DOSE:

1/2 bowl

smoked

Cannabis

It's not often that I write trip reports for effects gotten from cannabis alone, but some experiences are worth documenting. In my little bit over half a decade of hallucinogen use I've pretty much been across the board, building up moderate to high experience with psychedelics, dissociatives, deliriants, salvia, amanitas, and cannabinoids, and despite this, I still find cannabis itself to be one of the most profound hallucinogens by far. This was just another in a long line of experiences that remind me why I love this wonderful plant so dearly.

For me, cannabis has always been powerful to varying degrees. Before I built up a tolerance to it from regular use, the way that it would affect me is most alike what I would expect out of a moderately heavy dose of a dissociative today, in terms of anesthesia, time dilation, and feelings of floating behind myself. I was only using cannabis for a short amount of time before I started using psychedelics as well, so I'll never know if I would have started getting any sensory visuals on cannabis by itself if I had stayed with it alone long enough and learned how to use it right, but what I can say is that I definitely started getting those things on it once I started tripping frequently. For a while I thought that cannabis was merely reproducing bits and pieces of visuals from past hallucinogenic experiences I'd had, which I think it does in me to some minor extent due to faint HPPD-like symptoms, but eventually I realized that the experience it produces in me is actually quite unique from others in many ways.

The primary way that I'm able to obtain significant hallucinations from regular doses of cannabis is to smoke while lying down in my bed with the darkness already overtaking me, and then letting things develop from there. I realized this shortly after I started using psychedelics regularly, and ever since then this practice has become a favorite of mine. Back then, the most I was likely to get from doing this was faint colorful patterns that reminded me of serotonergics, but were definitely structured a little bit differently. Over time, as my openness to other hallucinogenic experiences also increased, I began to see colorful flashing imagery of mostly trippy faces, animals, and indistinguishable objects mixed in with the geometry. It's still faint compared to the bold neon colors of a psychedelic, but when I really let it build up it can still become pretty vivid and overwhelming. Through practicing getting myself into a perfectly relaxed state in bed and trying to meditate as these visuals formed, I learned how to let them grow stronger and stronger with less and less effort.

As a part of practicing meditation, I had also ended up stumbling on to something unexpected from all this, something which was more about my body feeling than about the visuals I had been trying to bring out. I noticed that while keeping myself as still and comfortable as possible, I would feel myself, physically in some ways and yet not in others, sinking into the bed. Since I was doing this pretty frequently, it didn't take me long to realize that I could manipulate this sensation by trying to focus or unfocus my mind in any ways that I could to see if I could make it become more intense and disruptive to my normal sensory perception. It was fun just messing with my proprioception for a while, but once I started getting really good at it I realized that I was beginning to touch upon something that could become fairly out-of-body. Unfortunately, back then, I was in no way ready to experience any of the more mystical states that hallucinogens can provide. I ended up being able to take my meditation all the way to what felt like a breaking point many times, to a point where my heart would be pounding with anticipation and I almost felt like my body was shaking from sensory overload, but I was never able to take it further than that no matter how hard I tried or wanted to. After a while, the strain it was putting on my body actually started to make me kind of nervous, and I quit and then mostly forgot about this practice for quite some time....

Fast forward a couple of years, and I've come quite a long way with being able to properly submit myself to a hallucinogenic experience. Psychedelics, dissociatives, amanitas, and even salvia I've now managed to have wonderfully euphoric experiences of pure loss of reality on simply from finally being able to just let go without fear. Even with cannabis, as my skills in this area have developed, very infrequently I've found myself coincidentally in bed in the dark while very high again and was able to snap out of normal consciousness for just a second, but long enough to ignite some very psychedelic imagery and fractal patterns moving around the darkness in my room, more on the level of what I would expect from something like LSD than just my usual cannabis in-darkness visuals. However, in that time I was really just taking advantage of my increased capacity to hallucinate, and not trying to meditate again like I had before. However, within the past few days I was finding my desire to attempt this again increasing.... Now that I've started experimenting with Amanita pantherina over the past couple of weeks and have been finding even it a remarkably easy substance to work with when you don't fight it, I've been wondering where exactly I'm going to go next in the hallucinogenic world. I feel like I've covered the six most important (to me) categories of psychoactives, and it's not like I'm totally done with them, but I suppose I was just waiting to discover something new. Maybe this is why I ended up trying my old technique of smoking in bed and meditating again, hoping it might prove interesting again for a little while... but honestly, I really don't think I ever expected it to go like this.

I had a feeling that I wouldn't need much cannabis, as I've been going so deep on so many hallucinogens lately that I'm extremely sensitive to such altered states at the moment. But really, I was still just expecting this to be some fun imagery and a relaxing body feeling. I ended up smoking the first half or so of the bowl I had loaded, then made myself comfy in bed while lying on my back and staring up into the darkness. The playful, colorful visuals started showing up easily, and for a moment I just left them stretch and grow. Shortly afterwards I felt the weight pulling me down into the bed again, and that was when I knew for sure that I was going to give it another shot. The main problem that I can always recall with this is that I lose focus too easily to keep it going.... I feel like there are actually two different forces at work, one of which slowly pulls me down out of my body, and one of which overwhelms my perception with sensory distortions and hallucinations all swirling around the center point in my vision. I kind of always felt like I had to somehow figure out how to cause both of these things to become stronger at the same time yet passively to both, not focusing too much on one to let the other go, but not focusing too little on either that I just zone out or something. It was a difficult task, one that I never felt like I could quite get right, until this time. It caught me by surprise because I had been so conditioned to this whole process failing, but I quickly caught myself from mentally drifting too much and just tried to let the effects grow as much as possible.

The visuals overwhelmed me to the point that sensory input was no longer making sense, and things were starting to seem very scrambled. In some way I felt that I could tell me heart was pounding like it would have been in this situation before, but I felt no fear or hesitation about it, and I was becoming so distanced from it that I could barely notice it anyway. Extremely complex and psychedelic visions were starting to wash into my perception at an increasingly faster rate, and I suddenly felt something that I knew so very well from previous experiences in which I had come to this point of climaxing tension before just to realize that there's only one answer: you just have to let go. I did so, and the experience, and the hallucinations, erupted into a new level of intensity. I felt myself becoming part of the hallucinogenic experience, as my body was comprised of several intricate fractal designs, geometric jewels, and dark neon colors. I felt still first person in a way, but my point of reference was starting to spiral around my body in a way that felt very freeing. As my emotional release continued, female hands were reaching up around my body, wrapping themselves around me in a way that felt quite erotic, until they covered literally every inch of free skin I had. As this process completed and my perception spun too far away from myself, my vision awareness of overcome with a brilliantly bright white light, and before I could even grasp what was happening, everything was gone.

Suddenly, I found my normal conscious awareness re-emerging, but I was still floating in this white void. I had a perception of my body, but there was no 'solid' one. Rather, I was still allowing my mind to go insane with simply letting go into the craziness of it all, and much as I tend to find when I simply release control, the experience was sculpting itself in just the way I would have tried to control it to go in anyway. In this case, I actually found myself rapidly transforming through many different bodies, at a speed that was actually reminscent of smoked DMT. These bodies, rather than being mystical entities or something, were mostly people I know or at least recognize, and were all female. Friends, acquaintences, celebrities, models, fetish icons, and so on. Though this was happening remarkably fast, and as I said in a way it was just an emotional release, it was still being guided very much by my desires. I felt as though I had total control of the life I wanted to live, and so I felt the need to experience as many different ones as possible.

The most amazing part for me was the fact that whenever my new body would develop, whoever the person was and whatever they were wearing, I would actually physically feel it as own body and clothing. This is something that has happened to me on large doses of psychedelics before like LSD, but during those trips, the people I become get progressively more abstract, and of course my mind is also speeding out of control. During this experience with cannabis, I felt totally and utterly lucid, like I was perfectly aware and could guide the experience in any way I wanted. With this thought in mind, I actually started trying to generate an entire sexual fantasy around one of personas, which I actually felt materializing very vividly in my mind's eye, but at that point the whole thing felt as though it was fading like waking up from a lucid dream, and my idea never was able to burst forth into full sensory perception. I was disappointed that the experience was passing, but having had plenty of lucid dream practice to make peace with this feeling, I simply relaxed myself and then opened my eyes again in the physical world.

Upon emerging from this experience, I burst into euphoric laughter similarly to returning from the void after nitrous oxide or salvia, for me anyway. It wasn't as uproarious as those experiences, but it might have been if I didn't have to keep the volume down at the moment. I felt pretty amazing about what I had gone through, and understandably really wished that I could get back to that and experience more. However, I calmed myself and reminded myself that special moments like that should be appreciated for what they are, and that if I've come this far already, obviously I should be able to take it even further in the future with more practice. I also know that I need to be slowing down my cannabis use lately as I think it's really been getting to me.... I've been exhibiting a lot of schizoid behaviors lately which smoking cannabis very frequently seems to do to me, and I'm a little worried about dislodging something in my brain with all of the tripping I've been doing lately, so I definitely wanted to fight my desire to just jump right in and try to recreate a powerful hallucinogenic experience immediately after it initially ended. Actually, I'm thinking that this experience may even mark the start of my new good break with cannabis, since I really don't know how I could top that as a sign that my practice really has been for something good, and now maybe it's time to give myself a good rest again before continuing on....

In any case, my respect for cannabis remains as high as it ever was after this experience, or possibly even higher than that. I am very happy that my explorations into other hallucinogens which get their most profound effects from being able to release yourself into their experiences have helped me to be able to apply the same lessons to cannabis as well, because otherwise I would never be able to have incredible trips such as this. After everything I've been through lately and coming to really know all of these major classes of hallucinogens, I really don't know what to feel other than awe, and delirious excitement. These are some truly profound compounds we put into our bodies, and even what many think of as the tamest of them can just as humbling as any other. This is a night I will surely not soon forget, and hopefully there will be many more like it in the years to come.

Exp Year: 2014	ExpID: 105116
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jun 17, 2020	Views: 2,178
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
Cannabis (1) : Retrospective / Summary (11), General (1), Alone (16)