4-HO-EPT + Clonazepam + Etizolam

Age: 21

Weight: 130 lbs

Dosage: 75 mg Oral

Setting: My apartment

Preface: I intended this to only be an experience with 4-HO-EPT, but it unfortunately went a bit off the rails and I had to abort it with benzodiazepines. 

T0:00- Take the capsule with lemon extract and ginger for the nausea.

T0:15- How odd... I am already feeling the substance coming on with great intensity. It's as if there was no gentle comeup, the onset was a plunge straight into the the opening shades of the peak. I feel light and giddy with some GI discomfort, but its nothing serious. I am beginning to shake quite a lot and visuals are beginning to appear.

T0:20- This feels equivalent to what I would call the peak for any other substance. Little did I know that this was still just the comeup, that this was just the foothills of the mountain I was unknowingly attempting to summit. I feel like I am accelerating exponentially into the experience. The abrupt intensity of it all is shocking to say the least. My entire existence is quaking with the raw force of it. The visuals have reached a point of interrupting my activities, obscuring my ability to read and warping my perceptions to make the room around me unrecognizable. It is as though I am viewing everything through conchoidal fractures in glass, everything warped by transparent concentric curves, accented with rainbows. My field of vision is splitting into blocks that separate and spin and twist and alter independent of one another, seemingly in competition to see which can baffle and confuse me the most. The edges of my vision begin to disintegrate to reveal a much wider, deeper, and alien world that is typically beyond my perception. Auditory effects present as flanging and echoing of the sounds around me, steadily increasing in pitch as they reverberate. It's as though the universe is laughing at me. That alien essence that lingers in the wings of my vision is rending my reality apart, and it finds this hilarious, it finds my growing panic and discomfort absurd. It is not malicious, but rather a laugh of pity at the ludicrousness of all that was occuring. Everything is moving, regardless of whether my eyes are open or not. It all feels so automatic and robotic, as though the blocks the world has been split into are acting on their own in accordance to some esoteric programming. Things are twisting and spinning, and soon my physical sense of self feels like it's being torn apart and manipulated by alien tendrils, tendrils made from strings of repeated quadrilaterals like that computer glitch where a window leaves a trail behind it when it’s dragged (https://i.stack.imgur.com/5RJGy.jpg), weaving their way out of the cracks in reality. They are each tipped with claws that pull apart my essence and pick apart my mind. There is no comfortable way to situate my body.

I feel like my neural processes have become mechanized, like my brain is a computer. The visuals have picked up beyond the point of mere distortions of the environment- vivid hallucinations are forming. A parade of fantastic spiny golden creatures circles in the air around my head. They advance solemnly, as though they are marching to battle. My mind continues to click and unform itself, as though it is being deconstructed more and more, reduced to the raw physical mechanisms of the electrons that make up my nerve impulses. I feel like I am becoming an embryo of a human, some lower, primal state from which any person can be built, a sort of “debug mode” for humanity. The open-eyed visuals glow like neon lights, they are lines and forms that conform to the shape of every object around me, with concentric patterns extending inwards from them. It makes everything look futuristic.

It is around now that I begin to notice some aberrant physical effects. Firstly, I notice I am shaking more than I ever have from any psychedelic. And I notice that it is not just shaking, but full convlusions of my limbs, uncontrollable muscle contractions from my elbow down. This is somewhat worrisome. It feels like my mind is melting down. I also notice my heart is beating extremely hard and fast. This may have been psychosomatic anxiety, but it absolutely had me worried. I also noticed myself producing a lot of phlegm, having to cough and blow my nose quite a lot. I begin to fear that I might experience a seizure.

T1:00- The physical effects have me sufficiently worried. I decide to dose 1 mg Clonazepam and ~2 mg Etizolam. In addition to calming the spiraling out of control mental aspect of the trip, it should also slow my heart and calm the muscle contractions. For a brief time however, things only continue to pick up.

At first it feels as if the benzos are falling like snow, covering everything in a soft blanket, gently placing a stratus cloud over existence. Everything has been encased and preserved in foggy glass. The landing procedure has been initiated but there is an intense storm to pass through first. The tryptamine nonetheless rages forth, popping up from the snow and shaking it off.

Indeed my mind seems intent on straying further and further. I feel as though I am at the threshold of a great and infinite other, a glistening blissful world where I am omnipotent, where I am in control of atoms and the flow of electrons. I close my eyes and see the room I was previously occupying in faithful clarity. For the next several minutes, I am genuinely unsure if my eyes were open or closed, it borders on delirium. I feel like I have passed through the threshold into an alternate and mysterious version of my sober reality. In this world, everything is ethereal, everything is made of dense smoke that I can craft and alter with my mind, I am entirely telekinetic. The world is putty before me. I find with great excitement that I can spontaneously generate images with my mind. This has been one of my goals since I began taking hallucinogens and my newfound ability to do this is absolutely exhilarating. All it took was allowing my mind to be subsumed and adopted into this alien paradigm. In this world I can see pathways of energy left behind by everything, trails carved in the fundamental smoke of this existence. I am overcome with the feelings of peace and serenity that come with a sense that this is my dominion and sanctuary. Yet at the same time, I still feel like a guest, an outsider, like this realm is a sentient being that has invited me into itself. I look at my hand and see energy flowing around it like it is being consumed by a flame, the plumes of energy transparent, though they warp their surroundings. With concentration, I can make these invisible tendrils coagulate and turn to forms, I can concentrate them and cause them to erupt, or let them disperse into the smoke around them. Nevertheless, I realize that this existence is simply not compatible with my material reality, to even comprehend things in a way that allows me to do this means abandoning all semblances of my sober being.

            After this delicious foray into the potential of a ravaged mind, I descend into the next gauntlet, a floating, drifting incoherency. My mind gets caught repeatedly in benign loops, yet they carry with them a sort of dirtiness, a sense of failure to function properly. That parade has returned and it waltzes around me yet again, they seem to be preparing for some mission yet are excluding me from their plans. There are a lot of thoughts running through my head, faster than I can comprehend. It’s as if time or some fundamental law of the universe has been suspended just so I can fit this impossible glut of cognition into my existence. Every minor thought explodes and chains off into a million more, a tree bursting into fractalizing branches, each capillary twig of each branch containing a million worlds within. There is so much to process, so much to explore, and I have no idea how I’ll do any of it. Each little shred of thought gets entertained in exhausting detail, to the point where I am hallucinating entire alternate histories and geopolitical events taking place on the earth. Each time I snap myself out of whatever historical paradigm my mind generated on its own I am disoriented and shaken. This all occurs rapidly and repeatedly at a consistent rate for quite some time. It’s yet again almost a delirious feeling, of my mind convincingly generating events, locations, images that do not and never did exist, and presenting them before me. Some of these specific hallucinations taken from my notes include a storyline about me hosting an art show, something about watching nature documentaries with my friends, my friend’s boyfriend seeing a fractal on a pipe and having it turn into a shrimp, a conversation with a police officer, and something about a crystalline log being shattered by a powerful female energy from the ‘Northwast” (?). Needless to say, the chains of events and the ways they manifest are esoteric and incoherent. Every time I close my eyes, I am in a different time and place.

T1:30- What a fascinating experience! I am already beginning to drift down, much to my relief. I spent the past hour and a half with my mind shifted so far away from its normal self that I don’t know what to make of anything; the chaotic static that had so powerfully dissociated me is slowly dissolving away for a gentle landing. The benzos feel like a vice clamped onto my mind, preventing proper recollection or integration of the experience. I’m still stumbling on delusional pitfalls of truly believing things that are likely just imagined. I can reflect fondly on feeling like a god- indeed they took me to a place I didn't know I wanted to go, this place was my eden this place was my divine, it will be my node and my garden and I fully intend to return there In more stable circumstances. There is something in the other, it lingers there passively, in a place where everything is formless and eerie and the inhabitants exist collectively. It was unexpected but I'm glad they took me for the ride, although it was very rough.

T3:30- I am lucid enough now to be around others. The past two hours were just a slow confusing burn that sizzled my circuits and injected more absurd imagery into my existence seemingly just for my entertainment. My roommate comes up to smoke some cannabis with me and I try to relate the experience to him as coherently as I can. I feel manic and quick witted, I am able to communicate and interact effectively and competently. Being around another person who I trust after such a rocky experience is blissful. This drug clung on to every strand of imagination i had and made them flourish into full on vivid hallucinations.

T4:00- More friends come over and I excitedly greet them and relate the experience to them. There is a definite empathogenic effect to the experience now, I am talking way too much and I feel really great about it. My mind is working on overdrive to produce as many words as possible. I do not know if I am being obnoxious to the others in the room. My short term memory is quite stunted at this point, much to my chagrin. I feel a great deal of regret at taking the benzos as now I am in that fog and I cannot enjoy what is likely to be a fun night with the people I love most. My roommate and friends ask me all sorts of stuff about things I know about, perhaps just to humor me. I answer their questions about biology and leftism with enthusiasm and vigor, eager to talk to others and share the limited knowledge I have on the subjects.

T5:45- My girlfriend comes over, being around her is blissful and delightful. I am so glad she is not judgmental about the state I have put myself into, though she has every right to be. Nonetheless we have a relaxing and pleasant evening hanging out with my friends, smoking weed and drawing pictures together. I do not recall most of the rest of the night.

T12:30- After a long night of being social, I am mostly back to baseline. My memory has crept back by this point and I am pretty lucid. I go to sleep without issue.

Conclusion: This was one of the most intense psychedelic experiences I have ever had. My research led me to believe that 75mg would be a strong but manageable dose, but it proved to be way beyond my capabilities, at least within the realm of the psychosomatic effects. The headspace was fascinating and beautiful, particularly the ability to spontaneously generate imagery to my own will. This is something I am eager to explore further, though definitely with a lighter dose. 

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