DOSE:

180 mg

insufflated

Ketamine

(powder / crystals)

BODY WEIGHT:

160 lb

Prior to this experience, I’d been using about 50mg daily for four days, so my tolerance was up. These lighter doses provided the blurry psychological intrigue that made mundane things, such as local geology or late-80’s turntable technology, suddenly very profound.

But for me the real value of this compound is its ability to, at the right dose, send one headfirst into a sprawling chasm of lightshows, bizarrely synestheticized memories, and questionable epiphanies. The “hole” is where it’s at, and I want in.
Considering my tolerance, weight (160lbs), and experience with ketamine, I arrived at 180mg as a suitable dose.

Set/setting: At my apartment by myself, feeling good emotionally and physically. No time constraints or responsibilities that evening, and my phone is on silent. I’d holed before, was cognizant of the sometimes-jarring physical sensations and was ready to encounter them without worry. I’m recalling this trip without having taken notes, save for one during the come up, which was indirectly valuable at describing my reaction to the drug.

00:00
I weigh out the crystalline solids, crush them up with a non-porous mortal and pestle, then arrange two lines to snort. I snort both lines successfully and feel a mild burn that persists for a few minutes.

I survey my living room for possible pitfalls and opportunities and notice that I’ve left a wine-fault aroma kit open. I decide that spilling a vial of trichloroanisole on my coffee table would be a bummer during and long after my trip, but also think that a little sensory analysis could be a fun game to play, and dip a few paper strips into the vials, and arrange them on a sheet of paper next to their basic descriptors. I pour myself a glass of water and wait for the onset.

00:15
I begin to feel the telltale numbness and light-headedness and decide to go the bathroom to clear my nostrils with water. I get a mild drip, but it seems like most of the substance has been absorbed. It occurs to me that I’ll want to hear some music during my trip, and I walk over to my turntable and put Caribou’s SWIM on the platter. It also occurs to me that this a 45rpm double-lp, and I’ll need to flip and replace a few times, so I queue up the album on my phone and hook up my headphones so I don’t have to mess with the turntable while physically impaired. Alright. Let’s do this!

00:20
Here it is; I have a sensation that I’m falling down a hole, surrounded by rushing vapor. It feels like my brain is swimming in a jacuzzi of simultaneously hot and cold cerebrospinal fluid. I feel giddy and euphoric. The dissociative comeup always compels me to delve into esoteric subjects, and fermentation science is a favorite, so I begin smelling my way through the aroma strips; hydrogen disulfide, ethyl acetate, and geraniol all smell the way I remember them, but geosmin gives me pause, and I am compelled to write about it:

Geosmin, the strange fungal metabolite, smells like damp soil, almost mushroomy. Pinot Noirs, especially those from France often express this. Amazing that it is detectable at threshold of < 300 nanograms/liter. A few nanograms less and a $500 bottle of wine loses its soul. A few hundred more and it becomes undrinkable. So bizarre that humans had stumbled upon this basically rotten ethanolic jar of fruit called wine thousands of years ago and have been refining its production ever since, fetishizing its sensory aspects and geographic idiosyncrasies endlessly. But if it wasn’t intoxicating, would anyone have cared? What implications does this have for…

I’ll spare you the rest. It’s amazing how such a banal bit of knowledge becomes epiphanic at the time. This effect is unique to dissociatives, for me at least. Psychedelics focus my intellection outwards and make me feel dumb and impotent in the face of the vastness of everything. Dissociatives make me feel as if I’m a genius whose passing gaze illuminates previously undiscovered knowledge hidden in plain sight.

00:25
Side A ends, and as I clumsily pull the tone arm back to its cradle, I realize that vinyl is a great idea if and only if one has fine-motor control at their disposal. I put on the headphones and begin playing the rest of the album.

00:30
At this point, I am too high to stand and lay down on my couch. I feel like I’m rushing through space on a bullet-train with no walls or roof. It is exhilarating and terrifying. I close my eyes, time loses meaning, and the intense visuals begin.

First there is darkness. I no longer feel any sense of physicality, just a placid numbness. I feel content. I am in a cave, disembodied and floating, and the walls around me are somehow close and incredibly far away. As my “eyes” pan over the cave walls there is a void or blackness always at the periphery, but it has the sense of a starless night sky, rather than merely an absence of light. Hard to put into words, but this sensation of night accompanies me throughout the rest of my trip. Continuing through the cave, I notice that the walls are in a constant state of disintegration and regeneration, moving in a way that doesn't make sense for rock to move.

I suddenly realize that I am not in a cave, but rather at the center of a massive clay pot on a spinning wheel. The walls of the clay pot are shimmering and liquid. There is chromatic color; first it is all blue, then all red, then green. I can change the color at will, but for some reason can’t mix different hues. It’s difficult to describe my perspective here, but it’s something like a panopticon. I’m seeing the cylindrical paste spinning around me with 360 degrees of vision and it’s incredibly beautiful. Somewhere in this panopticon of spinning clay there is a single black pixel (the night), and as soon as I notice it becomes “closer” and I begin travelling into this weird Lynchian black tunnel and finally emerge out into a Saharan landscape populated by undulating dunes of blue sand. The landscape is domed by a weirdly artificial starscape, as if the stars were optical lights poking through black construction paper. I realize I am free to create whatever I’d like in this gigantic sand box, and start building pyramids, generating them brick by brick. The pyramids rise from the earth seemingly thousands of feet high, and upon laying the vertex stone, they are suffused with neon red light and I am catapulted to the next empty swathe of land. Every pyramid I build has a unique texture, and these textures seem linked to different memories. A raw steel pyramid draws material from my job at an industrial facility and I remember the excitement and awe that the job induced at times. A wooden pyramid has the same grain as the dinner table I sat at as a child, and I am flooded with nostalgia. It is incredibly fun, profound, and strange. I feel a sense of agency in creation that only dissociatives provide. A lucid dream that I control.

I eventually notice that there is no music playing and at this point the trip begins to recede. I realize where I am; lying on my couch in my living room. I look around with my eyes still closed and I can somehow see my living room. It’s like sonar. I see the outlines of objects and walls in the room and I reach out and touch the table in front of me. My hand meets the physical table exactly where I envision it and I’m blown away by this chemically induced night-vision. I open my eyes and everything looks as it did with my eyes shut, but with more color and detail.

01:10
I sit there on the couch contemplating what I’ve seen. I’m still high, but at this point I know nothing remarkable is going to happen. I listen to some music and zone out.

02:30
I am back to baseline and ready to sleep, which I manage to do without issue. The next day I feel mostly normal, if a bit groggy.

I am amazed at how fun and hallucinatory this experience was. Normally, ketamine makes me more ruminative and is nowhere near as visual. For whatever reason, the 2F-DCK I took gave me some of the most intense visuals I had ever seen and left me with a great deal of control over what I saw. I felt like my visions had physical dimension that I could move within and abandon at any time. The potential for this compound is incredible. Nowhere near as manic/euphoric as MXE, but only MXE gave me this same feeling of control. I’m excited to keep exploring with 2F-DCK.

Exp Year: 2020	ExpID: 113978
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 25
Published: Jan 18, 2020	Views: 813
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