DOSE:

repeated

smoked

Cannabis

(plant material)

BODY WEIGHT:

115 lb

About Me:
I am fifteen years old and am enrolled in lots of overachiever high school classes and so on and so on. Nevertheless, I am decidedly lazy and inconsistent, maybe pulling an A plus in one unit and perhaps failing the next. Last year I went through a minor depression during which I was slightly paranoid about others’ motives. I have been on a low dose of floexetine (Prozac) for about a half year, and have since have returned back to “normal”. I have no other known afflictions and am on no other medications.

Experience:
Over the course of the past few months, I have become increasingly interested in psychoactives. However, I would describe myself as very inexperienced in this field. Prior to the following experience, I had only experimented with smoking marijuana and consuming alcohol.

About this report:
Yes I know, I know: there are plenty of reports already on Erowid about cannabis. By George, Erowid needs more information about rare psychoactives or potent mixes, not a random girl’s account of smoking lots and lots of weed and tripping out! However, after having culled through a few hundred experience reports, I’ve not yet read many that have described a psychedelic experience the way a complete “newbie” would experience it. Sure, plenty have depicted in great detail going to the neighborhood park and feeling weird and walking around and seeing things weird and feeling stoned and weird weird weird. But few have really emphasized how alien, how inexplicably terrifying, how divine and shining, how clear and how blurry and how beyond…just beyond, is even the most minor psychedelic experience. Perhaps I am merely aggrandizing my own experiences; however, I have a hunch that others have felt similar things regarding the sheer grandeur of psychedelia. I understand that many people do not “trip out” from smoking marijuana by itself, but I myself have cracked open the door to the crazy, wonderful world of psychedelia from doing so. I wrote the following account while coming down from the high—thus, it’s very possible that I bartered some sophistication in diction for, I hope, a more accurate portrayal of events.


The Meat of the Report:
A few hours ago, my friend (whom, for the sake of anonymity, I’ll call Catalano) asked me if I wanted to come over and smoke with him a girl named Rayanne (yep, another pseudonym). I decided to go, since I was bored. She was excited to teach her methods of efficient smoking to me, the newbie, and she told me that I could be a part of their circle of friends. I politely mumbled that I couldn’t be a full time druggie, and she assured me that in no time I’d be snorting coke. So I decided to leave it at that.
After a few bowls, she was convinced that I wasn’t inhaling enough smoke. So she told me to smoke another bowl.

“Trust me Catalano, this girl’s gonna be really high soon,” she said. I was upset that I wasn’t feeling the effects; not because I deeply desired to get high at the time, but because I wanted Rayanne to be proud of me or something (I know, I know: stupid of me). I lay down on Catalano’s bed in mild disappointment, which is the bottom of a bunk bed, and waited for the effects. All of a sudden, the ceiling, or rather the top bunk, which was a couple feet overhead, slightly turned into a nebulous stone path and quickly turned back. I brushed it off as placebo effect. Then, I narrowed my eyes a bit and became enthralled with my eyelashes. They had little rainbows from the mixture of natural moisture and the light bulb shining on me. Of course, eyelashes always look like this. But all of a sudden, they sparked a childlike wonder in me and I watched as they swayed in beat with the music. Okay, I thought, so my eyelashes have become kind of cool. So what?

Then I sat up and opened my eyes fully. I don’t know whether I sat up and down multiple times or if it was just in my mind, but whatever it was freaked me out. Before I knew it, I had entered a vast, dusty other universe in which I was being woken up by a sort of mother aura from downstairs in a motion picture over and over and over. My thoughts were becoming cyclical and I thought I was stuck in this moment in eternity. The effects of the drug hit me far faster than I could realize what was even happening.

Luckily I broke free from the sitting up and down…but then I really started to tweak out. I ran halfway downstairs in swirling panic, my head buzzing with warmth, in disbelief that this other universe is what people call “high”. I had the strange sensation of being *completely inside my head*, aware of my surroundings in a panoramic view; it felt too wide, too open. This shocked me, since it was the total opposite of a blurry, drunken head buzz. I heard Rayanne ask Catalano if I was mentally unstable—this made me freak out exponentially more, as I realized that my reaction was abnormal. I caught the word “tripping” in their conversation a few times. So I was tripping! Now I was thrown into a confused, swirling state. You know when you’re asleep and realize that you are in a dream, and inexplicably get really bored and restless and have to pry your eyes open? This was like that, but scary and real and I was already awake so I couldn’t open my eyes any wider and my heart was beating out of my chest and I thought I was in some sort of Hell. When was I born into this eerily clear new world?

Still on the staircase, Rayanne came out of Catalano’s room and asked me if I had any underlying mental disorders. I stuttered a “No—uh I—I don’t t-think so…”; as one can imagine, this didn’t really calm my nerves. I stumbled back into Catalano’s room and realized that I was in a movie like Matilda. My head was spinning and it looked like I was on a movie set. I kept switching in and out of different scenes and mindsets and worlds. Every few seconds I would zero in on Catalano’s face and exclaim “Whoa,” then whoosh off into my adventure again. I was still coming up and was terrified on a higher level of fear than possibly ever before. Whoa.

This state was so different from any I had been in before that I wondered how (or even if) I could return back to everyday living and perception. I was wholly overwhelmed by my sudden transformation into this other-dimensional being in a heightened, other-dimensional world. I decided that I was definitely not living in the same world/life that I had been for as long as I could remember. My foundation had been shaken; everything that had been constant throughout my life was suddenly adrift except for my steady, subtle unconscious.

My panic-inducing cyclical thoughts, I decided, could only be combated by me constantly talking. I spoke in a loud voice, but every time I began to speak, my words sounded corny, like I was in a movie and my words were going along with the music. This scared the hell out of me. It sounded like someone had written a rather cloying score of music to perfectly coincide with my voice. I feared that Catalano and Rayanne would find me ridiculously corny, so I stopped talking, then realized that I had to talk to keep time going (or else I’d get stuck in an infinite loop of time). I went on and off like this until I had Catalano turn the music off. Now, to keep the rhythm going and crawl out of the hole of eternity, I decided that Catalano and I had to communicate through typing on Microsoft word. All the while I was shaking madly and swearing uncontrollably, all of my thoughts and sentences strung together with ‘fucking’ and ‘shit’. In the back of my mind I knew that my state was silly and that Catalano and Rayanne were probably weirded out or amused. They, in contrast to me, were feeling lazily stoned.

My thoughts were still scary and circular, and I was still tweaking out, but here’s where I started to have some fun. Taking a cue from his red bedroom walls and contemporary music, I realized that I was in a Target commercial. Everything was sterile and overly bright for a minute, just like in Target stores only amplified (and in another dimension). I imagined that the objects in his room were random products being creatively stacked up to an upbeat soundtrack like in the advertisements. Still very frightened, I sat back down on his bed and talked to Rayanne and him. “I think I’m in a dream, but then I know I can’t be because my memories are more tangible than in dreams,” I pondered aloud to them, my thoughts coming out in shaky, fragmented speech. There was a pause and Rayanne filled it with “Are you really smart or something when you aren’t fucked up?” I couldn’t really think of an answer so I just mumbled. I laughed at myself-- why do I even care what they think if I’m in a dream? Then I realized that I wasn’t in a dream. But how do I know? When I’m dreaming, I am totally convinced of my scenario until I wake up and realize how absurd it was. So what made me so cocky and sure that this wasn’t another of those circumstances? I mulled over that for a while and closed my eyes. Unfortunately, I had no closed eye visuals.

I decided to stand up next, and what I perceived amazed me. Actually, it wasn’t exactly *what* I perceived. Same room, same people. It was *how* I perceived. It felt like I had unlocked this godly third eye or other sense or something, that made everything glow and space and time seem so much deeper and thicker and richer. Silly as it sounds, it felt like I had been living in the second dimension my whole life, then suddenly stepped out into the ‘real’ third dimension. I had gone through my entire youth thinking I was living in a 3D world when I had truly just been a cartoon! The song Dear Prudence by The Beatles was playing and it melded with my thoughts to create a divine moment of realizations and beauty. My surroundings looked ever so deep.

I then lay down on the floor and stared up at the light bulb. It was amazing and it became a lovely, godly sun. I looked up at the ceiling and saw a purple candle and suddenly I was in a bird’s eye view of an intricate, wooden, homey smelling cabin. I was quickly transported back to where I lay. Now, I three-quarters-closed my eyes and peered at my eyelashes. The light from the light bulb streamed through them and I felt wonderful and profound, like I was in a colorful fortress of eyelashes filled with deep glee. So this is how the gods feel, perched atop their fluffy pedestals sniggering at the triviality of human triumph and suffering. How beautiful, how glorious it felt to be admitted to this heaven of sorts.

As I lay there on the ground, I looked up at Rayanne and Catalano, who were sitting across from each other. They were suddenly in a diner in one of those predictable, beige romantic comedies starring Kate Hudson or someone, except the “camera angle” was rather avant-garde, since I was lying on the ground peering upwards (yet, strangely, I also felt like I had sort of an aerial view). Catalano was the long-haired dude and Rayanne was the edgy chick that works in the library, and they were on a date. I realized that I had been saying all this out loud when Rayanne said, “Uh I don’t work in a library..wow this girl must be really high”. But I didn’t care. So here they were in this diner with ketchup and mustard and shit and chatting away. I got a little frustrated at one point and asked, “If I’m God, then why is this such a low budget film, huh?” Then I became someone viewing the movie, and Catalano and Rayanne looked through the screen at me. That was peculiar; since when do people in movies look at the viewer?

I lay down in quiet contemplation for a few minutes. Although I was in a small room, the world appeared to shimmer above my head in infinite, radiating layers. “I’ve just entered the third dimension,” I said to nobody in particular. Even though I was aware of how stupid it sounded, I meant every word of that statement. Catalano grinned and said playfully, “From where? The second dimension?” I said yes, that’s exactly where I just came from, to which he replied, “We already are in the third dimension.” Ah, did that get a rise out of me. I started laughing and fell into a pool of laughs and was on the ground curled up from laughing. I stopped, looked at Catalano, and proceeded to break out in giggles again.

By now he was starting to get a bit weary though, since he had essays to write. He was trying to nudge Rayanne and me out but decided to let us stay until I was ready to leave, since I was still tripping out. I had little perception of time though, so I don’t know how long we stayed. I turned to Catalano and asked him if he was mad at me for tripping on weed. He smiled and said, “I’m furious”. We looked at each other and I was laughing like mad. Rayanne and I decided to let him do his essays, so she dropped me off at home. I stumbled inside and ran upstairs so as not to get caught by my mom. Once there, I stared in awe at the little rainbows on a cd-rom. Were those always there?

All in all, this trip was extremely worthwhile. That’s a complete understatement: it’s the first time I’ve felt truly, fully alive, although I sometimes have a bad inkling in the back of my head that I just use marijuana to *trick* my mind and I wonder— does that matter? What is “tricking”; and is that sort of subjective experience any less real than generally accepted reality? Alas, I am getting a bit ahead of myself. At first, I was caught up in panic, but I attribute that to my confusion. I plan on continuing recreational drug use and branching out to other psychedelic substances that will unlock other barriers to the dusty corners of my mind.

Further:
After re-reading my account, I fear that I may have written a report akin to the ones I previously said have left me dissatisfied: a mere narrative lacking insight into the nature of the drug’s subjective effects. I’ve decided to add some other things I’ve written about or while high on marijuana, to reinforce my description of this heightened other dimension.

Here’s another small report I wrote on this subject while **very high** a month later. I resisted glossing it over with my smug, sober editing to perhaps give more insight into the way marijuana acts on my brain:

They say marijuana reduces concentration. This makes me smirk in contempt because even though, yes, it can cause one to not be able to focus on the two-dimensional shit of our everyday lives? Sure weed makes me lose focus on that shit, but only because I’ve moved on to another world in which all things that seemed important now are trivial in the context of this vast other universe (universe isn’t even big enough a word. Dimension, if that weren’t so overused..ahh) So I’m in another dimension. That’s why I can’t focus on stuff from the lower place. Because I’ve been temporarily raised to the view of god. This makes me very vulnerable. I feel vulnerable (fearing fear itself a lot) when I smoke weed. But that’s just because I’ve stripped away myself and zipped into, it seems, a large tent in another dimension. This is rather unfamiliar and scary each time it happens. But wow, these words are really two-dimensional. Or, in my state, one-dimensional. It’s difficult to describe normal life in words. This is in another dimensional shit.

I sound like such an idiot right now. I think, in this temporary moment, I’m trading my (hopefully) eloquent style of writing for a ticket into another place. No, not Switzerland or Canada or Wyoming. Those are flat trips. This time I’m vacationing in a 3d world. I was a circle, but I was rotated around in directions I didn’t know existed I became a sphere. A circle cannot conceive of a sphere while it is a circle still. But alas! I can conceive of this being that I’ve become, this world. I’ve been a piece of paper and suddenly lifted up into the air. What is this air? Except this feeling…it’s familiar in a way. It’s like, the way things are supposed to be. This is another spiritual level (god do I sound corny but I must go on). Not different levels like in a staircase or building.

When I smoke I get the shakes, as in I weirdly twitch. This really freaked me out as I walked upstairs. I could’ve sworn I was a robot version of myself coming to kill the real me. My shaking fragmented my steps and my movements were jerky and..well, robotic. I felt like I was a robot implanted with sufficient human wit and compassion. I was heartbroken that I had been given this empathy and yet was programmed to kill the person my thoughts were modeled on. This stuff will sound funny when I read this sober, but it is really terrifying.

Ok I know I’m rambling. One last thought: wow. Can’t remember. Oh yeah, SHIT I forgot again. (I’m not erasing all these random thoughts because..idk why- wait that doesn’t make sense) oh yeah okay so, although it is terrifying, it something vital to spiritual vitality. Another dimension! Words, English, feel petty to me. Ha, to think that these mere flourishes on paper could describe an experience like this? Words feel silly and flat. Incompatible with life. Incompatible. My thoughts are full and round and by recording only one little road of thought while others swirl and dip, mostly dead ends, around it in my brain. These side roads are in directions and dimensions that the main road, these words, cannot conceive of. I find it interesting the tradeoffs of smoking weed. I become less coherent but at the same time, more lucid and more in the real world. Realer than real. My thoughts don’t flow, they don’t connect. An eraser is chasing every thought that crosses my mind. I’m beating it. But boy, those are some delicious words. You could fucking eat them. So yeah, for now the tradeoff is worth it.

“Everyone knows you only live a day, but it’s brilliant anyway.” –Elliott Smith.
Just heard that lyric, and felt it so deep. Some days you can sharpen the dull lead of your daily life with some good ol’ drugs.

Version of this written while sober:
Many opponents of recreational marijuana use are quick to point out that it reduces concentration and coherence. What those opponents do not acknowledge, however, is *why* marijuana appears to reduce concentration. It is not because users become stupid, intoxicated, or lazy. Rather, users are lifted out of ordinary life and transported into a much more meaningful world. It resembles everyday reality but is much more malleable, frightening, and euphoric. Everything is amplified and nothing is certain. In everyday life, time goes by at more or less a constant rate. Events and speech are linear and you are where you physically are and will not leave until you physically leave. On marijuana (although I’ve been told that many people need stronger psychedelics to experience such trippy things), seconds can seem to last for hours or milliseconds. The same moment can happen hundreds of times in a seemingly infinite circuit. Speech can be circular or spiraled instead of linear. One can be transported elsewhere while physically in the same spot.

In this fantastic other world, it seems (and perhaps is) pointless and laughable to try and focus one’s attention on the inferior, one-sided everyday shit. It doesn’t feel real enough. It’s like being placed on another planet filled with aliens and wonder, and being expected to focus one’s attention on an episode of Star Trek playing on a small portable T.V. screen. Right now I am fully engrossed in that dull screen we call reality. But come the weekend, I may buy myself a ticket into the magical, terrifying world that I’ve come to love, fear, and revere.

And, lastly, I have typed up some interesting (albeit perhaps useless) scrawlings I have written while **very high** another time.

“Being tumbled around in waves, they roll, warm around me. In beginning I get caught up in the wave, spin around in vertigo. Then if I hold back the vertigo, waves will come back and knock my body back and forth jerkily. I’m shaking.

I just became Beethoven writing with a feather in a foreign, artsy film with saturated colors.

I can’t think straight but words splurt from my mind in florid, goopy, pretentious shit. I am a pitcher in a Vermeer painting, pouring out words instead of water. But the words are like water in that they can flow and splash thirstily. Can water be thirsty?

My third eye is triangular. It’s fucking blinking. And crying. Someone in a comic book- (lightening! In my mind) Ah forgot everything I was saying. Wow this is an amazing state. Fuck the law. Fuck teachers. Fuck parents. Fuck fucking. God damnit, writing everything, even melodramatic retarded things, is fun.”


Conclusion:
To tie this messy conglomeration of psychedelic ramblings up, I hope this was helpful to anyone searching for a decent description of how one’s first psychedelic ordeal may feel. Although I cannot claim to have fully illustrated a psychedelic experience in any way, I hope to at least have provided a vague outline. Those reading this may argue that marijuana does just make users lazy and stoned, that I am exaggerating its psychedelic effects. All I can say to those people is that they may be right; I claim not to have written of the average encounter with marijuana but solely of my own, personal experiences.

I have smoked marijuana many times since, although the effects are becoming far less trippy. I plan on trying Psilocibine mushrooms sometime in the near future (maybe in a few weeks). I am open to the *use* of most psychoactives; however, I do not advocate the *abuse* of any substance, only the responsible use. The abuse of drugs, I believe, leads to the condemnation of the drugs themselves, rather than what should be the condemnation of a specific inappropriate person-substance relationship. I am well aware that I have plenty to explore, and that I have merely opened the door to psychedelic journey, not quite embarked yet. I am only a sophomore in high school; no doubt I have a large amount of wisdom and humility to gain. If all goes as planned, I will continue to chronicle my journeys with substances and submit them. Perhaps I will create a blog. And with this, I must be off; so end these first scribblings of this infant phsychonaut.

Exp Year: 2008	ExpID: 69891
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: May 15, 2009	Views: 20,700
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Cannabis (1) : Retrospective / Summary (11), General (1), Small Group (2-9) (17)