DMT (Changa)

Age: 24

Weight: 125 lbs

Dosage: 1 bowl, smoked

Setting: My house

Preface: I tried DMT several times, though none of the experiences were particularly noteworthy. Just a mild psychedelia, visuals begin to creep in, it builds like a plane ready for takeoff, just for a minute, then- the engines sputter, it brakes on the runway and rolls to a stop, everything’s faded back to baseline. I mostly attribute this to user error in consumption/a baseline tolerance. I’ve tried it sandwiched in bowls of cannabis, in lightbulb vaporizers, digital vaporizers, dab rigs, a homemade “machine”, all of which yielded subpar results. Well I had come across Changa (DMT infused MAOI-containing plant matter (Typically B. caapi but can be others) which can be smoked from a bowl with regular smoking technique, fairly idiot-proof.

            The setting was sitting on my bed in total darkness and silence, save for ambient city noise. I did not keep rigorous timestamps for this experience. It followed a narrative with a fairly uniform intensity throughout.

            When I was ready, I lit the bowl- the plant material smoldered but was quickly smothered by the DMT, bubbling and sizzling as it melted. I held each hit in for 10-30 seconds, but the smoke was harsh and it was difficult not to cough it out. First hit, felt nothing, second hit, felt nothing, third hit (a big one), I began to feel a little different, flashes in the darkness beyond my usual HPPD, a sense of lightheadedness and unease, the tension, the energy, it all built up. There was now a little nest built, a crystalline cherry encrusted with embers of plant material. Each hit felt like it was making my body lighter, a stimulating shot of helium through my veins, I perked up as it crept up on me, my extremities tingling with excitement. It felt like rain falling on my face, taking me apart bit by bit. The bowl was finished and the ambient sounds around me had coalesced to a flanging buzzing, steadily increasing in pitch and frequency. I lied down on the bed as the visuals coalesced into a great radiant form, pulsing with concentric striations. I closed my eyes and prepared for what was to come.

            There was no plunge, not so much of a rush as a gentle stream, continuing at a consistent intensity for what I would gauge was about 3 or 4 minutes. I began to worry again that it would not be enough, that I was undershooting again, I was wishing that I had more substance to undisputedly push me over the edge. Fiending and fiending, it will never die. I had been gently passing through a tunnel, ringed by tessellated rhombic forms, all flowing and pulsing with stripes. The visuals were nonetheless dim and indistinct, their details muddled in darkness.

            I began to worry that my worry about not achieving an intense experience would interfere with me truly surrendering to the experience- what a contradiction! I must live in the moment, I must surrender to it, I am not trying to take it, it is trying to take me.

As my mind wandered, the stripes radiated faster, my heart pounded faster, my extremities crept numb. It felt like my veins were pulsing and throbbing, twitching under my skin, especially in my skull. The rushes of blood in my temples were pelting my neurons with shockwaves. My muscles tensed and I felt as though I was vibrating too fast to be contained in my body. As the stimulation and numbness build, I get a distinct sense of disintegrating, my body starting to vibrate away bit by bit.

            The radiating forms became more distinct, larger, pointier, faster, more aggressive, the colors becoming more vibrant, the energy seizing through this, more and more of myself being sheared apart by this grand acceleration-

            My room began to shrink around me, a strange 2-dimensional abstraction uselessly and annoying floating in my field of vision. I felt like I could see it with my eyes closed.

            And then- this divine wind, so furiously taking apart everything, began to dismantle my head. It felt like the back of it had exploded into the wall behind me, which suddenly gave way to a great inky blue void, an abyssal cavity dotted with multicolored constellations. My brain was a tornado spinning deeper and deeper into the abyss, all I could do was lie there and feel the pieces orbit in a great tunnel before coming apart and disintegrating into the void.

I feel like I could see my room from every possible angle at once as it shrunk down to a little island floating in space, meaningless and frail, just like me, shrinking away and leaving oozing tracers behind it as it faded.

            My consciousness, freed from my skull, drifted into the space along with all the rubble of the rest of my mind, asteroids orbiting a mysterious light in the distance that I was slowly being drawn to.

            Upon my arrival I was greeted with a complex of floating orbiting islands, all of them overlaid with shiny chrome and gold. Temples with gleaming coiled columns, sweeping marbled surfaces, and swift dances of light across their graces. Silver gildings dripped from their interstices like honey from a beehive. Their garden was overcome with sprites of phasing whistling and whooping noises, contorting themselves into my ears, constructed from the ambient sounds around me

            My field of ‘vision’ is suddenly taken again by radiating forms choking in from the edges, ringed with a white aura. The visuals turn into great 3-dimensional polygons like snowflakes crusted in pyramids, great and green and reminiscent of goat heads- Suddenly a flash.

            A large glyph appears right in the center of my vision, remaining dead center no matter where my eyes track, it is roughly in the shape of Polynesian tribal designs with sweeping tangled forms and sharp edges. Four chains of smaller similar patterns extend outwards in the four cardinal directions. It is stark plain white but is ringed in a colorful aura that is always changing shades. It is constantly self-transforming. It is surrounded by pixelated images of sky and clouds.

            There is a sudden sense of presence. The glyph is flashing and transforming directly in response to my sentience, signaling, flaring, transmitting- it is not language or speech, it is thoughts and essences planted directly into my head accompanied by a persistent sense of scratching and warbling. Voices spoken from broken entanglements. It greeted me, let me know through cryptic terms that it would be my liaison in this realm. It planted thoughts to that essence.

            I still felt like I was zooming through a tunnel, my head disintegrating behind me. The sense of motion was persistent.  Beautiful images blossomed as I sunk deeper and deeper into a glassy still pool with flower petals floating upon it, radiant red crystals and flourishing fronds tipped with iridescent dewdrops, rushing through the glory of this glowing garden, my thoughts were chaining freely into one another, touched by flower buds, dancing gracefully like a figure skater. For my sake the glyph generated an image of a beautiful forest painted in brush strokes with a frozen pond where my thoughts could wander and glide and gracefully dance with one another, entirely uninhibited.

            Then, unexpectedly, it offered me the ability to generate images- to hand me the controls for a second. This was a shock, we had hardly met. In hallucinatory explorations, I have always held controlled image generation as a lofty goal, and perhaps it read my thoughts, but I was stunned and honored to receive the offer any way. I meditated to try and clear my mind, brush all the forms and colors out of the way, until eventually I had a blank black canvas.

            I tried to think of a coherent image, but I couldn't, I didn’t even know where to begin to what to make, this was all so exciting. My sight lines generated showers of sparks and bursts of color everywhere they landed. This all feels like a dream, I wonder if I’ll remember it, I’m having trouble piecing together a coherent form.

This all feels like a dream.

Will I remember any of this?

            I suddenly snap back, I am not in the same place. It appears I’ve become distracted, that I’ve exited out of this generational program. I felt so honored to have been given the reins but it appears I have failed. The glyph matter-of-factly transmits to me that I failed because I got distracted. That I have to focus, while surrendering myself to the experience. It leaves me alone to ruminate more.

            I begin to think of the report I want to write about this and realized I am becoming concerned with remembering and recording this experience, to the point where it’s interfering with the present live experience itself. I feel like I am trying to watch more memories while my arms are already completely full of memories. I envision myself inside a palace, armfuls of stones, trying to pick up another. It felt like trying to catch a waterfall with a butterfly net. A brief admonition: “Just surrender yourself, keep moving”.
And so I do- I feel what’s left of my physical body dissolve and come apart bit by bit, I surrender my head to the soundwaves generated by nothing and everything, they chew me apart, sparks and light are shooting off into infinity.

            I begin to wonder about the glyph appearing to me so vividly, and in my deep thinking about it, it appears. I begin to wonder, are we friends? Are we on speaking terms? Or does it feel like I summoned it? It seems to be asking me why it is there, impatient, irritated. I indeed appear to have summoned it, but I have nothing to talk to or present to it, I made it come out here to gawk at it.

I sheepishly transmit the confession that I merely wished to witness it.

It seemed incensed at this frivolity.

            The background turned a swirling flow of red and orange, the glyph turned to metal and rapidly exploded a series of arms outwards into an disc bearing down on me, composed of angular spiral arms in thorns, the shape reminiscent of a sonnenrad. White glowing teeth appeared at its epicenter, bearing the full terror of their form and gums at me. I felt spinning wheels of spikes trace across my existence, cutting up everything raging and flashing.

I seem to have angered it.

            But it felt unreal, it didn't feel true, it felt like a façade. I transmitted to it that it SEEMED angry but didn't FEEL angry. Suddenly, its fury died, its energy faded. It admitted that it had just been messing with me, testing me? Did I display some sort of special sensitivity? It quickly bristled with spines again to humble me before dismissing itself. Here was floating alone again in a void, confused, manipulated, a forest of pillars covered in glyphs, with grand radiant canopies stretched between them.

            This was a gentle place, serene like water dripping in a sunbeam in an abandoned building. It was a garden, graced with fountains and ivy climbing over the pillars, with flowers in bloom everywhere I looked. Memories cascaded like snow or pollen, coming to rest gently on and around me- memories of places I had grown up in, of my first psychedelic experiences as a teenager, of my childhood home, they all came back in stunning, pure nostalgia, like revisiting the places on a warm summer night. All of these places and memories were uninhabited, with placeholder phantoms standing in the place of the people who were otherwise present in those memories like wispy psychedelic mannequins. I began to experience a deep sentimentality, I began to think of my family, my parents, of being raised as a child.

            I was stricken with worry about their fate amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. I began to project how I would feel if they were to pass from it, to empathize with that potential future trauma.

            But I also quickly reminded myself that that wasn't real, that I can't predict the future, that there is no use to needlessly worry and feel afraid, and so I returned to the experience.

            By now it had begun to feel like a movie, where even if I like it I still kinda wanted it to end soon. I felt that I had overstayed perhaps? Where had my liaison run off to? I was adrift, sitting in the backyard of the party while the lights and music muttered nearby. I opened my eyes, my room had a dense cloud of smoke hanging in it, tracing out beams of light from the windows. This does nothing to lessen the intensity, the distinct sense of rush and motion in my veins and nerves. There are a lot of triangles and spiky forms running across my vision leaving tracers like a glitching computer. I lie back and let out a long sigh. It feels like a cold breeze is gently blowing across my face, I feel like I am in the dappled light of a forest floor and like I am surrounded by a muted and luxuriously soft grass.

            I look at the time- it is now about 30 minutes from when I began smoking. I put on music, it musters up a bit of synesthesia, playing out in residual colors, tracers, streams of neon polygons. I get up to open my window to let out the thick smoke and turn my lights back on. The glyph never even stopped in to say goodbye.

            The next two hours of so in the night were an excited stimulation, I still felt energy pouring into my limbs and light visuals still danced in the corner of my eye. I felt blissful to come back into my comfortable room, to have had such an exhilarating experience.

The night faded into the same as any other night, the chemical receded from my neurons,

I missed it dearly, and I hope to visit again soon, there is still much that I need to learn.

3-FPM

Age: 24

Weight: 125 lbs

Dosage:

T0:00- 25 mg 3FPM intranasal

T1:30- 40 mg 3FPM Oral

T9:30- 30 mg Oral

T11:30- 15 mg intranasal

Setting: My house

Preface- Just another day in quarantine, I spent the day watching movies with a sick 14 day free trial for criterion and smoking weed. Nothing worth describing. I had been awake since 1 PM. I stayed up late watching Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. I drank an energy drink and ate an edible beforehand, at around 1:30 AM, thinking it would hit at some point during the movie. The movie had finished and I still hadn’t felt it much, I figured my tolerance had just gotten higher. Around 5:30 AM I decided to go to bed. Unfortunately, and for some strange reason, the edible did not show its face until now. I was extremely stoned to the point where it felt like I had ingested psychedelics. My mind was racing and light visuals traced themselves out in the darkness of my predawn room. I tried to lay there and force myself to sleep, a bit irritated that my friend, weed, had been so late to its appointment. After about an hour of tossing and turning, as the sun rose, I realized sleep was futile. I didn’t want to sleep through the entire day though, so I decided just to power through and keep myself awake on 3-FPM until a reasonable bedtime the next day. I decide I will take my first dose when I actually start to feel tired. This ends up being around 10:30 AM.

T0:00- Cut out a 25 mg line and snort it. It stings quite a bit initially, not as bad as the intense explosive all-consuming pain of snorting a 2C-x but definitely enough to make me recoil and gather myself as a tear streams from my eye. The feeling passed entirely after about 3 minutes though and there was no lingering discomfort beyond the normal bitter drip.

T0:15- I was starting to get a bit drowsy but I’ve definitely woken up now. There is little presence of the drug beyond a sense of alertness and my fatigue clearing away like clouds before a blast of sunlight. I decide to play some Total War.

T0:20- The baseline alertness has been replaced with certain stimulation, its subtle but definitely there and highly functional. There is no tweakiness, no overstimulation or racing thoughts, there is none of the obsessiveness and compulsion that can arise with other stimulants, I feel warm and almost an elevated degree of sober. There is just the slightest noticeable increase in heart rate. I am engaged with the task at hand and having a lot of fun with it.

T1:15- Already feeling drowsy and exhausted again. This drug when snorted feels like a less euphoric coke with less rush. I decide I’m going to drop an oral dose on top, which usually lasts me much longer.

T1:30- After lazing around for a bit I weigh out a dose and dump the powder directly down my throat. It mostly bypasses my tongue but I still get a bit of bitterness. However it’s a slightly sweet bitterness that doesn’t make me gag and retch like the absolutely toxic flavor of many other chemicals. I would say its akin to an extremely bitter artificial sweetener. I lie down for a bit knowing that even if I doze off a little the chemical will jerk me awake.

T2:00- I am slightly more alert again, though physically I feel very tired and lying down feels very nice. I no longer feel like I am on the threshold of falling back asleep. I decide to watch Dr. Strangelove.

T2:40- It’s a good movie, funny and a bonified classic. When it began I felt like I had to be lying down on my soft bed but a sense of stimulation has slowly crept back in, building and building. I am now sitting upright, I have surpassed merely being alert and am definitely stimulated now. I am fidgeting a lot.

T4:00- The movie has ended, I can feel my heart racing in my chest and my breathing feels shallower. I feel a compulsion to move around a lot. It feels though that this is mostly physical stimulation, mentally I am mostly just very awake, the kind of long awakeness where my eyes feel shadowy and hollow as I gaze into things while unable to rest. I have no appetite even though I need to eat- I haven’t eaten anything since my dinner last night and I’ve been continuously awake since then. but I smoke a bit of cannabis and enough appetite sneaks in for me to eat some leftover noodles, though the pleasure of eating and the otherwise good tasting food fall on a deaf tongue. Eating good food brings me no joy, it just feels like a necessary task.

T6:00- I have mostly just been reading stuff on social media and talking to people and watching videos of competitive Super Smash Bros. Melee. I find myself being extremely verbose in my contact with others, writing out long detailed responses to everything. It feels like it takes 0 effort. I also try to finish another trip report, though I find this writing to be tedious and difficult. Time passes quickly, I hardly notice it leave.

T9:00- I have been playing Dynasty Warriors 3 for the last few hours, obsessively working on my task of getting 100% of the items in the game. I didn’t really feel exhausted or bored, I felt like I could’ve kept up the rather tedious task indefinitely even though it wasn’t particularly exciting. This reminds me of when I used to take 3-FPM before work (Usually 40-50 mg oral), and I could just whittle away at menial tasks without losing focus or energy for hours and hours. Despite the enhancement of mindless tasks, I have found it doesn’t do much to improve cognitive ability, intake, memory, or focus tasks without some tangible output and was ineffectual as a study drug. After hours of that however, I can feel the drug start to wear off and I begin to feel tired again. I decide to redose. I’m trying to decide whether or not I want to watch a movie.

T9:30- I take another 30 mg, oral again, dumped straight down my throat. I don’t really feel like the sleep deprivation has gotten to me yet. I’ve developed a headache, for which I take acetaminophen.

T11:00- I end up wasting more time watching more competitive smash. I feel that fresh sense of alertness again, though my body is slowly getting more and more exhausted and my mind begins to sizzle away into a stimulated daze, just energy but nowhere for it to go and no way for it to be used. The rest of the mechanisms in there have separated from the energy and it just sputters useless now as my mind fades to blank. I have been awake for about 30 hours now.

T11:30- I decide to cut myself one last booster dose of 15 mg to insufflate, just for fun. At this dose it really does feel like a calmer cocaine, without any of the desire to redose. I wasn’t getting tired yet but this definitely perks me up a little more.

T13:30- I decide I am going to finish reading the Manga Berserk- I had read up to all that had been produced in 2013 and hadn’t read any of what had come out since then. Berserk is one of my favorite pieces of media of any kind and I am excited to get back into it. I also decide to feed myself again, this time aided with a hit of cannabis from my gravity bong. The weed feels almost hallucinogenic as it pairs with the stimulation to draw out currents of iridescent visual snow, barely perceptible flashes of motion at the edges of my vision, flashing overlays on my field of vision. I eat more and it feels and tastes better this time but it still takes me a while to finish.

T16:30- I am going to get ready for bed. I don’t feel particularly exhausted however. I take 2 back to back gravity bong hits of weed and turn my lights off.

T16:40- I am now on 34 hours without sleep, and perhaps that has made things a little weird. As I browse my computer, I start to notice more aggressive visuals. The cursor on my computer jumps and twitches as I use it, flickering like it’s being hit with blasts of static. The visual snow becomes a whiteout, cascading down in curtains and disintegrating everything it passes in a mess of muted colors. There are waves and ripples of color travelling through my computer screen, and a vivid flashing image of twisting metal coils is overlaid over my entire field of vision for brief spates. There are lights in the dark spaces in my room, muted globs conforming to the vague shapes of objects in the darkness. Dark shadows and silhouettes in my window begin to shake and breathe and twitch, I almost expect them to start growing limbs and freely moving about. My heart is racing noticeably, but I otherwise just feel physically tired. The light from my computer screen crackles and flickers like a flame, and the ambient light coming through my window shifts in color and brightness, the shadows cast by it stretching and bending on their own. When I shut my computer and become completely immersed in darkness it is as though wires have been stretched across my vision and someone is plucking them.

T17:20- I have been aimlessly reading things on the internet, so much is so interesting right now. I fall into all sorts of holes of reading about various topics. As I type my keys seem to flee from my fingers, scuttering off like roaches in light, only to snap back into place. Damn I’m high.

T18:30- I realize that I am up at 5 AM again, fully alert and wide awake. I realize this is how I started, by staying up too late and figuring it wasn’t worth it to try to sleep. I decide it would probably be best to get some sleep so I dose ~2 mg of Flualprazolam sublingually from a propylene glycol solution, my usual unstoppable hypnotic. This has me asleep in about 20 minutes. I wake up feeling normal the next day, in the early afternoon.

Conclusion: I am not sure how I managed to achieve such powerful visuals at the tail end of this drawn out experience. I would guess it was a combination of my persistent HPPD, a fairly acute dose of cannabis, compounded effect from the stimulants, and lack of sleep. It was interesting to bring about, though it was kind of annoying to be stricken with that so late at night. I need to stop doing that. 3FPM is a delightful functional stimulant, I would consider it to be a more euphoric and giddy and sociable caffeine, generally subtle but definitely makes its presence known. I can imagine it could be a fun party drug if you did a bunch of bumps of it. Intranasal doses seem to lass for significantly less time than equivalent oral doses. In past experiences, the comedown from oral doses had me feeling fairly cranky and irritable, while the comedown from intranasal doses was very suddenly exhausting and usually just put me right to sleep.

4-HO-MALT

Age: 24

Weight: 125 lbs

Dosage: 40 mg oral in gel cap

Setting: Around the city, my house

T0:00- Dose taken while riding the subway. I ride it along the outdoor elevated portion towards its northern terminus. It’s a nice day out so I decide I will walk along the length of the elevated portion back to my house.

T0:30- The first notes of the experience start to bubble up- a bit of anxiety and light visuals. Interestingly enough there is no bodyload, which is usually the first note of any psychedelic experience for me. The opening salvo is always a pang of nausea and a visceral shock to my nerves, but that is noticeably absent.

T1:20- I’ve been walking for some time now. The whole street has a festive atmosphere with people blaring music out of amplifiers on the sidewalks and hanging out in the street in throngs, though this is a festival stricken by a severe opioid crisis and many of the people were seeking, dispensing, or administering their various highs. Police in mobile guard stands stood watch over the open market only to interfere if violence broke out. People twisted and faded in and out around me, circling into my sphere of existence as their voices flung and danced around me, shouts and mutters, some of them smoky and scraped and scarred, others booming and melodious. The sun is shining and beating down and people appear to be in good spirits, the energy coalescing into discrete blocks that drift around me as I walk. No one pays me any attention which is good because I do not know how well I would be able to interact with anyone right now. I feel strange and anxious and sweaty, but I don’t feel the anxiety in my gut. There is still no nausea or bodyload to note, the trip is well contained within my central nervous system. I feel giddy and jubilant like I am sailing with a strong headwind. Energy wells up inside of me, it’s a nice loose stimulation though and doesn’t bear the wound up tension that many other drugs can bring. Auditory effects are negligible beyond a more acute awareness of the space and direction of sounds, and an amplified sort of doppler effect as I move path stationary noises.

The visuals have set in more and more, they are mostly transparent overlays on everything else and are reminiscent of Mesoamerican glyphs, with intricate and well defined tangled forms, sinuous like serpents, with fronds and feathers blossoming at their apices. They carry a greenish tint but fade fairly easily into the environment.

T1:52- Bathed in smooth sparkling sunlight, the trip is drenched with euphoria and optimism. I feel like I can only think about happy things, that even the grim things I can think about are still touched with happiness and pleasantry. It feels like it’s a façade, it feels like happiness misplaced, naïve and wrong, though not as intensely or artificially as with empathogens. It is still the deep, profound euphoria that comes from psychedelics, but it feels odd and out of place. I don’t get that sense of wanting to proclaim my newfound pleasure or revel in it, rather is sits there matter of fact, like a bird watching me from a tree. Also odd and out of place is the continuing lack of nausea or any kind of bodyload. The streets become less crowded the further I walk and find myself becoming more absorbed in gazing at things, textured surfaces, the sky, tree branches, etc.

The visuals dance around as bas-reliefs on mottled surfaces, still reminiscent of flowers and serpents. My thoughts are racing, tearing their way through my baseline of apprehension and turning themselves towards the sun so they can bask in its light. It’s such a beautiful day and it feels as though there will be a beautiful tomorrow too.

T2:00- I have ended up walking around the older part of the city. I walked by the base of the great suspension bridge that spans the major river into another state. The piers are titans of stone blocks each as large as my bedroom, seeing this monument cast stark against the blue sky feels surreal, it feels like a vision or a shot of a movie. There is a subtle derealization carried with the sublime sense of aesthetics. Patterns weave their way out of the stone and drizzle from the sky, still writhing and entangling, still immaculately textured. I still feel elated, not overclocked with a stimulating euphoria, rather it is a peaceful sense of being exactly where I belong, of basking in the beauty of so much around me.

T2:17- The sun is setting now and its dyeing the sky with streaks of brilliant magenta. Ripples creep and crawl through the sky and dissolve into forms that twist into the lids of a thousand eyes, though it is barely perceptible. I am stopping to take a breather next to a park, I’m pleasantly sweaty and my body feels excellent from the light exercise. There is still miraculously little to no physical discomfort to report. Thoughts are stimulated but gentle. I set out for home. All of the buildings look particularly stark and powerful against the backdrop of the sky.

T3:00- I am back at my house now. I am alone in my room, smoking more weed. It causes the experience to bubble up a bit, though at this point I am mostly just riding on the afterglow. What remains of the trip is slight like dust bunnies in the corner. It is bereft of color and dancing light. I still feel chipper and energetic.

T5:00- Mostly back to baseline by this point.

T6:00- Definitely back to baseline.

Conclusion: 4-HO-MALT is one of the few psychedelics where my body does not react like I have been poisoned with something. None of the pangs of nausea or tension of visceral anxiety, none of that twisting discomfort that always rocks the comeups of my trips. I didn’t think it was possible. Otherwise this trip is pleasant, bubbly, and optimistic in the way a child is on a sunny day. Mostly in the realm of the cognitive, with the visuals being slight and lacking in vibrant colors, with a fairly generic tryptamine overlay of the flowing blossoming organic crossed with the sharp lines of the synthetic. It is a short sweet and light experience that might be a candidate for a good easy starter psychedelic for the curious but uninitiated. Not necessarily shallow, but also not with enough depth to cause panic or resounding problems. I would definitely be interested in exploring higher doses of this substance to see whether the manageable pleasantry of this substance eventually caps off and disintegrates.