DOSE: T+ 0:00	55 mg	oral	4-AcO-DMT	(capsule)
T+ 2:30	30 mg	oral	4-AcO-DMT	(capsule)

BODY WEIGHT:

210 lb

4-AcO-DMT was my favorite psychedelic, I decided. It was easy to find, it was easy to ingest, and the effects set in noticeably faster than LSD or mushrooms. It was possible I preferred shrooms, but 4-AcO seemed very similar, and to be honest I kind of liked the idea of being a psychonautic hipster and taking a weird research chemical that many people had never heard of.

I had tripped about 15 times before this, 4 of those times on 4-AcO, and I was feeling confident. Through a few very bad experiences—both by myself and with friends—I had to learned respect and to always trip in a safe environment. I lived with a couple of roommates in a large home, and over time I had prepared my corner of the house to be as cozy and trip-friendly as possible. Feeling prepared and knowledgeable, I weighed out 55mg of 4-AcO on a lab-quality scale, which I then deposited into 2 cellulose capsules. I also measured out a few more capsules for future use. I knew how strong this stuff was, but I had taken 35mg just a few weeks earlier and I wanted to go a level or two further. I knew this would be the deepest I had ever gone, and I was ready. I pressed 'Start' on my phone timer—a ritual of mine to keep myself grounded during the trip.

Imagine my surprise, then, when 2h 30m later I was stone cold sober.

I felt a comeup, yes, but I never peaked. At around the 60m I spent some time in bed and felt like I was on the way up, but when I got out of bed an hour later I realized I wasn't actually tripping. I was frustrated and disappointed, but I decided to give it another 30 minutes to see what happened. I ate some food during this time, but all 30 of those minutes were spent wondering why I wasn't tripping despite taking a very large does of a strong psychedelic that was only 3 weeks old.

So, at the 2h 30m mark, I pulled out the extra capsules I filled earlier. I grabbed 30mg, downed it with a glass of water, and put the rest back. Then I sat in front of my computer and watched some YouTube videos while I waited to see if anything would happen.

40m after my third capsule, something was definitely happening. Like all of my trips before, it started with noticing random things around me that never caught my attention while sober. I felt relieved that I was finally tripping and I was very happy with my decision to take that third pill. I decided to put on some music to keep the positive vibes going. One of the songs that came on had a female singer, and I was completely taken in by her voice. All I wanted was to hear her speak and sing. I realized that I was sexually attracted to her voice. I had had this thought on other trips so it wasn't particularly new or surprising, but I wondered how normal it was. Then, I realized that some inflections of her voice made her sound exactly like my long-time girlfriend—whose name is L—and that voice had probably been a big part of my attraction to my girlfriend all this time.

During this period I gagged a few times. I always gag a little bit on the comeup for psychedelics so this was nothing alarming. I thought about how tragic it was that I always felt sick at some point during my trips but that, ironically, the gags were so familiar at this point that they were almost comforting. I wouldn't normally mention this but it will be relevant later.

I want to point out that at no point during the comeup did I even consider that I had really taken the full 85mg I had ingested. In my mind, there was no way in hell those 55mg were ever going to hit me with full force. I guessed that the total amount I had taken would probably feel closer to 35mg. I didn't have an explanation for why, but I fully believed that the 4-AcO had lost much of its potency.

At about the 3h 45m mark (from the first dose) I started to feel a little overwhelmed. I realized the trip was becoming very strong and I felt the need to lie down, but I didn't want to go back to my bed. I searched Google for "extremely relaxing music" and clicked on a video that showed a beach and played soft ambient music with the sound of waves. Then I wrapped myself in an extremely soft blanket that L bought me. I dropped to the ground and squirmed around in the blanket, feeling its softness on my skin. I felt extremely comfortable, and I started to feel emotional. I felt like I was a pathetic human being but that I was so lucky to have the people around me love me as much as they did. I started to feel extremely grateful to L, and I started saying "I love you L" over and over out loud while squirming in the blanket. Her caring and tenderness were allowing me to feel that moment of bliss.

All of the sudden, I felt very alone. See, L and I lived in different parts of the country, and it had been a very long time since I had seen her. In fact, none of my loved ones lived near me anymore. This realization hit me very hard. I felt like an idiot, utterly alone, writhing on the dirty floor of his room because he took too many drugs. This lack of social interaction made me feel like I was barely human.

At this time I started to feel sick. I felt like I needed to gag again. I started to worry that maybe I wasn't even human; maybe I was just a dumb animal who accidentally ate the wrong thing. Did I even take drugs? Maybe this wasn't even a trip. I started dry heaving on the ground and I felt very sick. I always gag on the comeup, but I NEVER gag during the peak, so this scared me. Maybe I actually was sick. Maybe I was VERY sick. I started to dread that something was very wrong. I felt flashes of hot and cold, like I had a fever. I knew that people could hallucinate with very high fevers, and I suddenly became very convinced that I might be dying. I got so sick and had such a high fever that my brain was malfunctioning. I could actually die. The waves from the music sounded like they came from all around me, and I realized I was on the shores of death. I was actually dying. I was definitely going to die any minute. If I didn't get to a hospital I was going to die but I was completely incapable of using my phone and calling for help.

I wanted to be okay with dying, but I couldn't convince myself it was okay. I had too many loose ends in my life. I needed to marry L and live life together with her before I died. I couldn't just leave her alone. She would be absolutely devastated if I died right now.

That's when I realized I couldn't remember what L looked like. In fact, I couldn't perceive or remember the world around me at all. I couldn't remember what my brother looked like, or my mother, or even the room I was in. I couldn't remember the last time I saw any of it. All of my memories felt very fake. Everything I could imagine felt like a far off dream that all this time I had forgotten to question. I realized I had never lived at all—not even a single moment of my life. I could remember waking up from sleep and going to sleep, but nothing in between felt real. Everything felt so dreamlike, like the twilight as you lie in bed at night waiting to fall asleep. Had I ever actually slept? Was anything real? Did I spend my entire life in a dreamy state, recalling false memories, waiting for a sleep that would never come?

I then had the very strong sense that time and reality were not real. I was a cosmic being, trapped in the fabric of the universe like a single puzzle piece. Nothing had ever happened. It was all in my mind. Reality itself was only ever what I imagined it to be. All of the pain and suffering in the world did not exist, except I imagined it, which caused it to exist in my mind. Because of this, in a very real sense, I caused all pain and suffering in the world. I could stop it if only I could avoid thinking about it, but avoiding thinking of it meant actually thinking of it, so I was stuck in a loop. In fact, everything was a loop. I existed in this state for eternity, trapped in looping memories from my own mind, but there was no "future." There would never be new memories. The very few things I remembered were all there was. The universe was hopeless and empty. L did not exist. No one existed. I was absolutely, completely alone.

I tried very hard to come to terms with this, but I couldn't. I felt unbearable loneliness. I felt like I had always lived and always would live, completely inert, stuck in time. Nothing would ever change. I felt it was possible that I was literally in hell. Perhaps there were other celestial beings who actually had it figured out. They had figured out how to live without time. I could not perceive them because I could perceive nothing other than my own little pocket of dimensional space. I was utterly irrelevant and doomed. I wanted to die and I wanted everything to stop.

During this time I had a brief moment of clarity. I realized for a moment that I did have memories of taking drugs, and that if nothing else I might be able to go back to my illusion of a life once the drugs wore off. I remembered that I had started a timer on my phone. I did not feel like I could understand the timer if I looked at it, but I wanted to see it to prove to me that the trip had progressed. I wanted proof that time had moved. I wanted proof that this would end. So, with a lot of effort, I managed to pull up the clock app on my phone and clicked over to the stopwatch tab.

00:00.00

On some level I knew I had stupidly reset the timer at some point, but in this moment my mind filled to the brim with despair. It was the deepest, darkest, blackest place I have ever been to in my entire life. I had no proof that time had ever moved. L was not real. Nothing was real. I was stuck. I laid there on the floor, filled with self-pity and hopelessness, for what felt like hours.

Then, suddenly, I felt like maybe I wasn't actually about to die. I felt like I could sit up, and so I did.

I managed to stand up, still wrapped in my soft blanket, and I stumbled to the bathroom. I peed in the toilet, but it felt wrong, like I was wetting my bed. I had flashes of hope that the trip was over, but then I looked around me and saw the world shifting and morphing, and I realized I shouldn't get so excited because I was still tripping very hard. Except, there WAS a world around me, and it was real. Reality was real.

The realization that reality was real washed over me like the waves of a warm bath. I looked around me and realized that I didn't understand anything. I couldn't tell if it was night or day, I couldn't tell what time it was, and I didn't know what day of the week it was, but I knew that all of those were real things and that I'd be able to know them eventually. I became convinced that I was a literal god, and if I wanted something I could just will it to be. It was night and I wanted it to be morning, so I willed it to be morning, and it worked (that's how I felt at the time—obviously I couldn't actually change night into day). I walked around my apartment willing things to be true, and each time I willed it I got the strong feeling I was successful.

Eventually I felt well enough to leave my room and I went to rest on the living room couch. I realized I wasn't a god and I laughed at how silly it was to believe that. I still didn't understand time or numbers so I just laid there, waiting for my brain to catch up while I basked in absolute contentedness. Nothing mattered except that I wasn't a trapped celestial being, and L actually existed. She was real. Of course she was real. She was real and I was going to be okay.

In the days after the trip, I felt grounded and peaceful. I did not take away any big lessons from the trip, but I felt very emotionally stable and clear of mind. I called L, told her about the trip, and told her I loved her. After talking with some friends and others online, the operating theory is that at least one of the capsules took longer than usual to dissolve, and so I got hit with most of the 85mg after I took the third pill. In retrospect, the trip went way better than it had any right to. Because I was calm for the entire comeup and my room was comfortable, I went through the worst of it without becoming agitated or scared.

Even though I had done something risky and a little irresponsible, I felt appreciative to my sober self for taking my past experiences into account and creating a good trip environment. I wouldn't take that much 4-AcO again on purpose, but in the end it was an extremely beneficial and somewhat spiritual experience for me.

Exp Year: 2018	ExpID: 112696
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 27
Published: May 15, 2019	Views: 2,672
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
4-AcO-DMT (387) : Alone (16), Personal Preparation (45), Train Wrecks & Trip Disasters (7), Difficult Experiences (5), General (1)