AL-LAD

Age: 21

Weight: 125 lbs

Dosage: 200 µg sublingual

Setting: Woods, train tracks, around the city, my apartment

T0:00- Dose the tabs while waiting for a bus so I don’t dose too late. Ride the bus out to my favorite tripping spot- a park out near the river.

T0:25- Feeling the onset while on the bus- everything appears light and shimmery. I get off and walk to my destination, each step light and buoyant as the world seems to fry with colors around me.

T0:44- There are now sparkling stationary visuals in the sky, though they are mostly colorless. I am feeling a slight nausea, it’s certainly manageable though. There is a restless stimulation in my limbs- I have to be up and moving. Sitting still is very uncomfortable.

T1:00- I smoke a joint before getting up to run around in the woods. The forest feels like a big playground, with logs and plants to navigate my way through and climb and jump over. I practice my spatial awareness by mapping the tangled network of trails through the forest in my mind, running through them and retracing them to create a detailed map in my head. There is a large Memorial Day BBQ in the park nearby and the heavy bass of the live DJ resonates constantly through the grey air. The leaves and trees and dirt around me are all moving in a way that makes it appear as they are composed of thousands of little crawling creatures. The restless feeling in my body has given way to a pleasurable dry burn, it’s a warm comfort pressing on me from all sides. I feel absolutely great.

            Running around in the woods, I am stricken by an almost tear-jerking sense of nostalgia and longing. It reminds me of my days as a teenager romping around in the woods with my friends, looking for snakes and making campfires. It must be the smell of the Japanese Knotweed and the mud around me and the towering maple trees above and the dappled sunlight as it filters through the leaves and clouds. I am blissful here and the shifting light locks its fingers around the visuals, creating a most harmonious interplay.

T1:20- I am processing everything calmly, critically, neutrally and very rationally, but still with a twinge of emotion. The same longing and nostalgia crawls all over my mind, but I am approaching that raw emotional state quite rationally- what combination of memories and sensory information is making me feel this way? What is this feeling composed of? Why does this sensory input make me feel this way? I find myself carefully turning everything over in my mind, questioning and rationalizing everything I can. Every moment and every thought feels so profound and worthy of consideration, I feel both irradiated and radiant.

            The visuals are still somewhat faint, they pulse and ripple and are quite flashy. It’s as if the entire world is composed of a gently strobing light. They are not particularly prominent or in my face, they are simply decoration on what so far feels like a very cognitive trip. There are no apparent patterns or structures. I generally just feel warm and friendly, I want to socialize even though the experience continues to climb.

T1:45- I am stricken with a sudden sense of adventure and exploration. I don’t want to wander around familiar woods anymore, I want to set out and discover something new, I want to plunge into the unknown. I decide to follow the freight tracks farther than I ever have before. I feel spacy and cautious- as I wander further and further from people and civilization I begin to realize that anything could be lurking out here, there are not witnesses or anything.  Anyone could do anything to me. I am very on edge. I find a nice rock overlooking the tracks and take a break to perch up there. Anyone could sneak up from behind me and crack my skull or slit my throat and I would be out before I even noticed. One could say that I was being a bit paranoid. I pick up a railroad spike for protection.

            The visuals have become much more apparent now. They are foliate patterns, radiating fronds flashing in green and deep violet. They unfurl and join together to form soft reliefs on every surface, carefully sculpted friezes that adorn the earth and sky. They are striped with light and dark gaussian bands that swing rhythmically through their forms, splashing their contours with color. The bricks and rocks making up the railroad bridges and tunnels and walls around me appear to be sculpted and carved with patterns reminiscent of Mesoamerican structures. It is as though I am amidst ancient ruins, long ago conquered by moss and vines, their brilliant visages timidly peek out.

T2:00- After resting for a bit, I venture further and further into the woods. I am tripping pretty hard now, with the trees surrounding the train tracks forming a pulsing, telescoping tunnel that flashes with alternating peristaltic oscillations of light and dark. The trees come off as sentient in this moment, as if they are watching over me, thinking about me, reacting to me. This idea does not seem too far-fetched when they are mirroring one another and rhythmically pulsing like jellyfish. The whole world is repeating itself around me and all I can think about is how completely wiped out I feel in the midst of this. Everything appears faded and foggy.

            The visuals are still not very colorful, rather they are profound alterations of the world around me that seem to follow some esoteric biological guidelines that dictate the nature of their forms. My thoughts begin racing to accommodate this new paradigm and imagine the possibilities contained within a world where everything follows the self-replicating and self-preserving fundamentals of biology. The sense of the world buzzing with such vitality exudes warmth all around me.

            I feel manic and motivated to explore, it’s this desire to plunge in the unknown, peppered with an anxiety for what I may come upon in doing so. I find a cool swamp in the woods but panic and retreat when I hear footsteps in the distance- who may be all the way out here? I venture further down the tracks, coming upon a big rusty overgrown signaling structure spanning the tracks. I climb up upon it. This is extremely nerve-wracking- I am quite afraid of heights and the wet rickety and rusted ladder covered in vines does not come off as safe. I almost make it to the top before I realize that the catwalk is constructed from rotting wood that would surely not support me, dropping me 30 feet to the train tracks and railroad ballast below. Despite the overall warm numbness in my body and the dizzying sense of vitality, I still manage enough coordination to make it up and down the ladder safely. I suppose I can focus my mind and utilize it competently when I really need to.

           

T3:00- After wandering around aimlessly some more I meet up with my friend/roommate who was visiting the zoo nearby. I encounter a strange silent man who is aimlessly wandering around the tracks on the way back to meet him. He makes me nervous but pays me no attention. I meet my friend and I am eager to explore this realm with him, showing him around like a tour guide.  I am flushed with a sense of competence and pride, a rare confidence that is typically elusive in my life. Socializing feels awkward on my part however- I find myself stumbling over my words and forgetting them mid-sentence. It’s as though the part of my brain responsible for word recall and articulation has become fried and scrambled. I don’t really mind though. I’ve been collecting railroad spikes just for the hell of it and at this point my backpack is weighed down by about 40 pounds of rusted iron. Each step I take is labored. I take him out to the swamp and we hang out there and smoke more cannabis. We make conversation, each word presenting as earnest and intimate and deeply significant, though it really was just normal conversation. Smoking more makes the visuals more apparent- There are evident and bold patterns now, geometric designs interspersed with blocky human faces. They are still not very colorful. My mind is racing less now, it mostly feels worn and burnt out. I feel somewhat slower and I am still struggling with words. We eventually leave, and walking back we encounter that same mysterious man wandering aimlessly around the tracks. He disappears into the woods and I find myself muffled and muzzled by a nervous tension. Nothing comes of it though. We have to navigate down a steep rock face to re-enter civilization. I find myself coordinated and capable of descending it with ease, despite the great burden on my back.

T4:00- We walk to the subway station. My backpack clinks with its load and drags each step behind me. Being in public is manageable and I find it quite easy to ignore most strangers. My roommate and I discuss all variety of things, I do not feel the social confidence or burgeoning empathic energy I get while coming down from most psychedelics, and I at times find myself struggling to make conversation or relate.

5:00- We reach the subway station and I entertain myself with visuals dancing in the tiles and filth on the wall. They are the same fronds, angular and blocky leaf patterns, and faces that I was seeing earlier, though they are fainter now and still quite colorless.

           

T6:00- I arrive home and smoke a blunt with my friends. This does not seem to stir the dust much, it merely impairs me. We laze around for hours. I do not have that sort of sharpness of mind that psychedelics usually grant me- rather I am inhibited in my thoughts and speech. I feel mentally slower and incapable of much. I am burnt out and tired, my attempts at humor or being clever fall flat. The rest of the night is just spent lounging and smoking weed, not really doing or accomplishing much. We watched “The Office” for a while, which was utterly strange to me. I am not really one for sitcoms and seeing one in this state was profoundly odd.

T17:00- I fall asleep now without much issue.

Conclusion: AL-LAD has a distinctive lysergamide warmth in the bodyfeel, like a clinging and pressing numbness from all sides that fills my core with euphoria. The headspace was nostalgic, rational, and analytical, showing therapeutic potential in the mindful and logical approach to emotions. The sensory effects were quite marked, though not overwhelming or particularly unique other than a lack of color. The comedown was not like LSD, it was draining and dull and quite understimulating. Overall it’s an enjoyable substance, the differences between it and LSD are subtle but definitely noticeable for me at least.

4-HO-DET

Age: 21

Weight: 130 lbs

Dosage: 30 mg Oral

Setting: My apartment

T0:00- Dosed

T0:15- Onset. I am beginning to shake a good bit. Mentally it feels like a sort of soft psychedelic drowsiness with pangs of some deep primal anxiety.

T0:30- I am lying on my bed and amidst its immaculate comfort, the drowsiness has turned into a full and gentle sedation. I am locked in place and I have little intention of even attempting to move. My mattress is soft and it swallows me whole. I have chills and my eyelids feel heavy. I could fall asleep here. My fingertips feel numb save for a gentle pulsing tapping sensation.  

T1:00- Not really feeling much other than that same sedation and that sort of mental heaviness/heat that comes with psychedelics. No visuals or other noteworthy effects. A nauseous feeling has become much more apparent.

T1:25- I believe I am beginning to peak now. Visuals begin to appear, they are light but apparent. They manifest as somewhat indistinct stationary patterns, soft, organic, and harmonious. There is noticeable music appreciation now. I smoke some cannabis and this fleshes out the visuals further, inundating them with vibrant chroma- everything white is splashed with pulsing concentric stripes of color.

T1:40- I feel unnaturally warm and I am shaking quite a bit. I close my eyes and am greeted by more vague, indistinct shapes zooming towards me. They fly directly into my face, startling and energetic. When I open my eyes, there is a gradual fade back into reality, the room around me slowly generating itself from the void as though it is blossoming forth from a tangle of crawling vines.

With eyes opened, the visuals look like tessellated swarms of multicolored little winged creatures, entwined in an undulating dance on my ceiling, their bold eyespots raining a vibrant gaze down upon me. Their appendages are frilly and feathery, interlocking and overlapping to hold them all together in a harmonious tangle. Cognitively, the drug feels sedating and rather boring, there simply isn’t much to it. None of the rapidfire chains of thoughts or insatiable curiosity or calculating rationality, I am certainly not lucid or sober by any means, it’s just a dulled down mode of thought that almost seems to inhibit me from engaging in any task I may desire.

T2:00- Still drifting aimlessly through the peak of the experience. I feel understimulated and bored. I am laying on my bed doing literally nothing. I try to browse the internet but nothing captures my interest. This experience overall feels mentally and emotionally quite shallow.

This may perhaps be the most sexual drug I’ve taken, and by that I mean that it’s one of the only ones where sexuality does not come off as entirely repulsive during the experience. Rather, it’s quite neutral- by no means an aphrodisiac.

It looks like there are paisley and rosette patterns adorning my skin, gently embossed into it and rippling with pools of color. I can hear my breathing and heartbeat and organs churning quite loudly. 

T2:40- A stronger physical discomfort has set in, a sort of twisting and throbbing pain at random points in my torso. I am trying to lie down but cannot find any position where I feel comfortable.

T3:00- This drug has proven to be quite dull. With many psychedelics, I can find entertainment simply in laying still, closing my eyes and meditating. I would usually find myself traveling through novel mechanisms and chains of thought, exploring colorful depths and worlds of visuals. I would find myself looking at the world in new ways, considering things from a more holistic perspective. Psychedelics usually make it entertaining just to sit there and do nothing. This however, offered no such concession- my idleness was a shadow looming above me, criticizing me for my inaction, for the fact that I dosed myself with something that sedated my mind to the point of impairment, that I wasted an afternoon that I could’ve spent doing something productive. It’s a feeling of psychedelic self-criticism that is marked by a scathing scorching harshness I had not felt since my days of exploring NBOMes in the depths of deep depressions. I am a wastrel, I am wasting precious time and precious energy doing nothing but sitting around on my laptop, not even doing something productive like learning, just sitting there.

I feel like this should motivate me to get up and do things, to make the night more fulfilling, but I simply cannot. I just don’t have the interest or energy to attempt any task. I don’t want to just be lying here, but it’s all I can do.  

T4:00- More time has passed with doing nothing, but that depression, draining, self-critical sense is slowly and gently passing. I am feeling more able to simply exist peacefully. The comedown is a gradual and gentle landing.

T6:30- I am mostly down by now, even when I smoke some more cannabis. I feel burned out after, it’s none of that usual mental stimulation and acuity I feel when coming down from psychedelics. It’s just a sense of overwhelming dullness.

Conclusion: This is perhaps one of the more boring psychedelics I have tasted. The experience does not lend itself to any meaningful thought processes or profound explorations of existence, rather it is a dull neutrality that I simply drifted through, gaining nothing. The sensory effects were colorful and vibrant, but not enough to make the overall experience stimulating. This could perhaps be attributed to a particularly dull set and setting, though many psychedelics manange to make lying on my bed with my eyes closed for long periods of time entertaining and profound. 

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. 

x