This morning I tripped on a high dose of pharmahuasca, probably not that high for some people here considering how much y'all love DMT but my highest dose ever.
With full MAO inhibition, a common dose of DMT for pharmahuasca is 1mg/kg of body weight. I took 300mg of harmalas extracted from Syrian Rue, which I believe should have been enough for full MAO inhibition, and then took a DMT dose of 5mg/kg of my body weight. I was also intending to vape some freebase sometime during the trip but was tripping too hard so I did not.
This was obviously a heroic dose and I made sure I had a tripsitter, a good set and setting, etc. I'm experienced with heroic doses of other psychedelics so I was pretty sure I could handle the intensity. As it turned out, it was FAR more intense than I expected, but I still handled it well and had a good trip overall.
How I dosed: 150mg of syrian rue extract, waited 20 minutes, then dissolved 150mg of syrian rue extract and 300mg of DMT in orange juice together and drank the solution.
The come up: I started to feel the effects shortly after ingesting the DMT, less than half an hour after. As I was coming up I felt this incredible joy, I was nearly crying with happiness. My tripsitter put on this song (I don't know what it was, I'll have to ask him) and it just set a certain mood that made me think of enjoying warm summer weather, and I almost felt like I was on a beach somewhere, feeling the sun on my face and hearing the waves crash and people having fun. After this I purged, and it felt pretty nice. I've only ever purged once with pharma before, and that time I didn't enjoy it much, but this time was kind of interesting. As I purged I felt like there was something working its way out of my body and going out with the bile.
The most intense part: Very quickly after I purged things started getting extremely intense, like most intense psychedelic experience I've ever had intense. I started saying the hanuman chalisa because my dad used to sing it to me as a kid and it always makes me feel calmer, but after a few verses I felt like my tongue was getting tied up in my mouth and it was hard to speak. That was the point at which I entered a trance. My tripsitter reports me doing the following at this time: walking to my bed, rolling around on it and falling off and eventually settling down lying under the bed. What I was experiencing was complete ego death, and a replacement of my "self"-consciousness with what I'm calling a weird kind of "periodic consciousness function." If you think of being conscious as receiving inputs (experiencing) and then creating outputs (thinking), this was like a state of consciousness where instead of the function became periodic, meaning it repeated itself at a certain frequency. I had no sense of time during this state, but I estimate I was like that for about 30-40 minutes.
The come down: Once I left the trance and remembered who I was I realized I was under the bed. I didn't feel like emerging so I just stayed under there. While I was under there, I had this strange feeling that I was looking into a mirror and there was a mirror image of me copying all of my motions. Really I was just looking down at my own body, but for some reason it felt like I was looking at an image of it instead. Eventually, my tripsitter asked if I wanted to come out so I looked out from under my bed and to my surprise instead of my room I saw what appeared to be a 2-dimensional picture of my room, as though someone had taken a photo from where my eyes were, printed it out, and stuck it in front of my eyes. I was quite surprised when I stuck my hand out and my hand went into this picture, so I crawled out and realized that it was not in fact a 2D picture but the 3D world in which I reside. After that I started to come down pretty fast actually, so I thought I was fine and told my tripsitter he could leave.
I think this may have been a bad idea because I started to get a bit anxious as I was coming down. I also was having these weird delusions that I've had on high doses of LSD too. They usually revolve around me having, through the use of psychedelics, discovered some truth about the universe and I feeling like I have to share this truth with the world. I snapped out of that pretty quick but the anxiety was still there so I called my partner on the phone and we talked and I felt a lot better. After finishing that call I was pretty close to down and my tripsitter came back to check on me. I told him about the trip and he told me about what he saw me doing (apparently while I was tranced out at the peak I kept repeating one word that he couldn't really catch because my speech was so intelligible). I then cleaned up my bedroom, because during the trip I was too intoxicated to walk properly so I ended up shuffling around and I made a mess of things. Once I was done cleaning I sat down on my computer and had one last noticeable visual affect: my computer screen seemed to be much farther away from me than normal. After that ended I was pretty much baseline sober. This was 5 hours after my ingestion of the DMT.
The afterglow: Honestly I didn't really feel any afterglow. Instead I just have that headache you get after you trip really hard because you just get so much sensory stimulation. In my experience it usually goes away after you get some sleep, so that should be gone by morning tomorrow.
Honestly, I'm not really fully doing the trip justice. I wrote that "it got really intense" but I'm not sure if I can explain how intense it was. The OEVs were way more powerful than I expected, because usually DMT produces mostly CEVs. The CEVs where also very vivid and real seeming, mostly fractals that would shift and move with the same frequency of my periodic consciousness that I mentioned. In the time shortly before I entered the trance, open eyes, I honestly couldn't visually understand my reality, there was just too much going on. Even before it got that intense, there where I felt like I was suddenly embodying certain "archetypal forms" of humanity, like a hunter, a seducer, etc. It was like a sort of soft ego death where I was half me but half these various characters each representing some type of human personality. I honestly can't really compare the intensity of it to anything because I've never tripped this hard. My heroic dose LSD trip in March was maybe half as intense as this. Honestly though, I think if I were trying to trip this hard, pharmahuasca is a superior psychedelic than LSD because high doses of LSD also last much longer, too long for me to really be comfortable. This was an extremely intense trip but pretty short in comparison to LSD, which is a good thing for me because I usually have a great time on the come up and peak of trips but have bad comedowns, and this comedown was very quick.
How I would rate my trip: Overall, while crazy intense, I would say I had a good trip. The emotion of the come up was incredible. I'm usually a pretty happy person because I'm happy with everything in my life, but rarely do I just feel that kind of pure joy. The ego death and trance I entered at the peak was similarly incredible. I felt like I was experiencing what a mind must be like with everything stripped bare, just a cycle of consciousness. While the comedown was not that fun I sobered up pretty fast and it wasn't so bad.
If I were to do this again: First of all, I would want a tripsitter who could act as a guide and talk to me during the trip, rather than just someone to watch over me and make sure I'm okay. I don't think that the religious shamanic aspect of ayahuasca is particularly necessary, but having someone there who is knowledgeable about what kinds of things people do and experience while tripping would be a big help with something this intense. I would also probably pick the music beforehand and listen with headphones to fully immerse myself in it. Finally, I would drink more water. I sweat a lot during the trip (though not nearly as much as how much I sweat on LSD) but didn't really drink anything so I was pretty thirsty afterwards.
Just a general warning to anyone who might be reading this and is interested, what I did today was a LARGE dose of pharmahuasca. If you ever plan on doing something this powerful, do not trip without a sitter, do not trip impulsively, trip in a comfortable setting where you're sure no one will bother you and you won't bother anyone else (because if your trip is anything like mine, you may not be able to tell if you're being a bit loud), and please don't try this if you aren't experienced with pharmahuasca or ayahuasca. This is something you work up to, not a first time pharmahuasca dose. Try to 1mg/kg or maybe even slightly less and work up in increments no greater than 50mg. This will knock you on your ass if you don't respect it, but if you do it can provide for you a sublime sensory and emotional experience.