the experience, with the help of cannabis, I have entered a sort of a hole. I have curled up on the couch next to my friends and closed my eyes and become entirely separated from the reality they inhabit.

The hole began with a great golden pulsating concentric angular patterns across my eyelids. This soon became wiped aside by a great black abyss, which was soon speckled with explosions and splatters of little white dots, like CRT static or a blizzard. The abyss began to fold up into a network of cylindrical shapes and tubes, still streaked and battered with this onslaught of white particles. These forms then became cut and partitioned, it felt like my mind was being split into sections and separated into its various components. At last this visage shattered to reveal a vast infinite forest of spindly conifer trees, arranged in an eternal field of fractal patterns. I found myself hovering above it, then wandering amongst the trees, the sky above deep and infinitely black, no stars or clouds or anything. The white particles became a raging blizzard, the snow swirling and blowing around me and grating away at my vision. The ground was white with a shallow accumulation of snow. The forest was not scary, or uncomfortable, like everything else this trip it was fundamentally neutral. There was no fear in my heart, no sense of being lost or out of place, simply a sense of being somewhere new. It almost felt magical, and the mystery and majesty of the vastness bathed me in the glory of exploration. Upon opening my eyes and returning to the hole, I found myself immediately back among the forest, not having to navigate the convoluted entry process again. As time progressed I found myself entering a different sort of hole, a more abstract space where I was able to generate clear imagery in my mind, though without constant focus these would soon decay into rainbow concentric ripples and lose their form.

T13:00-Was down enough to go for a walk to a convenience store with my friends. Still felt pretty distant and not entirely stable on my feet, and interacting with the cashier/sharing space with strangers was difficult and awkward.

T14:00-I mostly just feel stoned now, but the visuals are presenting still. It’s the same rainbow suture patterns, now moving and breathing and subtly rippling. I end up falling asleep around now with little trouble.

T24:00-I wake up the next day, still feeling dizzy and out of it. This persists through the entire day, I have difficulty balancing and staying properly on my feet. Smoking brings back a similar feeling of dissociation, though definitely not to the same degree, and lacking in the visual aspect.

T48:00-I am still feeling it the next day. I feel separated from the world, as if I am watching everything on a TV screen. I am a bit off balance still, but find interacting with people smoother and easier.

T52:00-I can finally say I am down about now.

Conclusion: This drug is certainly fascinating. Not entirely enjoyable or fun, except for some tinges of euphoria at the beginning, rather it just felt fundamentally and deeply neutral. It’s essence was elusive and mysterious, it felt as though it was a drug that existed at the fringes of consciousness that simply was not meant to be understood. The cold and wintry essence of infinity that it contained was perhaps a symptom of the cold winter day, but the depths of the experience were certainly isolating and chilly. The afterglow is very very long and left me feeling off-balance for days.