4-AcO-MET (Revisited)

I am beginning a series where I will be revisiting some substances I have already taken and reported on before. This is because I went back and found my reports on those substances... lacking. The writing was clumsy and they were sparse in important details, among other errors. (Some of this is addressed in the conclusion)(The older and poorer quality report can be found here). I figured I should revisit them and write a detailed report now that I have had more experience with this substance, more experience with psychedelics in general, and now that my writing and observational skills have developed further. I think this will produce a report that better characterizes the substance for others who are interested in this research. I plan on eventually revisiting other substances I initially explored and reported around this time period, particularly DPT and 4-HO-MiPT. 

Age: 24

Weight: 135 lbsg

Dosage: 30 mg oral in gel cap

Setting: Around the City, In my room

T0:00- Eat my dose. I am in a park near one of the major rivers that delineates the boundaries of the city. It is an unseasonably warm overcast day.

T0:18- Feeling tension in my jaw and my muscles. Chew some gum. I decide to go for a walk across the big bridge that spans the river.

T0:49- I am feeling chills and pangs of nausea. The sun sinks towards the horizon, muffled by swathes of vast clouds.

T0:55- I smoke some weed. I am not feeling too much yet. It’s getting colder.

T1:07- I am starting to feel the come up, energy buzzing up through me from my core, tickles of white-hot electricity, creeping and subtle. There is a warmth behind my eyes, my body is shimmering with energy.

T1:19- The wind has picked up, whipping and pulling at me amidst the cacophony of the cars below. This bridge would be a beautiful place to watch the sun set, but the clouds on the horizon have smothered the fire in the sky. The night stalks in on dusky pastels. I gaze into the concrete and onto mottled surfaces but there are no visuals to note yet. Still that glowing warmth in my core, a fire steadily glowing brighter and brighter.

T1:33- I am walking back into the city now, all of its lights begin to twinkle as the sky turns a cold blue. I feel like I’ve missed my shot, I would have loved to have been peaking right over the center of the river, watching the fading glow of the sky in a torrent of wind. I did have to pee really badly though.

The trip comes crashing down on me as I begin to immerse in the buildings again. It is an unseasonably warm day and many people are out exercising or commuting or whatever, joggers and boyscout troupes and all variety of families and passerby. I am filled with a sense of love for the entire city that I can take into my view, love and already mourning for when I will have to leave it in a few months. My guts crawl with discomfort as I am showered in cascades of developing visuals like giant flashing snowflakes pouring onto me. I make it to the base of the bridge and decide to walk down to the waterfront.

T1:45- I am certainly peaking hard now. All of the people going about their daily lives in the dark are so endearingly alien to me now, all of their music and conversations are glossy faceless intruders, weaseling into my perceptions and clawing to the forefront of my thoughts. I gaze over the water as rippling buzzing visuals form out of the city lights dancing off of the waves as flowing hexagonal forms begin to breathe in from the edges of my vision. Everything is melting and twisting and bending. It feels like some force is climbing up my body from my feet, threatening to lift me up and throw me off balance at any second like a great electric updraft. A great unease wrests my body, I cannot stand still for too long. Despite the discomfort, I am in adoration of all the lights and colors and motion of the world, in adoration of achieving the success of dosing myself with drugs on the internet. I set out for home, a brisk 20 minute walk on this warm night that steadily gets colder. The trip seems to dog at my back as I walk, occasionally overtaking me with a sweep and a swirl of colors and geometric textures like glittering fish scales. As I walk my inner voice sounds confident, competent and authoritative. I feel like I can just talk to myself in my head and get myself hyped up, it is an odd sort of inner guidance. My thoughts are articulate, my brain taking their tangles and laying them out in straight, digestible lines.

T2:27- I return safely home just after dark. Once inside, I immediately set up my room to be as comfortable as possible- dim lights, incense and scented candles, droning gentle comfortable music with a thrumming bass.

Everything I touch feels so comfortable I just want to curl up in my blankets and nuzzle around like a dog rolling around in a sunny field. I am thrashing and twisting around in what feels like a pool of glitter, sticking to everything and being strewn into the air which each move, shimmering as they fall as they catch the city lights outside. I just want to sink deeper into my bed, twist and feel its softness and textures as it entombs me, rippling me with comfort and pleasure.

I become suddenly subject to a distinct sort of visual- a rhythmic strobing light shining right in my face- it is as if an object is rapidly rotating at perfect 90 degree angles, with one face of the object a glaring halogen bulb. It is a feeling of car headlights stunning you, rotating through my mind. It fees as if an object is rushing up to me to flash a sterile glow at my frontal lobe. This effect persists throughout the trip.

The visuals otherwise are extremely bright and colorful and energetic, rippling with tributaries of flashing motion. They radiate off everything, sprouting and blossoming to consume my entire visual field, adorned with iridescent leaves.

So much electricity is chased through my body, I feel nauseous and restless and cannot sit still, which has me nuzzling into my blankets more.

The cognitive effects have me curling up on my bed, my head in my hands, contemplating and reminiscing so many thoughts and memories and ideas, all of them freely flowing into each other, rushing by me at a rate where I still feel like I can give each sufficient consideration. Every one of these thoughts, ideas, associations, are tinged with an almost pathological euphoria, truly “good vibes only”, where it seems like only the most saccharine thoughts can exist. I keep getting up to do things but keep getting sucked rapidly back into these tunnels of pure pleasant thought. The pleasant thoughts begin to form structures, each one arriving, being contemplated, then sent off to crystallize in an underwater crystalline cavern, formed from the finest gems, a great palace of euphoria, catching filtered prismatic light through its vitreous walls. Being sucked into such a place is frankly, unavoidable. The thrashing visual sensation continues nonetheless, as does the restless desire to nuzzle into everything. Amidst the ornate crystalline tunnels, amidst the chaos of the strobing light and the sense that something is perched, watching me, right in front of my face, is a backdrop of fractals and patterned visuals seeping in from every angle.

T3:00- I have rediscovered another favorite activity on psychedelics- using social media to do extremely deep dives into the lives of people I don’t know (mostly posting in special interest groups), watching the progression of their lives over the years, piecing together a story based on what they show and wondering how much it differs from their actual story. It sounds creepy but I have no stake in it beyond bearing witness. It is just fascinating that I can develop such a detailed profile of a complete stranger. I nurse a bowl of cannabis while I do this.

The overall experience has calmed down a little, its settled into being warm and luscious like a jungle made of opals. I feel glints of polychrome light everywhere. I am being massaged by electricity, no longer struck by whipping currents. I think that I am so happy not to be at work right now.

The odd strobing, “in my face effect” has not subsided, and it is frankly a bit irritating at this point, but everything else is gossamer pleasure. I feel so much love an empathy for everything around me, for this whole wild world, for the fact that I am tripping now. I definitely sense that I am just starting to come in for a landing.

T5:05- There has been a steady and gentle comedown, conceding to me the last taste of my favorite bits of the experience before filing them away in my memory. I decide to pass the time by trying to finalize and edit a trip report I wrote a week ago. I figure this would be a good state to read my own writing.

I find it verbose, melodramatic, and tedious.

The words are contrived and pretentious and I feel as if I am trying to railroad a narrative than just let the experience flow. I lean heavily on purple prose and flowery descriptions when I could just be concise. I know these are problems but I don’t know how to stop, in fact I’m still doing it here. Despite feeling harshly critical of my writing, I in general feel good and euphoric and otherwise kind and merciful to myself. Feeling absolutely jovial in fact.

I reminisce on the first time I took this drug, in my room at my old house on a lonely summer night. I laid in the backyard watching the hexagonal visuals dance across the sky, I retreated to the first sanctuary I built to be buried in incense and cannabis smoke. Dim lights, draped in my most nostalgic and ethereal and intimate music. I remember the gentle comfort, a dim light in the cold blue glow of my sinking depression. I remember the empathogenic effects, the desire to talk to everyone and express my love, and the sun setting on another cozy summer day.

The strong social empathogenic effects were noticeably absent this time around.

I otherwise talk with a good friend about geopolitics (This was shortly after the U.S. murdered Qasem Soleimani), my thoughts feel precise and my analyses feel solid and well supported. The conversation is high energy and enthusiastic.

T5:30- There was a party I was going to go to. The empathogenic effects are so lacking that I honestly feel too anxious to go to a party with mostly people I don’t know. Though there are people there I love dearly who I could cling to, I feel like being in such a crowded environment wouldn't be comfortable right now. I am in the mood to hole up for the night and seek some media that might be enriching. Then a close friend calls me over to her house to watch anime with her and few of my really cute and sweet and kind old friends who are always in an aura of love and comfort. I decide it would be a nice to go out and it would be a calmer more intimate sort of interaction, and it would be nice to feel cozy with them, so I  put on my makeup and gear up and head out into the night. Riding the subway there feels odd, I am not really rocking with visuals anymore but I feel burnt and stimmed out and hyper-aware of my surroundings. Some reluctant visuals creep around in the corners of the subway stations.

T6:15- I arrive at the house and am immediately immersed in the auras of my sweet and cute and beautiful friends. The house is warm but the warmth of these people makes me feel like I am basking in heat waves off hot pavement. I literally have a crush on everyone here and it’s so nice to just really casually hang out. We smoke more weed and watch the anime ‘Space Dandy’. The psychedelic still sits in me as a sweaty hypomania, easier social interaction and a general sense of smoldering euphoria. Repeated blunt smoking slows the machines down, and I find myself less able to hold coherent conversation, but the jovial energy still dances around with the lights off.

T8:15- The night winds down. I decide to head home via subway. The trip has mostly subsided. I get a second wind coming off the subway and decide to take a long circuitous walk home, taking in the beauty of all of the lights of the city around me catching the drizzle that has now taken hold. I am filled with love, I want to run around like a puppy on a big puppy playground, run, jump, climb, but mostly I just want to see as many little details as I can.

T9:10- I’m back home. I have to do things tomorrow, so after a bit of relaxing, I shower, eat some food, and then get ready for bed.

T10:20- Go to bed and fall asleep after about 30 minutes from some residual stimulant effects.

Conclusion: This report exists for me to provide what I hope is a more detailed account of the 4-AcO-MET experience than the first report I wrote. I wanted to revisit it when I had had more experience with psychedelics and had developed my writing/observation skills more.

In my initial trial, dosages were imprecise due to a poor batch of product. This time my measurements were more precise. Further, in my first trial I consumed the drug in solution, and attributed the fast comeup to the drug itself, while in reality this was the R.O.A.

Interacting with my own writing and meditating on my first experience with this substance underscored the recursive introspective nature of this trip and the ability of this substance to really bring out those qualities.

This experience did share with the previous one some distinct qualities (That I’ve also noticed in other unrecorded trials)- A particular strobing visual that seems to fly at my face, a desire to nuzzle and revel in tactile sensations, other iridescent visuals with a hexagonal shape, a general warm electricity. This experience differed in lacking the strong empathogenic wave that typically sweeps into the comedown, which the first time, felt as if I had suddenly had a booster dose of MDMA. Other experiences had me feeling extremely social and talkative during that phase- this trial oddly enough did not feature that.

My overall assessment has remained the same- This is a lovely introspective, warm, and amorous psychedelic, stimulating, flashy and at times a tad overwhelming in an intensely jovial way. I would expect a wave of empathogenic effects to take hold during the comedown, though this isn’t always the case. Visuals are fairly intense, geometric and repeating, very shiny and colorful. There is that persistent facial strobing but it can be ignored when lost in thought. This has always been a winner for me. It is highly introspective and offers lustrous tunnels of memories to explore and examine, all of them encrusted in rose tinted gemstones, a crystalline library of pleasant memories and sensations.