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Growing Up
Tabernanthe iboga (root bark)
Citation:   Pandora Spice. "Growing Up: An Experience with Tabernanthe iboga (root bark) (exp89253)". Erowid.org. Mar 1, 2011. erowid.org/exp/89253

 
DOSE:
T+ 0:00
9400 mg oral Tabernanthe iboga (roots)
  T+ 11:00   smoked Cannabis  
BODY WEIGHT: 115 lb
Married, female, age 42.
115 pounds
19 months detoxed from opiates, muscle relaxants & SSRI anti-depressants
DMT Fanatic since August of 2009.
Longest trip of my life to date - 14-16 hours

Ever since I “broke my head” in December, 2009 with a series of extremely rough DMT breakthroughs, I have had this nagging and oppressive thought that my death is near, sometimes imminent. And for no obvious reason. This was my first real experience with the type of anxiety that could result from a heavy duty panic attack that felt like it had settled into a level of low-grade psychoticism for about six months. Then started beginning to truly heal in the next six. But nowhere near where I should be. And frequently, this sense that it will all be over soon. I had better take care of what business I could. One thing I had on my “bucket list” ever since reading about it, was to try Ibogaine.

I feel I have been shown my place in history and time for the first time in my life. It is tremendously reassuring on some deep level.

00: Ingested 17 00 gel caps packed with 9400 mgs of ground iboga root bark.

+00:30: Got a very strong alert. Body load, feeling of instability and starting to see trails but something else. The room was developing little tendrils and wisps of weird ectoplasm, different texture but same appearance as tendril-filled and expanding dense white smoke or vapor.

+00:45: Starting to notice some nausea with head movements and am not sure if I could stand up if I tried.

+01:00: There is the most bizarre sensation of liquid energy moving in my spine that literally, casues me to sit up straighter. Very still. Now I am tripping hard. The tendrils of ectoplasm have expanded, thickened and radically multiplied, At this rate, they will very rapidly fill the room and clearly “rip reality at the seams.”

I am beginning to see, peripherally at first but rapidly moving more into central vision, figures of people and cats that were not in the room with me. Soon they are in my central vision and I spend about 15 realtime minutes talking and reaching out. I snap out of it and realize just how intoxicated I am. This is coming on so fast and hard for a relatively low dose. I lay down, but the movement is too fast. Thus begins a Hellish purge. The purge is ongoing, miserable and comes from rapid movements of the head and open eyes. Once the material has been purged the dry heaves continue . . . .

I am hearing a bizarre background buzzing sound that I have never heard before. I have difficulty describing it, but it's like a combination of bass male voices that are trying to hit higher notes, long singular notes, chant-like, but combined with a deep buzzing of the world's largest insect. This sound remained until we after I emerged from ibogaspace and into the rest of the trip.

I turn the ambient, psy trance, electronica Youtube playlist down significantly and finally, I am able to lay on my side on the bed, with my bucket on the floor beside me.

+02:00: The moment I lay down, the 3-D, very detailed visions began. This was different from the echoingly spiritual, highly polished & edge defined, short (elves) entity hyperspace. Different from the repeating dissociative visuals with the non-Euclidian geometry and extremely bizarre scenes of sagespace. For lack of immediate nomenclature I'll call it ibogaspace.

Ibogaspace was not as sharply defined as hyperspace to me and had much more of the dissociative visuals of sagespace. Though the geometry was distored, as it can be sometimes in hyperspace, it was not non-Euclidian. But, it was equally 3-D and detailed. As colorful as hyperspace but with a darker edge to the colors kind of like really big mushroom doses can hit me. There was an insane playfulness with a deadly serious undertone here. This place soon seemed to me like an Ibogaspace/reality that was a fairly accurate representation of the societal structures & values as our own. Lessons were being pushed on me/imparted from the moment my eyes closed.

It began – I am surrounded by tribal dancers, some sort of stereotyped, stylized version of what African tribal dancers might look like. They had highly decorated shields, small spears and were covered in very colorful trinkets, regalia, decorations, etc. They were dancing around me joyously in a circle. Then I was led to a building with a door and I entered.

I am in a room, a kind of either small office or waiting/reception area. I am standing and there is a middle aged burned out man, who looks really tired sitting behind a desk. The door on the left side, in front of the desk, opens and a diminutive secretary with a bouffant hairdo rapidly enters, arms full of stuff, which she rapidly sets down on the desk. She sits down in her chair, behind the desk and begins to take notes as the burnout sits down and dictates. Soon he notices me. He stands up and looks very impatient and exacerbated. He unbuttons his cheap gray business suit coat. His foot taps. He tries to show me something.

+02:34: I am up and retching horribly again. The last of the bark feels like it is out of me. I guess I absorbed what alkaloids I could. There were no visible capsules or capsule halves in the bucket. Once the bark was gone, all purges were dry or yielded only nasty globs of mucus rich saliva.

The room is completely filled with the ectoplasmic tendrils. I can barely see the borders. There are a lot of standing people and a few wandering stranger cats. The real cats have been slowly bailing from the room as if the vibes were just becoming way too intense. My most strongly bonded cat, Hathor, re-joined me soon after and stayed the rest of the night. Music is fantastically distorted and almost uncomfortable. I turn it down even more. Sometimes long sometimes short sounding. Sometimes I am sure I just heard a patch of tune and am convinced it is endlessly repeating . . . .

When I speak to entities, I realize I have NEVER heard my voice sounding like this. It reminded me of the very end of Episode 2 of Through the Wormhole, where Leonard Susskin's theory is explained. Like I wasn't really on my bed, but actually, really spread out much more diffusely within the rooms, up on the walls and ceiling. The echo sound was unreal and reverberating with a metallic vibration.

+03:30: I slowly and very carefully, with closed eyes, ease myself back down, this time feeling more stable, I am able to lie in my usual, surrender position, on my back with arms and legs slightly spread, hands palms up.

I am back in the room wth the burned out guy and his assistant. They get more done this time and he looks at me longer. I'm sitting up, sick again. I am shaking deeply all over, both my extremities and my center. My spine. My heart. My head.

+03:40: Back down and again in the room. I try to open myself and use my DMT surrender skills to see if I can get more information and move the trip along. All of a sudden the burned out man, shifts to the side on his foot and a door opens behind my desk – he points in a way that says, “Watch, but do not enter!”

I am shown what I can only describe as a reality that might have developed had I been born a boy. This was an outrageously, detailed lesson and I got to see this boy's early life and interactions with my parents as their first born. But something happened as he entered young adulthood and it was the cause of his premature death. Much of this was highly symbolic and/or direct download, but much was actually illustrated, including scenes in the house in which I grew up.

+03:50: I close my eyes and the scene does not change. I still see the room as it appeared with open eyes. After awhile it changes and shifts and I am back in the room I was in before in igobaspace, or back mainly seeing the room. The door behind the desk closes, the secretary exits out the door in front of the desk. I am still viewing it from the left side. All of a sudden the burned out man points to the wall in front of me and I notice that it has turned deep, blood red and there is a small square opening, that quickly changes to a tube and I am drawn up and inside. I am in what appears to be a blood vessel. The details are fantastic. I can see the individual cells of the vessel walls. I can see individual erythrocytes, immune factors and fantastic nanomachines! Like the ultimate “Fantastic Voyage.”

This tube is sinuous, twists and turns and opens up into a dark, red room. I watch the walls which have weird, scrolling textures for awhile. Bizarre faces appear in the walls and their mouths open obscenely wide. The mouths are huge and are filled with endless rows of ugly teeth in grotesque gum tissue. Then all of a sudden the whole room turns light pink in color and instantly transforms into a delivery room. A woman is in the absolute extremis of labor. Her vagina has replaced the main tooth-filled mouth. The husband is nowhere to be seen. She is altered/sedated and surrounded by personnel and machines. The baby crowns, she screams, the vagina expands in that truly fantastic way, the hips spread and a baby girl emerges into the hands of the doctor covered in slime and blood.

I have just witnessed my birth. I am utterly, emotionally detached. I am a pure spot that absorbs lessons.

+04:00: The scene instantly changes. I am out on an open “street” that is filled with human looking but highly psychedelicized entities. Their entire bodies were in extremely rapid movement but the details on their bodies were not in movement/changing, they were not “self-transforming.” The entities are on the street, in the air on the walls of the surrounding buildings, some in small one-person vehicles, some on bicycles and others on foot. Many are pink, purple and/or orange. There are green tones.

I watch this scene for awhile, and then I am led by a female entity to the side of a building and shown a wall. I look closer and realize that it is something like a building wall but with a deeply detailed scrolling texture, like language or data. A square opening appears and I am sucked inside. It is a short passage, red-orange in color and leading to another scrolling textured (different) building wall. This happened again. Then on the third level “wall” a small square thing appeared. It was very strange! I could cause this thing to move with my will, I would think move up, down, left, right and it would instantly comply. I was unable to turnaround. This was a one way trip!

The square thing allowed me to not only change perspective but to cause a specific area to become incredibly magnified and detailed. I could then back away to get the bigger picture of the wall. I cruised up, down, left and right awhile exploring and trying out the square. It was fun.

Soon the perspective was out of my control, but I kept the control/magnifier square - it followed me wherever I went. Now I realized what I was seeing/being shown. I was in a huge, kind of sub-fractalized city of very tall buildings and within them endless other layers. This place I very quickly came to realize was like the deep, high, rich and dusty old stacks of some library. This place was literally, “The stacks of my life,” and I was being gently encouraged by entities in the general vicinity to actively explore, which I did.

I spent a fantastic amount of time in here. I reviewed HUGE swatches of my life, with particular attention to and focus upon key areas within my childhood. Incredible, fantastic depth. I had forgotten that I remembered so very much. So many details. So many visits to relatives' houses. So many days in school with friends, peers and enemies. So many milestones. So many victories. So much tragedy. A lot of pain. God! Arriving home the very first day I was permitted to walk to my second grade school with other kids rather than my mother. Coming home on that new day of independence, opening the front door feeling so proud and independent and what do I encounter when that door opens. A wall of Mom smell. She is baking homemade sourdough bread. Still one of my faves (I make it now) to this day. Wow! The day I first learned to tie my shoe and her role in that. The day I learned to ride a bike. First day in kindergarten. Touring more than one pre-school before Mom decided that was good enough for her kid.

I was shown/came to know that somewhere along the line in this not-too-unusual human experience, something had gone wrong. I had forgotten the lesson that my Mother taught me as a little baby. I talked the talk but I no longer walked the walk and had not done so for a very, very long, long time. Decades. This was one of my greatest personal failures.

I was shown the obvious, what we all know in our hearts. What all good Mothers teach their babies naturally. That we all need love and nurturance, all of us, no matter what. I was shown that almost everyone fails to remember this very important lesson in their lives. They are hurt, they experience deep loss, they experience fundamental lack of control for the first time. . . . The wound is deep. It does not heal, though given time, a nearly guaranteed healer, it can thickly scar over. That was what I had achieved. I had forgotten my Mother's most important instruction. What she taught me before I had language, the structure that rules my thoughts currently. I was also shown that I have another chance. It is NOT too late. I am not too burned out/jaded. I am not too old. I do remember everything, even this lesson, the one I took to my heart as a child. I am capable of sharing this lesson via my actions and words with others. No need to preach, just be.

+06:00: Life review in fully immersive ibogaspace continues without let up. Well, actually, a few times I am permitted back out into the general street area for little rests, but then back in with the controller/magnifier square being with me . . . Once I actually surface back in my room, completely crushed, having to pee and realizing this was not going to happen. Closed my eyes and was IMMEDIATELY back where I had been.

When I do surface, my short term memory is complete hash and getting worse until at the peak if my thoughts were graphed as language, I couldn't hold one longer than a short, simple sentence. This seems odd in hindsight. My long term memory is ultra detailed and crystal clear. Thought we needed functional short term memory to be able to preserve long term memories. Maybe not. Very deep lessons.

Same kinds of lessons but out of childhood and into my life with my husband. Too much focus has been put on pain. With pain and bullshit, best to live/experience the moment completely and utterly fully (Zen Master says “Fuck!” when he stubs his toe) but to then move on. Lessons learned, but move forward.

I was shown directly how to apply this in my future relationship with my husband of 22 years. I was shown why I'm not what I should be. What I need to do. What I need to stop doing. What to say. When to say it. And why. It is important not to have too many unanswered “Whys” at the end of one’s life.

06:30-08:00: I began to surface more frequently. Began to try to take water without purging. Began to think seriously about making a try for the bathroom.

This last part in Ibogaspace was more review but also a meeting with the tribal shaman from the group I saw at the beginning. The regalia and adornments were gone. He was an old, long haired, bearded, soft spoken African man. He showed me many things. I saw the complete life and death cycle of many, many different plants, animals, and humans over the deep past. He also showed me how they relate to my place in my life currently.

He gave me more instructions on how to try to maximize the potential of the second half of my life and locked the lessons in each time by pointing to a floating analog clock that showed seconds/minutes/ . . . . /decades . . .it was winding down. The clock of my life. Still about 1/3 to ½ left depending on choices and for lack of a better term luck . . . but still, winding down.

I am not left ego-swollen and thinking I am a key in history from all of this. As a matter of fact I am filled with an even more profound sense of just how very small I am in the overall, miraculous, beautiful scheme of things but also a deep quietness of my center, a calmness. It is just that I see my place in this long-term cycle that is LIFE clearer than ever before.

+08:30: By the time I’m more fully surfaced, just like that first DMT experience, I am convinced that I am nearly baseline and the entire experience will be over in two to four more hours. This is hilarious in hindsight and as I sit up on my bed with eyes open I watch over time as the open eyed visuals become more hectic and intense. People and animals are visible and moving in my peripheral vision. The streamers of ectoplasm are everywhere. Head turns make me nauseous but it is much better than before. I am able to take and hold a bit of water.

+09:45: I make my way super slowly, flat footedly, one step at a time, eyes mainly closed, purge bucket in hand to the bathroom and take what I think may be the longest pee in my life.

+10:30: The entities are dying back and the ectoplasm isn’t so, well, everywhere anymore but I am still incredibly high, it is coming in waves, I am tripping hard and whenever I close my eyes I’m seeing the room I was in with open eyes, then changing into a red, green or silver room with the scrolling wall patterns. I no longer have access to the controller/magnifier.

+11:00: I smoke a small amount of pot with my husband and the effects pick up again quite nicely. By now I’ve spent some time online checking in and reporting effects.

+12:00: I am exhausted and attempt to go to bed. Surprisingly, I sleep a solid, dreamless three hours.

+15:00: Upon arising I am very surprised to find I am tripping MUCH harder then when I fell asleep hours ago. Now new and improved, with extra ectoplasms and bonus tendrils! After an hour or so it settles down as long as I do not move my head. I am still very, very unstable on my feet.

+18:30: Back to bed for two choppy, weird, hallucinatory hours.

+20:30 - +35:00: Interesting day. Every time I sleep or trance even a bit with eyes closed the visuals with open eyes crank up. Slowly getting a bit more stable on my feet. Still feel very intoxicated. A glowing, sensation of euphoric warmth flows within my body. Whenever I move, the edges of things in the room get these parallel slim slivers of blue/white/silver light that radiate out from those edges. With the sudden turns this happens so much that they sometimes fill the room and break off into little wispy tendrils of smoky ectoplasm.

Throughout the experience, from the first hour forward I had the nagging, recurring thought that iboga hit me the way I always fantasized a good stiff dose of a tropane would.

+25:00: Still tripping such that I cannot drive or attempt thinking about gardening or extracting safely and correctly. Still getting occasional peripheral entities/movements, smears of occasional ecotplasm and a feeling of comfortable intoxication. I can sleep 2-3 hours at a time and wake up tripping much harder than when I fell asleep.

+27:00: Take a 2 hour nap. No longer getting weird rooms with patterned textures whenever I close my eyes for any period. Eating dinner makes the visuals die back a bit. I feel very good.

+31:00: Still getting visual effects, especially with head movements and there is a warm euphoric glow constantly circulating throughout my body.

+39:30: Current state. Preparing for a relatively early bedtime. Curious to see what effects tomorrow brings.

What a beautiful privilege of an experience. What a perfect point in my lifeline to have it. I am so glad I did it. I do not feel ready for a flood dose. I feel I will likely never do it again. I was shown the even deeper meaning of my signature below.

Deep Feelings of Peace & Love to All

Exp Year: 2011ExpID: 89253
Gender: Female 
Age at time of experience: 42
Published: Mar 1, 2011Views: 23,095
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Tabernanthe iboga (200) : Alone (16), Therapeutic Intent or Outcome (49), Entities / Beings (37), Glowing Experiences (4), First Times (2)

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