DOSE:	1 g	smoked	Cannabis	(gas)
	3 carts.	inhaled	Nitrous Oxide	(gas)

BODY WEIGHT:

132 lb

DISSOCIATIVE INDUCED OBLITERATIVE TERROR, THE AFTERMATH, AND WARNINGS

At the tail end of summer in 2015 I had been living in my house with two of my friends, D and J for almost a year. J easily has the largest network of friends than anyone I know, and as a result, he has the largest network of dependents I know. Throughout the course of our stay in our rented home he had offered shelter and charity to at least three different strangers. Through this “safety net” I met C – a doper who has quite literally seen it all – and his friend N. Around this time I had begun regularly using cannabis (much to a betrayal of principal), and C and N routinely put pressure on me to expand my usage to other substances. One afternoon they came over with canisters of nitrous oxide and began cracking them into balloons and inhaling them. They explained the basic concept to me and by the early evening they had convinced me to try.

The initial experiences were indescribably euphoric. Visually I defaulted to hallucinating fractals, the specificity of which I found to be interesting. In the following weeks I had tried them again once, this time with N alone. I began working my way up to higher doses, setting up two canisters of nitrous at once, then to three. By the time I had acclimated to three canisters at once I began having abstract realizations. By the time the high faded I would be unable to recall what these realizations were, but the basic delusion I operated under was that nitrous (and perhaps dissociatives in general) was a sort of vehicle that carried your mind into an otherwise inaccessible place and that the deeper you “traveled” into this place, the more you acquired answers to profound questions, but by the time you returned you were unable to remember the questions and answers themselves. However, a general feeling of satisfaction resulted in these “journeys” and so I wished to further “expand my knowledge.” Ultimately I assumed that I would return with more and more memory intact until I reached a form of enlightenment.

About a week later, the precise date I cannot remember, I lapsed too far into this phenomenon. On the day of my experience, N and several different friends of D and J were at our house preparing for a barbecue for the next day in honor of J’s twenty-first birthday. We had all been smoking cannabis outside on my porch when C appears at the door with a box of nitrous canisters. Excitedly, and having already consumed about a gram of cannabis, I rushed downstairs to join C and N. At this point I feel that it’s worth mentioning that I am a complete lightweight, and after a gram I was stoned out of my gourd. I find it also relevant to mention that nitrous highs typically only last one to five minutes, maybe ten at most. Immediately, and without even considering the consequences of mixing highs, I requested that C crack three canisters into the balloon for me. He obliged, and listening to the first track off of Tycho’s Dive (an album which admittedly was an inane choice) I began to inhale the nitrous in deep, continuous breaths. Before the balloon was empty I had lost consciousness. At the time I did not remember losing consciousness, and instead I suddenly found myself in a very strange place. From an outside and sober perspective, the experience is best describable in the following.

I was so dissociated from my senses that from my perspective, time had slowed to almost zero. Time was moving so slowly for me I was quite literally only able to have even a single thought about once every three or four seconds. Because my other senses had been rendered essentially useless and visual data from my eyes was coming in as unrecognizable blobs of light and vague shapes instead of as the room around me, I had no frame of reference of the passage of time between my thoughts, so what felt like an eternity passed in those three to four seconds.

Of course, thoughts themselves last only an instant or two, and so in my confusion I could only think the worst to try and rationalize my situation before slipping back into this nothingness.

I remember thinking, “I’m dead.” “The world has ended and this is death.” “Something horrible has happened in existence and suddenly nothing exists, this is nonexistence.” “I’m trapped.” “I must escape.”

This cycle of thought and nothingness continued until suddenly I regained my senses for a moment. Panicked, I was chanting “Oh god, oh god, oh god,” as I sprinted up the staircase before I lapsed back into this state of mind. Strangely, I had a vague memory of seeing myself running up the stairs before I was allowed brief sobriety.

This ended the first phase of my high. The second phase was notably weaker, as between slipping back into nothing I would lose gaps of memory, in effect building up a sort of resistance to the terror of the nothing. The result was a somewhat milder experience, and I suddenly found myself in my room. Then I found myself at the sliding glass door leading to my porch, but turned away from it, like I had started to run back.

At this point I regained my senses again, and all the people who had gathered in the living room were staring at me as I faced them. J asked me if I was alright, to which I could only blink confusedly, trying to clear my vision of fractals and clouds. C and N had at this point ran upstairs after me and as they reached the top, C specifically stated “Don’t worry, I’ve gone through this before,” almost in response to J’s question. At this point I stated, weakly, that I was going to my room to lie down.

I lay in my bed, able to function as a normal person for the time being, but I felt myself gradually starting to slip back into that mindset. I would have to continually “snap myself awake” to keep from fully winding up back where I was. I reached a point where I felt I was going to be unable to stave off the encroaching tide of dissociation, so I instead chose to stand up and go to the bathroom. This feeling of inevitable relapse triggered a deep panic.

I recorded myself briefly on my phone pacing in the bathroom trying desperately to remain sober, but it was a losing battle. I would continually lose myself for a brief moment and then “awaken” in the middle of a different train of thought. Despite the effects growing stronger again (I remember describing the gradually stronger return as coming in “orbits” instead of waves) I was continually repeating to myself “It’s wearing off.”

Again, it got worse, so I chose to step outside onto the porch.

At this point, I was entering my third phase of the high. I was in a full blown panic attack. I was sweating and shaking; anxiety was gripping my stomach. I bowed my head at the railing of the porch to let the wind that was blowing cool off the back of my neck. My friend T showed up at the house and went to the back porch after hearing from everyone what I was going through, and I began to babble at him basic small talk in an attempt to stave off this awful feeling.

Eventually I had to sit down. The high was coming back. Almost as a defense mechanism, my panic attack reached a peak, and I passed out. It was a sober loss of consciousness, unlike the earlier fainting as the result of the initial intake of nitrous.

When I awoke, it had finally passed. Except for the cannabis high, the event had for the most part subsided.

Needless to say, it was the most terrifying experience of my life, but it had several unexpected consequences.

First, if I use cannabis to a high enough degree, the mindset begins to come back. It feels like it felt when I was laying in my room, attempting to fight it off. Before this, I knew I had smoked too much if I was routinely falling asleep and then waking up anxious and nauseous. An unpleasant thing, but not sinking to the depths of terror I now experience as a result of higher doses. The effect is curbed if I drink when I smoke, but of course this is not always an available option. The second consequence is more terrifying.

I began to research into perception, memory, and the nature of oblivion to try and make sense of my situation. My findings were somewhat inconclusive, but shed some light on a few things. My overall conclusion is that human experience is sensory data from our five senses filtered through our ability to think and rationalize. If the senses are taken away, we are only able to think, and it drives us mad. If our ability to think is taken away, we are only able to sense, and it drives us mad.

I was obliterated. Denied my ability to think or sense I gazed without eyes into true oblivion. As with my earlier experiments with nitrous, I came back not remembering truly what happened, but having fragments of thoughts to which I could compare the experience. It creates a rough sketch in my head, a picture of a horrifying nothing gnashing its yawning, eternal maw at me. He seeks my mind. He’s searching for the food he tasted but could not bite into. Truly, I have burned myself on something incomprehensible and dangerous. I have pricked my mind on hell’s needle.

Even as I write this I can see it in the fringes of my vision; tiny clouds of abstract light clutching the corners of my sight. I cannot describe what it looks like, but it is there, forever stained onto my eyes like a scar, and now in between everything I see are little cracks into which nothing gazes at me furtively and with hungry desire.

It is worth mentioning that for most of my life I have struggled with somewhat concerning emotional issues and regular homegrown depression. This of course can attribute the fear to nothing more than neurosis, and indeed I have considered not only this fact, but also the fact that the entire experience itself was nothing more than inane drug induced delusion filtered through a panic attack.

However, the impact it has had on my life is not ignorable. I live in fear now, either rationally or irrationally.

My life has now been split between the before time and the after time. I went through a door I can’t go back through.

Exp Year: 2015	ExpID: 107469
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 20
Published: Aug 27, 2025	Views: Not Supported
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Nitrous Oxide (40), Cannabis (1) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Post Trip Problems (8), Bad Trips (6), Combinations (3)