Below is posted my first true experience with 5-MeO-DMT, and my only one with a DMT compound. It was terrible, yes, but it did little to lessen my desire to explore the tryptamines. What it did push me to do is center myself mentally and spiritually- to try to learn what it means to be at peace in my mind, and how that feeling should be applied to my trips.
Before last night, I had taken 5-MeO-DMT once before: 10mg through a glass pipe. The experience was remarkable; I was overwhelmed by the intensity of the sensation. But that was the extent of the trip - an unbelievably intense physical feeling. For the ten minutes it lasted, my mind was clear and I was unafraid. After the comedown and a good 15 minutes of speechlessness to gather my thoughts, I felt fine enough to think about the implications of the drug. I decided 1. It was my most intense drug experience to date (I have felt ego death, disappeared into the timeless nitrous void during the peak of an MAOI potentiated psilocybin trip, and surfed upon seas of fractals on acid, so it's saying something) 2. It was neither positive, nor negative 3. I could not recommend it, but would not tell someone to stay away from it either.
I watched five friends have nearly identical experiences, so I began to get a feel for the drug. Flash forward a few weeks to last night - my friend and fellow psychonaut K is taking a 10mg dose. We've procured an empty room with a large bed. He was using a small glass pipe, as we had been for most previous doses. I left him in the room for around 15 minutes before checking in on him. He was sorry to report that his trip was like his others - not particularly intense and somewhat uncomfortable. I decided that I needed to try it a second time.
We concluded that a different smoking method was needed, so I borrowed a friend's 24' glass bong. I also changed into more comfortable clothes, and gathered my sleep mask, closed-ear headphones, and iPod. K measured out 18mg on his digital scale, and we packed the bowl using some ash from some previously smoked weed. I queued Stars of the Lid on the iPod, put the headphones on, and put the sleep mask on my forehead so I could easily flip it down over my eyes. K and my other friend W, whose room I was in, left me alone at my request.
In the past months, as I began probing further into the psychedelic experience, I have been wondering how to prepare myself mentally for a spiritual trip. It has yet to become clear to me. Last night, as I sat on the bed, lighter in hand and bowl ready, I dismissed my lack of mental focus with my normal 'I'll be fine' rationale. I was totally wrong.
I've heard the 5-MeO-DMT comeup compared to being shot out of a cannon. My first trip was like that - a nearly instantaneous and overwhelmingly intense wave of bizarre body feeling. This time, after I slowly worked the flame of the lighter above the bowl to vaporize the crystals, and then ripped it to burn everything else, I felt something quite different. I realized as I inhaled that I was getting a massive hit. My lungs burned as I tried to remember what to do. I could feel it coming. I set down the bong and lighter, and reached to pull down the sleep mask as I laid back. Nothing could have ever prepared me for what was about to happen.
After my first 5-MeO trip I said that trying to prepare for the comeup is like trying to prepare to get hit by a bus - it doesn't matter what you do, you're going to be knocked on your ass. I didn't know how right I was. It hit me as I exhaled. I have no idea how much smoke came out of my lungs because I was in another dimension. The only thing I can compare it to is Nitrous. I love nitrous - love the intensity, the euphoria, the endless void of darkness and frequency the world becomes on it. If you know the first few seconds after you exhale nitrous, the first 3 or so seconds of 5-MeO-DMT were similar. But, unlike nitrous, the rapid acceleration of intensity didn't stop. I wasn't shot out of a cannon, I was dropped out of an airplane.
I fell into what I can best describe as pure intensity. There was no self, nothing to separate me from the sensation. It was overwhelming, unstoppable, uncontrollable, and after the first few moments, horrifying. I could only tell time by varying levels in the amount of suffering I was enduring. I had no thought, no intention other than that what was happening needed to stop. The fear grew and intensified just as the original feeling had. Have you ever been on a rollercoaster, and right as you reach the peak before the giant drop, felt that terror and regret, that 'I want off this ride now' feeling? This was akin to that, but I felt it as much as a human being could possibly feel it. All I could feel was fear. I was essentially reduced to an animal in pain - I was operating on pure instinct within the void. I couldn't see or hear.
I can't say how long it felt like I was falling, things were too intense for me to grasp what was happening. I eventually came down enough to see. My vision was reduced to a very blurry, very simple haze of meaningless objects. It didn't make much difference at that point.
I started to try to make sense of what was going on, and instead of the pure feeling I had before, I began to detect other, more specific feelings. I was being stretched and pulled through some kind of fractalline black hole, twisting and contorting into its shape. In a bout of sheer terror, I realized that my lower jaw was twisting in on itself, rolling up like a carpet into my skull. The rest of my body was following suit, legs through abdomen, into a spiral. I was coherent enough at this point to think 'this is not happening to me.' I could still detect that my tongue was in my mouth, so I knew it wasn't flowing into my throat like I felt it was. If I had been slightly less conscious of the fact that I was on a drug, and that I was hallucinating, I think I would have endured far greater horror at what was happening to me. It was still torture.
Things came down further. Both K and W were sitting on the edges of the bed, attempting to speak to me perhaps. Compared to any mushroom or acid trip I had experienced, I was still tripping harder than I ever had in my life. Objects jerked into focus, and back again, as if I was watching a flip book comic or low FPS film. My hands and head revolved along spiraled grooves of gravity. I became far more clear headed.
Over the next 3-4 hours I tried my best to calm down and consider my experience, and listened with shock as my friends told me what happened. Shortly after I went into the room, they heard violent and terrified screaming. I was crying for help, screaming in agony for it to stop. I do not recall this in the slightest. They watched helplessly for ten minutes as I convulsed and contorted on the bed, spasming, whimpering, and eating food that wasn't there. At one point a smile crossed my face. I couldn't see or hear them as they tried to help me. As I came down, it took some time for me to recognize them as human, and then as my friends.
I tripped hard for two hours after the initial experience, and was still tripping intensely when I went to bed four hours later. I found my hands moving in spiral patterns, and could still feel the jolts of energy moving from arm to arm. As I type this now, I can still sense the bizarre tactile effect the 5-MeO-DMT has. I dosed over 14 hours ago.
I've heard that 5-MeO-DMT has polarizing effects - some love it and some hate it. I can't say in my experience if this is true. My best explanation for what happened to me could be that my lack of mental/spiritual preparation, compounded with anxiety about a test the next day, resulted in an infinitely magnified feeling of pure panic and fear. I feel like I have to revisit the drug. If the earlier statement is true, and some people are just affected negatively by it, I suppose I am doomed to another traumatic episode. But I feel a need to conquer it - a need to know what happened. I'm going to need help with the mental problems I have. I don't know where to begin.
I want people to be aware of what this drug is capable of. Read trip reports - there are people who have anxiety attacks every time they think of their 5-MeO-DMT trip, people who can't touch psychedelics for months or even ever again without feeling that fear. K read James Oroc's Tryptamine Palace. The author spends the majority of the book singing the praises of 5-MeO-DMT, describing the positive spiritual effects of the drug. I don't doubt his story, but the impression he gives is that 5-MeO is a powerful and uplifting tryptamine. I'm here to give an account of its dark side. I thought that as an experienced psychedelic user I could handle whatever came my way. I was wrong. Please think heavily about the implications of using this drug.