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Just A Pleasant Head Trip [Trip Report]
Cannabis
Date: September 11th, 2012

Dose:
repeated, smoked, Cannabis (plant material)

I packed an almost-filled bowl of something close to Mexican brick weed, but not quite as bricky, into my bong some time around 5:00 PM. This was to be the first of my experiences with cannabis after deciding to return to treating it as a psychedelic and something to be done occasionally rather than an all-day-every-day kind of high. I'd taken a short break before this so my tolerance was a bit lower than normal. I quickly downed a couple big rips and set the bong down. Lucky me, I tend to get psychedelic effects from smoking fairly easily, and the schwaggier the bud the more schizo it seems to make me.

Come-up anxiety tries to make itself known, but is quickly dismissed. Weed is nothing to fear. Somehow in the fog of the peak I became stuck on how trippy of a thought it was that we are literally the only species in the whole world that has come anywhere even remotely near as far as we have. I started considering all the strange things we as humans do to have fun, and how to any other species it must all just seem like complete absurdity. Like thinking about it from the point of view of an advanced alien race who has evolved to be extremely intelligent but still only focus on what needs to be done to survive and expand, having them come to Earth and seeing us going to clubs and dancing, and all that kind of stuff that would just seem totally pointless because we only do it because it's fun, and just wondering WHY those things are fun.... Like why is dancing fun? It just is. >w< But anyway, that made me think about what it'd be like for some random animal like a rat to be wandering through a rave or club, and then THAT made me think about what it would be like to be a human who was raised in the wild and never learned language so they act more like an animal wandering through a club. How would they feel? I began getting a strong mental imagery accompanying this, sort of like a third-person dream. A teenage boy who grew up in the wild unleashed in a club, the first thing he notices is all the people dancing around, especially the pretty girls dancing with guys. He's still a human so he's going to want to try to get in on the action, right? Would he learn to start dancing with everyone even without language? To be honest, I think he would... he may screw up a few times at first, but I think he'd learn. Thinking about that gave me sort of a sense of connection to my animal nature, just considering all the things we still do just because it's fun and we have an urge to let loose. It seems more complex than what animals do because there are so many different variables to consider in our situations, but it's all still the same kinds of instincts. The world really is a crazy, crazy place.

After I realized how couch-locked I'd been during all of that, I decided to get up and go out to the backyard and appreciate nature a bit. The weather outside felt amazing and it was very easy to feel in tune with everything. I wandered around looking at the tree and the garden a bit, and I got a couple pictures of things that really stood out to me.

First there are these leaves, which totally rock. They've got a nice fractally look to them, if you ask me. I could stare at them for ages.

And this mini rose, which is just wonderful. Look at the swirl, nature is so intensely beautiful.... I felt like crying when I first got a look at that flower....

That was about the end of significant parts of the experience. Weed is still the number one psychedelic in my book.

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Approaching the Void [Trip Report]
Salvia divinorum
Date: August 10th, 2012

Dose:
T+0:00: 1 hit, smoked, Salvia divinorum (100 mg extract)

Last night, after my parents went to bed, I decided to get out the salvia I'd been holding on to for a while now. The extract I have is standardized to contain 100 mg of salvinorin A per gram, and if you know anything about salvinorin A then you'll know that's a lot! I wanted to be cautious as it had been at least a year and a half (if not more) since the last time I smoked salvia or really did anything like it, so I loaded a very small amount of it into one of my bongs that I've found to mask the taste and (usually) harshness of just about anything very well. This is significant, because salvia tastes pretty nasty and you often need big hits to get appreciable effects out of it. After filling it with water and preparing myself, I grabbed my torch lighter and took it all in one inhale.

I've read many reports of people smoking salvia and saying they always get a slow come-up, or they gets lots of psychedelic-like visuals over reality. While salvia has given me those things before, the first time in a session always hits me like a train with no warning whatsoever, and is nothing but pure dissociative ego loss. I was sitting upright on my bed after I put the bong down, and by the time I let out the hit I was already slipping away. My first thought, which I actually voiced, was "I remember this now." I think I at least mostly understood that when I said it. There was this feeling of approaching the void that salvia always gives me, like I was about to be unplugged from reality. Of course, higher doses actually put you in the void... but that's another story. I wasn't really sure whether or not I was hallucinating at the time, but I do recall that the left door to my room closet and the front-right corner of the bed (from my perspective) had now taken on distinctly humanoid personae, and I spent the rest of the trip talking half to them and half to no one in particular. I felt that they were trying to explain the situation to me, and I responded "Oh, I guess I should wait my turn. I'm supposed to just lie down like this?", after which I knelt down forward on to the bed, not actually fully changing from my sitting position. Immediately after I shot back up and asked "Wait, I'm in control of this, right?" This was a meaningless question, my ego's last attempt to save itself. At the time I wouldn't even have been able to tell you who I was. I felt (mistakenly) affirmed that I was indeed in control, and I so I got back down and rested the side of my face on the bed. I believe I was just waiting for the trip to start (a strange sensation I often get on low doses of salvia), but then shortly afterward cognition started returning to me and I realized that it was already ending. I got up and had an increased amount of energy while walking around, and I couldn't help giving in to the strange feeling of gravity constantly pulling me to the left and ended up twirling around a bit. Shortly thereafter, I returned to full sobriety.

This trip was weak but significant because it reminded me of something that I used to know, but that had been lost to hazy memories and too much drug use: With salvia, you either go for broke or you go home. Like I said, my first time in the session is always just an experience with the void, and afterwards I tend to get more powerful sensory hallucinations. I wanted to see if I could work around that by starting small, but I forgot that not experiencing that feeling all the way just makes me not want to do it again because it feels like I'm still going to have to break through before I get to anything worthwhile, so I might as well get the discomfort out of the way in the beginning. I won't be forgetting next time.

Oh yeah, this is what euphoria feels like! [Trip Report]
Alcohol, Cannabis
Date: May 3rd, 2012

Dose:
repeated, oral, Alcohol - Cabernet Sauvignon
repeated, smoked, Cannabis

Yesterday afternoon, K, the same K I always talk about but who from this point on I'll refer to as R, texted me saying that his evening plans had fallen through so I asked him if he wanted to hang out. I went over there without really intending to get too far away from sober, but at one point we decided to go get drinks at Sonic and then buy some wine and beer afterward. I'm still trying to not really drink these days, but I figured it'd be okay as long as I got a set amount and stuck to it, and stayed away from liquor. I bought a bottle of red wine, a Cabernet Sauvignon, and R bought a six pack of beer, and then we headed back to his apartment.

After R found a neighbor with a corkscrew, I started drinking pretty quickly. We watched an episode of Metalocalypse that R wanted to show me and then listened to some music, and I was feeling drunk pretty easily. Alcohol tends to hit me pretty hard most days the way I normally drink, especially when I haven't had a drink in a while. I barely checked what time it was at any point in the night, so it's hard for me to say the time frames beyond this, but we just talked about stuff for a good amount of time and kept drinking, and eventually I started to notice that my memory didn't extend very far beyond 10-20 seconds back. I decided to give it a rest as to avoid a blackout.

Ever since my tequila excursion before last where I blacked out for the first time I've been faced with a problem. Once you're on the verge of blacking out, how do you directly enhance the alcohol's high without losing awareness? But then, R brought the solution straight to me. Smoke weed! Sounds simple, no? But I realized then how accurate of a solution it is. Alcohol is said to raise phenethylamine levels in the brain, which causes D2 activation. I've had enough clothes-shedding tequila experiences to believe this is true, since my mindset, imagination, euphoria, dissociation, EVERYTHING I get from drinking tequila, and to a lesser extent other alcohols as well (I just don't drink them as fast as tequila), is characteristic of D2. The beauty of this is, THC works by raising phenethylamine levels too, to an even more significant degree than alcohol at least for me, so the D2 effects will stack without increasing the GABAergic amnesia! R only had a small amount of weed, but he had wanted to get rid of it anyway. We loaded a bowl and quickly smoked it, and it was pretty high quality. I'm also fairly certain I took another hit or two later on, but I'm not sure exactly when it was. Some time in there I also drank the last bit of wine from my cup (yes, cup ) and put the rest of the wine away; I can't remember if that was before or after that last bit smoking. There was just enough wine in the bottle left for another cup of the sizes I'd been pouring, so I took out a pretty good amount of it.

Once it had all hit me, I was just lying on the floor staring at the ceiling in ecstasy. I hadn't felt that good since way back when R and I first started getting heavy into the drug scene! The weed high was mostly assimilated into the drunkenness, rather than adding its own effects it really just potentiated what I was already feeling. Everything around me was in a constant spin and difficult to focus on, but in a very pleasant way. My body high was very intense, and I essentially felt like I was blackout drunk but not blacked out. It was pretty great. R and I ended up just talking mostly for a while, and at one point we spontaneously started improvising a skit where I had already seen some unmentioned truth and I was trying to convince him that he was keeping himself blind by resisting it, and in the end when he finally admitted to it he couldn't bear the weight of reality and ended his life, and I silently lamented his loss. It was rather satisfying considering it flowed pretty flawlessly. Eventually we were getting hungry so we decided to walk down the main street his apartment complex is off of and find some food.

The outside world was awesome! The D2 effects were in full swing here making everything look very intensely detailed and colors were highly saturated, and I felt extremely playful as far as perceiving my environment went. Combined with the memory fog of being drunk, it made the area look like a totally new place for me to explore again, despite having been there countless times. It was already around 1:00am at this point, or possibly a little later (it's hard to remember exactly), so we weren't expecting too much, but we tried to going to Del Taco first. Closed! There were people in there so we tried walking through the drive thru and they totally ignored us. We walked to Whataburger next and they were closed too, and we were considering trying the drive thru again since we know it's 24/7 for sure, but then R noticed that the Jack-in-the-Box across the street had an OPEN sign turned on in the window. Success! We stumbled over there as we had been this whole time and went inside, and I don't remember what I ordered but it was some chicken sandwich, and holy crap it was freaking fantastic. It was almost too much to handle, it was soooo good. I was still fairly full from earlier in the day when I had my 20 McNuggets celebration meal from McDonald's though, so after the sandwich and about half of my french fries I gave up. R, barely having eaten all day, ordered three sandwiches and a thing of cheese sticks, and finished my fries.

After we finished eating we walked back to R's apartment and we were both pretty beat. I told R I could sleep on the floor but he wouldn't let me, he insisted that I take his bed. (There was nothing else to sleep on like a couch or anything, it's his new apartment and he doesn't really have much furniture yet.) I'm pretty sure it only took me about five or ten seconds to pass out after my head hit the pillow. When I woke up today I was fairly dissociated, I wasn't really comprehending much of reality aside from how comfortable the bed I was in was. I rolled around sort of in a trance until finally I opened my eyes all the way and saw that my vision was so blurry it was nearly pixelated, and there was a strange filter over everything, sort of a grid of yellow, blue, red, and green dots that was creating sort of a fuzzy static noise as well, but it faded away quickly. I didn't really want to get out of bed yet at the risk of being hungover, so I just rolled around some more trying to fall asleep again. I'm pretty sure I did at least once or twice, but I was also hallucinating a fair amount. Just hypnagogic and hypnopompic stuff, I suppose this combination made them come out especially easily. At least five or six times I saw R come into the room and try to wake me up for various reasons, though he never actually did, and I knew he had really gone to work before I even woke up the first time. I heard voices coming from the room next to me a few times too, but I think they were actually coming from outside. I also spent some time looking at the ceiling and noticing what a strange pyramid-like shape it had, only to later look at the ceiling again when I actually got up and notice it was flat.

Surprisingly, there was no hangover of any kind. When I got home I did some chores and then got in the shower and felt very refreshed and energized. As I'm typing this I still feel fairly ready to do something. Definitely a good experience overall.

Too Many Negatives [Trip Report]
Cannabis, 5-HTP, Valerian Root, Ginger Root
Date: April 27th, 2012

Dose:
repeated, smoked, Cannabis
T+0:00: 200 mg, oral, L-5-Hydroxytryptophan (5-HTP)
T+0:55: 450 mg, oral, Valeriana officinalis (Valerian Root)
T+1:15: 1100 mg, oral, Zingiber officinale (Ginger Root)

A couple days ago, against my instinct, I decided to see if there was any recreational or experimental value in 5-HTP. I've taken it before, but not in a long time, and my memories from back then are hazy. I had originally planned to use it with EGCG, from green tea, as an aromatic L-amino acid decarboxylase inhibitor so that it would only metabolize into serotonin in the central and not peripheral nervous system, but I assumed I could probably take it safely enough as is for a test run without having to worry about too many physical side effects. I was wrong.

I smoked a small amount of weed shortly before taking the 5-HTP, and just a little bit more right afterward. Within an hour I was starting to feel some tingling and was yawning occasionally, something I'm used to having as a come-up sign for serotonergic drugs like MDMA. However, I was also starting to feel significantly nauseous, and it was starting to make me very dissociated and anxious as well. I took one capsule of valerian root in the hopes that it would combat the anxiety and help get rid of the nausea by increasing GABA activity and lowering serotonin activity, but it didn't do very much other than make me a little more sedated. Not long after I took two capsules of ginger root as well, since I believe it relieves nausea by antagonizing 5-HT3 receptors, an antiserotonergic mechanism. It helped a little bit, but not much.

The experience overall could be classified as almost psychedelic as far as the mindset goes, but in a very negative and dissociated way. There was some change in my sensory perception, but it was hard to put my finger on. I imagine this effect could be viewed positively without all of the side effects. It took quite a while for the nausea to finally wear off, but it eventually did. The rest of my day was pretty normal, and then I went to bed and had two lucid dreams. So at least that's nice.

Paradoxically Stimulated and Sedated [Trip Report]
L-Theanine
Date: April 21st, 2012

Dose:
T+0:00: 400 mg, oral, L-Theanine

Today I decided to give L-theanine a run after reading that it had some stress-relieving effects and reading about its pharmacology. It increases levels of GABA and dopamine and has some affinity as a NMDA receptor antagonist, meaning overall it's a sedative, stimulant, and dissociative. The bottle I bought had one 200 mg pill as the recommended daily dose, so I chose to double it for this test; the LD50 is said to be very high. As a final note, I'm feeling rather sick today so my resulting lethargy may have skewed the results slightly as far as how much energy the dose gave me goes.

I took the dose in the early afternoon and waited for it to set in, totally unaware of how long it was supposed to take or what the duration of the effects would be. Within half an hour I was feeling noticeably sedated, but not necessarily enough for me to say it definitely wasn't placebo. But by the hour mark I could feel a bit of a head fogginess that I recognize from other GABA drugs, and the music I was listening to had started sounding wider and deeper. Though this could have been from NMDA antagonism, I'm going to say it was likely at least mostly from the increase of dopamine. The mood it created was one of being paradoxically stimulated and sedated. Figuring that staying on the couch would be a waste of a dose, I decided to go for a walk in the nearby park forest.

Unexpectedly, once I actually got outside I had a good deal of energy. Or rather, my body was moving very swiftly and fluidly, despite feeling rather at peace. It was a great day outside and being in the sun and feeling the wind rush by me was very soothing. Once I reached a hill that I really like in the area I could tell that my senses were somewhat expanded. I felt like I had a wider panoramic view than normal, as if my vision had been flattened somewhat horizontally, but I believe that was only an illusion caused by the fact that I was taking in a very large quantity of visual data at once (like the opposite of tunnel vision). Among the forest wall I could easily spot several complex patterns of leaves and branches, and colors were fairly saturated in a way that was almost cartoony, but not quite. There was definitely a dopaminergic filter applied to the world, but given that I am very accustomed to this mental change and can pick up on it easily.

I ended up walking down a path in the forest and found myself feeling very connected to nature. I watched bugs fly around me and animals scamper through the trees as I just walked by. The feeling of mental calmness despite the stimulation made for a very synergistic mindset at this point. I read that L-theanine may have effects on increasing serotonin as well, though it's still disputed. I'd believe it after experiencing this, but it could have just been from the GABA increasing/NMDA antagonist effects as well. Eventually though, I started to feel a bit tired. This may be due to my sickness, like I said, but I also suspect that the dual nature of L-theanine might make the stimulation more susceptible to reduction from fatigue than the average stimulant. It wasn't really an exhaustion though, just that I had gotten my fill. I headed home and basically relaxed until the effect died out. I'm not totally sure when that was, I didn't much pay attention to it after that.

This was more impressive than I had hoped. It wasn't a very powerful effect, but it wasn't negligible either. I do think though, based on some reports I've read of people getting "drunk" from higher doses, that L-theanine's sedative effect will eventually overpower and probably blunt its mild stimulant psychedelia. This is one probably best used as a compliment to truly psychoactive doses of stronger drugs, as it seems like it could ease your mindset a bit if need be or maybe just smooth out an experience a bit, while still maintaining the same level of hallucinogenic effect. I'll certainly be keeping it on my shelf.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about how activating or deactivating various receptors in the brain brings us closer to the dream state, and what that implies for using hallucinogens in respect to various dream phenomena like signs and guides, understanding the way dreams work on a more basic level, and beliefs like shared dreaming. To study this relationship and see if I can come to any conclusions, I've decided to use side note DJ entries to track any experiences I have which enter the hallucinogenic realm, no matter how small.

Exploring Nature, and the Dream-like Qualities of THC [Trip Report]
Cannabis
Date: April 19th, 2012

Dose:
T+0:00: 1/2 bowl, smoked, Cannabis
T~1:30: 1/2 joint, smoked, Cannabis

After getting a few errands done for the day, K and I decided to go walking through a forest and smoke some weed since we hadn't done so in a long time. I went to pick him up and we smoked a small bowl before leaving his apartment, and then I drove us back to my house. I was already really high and could tell that the weed was pretty strong! My tolerance is not insanely high at this time either, but K's is and he was pretty stoned as well. We waited at my house for about half an hour and watched TV, then went walking around the park near here.

We picked a small opening in the side of the forest next to a big clearing and smoked the first half of the joint there. It's a pretty nice spot, but we decided to go somewhere more secluded and deeper into the forest for the other half. On the walk to the next area I was starting to become fairly stimulated but also dissociated, and I was beginning to ramble about whatever was on my mind, though I can't remember what those things were now. We stopped half way down a dense path and finished the joint, and then we kept following it as far as it went. My thoughts were starting to feel very associative and I went on a long rant about the difference in perception and stereotypes of the old and modern drug cultures.

When I finally ran out of thoughts I noticed that colors were becoming highly saturated. Everywhere I looked I was noticing patterns of leaves and things among the plant life, and my mind was connecting incorrect meaning to various shapes. For example, many trees suddenly looked like they were gigantic flames, and others that had long, slender leaves with pronged tips suddenly looked to me as if they were covered in snowflakes. What's interesting to me is that now, after my long break and my other drug experiences, I can come back to these weed experiences that normally die down a bit once tolerance sets in and look at them through enlightened eyes. This euphoric energy, analytical nature, color saturation, and psychedelic image association... it's all very reminiscent of my experiences with dopaminergic psychedelics. Is this the potential of THC's cannabinoid receptor-induced phenethylamine release? It certainly has the same feel as a phenethylamine psychedelic. In this case, the psychedelic effects would be coming mostly from the D2 receptor, which causes effects similar to NMDA receptor antagonists, among other things. This mechanism is the same that causes OBEs and is likely very important in dreams, and I wonder if that's where the associative thinking comes from - the same way that dreams are built off of our internal schemata and expectations, only whereas with dreams we have only the blackness behind our eyes to work with, instead here my schemata are applied to reality and my mind attempts to make sense (dream sense, anyway) of my surroundings.

Anyway, we returned to the small forest opening by the clearing where we had smoked originally, only this time I noticed a path that lead out behind where we were originally sitting and was amazed at what I saw. There were three stone benches where we were, cut in sort of a way that looks like if you were to divide a circle up into four even sections and then remove one of them. Behind, and juts a bit to the right, of the now middle section, there was a path made in the ground that led down a tiny hill and into a densely covered forest area. However, in the center of this, where the path directly led, there was just a, not huge but not small, patch of grass with no trees, and so the area itself looked like it had a large opening where you could see the sky, surrounding by a ring of tree tops. The patch was also just a very slight hill, and surrounding it on the edges of the circle was a constant low level of water. All of this was a few feet below all of the ground around it, enough to where it'd be difficult to get back out of this ditch if that path weren't there. The very first thing I thought when I saw all of this was "Holy crap, we're at a boss area!" I turned to K and started explaining. The clearing was the world map we had passed through to reach this tiny opening in the forest, and this is where the final space before the cutscene was. K even pointed out that the three benches with the two spaces in between them made perfectly for a save point and an item shop. Then, following the path would take you down into the ditch, and then the path would be closed off by rocks caving it in, or the trees moving to block it, or whatever fits the plot. You'd then be stuck in this tiny arena to fight the boss in, and they'd be situated on the hill whereas the ring of water on the edge of the map would be where you'd find things like rings in a Sonic the Hedgehog game or pots in a Legend of Zelda game. The forest scenery was definitely fit enough to support this epic battle, as it all had a very intense feel to it, even compared to the rest of the forest we'd been in. After a while the illusion became too much, and we left because we were tripping out.

On the walk back I mostly noticed more associative imagery. The trip dwindled a bit after that, and I was merely extremely stoned for the rest of the day. I was also feeling a bit sick by the end of it (as I had been for the past few days as well), so I knocked out after dropping K off and coming back home. All I can really say about this experience is that it was a fun reminder of what a psychedelic state of mind is like. It's nice being able to observe these mental processes from an outsider's view this time, and to be able to compare it to phenomena in the dream state. I will certainly be remembering this one for future reference.