This is recounting an unexpected psychotic episode induced by what was ostensibly a recreational and manageable combination of dissociatives. I have no idea why this experience was so intense or what triggered such overwhelming panic, what brought about an encounter with a deeply antagonistic and familiar entity I call “The Presence in the Walls”.
I was at a friend’s house cuddling and
watching horror movies for several hours before this. Perhaps this primed me
for what was to come. I returned home at 1 AM. I had intentions to take a
recreational dose of dissociatives no matter when I got back though this was
later than desired. I wanted something light and visual that wouldn’t drag on
too long. 3-Me-PCP and MXPr both had a relatively short duration, a shallow
headspace, and were sufficiently visual for my tastes. I had previously
combined 10 mg of 3-MeO-PCP with 40 mg of MXPr and found that to be a pleasant,
lucid experience. 3-Me-PCP is quite similar to 3-MeO-PCP in potency and effects
so I figured 10 mg of 3-Me-PCP combined with 40 mg of MXPr would give me what I
wanted. I combined the chemicals into one mixed line and snorted it down in one
go, recoiling from the bitterness and sting of it.
The onset was immediate, which struck me as
odd. Instantly I was dizzy, colors brightened, languid textures formed on the
walls. Such a rapid onset for me is usually the herald of something
unexpectedly mighty. I made my way upstairs to hang out with my partner. For a
time, I was jubilant, talkative, stimulated and full of energy and euphoria.
They had just woken from a nap, there was a vast gulf between our energy
levels.
I expected to wait for a nice low plateau and
go play videogames by myself. This never came. The intensity grew and grew,
heavier and heavier, higher and higher. I shrugged it off at first, tried to
laugh about it, “oops!”, but soon it grew beyond my feigned smile. Higher and
higher. Greater and greater. Worry takes hold. Everything is growing louder,
building to an impossible cacophony, a neverending crescendo. The room is quiet
and still, there are only the usual ambient noises- the air conditioning, city
noises of traffic and helicopters, the wind outside. The sounds clamor to reach
my ears, with growing urgency and desperation, pounding louder and louder, my
heart pounding louder and louder. What lay at this peak?- the terror of not
knowing.
Then it came in, the terror only grew- the
familiar sound, a quiet hissing, phasing and warping in the shudders of the
drugs that gripped my nerves, growing louder and louder. It’s here.
It was like a rock was dropped onto a glass
pane. It all shattered, suddenly and terribly. The crescendo seemed to peak
into infinity, a threshold passed as the world around me shivered and
collapsed. My vision flashed and pulsed, the light plain and dead. There was
that familiar malaise, that familiar madness and terror. Surely my partner
could feel the walls tremble under this power, surely they could feel the
consequences of me embalming our shared reality so terribly. I turned to them,
my eyes sunken, my voice wavering with terror- “Do you feel that? What’s
happening?”. They were feeling nothing. They said I was shaking, my heart
pounding, sweating and panicking. My teeth began to chatter as chills ran
through my body. It was here, it has arrived.
The room is white like sunbleached bones as
The Presence in the Walls creeps up my spine, takes my skull and the brain
contained within in its shadow of a hand, clutching my nerves like one grabs a
bundle of vines to tear them out of the way. In past nightmares it has taken me
in its maw, dragging me along like the tossing and turning of a bony corpse being
dragged behind a car. Sometimes I could simply will it away. I could force it
from its perch by changing my setting or inducing a sudden strong sensory
effect. It was a runaway chain reaction, if snipped in the bud it would retreat
back into the shadows of unknowing.
It is full of lust and hunger and a wild-eyed
devotion to weaving tunnels of delusion into the minds of the vulnerable. If
given the opportunity it will grow and increasingly take hold like creepers
strangling out a forgotten stretch of woods. Vulnerable I was- so dissociated I
could barely stand or form a sentence. I could not form the words to beg for
help, reassurance, something to break the swirling entrapment of the loops my
mind was swimming in. I was fully ensnared this time.
I have unfortunately crossed paths with the
Presence in the Walls on other occasions, like here, here, and here, though it
is not labeled as such in those times. I only recently began to pattern
together why the occasional sense of dread and terror that overtakes me on
drugs was so familiar. It is invisible, only perceived by the senses as a quiet
and ominous rushing noise, a flashing or the vision, and most of all, a cold
sense of dread, a creeping malaise and overwhelming fear. It feeds on my
consciousness, it revels in inducing madness and rotting my perceptions. It
does not form or intend or attack- its mere existence or nonexistence itself is
an assault on our idea of reality and existence. I loathe it and fear it and I
am nothing but another bit of preterconscious plankton for it to gobble in its
vast reaches of madness, I am unnoticed as it drags me in the maelstrom aura of
psychosis that always cloaks its passage. It is the end of the world, of my
world at least. I could beg for something other than shivering indifference.
Like gunshots, shrapnel flying from its
being, the delusions begin to pack in and bleed all over my brain, mixing and
swirling into fantastic new concoctions of panic and terror. Some of these
delusions bear names in the sober world, playful names drawn from pop culture-
the Matrix Delusion, the Truman Show Delusion, common, even unoriginal
experiences in shaken minds. But there it was- the feeling of a thousand, a
million, a trillion eyes watching me from behind the sky, waiting on bated
sinister breaths for what I would do next. There were those that moved in the
shadows, frantically working to prop up the room around me, the walls stage
flats that would collapse at any moment with a stiff breeze. There were those
lurking behind them, sensing something is amiss with their illusion, that
something had learned a secret it shouldn’t have. They are poised and ready to
exact punishment on me for defying their construct, an infinite punishment
beyond the boundaries of everything I have ever known. They would play within
the confines of our reality, initially execute my sentence by means of worldly
things, of faceless SWAT teams bursting through the door to drag me into the
night, of suddenly finding myself entirely alone in the entire world, of being
swept away into a hospital where nothing would look me in the eye as I was
forcibly restrained. But then their illusions would collapse, the jailers and
doctors and the all-consuming solipsistic solitude would give way to deeper
more terrible things, faceless things that would have me die a million deaths
in panicked heart attacks just on the wind of their silent breath. They were
waiting. It was over. This was it, this was the big one where everything came
to an end. My story was over, I was certain of it. The world wouldn’t even know
I had left, it hadn’t even been there in the first place. I felt so cold and so
deeply alone. I was silent and confused in terror, a prisoner of powers I could
not comprehend, I could not even convey anything but a dull confusion to the
person next to me.
It was all terribly wrong. I just wanted out.
I was thankfully beyond the concept of death, death seemed little release from
this that went beyond life and death, these forces that were here before I was
aware of the world and would always be there after. I dared not to do anything
rash just to shock myself out of it, I couldn’t even control my body well
enough to do anything anyway. I was paralyzed and silenced, as though a great
cosmic wasp has stung me to feed to its larvae, who would burrow into my brain
and slowly and painfully devour me from within.
What killed me was truly the finality of it, this
time it really truly felt permanent, I had unlocked some terrible secret of the
universe and my brain was being punished for it. There was no coming back from
this, I was certain. I don’t know how much time had passed in silent terror
before I could finally choke out anything coherent beyond vague complaints of
malaise-
“Pyrazolam!”
In retrospect that wouldn’t have been my
choice of benzo to abort this experience. Something heavier would’ve snuffed
the panic out better and stilled my racing heart. I could dwell in a blacked-out
haze where I would be safe from the prying eyes of intrusive thoughts. Etizolam
or Clonazepam perhaps. But I had already decided before I took anything that I
was gonna take Pyrazolam on what I expected to be the tail end of a nice
experience. I suppose it was still on my mind.
My partner obliged and fetched my stash of
substances for me. None of the pre-dosed pills were labelled. The tiny 2 mg Pyrazolam
pellets were well familiar to me though and even in my inconsolable state I was
able to fish out 2 and dose them sublingually. I could hardly stand, and if I
did it was a constant struggle to stay upright. I felt as tall as the room, or it
had shrunk to half its regular height. My steps felt like placing a crater in
the floor that left me dizzy, feeling like I had been turned in a new direction
after each footfall. This was absurd to me. MXPr and 3-Me-PCP are both light and
fairly lucid chemicals, both of them lacking intense physical dissociation.
That I could barely control my body after combining perfectly modest doses of
each of them was inconceivable. The confusion of this fact contributed deeper
to an overall sense of confusion that certainly fed the fear and panic that had
overtaken me. It felt like I had been targeted, hunted, chosen to suffer this,
well beyond the expectations of any drug, it just wasn’t my day.
I don’t remember much of the rest of the
night. My partner caught on to my distress and put on a gentle and calming nature documentary, some fresh stimulus to distract me. It was a very sweet thing to do. I don’t remember saying or doing anything. I remember taking a 1 mg Flualprazolam
pellet at some point which buried me in a deep sleep.
I woke up fine the next morning, a bit confused
and anxious, trying to piece together and make sense of what had happened to
me. I spent the rest of the day in a haze. A bunch of people came to our house,
I took Etizolam to keep myself calm. People unexpectedly stayed overnight and
through the next day. I was too burnt out to socialize, I avoided people and
binged Clonazolam and 3-MeO-PCP all day long. It wasn’t until later in the
night after everyone had left and I was alone again with my partner and some
Clonazepam and food in my belly that I felt like myself again. The fire and
life had returned to my paled countenance, the sense of grief and anxious dread
had finally cleared, the sun shone through. I learned nothing, I continued to
subject my raw and naked mind to yet more alteration, yet more unreality. It’s
a blessing that any sense of well-being returned.
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