I’ve been smoking some changa I made for a few months now and I need to know if some strange effects I’ve been noticing are normal or not. Some relevant facts before I get into what ’s been going on: This changa is my first foray into DMT but I have a great deal of experience with other entheogens spanning almost 20 years at this point and usually feel pretty at home in the psychedelic realms. The changa is a 1:1 ratio of spice to herbs. For the harmalas, I soaked 10 g of caapi vine in IPA for a couple months to make a menstruum. I know this method yields an unpredictable amount of harmalas, but I think as you will see from what I describe there are definitely harmalas present in my changa. Herbs are blue lotus, french lavender buds, mountain sagebrush and a tiny amount of bobinsana. During my time of experimenting with changa, I have had an average of one changa session per week, but sometimes it has been twice a week and sometimes I have gone a couple weeks without smoking any. During each session, I have smoked approximately 40-60 mg of changa, which would equate to 20-30 mg of spice per session. When it comes to psychedelic tolerance, I tend to be on the more sensitive end, if that might have anything to do with what I’m about to describe...
The first couple times I smoked my changa, I smoked it a few hours before bed and still had an afterglow at that point, so when I realized I was continuing to have effects during the night, I didn’t think anything about it the first few times. I just figured the changa trip had lasted longer than I realize at first, or that by relaxing in bed any continuing psychedelic effects became more obvious. I would have closed eye visuals when going to bed, or when waking up in the middle of the night. Or, I would wake up in the middle of the night because in my dream state I would “see” or “hear” entities in my room and wake up. But like I said, considering my tendency to smoke at night at first, and knowing the effects of changa can be unpredictable, I just thought this was a bonus.
Well, it became obvious when I hadn’t smoked changa for a few days, that for whatever reason I was continuing to have effects in the middle of the night. During the day, everything would be pretty normal, but at night either when falling asleep or, if I woke up in the middle of the night (I have insomnia so this is common for me), suddenly I would be aware of being trippy. I started to hear the beginnings of the “carrier wave” when I would start to fall asleep, and have clearly DMT-inspired hypnagogic imagery. Now what’s weird about this is, when I am actively smoking the changa, the visuals are more Ayahuasca-like. When I’m approaching breakthrough, instead of the chrysanthemum, my vision breaks up into a million wiggle worms of serpentine energy. My visions tend to be beautiful multicolored animals and plants made of dots of jewel toned light. All that sounds more like Ayahuasca than freebase DMT, yet these night experiences sound more like what I would expect from freebase (based on other’s descriptions, I have not smoked freebase). I’ll see the chrysanthemum pattern in front of my eyes, or elvish and jester faces, hear disembodied voices floating above my bed talking about my partner and I in my sleep, etc. On a few different nights, several weeks apart, I have been awoken by the feeling of some kind of energy jolting me in the center of the chest, and each time found I was in the middle of some kind of mild DMTish experience.
Anyway, these effects would last for about a week after smoking changa. At this point, I was thinking this was just evidence of DMT being connected to dreams. I noticed I tend to have more vivid dreams after doing any psychedelic, so why not these kinds of effects on changa? But then, it got weirder.
My partner uses mushrooms and LSD as entheogens, but he won’t try changa or DMT because he’s afraid of it. He knows/supports me smoking changa, but I’ve always done it when he isn’t around, so if “second hand changa smoke” could even be a thing, it isn’t. Yet my partner spontaneously started to report having a lot of vivid dreams about strange things he wouldn’t normally dream about - including a dream in which he was talking to someone and HE told them “I smoke changa for meditation.” Although he respects entheogens and uses them, he’s not a nerd about them to do much research, and like I said he doesn’t consciously want anything to do with my changa. So what was strangest to me about this is… at that point, I’d never told him people use changa for meditation, or described my current changa experiences that way. Yet people use changa for meditation, and he has been dealing with a lot of stress lately, and suddenly… a dream where his dream self smokes changa for meditation. Just…. what? (Incidentally, I researched it but I don’t think he can smoke changa because he takes lisinopril for high blood pressure).
In addition to the night time stuff, another “extended effect” I have been experiencing is that, even though I don’t mix marijuana or alcohol with changa, I noticed that if I smoked MJ or drank anything for about a week after changa, there was a good chance whatever state of alteration I experienced would become a little trippy. I’ve had a few mushroom or LSD flashbacks when stoned before, but those only occur when the planets align, as if all the energy and my mental state has to put me in just the right mood. Not so with this. Basically, if I got moderately stoned or drunk, I would go into a pleasantly, mildly psychedelic mental space, and have mild perceptual effects that definitely seemed like changa/DMT not anything else. Like the night visions, this effect would taper off throughout the week. I wasn’t extremely concerned about this initially, since it seemed sensible that pot in particular could trigger a flashback. I was just surprised at how consistent this was, as long as I reached a certain level of high (or drunk, but pot is much more frequent for me).
As I continued to smoke changa off and on, both the night time effects and the likelyhood of mild “changa flashbacks” when otherwise altered seemed to build. They still diminished throughout the week, but it seemed that each time I did smoke it, these odd effects would come back a little stronger and then have to diminish from that point. Once, as I was going to sleep, this vivid, colorful Cheshire Cat-like being flashed before my closed eyes so intensely that my initial thought was “shit I’m about to breakthrough,” but it went away the second I startled. I wondered, was it the harmalas staying in my system longer than I expected? I read about people smoking changa with much greater frequency than I do, and it seemed like most concerns over RIMAs were minor. I decided to do a bit of informal experimentation.
After almost two weeks without changa, and with all these effects seeming to have dissipated, I did a single changa session during the afternoon instead of the evening. I smoked 40 mg only (presumably about 20 mg of DMT), spread over an hour and a half span of time, keeping it extremely light. During this trip, I WAS meditating with it, just taking a puff here and there to keep me in a certain mental zone. I had no real visuals, just the slightest shift to my perception and a sense of being disconnected from my body. Probably the lightest changa trip I’ve actually taken. I had an afterglow that lasted maybe an hour, tops. For several hours before bed, I was totally sober, no noticeable effects at all. A couple hours before bed, I smoke a bowl of MJ, curious if it would rewaken the effects. It didn’t. I just felt stoned, nothing happened at all. I had no trouble going to bed, no hypnagogic imagery as I went to sleep. I thought to myself, “Ahah! The changa trip was much too light to cause those after effects this time.”
Well, remember I said insomnia is normal for me. I woke up at 3 AM, and I did not feel trippy as I did waking up in the middle of the night after other changa sessions (I also wasn’t stoned anymore). I read for an hour, before it became clear I wasn’t going to get sleepy anytime soon. So, I took some hits off my MJ vape pen, because when I have a bought of insomnia pot helps, yet I didn’t want to mess with packing a bowl in the middle of the night. This does make me sleepy, so I lay down. IDK if it was because it was a vape pen and not the bowl of flower I smoked earlier, but I start to hear the carrier wave, see the chrysanthemum and then… basically a second changa trip occured, only much more intense than the actual changa session I had 12 hours before. It wasn’t a breakthrough, but I became fully aware of entities in my room and communicating with me in my mind and body. I had mild open-eye visuals, moderate visuals when closing my eyes, and just a lot of “weird stuff.” For example, I became aware that an entity was shining a deep, blood red light that looked like a laser (but a darker color than a usual red laser), into my left eye in a similar way to if a doctor is looking in your eye. When this happened I startled and it stopped, but the thing that creeped me out about this was that for 10 days afterwards, my left eyelid twitched continually. I also became aware that my sweat somehow smelled like DMT - I’ll experience that kind of thing with mushrooms, but with this? The peak of this “bonus trip” lasted 2 hours. At the end, I felt a ball of warm energy move down the length of my body from my head down, and when it got to the bottom, I suddenly had to run to the bathroom to have a mild, caapi-like purge. After this, the bulk of the experience was over, but I remained trippy for another two hours in the sense that I felt like I was dreaming (I was fully aware I wasn’t, however), and patterns/colors were popping out at me. I remind you, this occurred 12+ hours after my lightest changa trip ever, after almost two weeks without changa, after all effects had stopped, after I had not successfully reinstated the effects with MJ flower, and it was/still is the most intense of the “night visions” I’ve had.
In the few months I’ve been experimenting with changa, I’ve also taken LSD twice. The first time was 140 mcg, 5 days after smoking changa, the second was 125 mcg, 10 days after smoking changa. At the time of the first LSD trip, I had at that point noticed that pot sometimes caused a changa flashback, so I wondered if that would happen on LSD. The first time, it didn’t, and in fact I felt like the LSD erased any trace of the changa effects in me. But the second time, on a lower dose of LSD, with twice as much span of time between changa and LSD (and in fact, my last changa trip at that point was also the ultra-light afternoon trip I described above), it got weird. I have taken a LOT of LSD in my lifetime, and I feel like I know its effects very well, that there is a certain predictable timeline my LSD trips tend to take, even when the content/nature of the trip varies. The first portion of the trip progressed pretty normally, and after four hours I felt that I had reached the plateau. Well, as I got up out of bed and started moving around, I realized that no, some kind of SECOND peak was being triggered, and it was of a very different nature than the first. I started feeling really disconnected from reality in a way I never have on LSD even at high doses. I put on Lord of the Rings, because that’s my go-to movie to try to stabilize myself. My god, Gandalf and the Hobbits were gonna become entities, I was just on the edge of starting to think they were real beings talking to me, almost becoming immersed in the movie as if it was an alternate reality I was observing, even though I’ve watched the movie countless times. Then the CEV visuals, which up until this point had been typical hippy rainbow LSD stuff, started to change and become more Ayahuasca-like. The colors became like black light, a gigantic serpent head appeared and there were vines and jungle animals everywhere, and then suddenly, THERE WERE WILD ANIMALS IN MY HEAD. I don’t mean the visuals of the wild animals, I mean there were wild animals in my head. That’s the only way I can describe what happened then. I think it’s safe to say this is not normal for LSD.
I admit, I got pretty scared at this point, wondering if I was just about to have the equivalent of a 12-hour changa trip precipitated by LSD. But thankfully, this moment of “wild animals in my head” only lasted for a few minutes, and the whole “secondary peak” was maybe an hour, but goddamn it was weird, and made me scared to try LSD again unless I’m sure the changa is out of me because, I think if I was in a changa trip for 12 hours I might never be able to return to normal life again.
Soooo… is any of this to be expected, or is this outside the bounds of normal changa unpredictability? Honestly, I find these effects intriguing, but obviously I don’t want to lose my mind or find myself on a seriously unexpected changa trip. Am I unusually sensitive to changa and perhaps I need to avoid it? Was there a crazy amount of harmalas in my caapi menstruum rather than the “not enough” I feared, causing changa effects to stay in my system much longer than expected and continue to build even after longer spans of not smoking? Has changa altered the reality of my household without everyone even taking it? Or did I already lose my mind? Please advise.
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