The PCP Trilogy 1: Baseline

This first report is taken at baseline. I wanted to experience this purely and deeply as it was in a controlled setting. I am alone in my house, in my study- it is a room filled with bones, vials of insects, Warhammer miniatures, a microscope, dozens of specimens in jars, on the walls- bones and insects and feathers and posters and postcards and images and much of my art and my friends’ art covering every inch of wall. Sentimental trinkets and souvenirs litter every surface. Shelves of books, a couch, a huge CRT TV with old game consoles, and a grand mural I painted on one wall. There are dim lights, incense is lit, it is cozy and comfortable and familiar. I have no obligations tomorrow or for the rest of the night. I am generally in a good mood, I am experiencing baseline hypomania already.

 

NOTE: THE DOSES I TAKE ARE EXTREMELY HIGH FOR ANYONE. I HAVE A HIGH TOLERANCE TO DISSOCIATIVES, NECESSITATING I TAKE SUCH HIGH DOSES. AN EXPERIENCE LIKE THIS WOULD BE FOUND AT AROUND 10-12 MG FOR THE AVERAGE PERSON. DO NOT TAKE THE DOSES I TAKE IN THESE REPORTS.

 

Age: 30

Weight: 130 lbs

Dosage: 29 mg intranasal

Setting: My study

 

T0:00- Crush up cubic crystals of PCP HCl into a fine powder. The dose is taken intranasally, slight sting. I am feeling the beginnings of a cold, a slight malaise in my sinuses that would pervade this experience.

 

T0:10- First notes, a bit of numbness in my extremities, a bit of stimulation. A bit of tightness and lightness in my head. Listening to STOMACH BOOK to get hyped up. It is frenetic noisy transgender hyperpop-ish, genre bending and chaotic and theatrical. It fills me with chaotic colorful energy.

 

T0:20- There is suddenly an intense rush, like blowing into the genesis of a campfire. My head is swirling, effects are accelerating quickly. The mania is starting to trickle in. It’s a glow, a sense of possibility. I need to make sure to keep a level head and steer this ship through mania’s rocky straits.

 

T0:30- Developing quickly. I feel light overall. It is like there are tubes rushing and surging into the base of my skull and crashing into the backs of my eyes. Wires and pipes to pump me full of manic energy. The current infrastructure isn’t sufficient for this workload, we must construct more; They rush in, turning at right angles, plugging in exactly where they need to, like an Akira backdrop. It is a monumental time in history. I am scrolling social media and taking in information, I am doing it really fast, it feels like it is all going straight into my eyes, straight into this newfound infrastructure of pipes and wires; This is exciting, I feel like I can process faster, I feel like I can absorb information faster.

 

T0:40- Head is getting lighter, heart is getting faster! I have to pee. My extremities are mostly numb. I don’t feel too much loss of equilibrium. I am a little bit anxious. Why? I’ve used this compound several dozen times at this point in my life. It’s all familiar. I am at a critical and fragile moment in my life though, and perhaps I fear that this will disrupt that delicate place. The anxiety makes me a little nauseous.

It feels like I am swimming while sitting still, like there is water rippling around me, tickling my skin. I feel like I am buzzing. There are flashes of visuals on the walls, straight chains of hexagons and diamonds, flashing in blue and hot red and magenta. Waving and undulating like strings of kelp.

 

T1:00- I am antsy, I can’t sit still, I get up and start pacing the house. I am focused, I am clearminded, I am declarative and decisive and the world is a big place that I can ferociously devour like a starved hound, I feel like my mind is a powerful weapon that will liberate the world, I feel like I am floating a bit off the ground when I move around, I am an electric ghost. I suppose you could really call this mania. An extreme embrace of the ego in an ironically dissociated state, it feels like stepping outside of myself and being my biggest fan. It is fierce arrogance, the kind that drives people to the most offputting or horrifying behaviors because it just feels oh so right in that moment. It feels good. Of course I would want to chase this forever.

My muscles are tense but my extremities feel numb and floaty, like there is electricity tingling at my fingertips. I am a little off balance now, but I still feel tight control of my momentum.

 

T1:20 – I smoke some cannabis. The energy accelerates like a shot of nitrous into a carburetor. The visuals shake and shimmer, the diamonds and hexagons dance and flash running down the walls like riffles of a stream with an increasingly furious tempo. There is a persistent visual snow and slight tracers around anything in motion. It all has a sharp edge, it all bites and chews, there are a lot of tight angles. It feels like my laptop screen is drifting further and further away as I type my notes.

 

T1:30- I decide to lean fully into the experience and lie down. I prepare my space, I light incense, I don my traveler mask, prepare soft blankets and pillows. I find myself having to urinate a lot. I drink some water. I return to my room.

 

T1:50- My choice of music is the soundtrack for Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, one of my favorite musical choices for holes, it truly feels like going on an adventure. And as provenance would have it, my beloved orange cat Luigi comes into the room and sits on my chest as I lie down. It feels like a stroke of serendipity from Allah, to which I am grateful.

I don’t expect to go into a dissociative hole. This is not the type of dissociative that lends itself to that. I close my eyes and lie down. The neutral setting to purely experience the drug in a synesthetic space can at least do something.

And that something is glory, beauty, the first mango-hued rays of a sunrise breaking into a deep magenta sky, wind blowing through verdant grass, the shadows on clouds, city lights reflecting off of rippling water. I am in a fast, rash, digital and electric space like a pixelated impressionist painting. I can still feel my body, tingling and buzzing, but I feel like I can inhabit the space directly in front of my tightly clenched eyes, exist as a dissociated ball of energy there draped in vitreous polychrome curtains that twist and bend and buzz along jagged edges to the music.

Mania and beauty are a delightful combination. I am stricken with a drive to proclaim the divine virtue of beauty to the heavens. I am stricken with a drive to fill the world with beauty. It all feels possible, it all feels monumental, I am fantasizing about the maximum outcomes of those drives, of creating things of such beauty that the entire world stands in awe of it; I am really really getting ahead of myself! And I just can’t sit still. Not on PCP. I last about 20 minutes of trying to lie still and listen to music.

 

T2:00- I have been sitting on a steady peak for about the last hour and 20 minutes and it still feels like it is raging. I feel hot, tense, tight. My mind is flowing so fast, there is so much at once. I don’t know what to do with all of it. I try to write but I can’t focus because so many thoughts are demanding my attention like a pack of hounds striking at me every chance they get. It feels like there is light shooting through my entire body and firing out of my eyes and fingertips. I don’t know what to do with all of this dissociative energy, I don’t know where to direct it, I feel like I am on fire. I also feel a deep cold. Like a fever. I am cold and sweat and my throat is tight. This was perhaps too large a dose. But I will just ride it out. Despite all of this dysfunctionality, I am still propelled by a manic euphoria. I am burdened by feeling too great and not knowing where to put it frankly. How terrible.

I decide to direct the energy into an activity, my favorite mindless bashing game, Dynasty Warriors 3 (which I am so so close to 100%ing) for the Playstation 2. This is a game where you play as the legendary heroes of the Chinese epic “Romance of the Three Kingdoms”. The gameplay mostly consists of bashing your way through hordes of rank and file soldiers and dueling with other legendary heroes.

I select the Battle of He Fei Castle, and go on the offensive as Sun Jian, progenitor of the mighty Sun Clan of Wu. It feels like I have bridged sparking wires. The energy flows from my spine to my fingertips to the controller down its wire into the PlayStation into the AV cords into the electron gun blasting beams of energy onto a phosphorescent screen that then shoots directly into my eyes, completing a circuit and cycling into a smooth flow that does genuinely calm and ground me. The game is visceral, the controller vibrates like crazy, I feel the impact of Sun Jian’s blade on hundreds of hundreds of faceless digital Three Kingdoms Era soldiers sending them to their digital demise. Who were they to think they could challenge the mighty Sun Jian?

As stated before, I have almost maxed out this game, so every character is now a jacked up superhero that can effortlessly hack his way through everything. There is little challenge and I have played this level dozens of times before, this is just dull familiarity. I know exactly where to go, I know exactly what path to take and when to do it and where all the hidden items are; this feeds into the mania, in this game, I am truly an omniscient, omnipotent war god-figure. Everything falls before me. It is so great to direct the manic energy into this and not like, trying to do these feats in real life, which felt like an absolute possibility if the need arose.

 

T2:30- I finish the level and notice that the overall energy of the experience is beginning to recede. There is still a lot of electricity and edge but there is no more of that urgency or haste. The motion of the visuals is slowing down. I can sit with this mania. I can still feel grand and aspire to grand things but on my own terms now. Perhaps this scheming can bear fruit in the sober world- the greatest danger however is setting them in motion while still in this state- it drives an urgency for one to hatch plans and ideas and immediately pursue them-but I set a rule, prominently printed on my door. No calling anyone. No contacting coworkers, family, political spaces, prominent figures. No making decisive plans and setting them in motion. Write it down, save it for later. And so I do.

 

T3:00- More down but still feeling lightheaded and dizzy, still feeling a sense of motion when I am still. I decide to take a warm shower. I feel heavy and tense. The shower was a clattery space, with the water making a metallic phasing and flanging sounds reverberating off the walls, interlacing themselves with the jagged visuals. It was so disorienting I had to sit down, when I closed my eyes there were explosions of ripples of light with each gunshot drumbeat of the falling water. I was on the inside of a metal drum being furiously pelted with rocks. I felt an accelerated sense of motion, an accelerated sense of being a floating consciousness as the mercy of great sweeping motions like a caustic flash flood. Despite the cacophonous noise, my internal monologue was loud and cutting and raged through the storm. I became fixated inwards, as usual- though I felt it quite grounding in this raging sensory space.

 

T3:30- I feel clean, and ending that intense stimulus makes me feel like even further down than when I started. Still a bit numb and tingly and wavy but clearheaded and guided. Still tense, but much less so. I feel more of a sense of calm, my thoughts aren’t racing loudly and fighting each other for attention anymore, though the internal voice is still chattering away. I can take a deep breath and it feels like my heart is slowing down a bit.

 

T4:00- Lingering stimulation and mania but less numbness in extremities now. Physical sensations are overall decreased. I am able to eat again and have some instant noodles. I don’t have a ton of appetite but I hadn’t eaten in a while and forced myself to. It wasn’t particularly pleasant.

 

T5:00- Go back to playing videogames, now playing a mod for Attila: Total War. The game is immersive and tactical and fun, it is easy to roleplay myself as some sort of magic medieval general who could have a bird’s eye view of the earth. I just play a battle against the computer.

T6:00- I am mostly back to baseline.

 

T8:00- Feel entirely back to normal. The sun is coming up, I lie down to sleep but have a hard time actually falling asleep. It seems like the internal narration in my head does not want to shut up, and it speaks loudly and confidently and declaratively. How annoying. I don’t know how long I laid awake for but it seemed well into the morning.

 

Conclusion: PCP is just true ultrapure mania, distilled to its finest active dissociative form. I understand how one could damage their life, but I had the constitution in the moment to rein that in. I definitely can see how at higher doses, one may lose that constitution and fall victim to the urgent depredations of mania induced psychosis. I felt like I could do anything. I felt like I was meant to do anything. I felt like doing all of those things would bring me to prominence, would make me respected and revered by wide swaths of people. It felt like destiny. It is pure megalomania. At best it can be obnoxious and make one arrogant. At worst, one immediately pursues those ambitions and quickly finds out the hard way that they are not realistic. But ultimately it is a lot of fun, it makes me feel confident and good about myself. It makes activities engaging and offers a unique perspective for meditation. It makes a wide variety of activities more interesting or adds a new edge to them. It is beautiful, there are delightful visuals and a pleasant warm buzzing numb dizzy physical sensation. I think it’s a great deal of fun. Like most manic dissociatives, there is no hole, but with a portion of cannabis there is some dark visual space I can immerse myself in, though I am always acutely aware of my body.