3-HO-PCE (revisited)

Age: 24

Weight: 125 lbs

Dosage: 25 mg intranasal

Setting: My bedroom

Preface: When 3-HO-PCE first became widely available in 2017 I picked up one of the first batches that hit the market. My experiences with this substance back then were lackluster, a barely discernible and odd empty mental dissociation that barely felt like a dissociative at all, but rather some other strange, neutral altered state. I quickly dismissed this drug after a few trials as being fairly unremarkable. As time progressed positive reviews crept in and demand increased, which confounded me, but I just chalked it up to the subjectivity of drugs. It was only recently, in May of 2020, that I heard a rumor that that first batch was particularly weak or impure. I decided to see for myself and obtained some from a more recently produced batch. I initially experimented at doses similar to those I had taken with the first batch, ranging from 10-20 mg. The difference was remarkable- this later batch had indisputable dissociative effects at doses that only brought about threshold effects in the old batch. I prefer higher doses and more intense experiences with dissociatives and I feel that such experiences allow me to better understand the character of a particular substance, so I ran an experiment with 25 mg, higher than doses I had even taken with the old batch. That experience is as follows.

T0:00- Dose taken intranasally. Typical rancid petroleum odor of arylcyclohexylamines. Not much sting or discomfort to note beyond the bitter flavor.

T0:20- Begin to feel the first notes as being giddy and lightheaded and slightly dizzy. Already a presence of euphoria. This already seems better defined than the experiments with the older batch. Drip is moderately unpleasant but certainly tolerable.

T0:37- Feeling more and more dissociated, it is distinctly ringed around my head like I am wearing a tight diadem. My head begins to feel like an immense weight on my skinny neck. There is a steady feeling like I am rising- it is a gentle, soft, smooth and gradual dissociation that slowly immerses me. My fingertips feel numb and my visual field feels neutralized and subtly refracted like I am viewing it through thick glass. Open eyed visuals begin to form as smudges and blurs like some photoshop tool has been run through my field of view. Things begin to shudder and flicker ever so slightly. My eyelids feel heavier. Everything starts to feel heavy in fact, I am sitting very still at my desk and any motion feels like a massive undertaking. This is accompanied by a sense of accommodating warmth.

Cognitively, I find myself at first sitting with my eyes closed and tracing my way through pleasant memories, turning them over and analyzing every angle of them like one would analyze the shape and textures of an interesting rock. This begins to fade as a sense of stupefied numbness creeps into my brain, as though its creases are being smoothed over like clay. My thoughts begin to unravel from my head in great empty streamers that flop over and fall soft and flaccid as they peel off into nothingness, like great gooey streams of putty. I feel like I am forgetting to breathe occasionally.

T0:47- Spontaneous sensations begin to feel their way across my body like great empty hands made of wet clay. There is a pleasant pressure on my temples and it feels like my teeth are buzzing with numbness. This anesthetic buzzing passes across my skin, tickling and tingling up my neck and into my facial nerves.

T0:52- The dissociation wells up more and more, pulsing through my body like a dome of magma rupturing the earth’s crust, radiating a pleasant warmth into the shell of my being. I feel so incredibly heavy and steady and slow like I myself am made of heavy stone. Every motion requires so much effort and I am more than content to just sit perfectly still. Open eyed visuals become more and more defined, as spots, ripples, twitches and shakes. Everything is flashing and arcing off into infinity.

T1:00- It’s so hard to do anything and the trip is evolving and accelerating so quickly. My mind wanders off from my catatonic body, flaring and dancing in the empty space of my room. That body, so still, is a melting lump of clay, its weight pooling with gravity. It feels like it is being smoothed over by wind or a steady ocean current, not sudden and violent but steady and unwavering. Every motion I can muster feels slow and deliberate like I am a puppet being operated with the utmost care. My skin feels cold, glassy, and artificial.

Breathing is shallower. Visuals are flowing, in constant sinking motion, like water running down cave formations, smoothing them out. Waves of color wash over me, deep navy blues and heavy maroons. My jaw hangs agape and my teeth continue tingle.

T1:15- It feels like time has slowed down so much. It feels like everything has slowed down really. Only the music I have playing, perceived at normal speed, anchors me in a proper conception of time.

This trip is remarkably warm, not the manic fiery warmth that other arylcyclohexylamines like 3-MeO-PCP or 3-MeO-PCE can impart, but a gentle, immersive smothering warmth like sinking into a mud bath. My body continually feels like it is melting and sagging to gravity despite nothing happening physically. It is a continuous and fairly pleasant sensation. I can particularly feel the weight of my skull, and in that, particularly the weight of my mandible.

The whole world begins to look slanted and askew, especially the text on my screen. I remark to a friend that I am chatting with that it seems like everything is suddenly written in italics. I am so lazy and sedated, I don’t want to move from this spot, but I know my bed would feel even more comfortable. I want to lie down and listen to big walls of sound, let them grind down on me.

I had a bowl of cannabis packed beforehand, I muster up the motivation to smoke a few hits. It doesn’t add much to the experience other than a slight intensification of the buzzing sensation. The buzzing runs up my spine into my skull, expelling its excess energy through my teeth. This is pleasant, blissful and fun, so slow and heavy. It feels like convection, like I am constantly bubbling and floating up, then succumbing to gravity and sinking down, like a ping pong ball caught in a waterfall. The closed eyed visuals are dark, geometric, and monolithic and imposing, quickly fading into distant dark obscurity. Everything is tinged by a deep green. They are very still with only the slowest discernible motion and energy.

T1:20- I have managed to muster up everything I have and haul myself onto my bed. I immediately melt into the mattress like a big gooey puddle. Vibrations wriggle and ripple across the surface of this perceived puddle that is my being. My eyes are watering and it feels like my fingers don’t belong to me anymore. They are alabaster specters that act of their own will, a will that just coincidentally aligns with mine.

Lying down now I feel like I am an empty corpse, just a dead body in a heavy glassy casket. It is pleasant and peaceful. The only sign of life I can feel is the motile sensations that crawl up and down my body in waves, radiating and pulsing. There is a remarkable anesthesia too. Nothing feels better right now than just lying still. I can’t imagine wanting to possibly do anything else. Anything other than the bliss and tranquility of stillness seems trivial and pointless. The trip has decided its own motion and I am more than content to succumb to it, like tubing on a lazy river, a river made of viscous syrup.

The closed eyed visuals begin to assemble more and more, a void with massive pillars begins to tighten up and form into endless expanses of vast dark, cavernous halls, heavy and meaty and moving in response to my slow and steady breaths. Indeed a sense of tightness and tension grows, like the experience is slowly constricting me. The glow of my computer screen casts my body in a sterile light, perhaps it’s just a visual hallucination but I feel like I am decidedly pallid and corpselike in appearance. But damn does being a corpse feel nice, carefree and peaceful. I feel so content to just lie down forever, heavy curtains falling on me to close out my time alive. I am almost certain that my body was not actually in any danger of shutting down, rather it was a perceptual illusion in response to every cognitive process slowing down asymptotically to a near stop.

Physical motion has already been stricken from any possible activities, and now thinking is next on the chopping block. Forming thoughts feels tedious and laborious and I no longer want to put effort into it. As I like to think way too much, this inhibition is somewhat frustrating to contend with. I lose my sense of direction, I have no idea which way I am facing and if I close my eyes I lose all sense of where my body is in relation to the space of my room. The only thing that feels worthwhile is surrendering to the steady flow of this experience, driven by the weight of gravity, like rocks grinding together. I am yawning a lot, and while I am breathing normally, albeit slowly and shallowly, I keep feeling like I consciously need to catch my breath. There is a slight nausea reminiscent of motion sickness.

Above all else, I am a golem made of wet clay.

T1:45- My notes for this part of the experience are heavily laden with typos. I am trying to still talk to some friends in a discord chat but I feel like I have to fight my way through an impenetrable denseness. I am bearing down on this inhibition like a massive glacier, slowly pressing my weight into it, but to no avail. I am simply dumbfounded, unable to effectively process anything.

There are bubbles of light rising through my visual field now. I am stone titan gazing on what now looks like a tiny screen. When I close my eyes I am greeted by the same monoliths, now contained in a room that is saturated with heavy colors. There is no feeling anymore- no anxiety or euphoria or disdain or discomfort or anything. The idea of discrete thoughts is incomprehensible, it has all been smoothed over. I feel like I am experiencing the world in the way a rock would, one that has been eroded round by a river.

2:00- I feel like I am possessed by the spirit of a cave, so neutral and empty yet tight and confined. I am not yet lucid, I am slow like paste being poured between gears, like corn syrup dumped into a computer. Visuals dance in a steady red and blue and all I can do is passively regard them. My bed feels so soft and it’s so nice. A lot of the all-consuming anesthesia and physical sensations have now passed into a ceaseless weight around my head. My cheeks and jaws tingle and twitch. My eyelids are still heavy and it feels natural to just keep them closed.

The realm of being a clay golem no longer feels forcefully thrust upon me, by now it feels like something I can passively allow to creep over me. It still reigns above all else though. This is the precipice of the comedown, and I feel content to let this experience and its stupefying inhibition pass into the night. For now it is nice to simply sit with its dying light, to regard mindfully and matter-of-factly. The sensation in my limbs as feeling returns to them is smooth and pleasant, unctuous and undulatory like a warm bath being sloshed around inside of me.

T2:28- As time passes I begin to come back into my body and mind more and more. Lucid thoughts begin to form again, thoughts about big numbers and unstoppable voids, of vastnesses and forces beyond known limits. There is a euphoric relief in becoming myself again, though I imagine the feeling would be opposite had I entered this experience in the midst of a depressive episode. This comedown is euphoric and enjoyable, almost worth the debilitating stillness of the peak. I still feel slanted and drenched in the heavy fluid of the drug, still at its gentle mercy like plastic toys floating down creek riffles. Vision is still so askew that things resemble cubism, I feel like I am viewing things from multiple impossible angles simultaneously. The visual effects are still very noteworthy despite many of the other effects tailing off, they bear down with the weight of a heavy pane of glass that seems as though it would take a great deal of effort to alter or remove. My tongue tingles like I have just swished with mouthwash.

T2:37- A lot of the weight feels like it’s been lifted from the experience, I now feel floaty like a stray balloon. I still don’t feel any motivation to move my body at all-I am content to remain a statue, albeit a one made of entirely different material than before- perhaps fiberglass or hollow plastic. Closed eyed visuals are still marked, as towers and tombs towering into the dark heavens. It’s all bending and twisting and steadily coming apart, succumbing to the formlessness of the void. I am a wobbled ghost in a dance of the dead, nursing a drink in the corner. Everything still feels slow, labored, wet and massive.

T2:56- I am getting tired of this sedation now. I want to move and do things again, but it still feels like so much effort. Though it’s only been 3 hours, the experience feels like its overstayed its welcome. I am generally an antsy person and I don’t have time for debilitating sedation. The tactile effects and numbness are now confined exclusively to my head, which still feels impossibly heavy. I feel like I will not be able to abandon this experience until the feeling in my head passes, and that currently shows no signs of abating. I am trapped in its mass.

T3:11- Still feeling dumb and heavy, though I can process thoughts and read and understand things much better than before, it is still far off from baseline and I am still distinctly incapacitated. I just feel off in a not particularly pleasant way. The experience at this point feels similar to the peaks of my experiences with the older and weaker batch.

T3:24- I note the consistent tickling in my face. It is like little caterpillars crawling up my facial nerves.

T3:52- I am feeling more and more lucid thankfully. I am able to converse with people much easier. There is still a slight numbness in my body and a lesser but still notable tightness and weight in my head.

T4:30- Still feeling something but it’s mostly just an afterglow now. I mostly ruminate on how nice it is to be able to think again.

T5:04- All that remains of the experience is a tightness in my head, like I am wearing a tight imaginary hat.

T6:00- Back to baseline by now. I go to sleep a few hours later without issue.

Conclusion: With a newer and better batch, 3-HO-PCE has truly shown itself as a powerful and remarkable dissociative. It is too sedating and inhibitory for my preferences nonetheless, though now that I have more thoroughly felt the substance out I can absolutely understand how others might enjoy this, as opposed to my total dismissal of it before. It is definitely warm, comfortable, and anesthetic, with pleasurable physical sensations. Less enjoyable is the total smothering of thought processes, of everything slowing to a halt, of the act of existing turning into a tedious and laborious burden. This drug is extremely incapacitating in the sense that it just drains any motivation to do anything, to even think much less move. This is perhaps the most sedating dissociative I’ve ever consumed, even moreso than a ketamine hole but without the rushing intensity. The visual effects are notable and theoretically enjoyable, though their vividness is stunted by an inability to process them. This drug is nice for just lying around, I can’t really imagine doing much else on it. It probably is great for pain relief too. The dissociation is heavy and floppy, I mostly felt like I was made of wet clay drooping to gravity. There was a persistent weight and tightness in my head- the first sensation to present and the last to leave. The comedown was pleasurable in the sense that it was a release from the frustrating incapacitation. I felt dead and catatonic and it felt so very neutral. A good way to kill a night with nothing to do I suppose.