HXE

Age: 25

Weight: 130 lbs

Dosage: 150 mg intranasal

Setting: My house

Introduction: HXE is the MXE-adjacent name applied to another novel arylcyclohexylamine, which does bear a passing similarity to MXE only with a hydroxy group in place of the methoxy group. HXE had been conjectured years ago, appearing prominently in the collections of some online research chemical vendors, though it was never for sale. There were few to no reports of anyone who had actually encountered or ingested this chemical for many years, until early 2021 when it was first seen for sale on the open market. It is likely that it will remain a rarity and a one-off curiosity owing to difficulty in synthesis, despite being a very natural direction to go in arylcyclohexylamine design.

I attempted a few trials with this chemical before this one, at 50 and 100 mg, all intranasal. 50 mg yielded threshold effects, a distinct dissociative stimulation, while 100 mg was more intense though still manageably lucid. Overall it is an interesting dissociative, very cognitive, physically sedating, warm, with a confusing and elusive headspace. It is homely and cozy, heavy and slow. It is assessed in full in the conclusion. What follows is a description of a trial with 150 mg administered intranasally.

 

T0:00- I weigh out a large pile of extremely fine, chalky powder and cut it into several lines. I snort them one by one, pausing between each to recoil and brace for the next. This chemical is incredibly uncomfortable to consume- the flavor is rancid, bitter and vile. It stings on contact with my mucus membranes and the powder fluffs into a cloud in my sinuses, coating every surface. Each draw into the snorting straw makes me flinch and recoil, the stinging forces tears from my eyes and I involuntarily retch at the flavor. This is not enjoyable in the least. Thankfully the stinging subsides fairly quickly, though the bitterness and discomfort continue to rage.

 

T0:10- Finally finish taking down all of those lines. No effects to note yet other than a continual unpleasant drip.

 

T0:27- Onset- feeling a bit faint and wobbly, something is definitely happening now. I am dizzy and lightheaded and my fingertips feel a bit numb.

 

T0:32- The drug overtakes me more and more. The intensity at this point is akin to that felt at the peak of my 100 mg dose. I feel like I am being compressed and tightened as my breath grows shorter and shallower. This is a tight and constricted dissociation, a sense that the boundaries of my physical body are no longer aligned with my sensory perception of my own size and shape- namely, the actual body is smaller, denser, pulled tighter than the perceived body. There is a cooling bubbling dissociation that burgeons now, an unease that travels from my core down to the tips of my extremities, something amorphous and indistinct growing larger by the second.

 

T0:44- I am sinking deeper and deeper by the second. This is not a rushing dissociation, there is no sense of floodwaters buffeting me and streaming my essence into the void. It is as though I am in a chamber that is rapidly flooding with water, water eager to fil the space even before it has displaced the air, growing denser than one would think possible, exerting an immense pressure on my body as it rises around me. I feel trapped, tightly bound, locked into my current position and pose, I am folding up, becoming smaller and recursive. It quietly beckons me into its core, I sink into its inky bed as its waters crush my bones with weeping frigid pressure.

;

In pitch-black waters under crushing pressure the pitch-black skin of the earth stretches and ruptures, open wounds that ooze with glowing molten blood, a primordial heat generated from an entire planet’s worth of atoms bearing down on each other. The great dense salty waters that creep and crawl across the earth trickle into the planet’s crackling skin, churning into the great heavy fires below the crust and exploding back out into the ocean as impenetrable black plumes of chemicals.

;

That which beckons me to sink deeper is still, stoic, glowing and warm like the core of the earth burning under its own pressure amidst the tumult of the mantle and the raging vibrancy of its crust. It resides in a realm still and dark and impossibly heavy, fluid but steady. It casts its glow into the abyss, its warmth crackles at my skin and seeps into my bones, a respite from the infinite cold that surrounds it on all sides. The cold sloughs off my shoulders like a reptile shedding its skin, falling into loose ruffles around me. I have turned off all of the lights and am sitting in the glow of my computer screen, there are patterns churning and seeping into the shadowy surfaces cast in blue and teal, quiet and pensive and watching me like timid hagfish scouting out a fresh ocean floor carcass to burrow into.

Despite this sense of depth and space and impenetrable void dominating my mind, when I force myself into lucidity it is quite manageable. Standing up and moving around, I have little loss in motor skills or coordination. I doubt I could hold a coherent conversation right now, but I very likely could walk down the street without giving a stranger the impression of being intoxicated. This is an odd sort of functionality.

 

T1:00-

I am enjoined with this drug’s light and its warmth, I am entwined with its molten core as its fire courses through my veins and steams off of my skin. In its glowering light I can gaze out onto the infinite watery abyss that expands on all sides of me, frigid, unforgiving, and unimaginably vast.

I take advantage of the optional lucidity to run and pee real quick. Sitting in the dark in the bathroom feels like being encased in a flooding submarine, the rushing currents painted with impressionistic strokes of maroon and turquoise reflected light. The writhing wriggling pressure bears down on my skull.

Back downstairs on the couch in the dark, the subterranean waters flow through me, like the tendrils of frigid ocean seeping into the Earth’s crust to do communion with the fires of the mantle. All light is hazy and diffuse through a deep blue filter. My fingers feel blunt and gooey like I am a gelatinous creature of the deep, my body feels like it is being rolled up with wads of abyssal mud and bioluminescent mucus. The world is spinning away from me like a twirling pebble descending down a water column. My feet are twisting around themselves, my body is giving way to diffusing into a softness that it sinks into, a softness that swirls and churns with convection and turbulence, mixing its essence with the glowing liquid heart of this chemical.

;

Deep under the ocean, incomprehensible and colossal masses of frigid salty water creep along the seafloor, heavier and vaster than anything we can comprehend on the surface. The eternal march of these great masses, step by step along the midnight bottom of the great seas, drives the circulation of water around the earth.

;

The drug is fearsome in its power, fearsome in its scope, yet- still and matter-of-fact. If one were to sit at the bottom of the ocean, surely it would be fearsome in the vastness, it would be difficult to comprehend the immenseness and the sheer volume of impenetrable water in every direction. It would be near impossible to consider in the abyssal dark but its presence would be heavy and distinct. The pressure the entirety of the ocean exerts would turn a person to liquid, pulverize them and churn their essence among looming deep sea currents bearing down on them. Yet one would simply be there, in place, among something that surely exists and surely contains so much power, regardless of our petty existence. That is the grip of HXE, fearsome like a mighty glacier, fearsome like an shroud of all-consuming fog, fearsome like the span of the night sky over an empty plain, vast terrible and awesome and completely indifferent to human existence like so much else that is vast and terrible and awesome.

I am incredibly warm and sweaty. I feel considerable nausea, moreso than I typically experience from dissociatives. I am enraptured in this drug’s magmatic embrace, its convections flowing in streams around me, pressing down upon my soft flesh. Its breath is at once warm like opening the maw of an oven, like a lover fervently exhaling on my neck, yet cold and breezy like the wind before a thunderstorm. It is like being pinned under a heavy mass of warm seaweed, great slimy undulating curtains that hold me to the ground, steam rising from their blades.

 

 

T1:26- Its currents and flows run over mid-ocean ridges, the prominences of seamounts and the skyscrapers of black smokers. Like great drapes being dragged across a stony riverbed, it bends and works its way around angles and edges and points that it obscures, protrusions and penetrations into an eternal inky flux. And thus its ribbons and vortices trace around my bones, the odd vertices of my body like an infinite sheet of black silk is being pulled over my form. With my eyes closed I seep into a world of shadowy obsidian forms, fractalizing and self transforming into illusions, presenting inconceivable dimension and perspective, gripping me in its heavy gaze. It is a storm of volcanic sludge, warm and impenetrably dark, and always in steady, heavy, unstoppable and indifferent motion. There is an uneasy pull, like a great creeping current has taken my tiny body and tossed it into the great blue dark. I plug in headphones and decide to listen to music- a compilation of B-sides and demos from one of my favorite musical projects, Julia Brown, it’s lo-fi, nostalgic, and intimate music that is deeply entwined with my life. There is great comfort in something familiar, there is great comfort at the bottom of the sea.

 

T1:43- Lying down and surrendering myself to music in the dark has brought about the typical dissociative hole sensation- this sense that I am being enclosed in an inconceivably soft cocoon, that my body sinks into its silken plush and becomes amorphous and malleable, that this new vehicle for my body enters a steady motion, in this case a sense of sinking and plummeting into a swallowing and crushing and undulating pressure. I would consider this to be the peak effects of the experience.

The world turns to dark, my cocoon swirls and stirs with its surroundings, everything is cast in palaces and arches of sea glass stained in the darkest teals and deepest blues, self-generating structures in illusion and abstraction, taking a distant, warm, muted light through their crystalline structure. The organic and cryptic motion and process of this geometry seems to suggest something organic, something alive, and yet this vast dark ocean floor is devoid of anything that could be considered biological. This is an ancient sea, one that persists even when all else does not. Perhaps it was once inhabited but the liveliness of this experience is like a fossil, traces and vestiges and signs of what once was but is no more, preserved for unknowable eternities. My cocoon gives way to a thick, deep glass sarcophagus, nestled among the shifting currents, a great heavy thing subject to a great pressure. There are tickles and ripples and trickles of electricity crackling through the space where my body lay.

The music is comforting, at once familiar yet impossibly alien, my brain can register that this is something it has heard before but it can’t quite grasp what it is exactly, it is like feeling the form of some familiar object in total darkness. My thoughts trace around the words, the melodies, but don’t seem to drift or engage with much else. All I can think about is the darkness, the blueness, the pressure, the ripples of sound waves in a viscous void. The visuals do not appear to be synesthetic, they don’t dance or shift or change their appearance in response to the music, they simply exist as they need to, flowing and shifting and swirling like any body of water would.

 

T2:00- I spend the next half hour or so sinking into the hole, opening my eyes and inflating myself to rise to the surface, ad nauseam. I enjoy the relative lucidity of this substance, how it can only overtake me when I allow it to, and then it bears down with the weight of the seven seas. Fine motor skills are compromised, attributed to a total numbness in my fingers. Standing up and walking still presents no issue. Attempting to use technology or communicate with people digitally or read information on a screen presents a challenge, owing to a heavy mental dissociation that scrambles focus and coherent lines of thought. I am dulled to only really being able to perceive the sensations I am currently being subject to, which is frankly quite pleasant and peaceful. It is a cozy and homely drug, akin to dozing off next to a fireplace. Chains of association have become cryptic, obscured in a vast blue dark, I can only hope to grope around to make sense of things the way I can while sober.

The latest sensation to overtake me when I close my eyes is a sense of my body melting into a puddle of slime or liquid or perhaps a heavy flow of voluptuous lava, glowing seething and steaming into the cold night, slimy and radiant. My body droops and sags and sinks into the ground, becoming amorphous. It’s novel for the experience so far and fun. I love taking delight in the little flourishes and touches that dissociatives can have. I feel like I am exuding heat, my skin feels hot and sweaty to the touch (though perhaps with the general sense of anesthesia my ability to assess temperature was not accurate). I wonder what my body temperature would measure as right now.

 

T2:19- Aspects of this experience seem to be traveling in great deep sweeping sine waves, such as a sense of pressure rising and falling. The beginning of the peak had my in its heavy grip, and that sensation has returned, I close my eyes and I feel cocooned, tightly wrapped in a smooth membrane, pulling tighter, shrinking around me, bounded on its other side by an infinite softness like the abyssal plain. But there is no world to be had beyond this high-pressure bubble that contains me, there is the infinite recursive void within my skull, where I fall into yet another high pressure bubble bounded by an inconceivable nothingness that extends in directions I cannot perceive. There is no point to perceiving a world beyond this sinking infinite light, radiating heat from my body.

 

T2:43- Stimulation and sedation are another feeling that have cycled throughout this experience, in broader waves than the undulating sense of pressure. The mental stimulation of the comeup and peak has crashed into an all consuming quagmire of sedation, suddenly my limbs feel like lead, my eyelids creep shut in a steady downpour, I am yawning and nuzzling up into the couch, wishing I could sink deeper into it than is physically possible. I would love to sleep but my brain still feels too jarred to get rest- it in fact is not a relaxing sedation but a heavy, forceful one.

The experience seemed to plateau and lag in a steady intensity for the last hour or so, perhaps steadily turning down, but it feels as though it has just peaked a great deal. Perhaps it is the anti-rush of being swamped with a sudden sedation, of drowning in a bog. Soon the fatigue gives away to a distinct alertness, a raw intensity. The drug has shot into the sky before burning out and fizzling before the glistening moon, one last peak before a sudden downturn in all of the effects. What an odd timeline for an odd compound. I wonder if this timeline is a result of metabolism and physical interaction with the substance vs. an inherent property of the compound. Further experimentation is required! I still feel slow, melty, sluggish, I am taken with an exhaustion like I am floating on the surface of a deadly still pool. I can force myself to stand up, move around, interact, but I just don’t feel much energy or drive to do so. It is functional on paper, but not in practice at this point.

Visuals are formed into regular harmonic grids, constructed of a deep translucent glass, overlaid subtly on surfaces, catching a light with no discernible source.

 

 

T3:21- Still a buzzing presence in my mind. I have been absentmindedly playing videogames as I am unsure what else I should do. My mind feels blank and empty. MXPr is a drug that I consider to be distinctly lackluster because the comedown is so inhibiting and dull. Drugs like DMXE or MXiPr meanwhile, feature a stimulated and introspective comedown replete with curiosity and a degree of cognitive enhancement. This drug falls in the middle, though more towards the inhibiting side. There is just enough stimulation for it not to be a dull experience, I simply exist in the present and process my senses rather than being able to think myself down rabbit holes and ruminate on whatever catches my interest. It is a state of Zen, one in which I am mostly too adrift to recognize it as such, and also too adrift to recognize that I normally don’t enjoy this kind of state.

One interesting cognitive effect that has been setting in during the comedown is that I am finding it difficult to fully process or comprehend things that are entirely normal and familiar. Things like objects around the room, reading about world events, basic house appliances, all are suddenly alien and foreign, I can’t quite wrap my head around why I know about these things or why I simply accepted them before, now they are incomprehensible objects and concepts that are pared down to their basest sensory information, bereft of all meaning and association. This is most striking when trying to read- while I can mostly read okay, certain words suddenly become near-incomprehensible, in that what was once familiar letters have become indistinguishable glyphs, divorced from my knowledge of the Latin Alphabet. The sensation is fleeting, I will stumble on a few words in a sentence before they realign and I can piece it together. Taking in that information and processing it into something coherent is a whole challenge that follows. But I do not mind, I find it to be novel, interesting, almost funny. There is a calm acceptance of all of these effects that should otherwise be jarring or annoying.

 

T4:00- The confused haze has given way to a bit of that motivated psychedelia- another flash of stimulation, another flash of cognitive enhancement peaking through the receding tide of the sedative ocean. Besides this sudden glow, most other effects have fade- there is very little physical dissociation remaining, feeling has for the most part returned to my limbs and extremities. The sense of melting and of sinking proprioception has for the most part faded. This is certainly primarily a cognitive experience at this point. Hyperthermia lingers but is definitely fading out. The night gets darker.

 

T6:00- The last two hours have been the comedown stimulation fluctuating with an overall sense of dazed sobriety. I am absentmindedly playing videogames still, I can’t find much else to do really. I am cozy and content. I smoke some more cannabis but it hardly stirs the dust, beyond making me more curious and more motivated to pursue topics that strike my fancy.

 

T6:30- Almost entirely back to baseline now, the final state of this is a residual neutral stimulation. This happens to keep me awake for a few hours longer than I intended, though I don’t really feel dissociate during this time, just weakly stimulated.

 

T7:30- That has worn off too. I go sleep.

 

Conclusion: I apologize for the flowery extended and perhaps repetitive metaphor for being on the bottom of the ocean, but I really cannot thing of a better way to describe this substance at this dose. So much was reminiscent of the properties of the abyssal zones of the sea, the darkness, the blueness, the vastness, the immense pressure, the sense of currents and flows and swirls, the sense of being pressed and tossed about by immense masses of creeping fluid. The sense of viscous magma glowing and setting and sinking into the dark, casting a warmth and light that beckons me in. It is a cozy, homely substance, like being in a dimly lit house during a thunderstorm. It’s a heavy dissociative, one whose magnitude fluctuates between varying degrees of stimulation and intensity. The headspace is empty and confusing, but also accommodating, cozy and warm, to a degree where one doesn’t really care about the emptiness. It is a cryptic drug, like much of the deep sea- does it have the potential to unlock something deeper? Is there introspective potential? In my mind, it is like being adrift in the pelagic column, begging the vast ocean on all sides of you for answers and insight- I am in its realm, it simply exists here, it is not equipped to answer anything I dare ask of it. It is best to sit back and enjoy the ride, the lovely pleasurable and novel physical sensations.

It loses points for me for how exceedingly difficult administration is. But other that I think it is a worthwhile compound for someone seeking something somewhat novel, though I conjecture there isn’t much deeper to go in it. I would classify this one as immensely fascinating but not particularly enjoyable. Perhaps mixing in some manic dissos will overcome some of the lacking qualities and yield some truly fascinating experiences. Happy dissing!