Author: Andromeda ✨
First written: 2021-07-19
Context
Demographic information:
Age: 24
Sex: Male
Ethnicity: European descent
Weight: ~70kg
Height: 5’9
T+ 0:00 250ug LSD (sublingual)
T+ 0:50 0.2g cannabis (vaped)
T+ 1:00 150mg ketamine (plugged)
T+ 2:00-8:00 12 balloons nitrous oxide (inhaled)
Set and setting:
Room setup with minimal lighting, lots of blankets & cushions, and a blindfold. In the week prior I spent many hours reading every trip report that I could find documenting this combination of substances (primarily from erowid experience vaults, and Steve Lehar’s book ‘The Grand Illusion’). I planned out the exact order that I would ingest these substances, and made sure to have people I could trust on call in case I had a bad trip (my prior on this happening was low given that I’ve never had a bad trip before, but better safe than sorry).
For the peak of the trip, I had a voice recorder sat beside where I was lying down. I attempted to narrate my hallucinations, and this trip report is based largely upon these remarks that I recorded. It’s a good thing that I did this, as I can remember only very little about the experience (which I suspect has something to do with the cannabis).
Music prepared:
- In the heart of the moon; Ali Farka Toure & Tounami Diabate
- New ancient strings; Tounami Diabate
- Hejira; Joni Mitchell
- In a silent way; Miles Davis
- A love supreme; John Coltrane
- Bitches brew; Miles Davis
- Pink moon; Nick Drake
General information:
- Well-rested.
- Generally high hedonic setpoint.
- Lots of experience with LSD (taken semi-regularly for the past few years, usually outdoors).
- Some experience with ketamine (taken 6 times prior, ranging from 35-80mg doses).
- Lots of experience with cannabis (taken every week or so for the past few years).
- Have taken LSD and cannabis together before on multiple occasions. Have taken cannabis and ketamine together only twice. No experience combining LSD and ketamine before.
Report
On the come up of the ketamine roughly an hour into the experience (and before I had the blindfold on) my mental model of the room I was sat in began to shift. I noticed that the previously hard lines separating the walls from the celling were now blurred and somewhat rounded. The room itself seemed to breath, and I had the impression that it was weakly resisting a gravitational force to fold into itself.
After donning the blindfold, I began to have strong closed eye visuals (CEVs, hereafter) of planes consisting of numerous shapes and fractals, and often people. These, too, began to fold into themselves (in a manner similar to simulations of a tesseract), as did thoughts and concepts I would attempt to hold in my mind. The nature of the folding of these items which I attempted to consciously manifest in my mind was less visual and more tactile, like the feeling of vapour dissolving in the air or sand running through one’s fingers.
I noticed that there was a slight delay / lag in my listening to music, since I would hear a note or a melody being played for longer than I knew that it was actually in the music. My perceived soundstage widened considerably, despite lying down and not being in the optimal position in relation to my stereo speakers to create the illusion of having a soundstage (which is in an equilateral triangle with my ears at the level of the tweeters). I heard notes bouncing around me on all sides, and my hallucinations seemed to follow the rhythm of the music. Certain sound frequencies had different tactile sensations: bass notes felt heavy and weighted on my body, and treble notes sounded more sibilant than usual (I had the sensation that they were burrowing into my skull).
During the peak I had an involuntary bodily buzzing / trembling, and was panting heavily. It felt like a very high energy state, and each second felt like minutes passing. My CEVs had something of a narrative structure, as if I was witnessing a dream taking place behind my closed eyelids, and I would experience several of these narratives before the end of the song (which ranged from 3-6 minutes). Like dreams, these CEV narratives often included people I knew in my personal life, eliciting a strong emotional reaction. I had the perspective of lying on the ground with a warped vision extending in all directions but downwards, and figures standing over me, sometimes reaching down toward me while maintaining eye contact. Sometimes these figures fought each other, before melding together to form an entirely new hallucination. At times my perspective would shift to 2.5D ‘over the shoulder’, floating across these landscapes with only limited conscious control.
When I took off the blindfold I saw translucent lines segmenting different layers of reality, and each layer had moving fractal images resembling eyes and (according to my verbal narration) frogs. These layers would shimmer when I moved my head, and remain in my vision momentarily upon closing my eyes.
With the blindfold back on, melting back into the intense CEVs, my ‘self’ began to fracture and split into several different entities. Some of these were versions of myself from the past, and some were unrecognisable aside from the fact that I knew it was ‘me’. Because they were all different instances of me, I had the disassociated experience of seeing myself from my own perspective, and I think that I could hold these perspectives simultaneously in my mind (on this point my memory is especially fuzzy, but I reported it verbally).
I did multiple nangs (nitrous oxide balloons) over the course of the trip and I remember absolutely nothing from them. I even forgot that I did nangs during the trip, at least until I saw the empty balloon in my hand sometimes 10-15 minutes after the fact.
Concluding remarks
The nature of the experience was more chaotic than I anticipated, and on multiple occasions I attempted to initiate a ‘free-wheeling’ hallucination without much success. As mentioned before, ideas and concepts that I attempted to hold in my mind would soon dissolve into other uncontrollable CEVs, as if I was stuck in a spiraling vortex of kaleidoscopic images, shapes, and colours. I struggled to narrate the experience, and often my sentences would trail off mid-way through as my mind had already departed from what I was attempting to convey. I believe this, and my memory loss, to be the result of the cannabis interaction.
While it was at times difficult, I felt calm and resolute even when I had forgotten who I was and what I was doing, and a total indescribable comfort in submitting to the experience. Reflecting upon the trip, it is difficult to separate whether my difficulty to control these hallucinations was intrinsic to the experience, or whether it was the product of my memory & concentration deficit (resulting from the cannabis). Next time I attempt to enter into a free-wheeling state, I will limit myself to only LSD and ketamine. Overall, this trip has increased my confidence in being able to safely handle high-energy states of consciousness, and the combination of these three substances was a novel experience that I am grateful for.