DOSE:

1

oral

Cannabis

(edible / food)

BODY WEIGHT:

110 lb

I can’t say I am well versed in the world of drugs, but I do enjoy the occasional bowl with some friends. The frequency I smoked increased during my first year of college, but it was still only once or twice a week at most. Around December of my freshman year, I grew tired of just smoking. I wasn’t getting the high everyone else was, or maybe it just wasn’t exciting enough for me. Being from a rather asthmatic family, I also felt a guilty obligation to keep my lungs intact. So I turned to edibles.

My experience with brownies had always been incredible. The high was a hundred times more intense with pleasant hallucinating and artistic insight. I always felt inspired after a night of brownies. Everything was beautiful and pure in a world I normally viewed with deep skepticism. I remember watching Oddsac with a friend during one such night and thinking I had found God. Of course, when I watched it a second time sober, I thought it was absolute shit. Nevertheless, that night left a deep impression on me. However, my fond relationship with edibles would soon sour.

April of that year my college experience took a turn off a cliff. A regrettable hookup at a party a couple months earlier left me traumatized and extremely anxious, and I attempted to escape through my gargantuan projects for studio. I rarely ate or slept, and pretty soon I suffered from massive burnout.

Around this time, one of my friends gave me the remains of a batch of “brownies”, one square, she had brought from home. She said it tasted bad and wasn’t that great of a high. I was doubtful. The thing was GREEN. Like some sort of dense cube of cookie. It smelled wonderful though, so I said I’d take it off her hands. My other friends were worried about its weird appearance and advised me not to eat it. We referred to it as the “green thing.” I decided I’d just wait and save it for a rainy day.

That rainy day came on 4/20. Everyone was celebrating the holiday with a few joints. I had a paper to write though, and didn’t really feel like being around people. My significant other decided to call it quits a couple days earlier, and one of my projects had gone to shit right before critique after I’d spent all night on it, so I felt pretty awful. But I did want to celebrate, so at about 9:45pm I said “fuck it” and pulled out the green thing. It tasted fine to me. It had that slightly sweet and tangy taste that’s so good. I ate it without a thought and continued to work on my paper.

About 45 minutes later (10:30pm) the stuff started to set in. I felt a soothing buzz, and my bad mood mellowed out into a sort of slightly foggy giddiness. Fifteen minutes after that the effects escalated into outright disorientation and euphoria. I hadn’t eaten anything else that day, so the little green thing must have been absorbed very quickly because usually it takes me about two hours to get to that point. I had stopped writing my paper, unable to concentrate. I felt a slight pressure enveloping my body. A little squeeze. It felt as if the world was giving me a hug.

The pressure kept growing and growing. At this point I decided I wanted to tell my friend down the hall how I was feeling. I remembered her telling me that I should go to her any time I was really intoxicated, and she’d make sure I didn’t get into trouble. I was fairly dizzy and it was hard for me to keep track of the hallway because I was floating and couldn’t feel my feet, but I was still euphoric. This stage was still somewhat familiar to me. My friend was hooking up with her boyfriend when I walked in, but I was too high to care and babbled something about the whole world pressing against me. Fortunately they didn’t really mind. Later they told me it was pretty amusing. But the pressure I was feeling kept increasing especially in my chest, so minutes after I had entered the room I was stricken with terror that maybe I was having a heart attack. “Too much pressure! Help! Can’t breathe!” I think I said something like that. My friends were perplexed and alarmed as I collapsed and called Public Safety.

It seemed like it took them hours to come get me. I was on the edge of passing out, but I had gotten it into my head that if I blacked out then, I wouldn’t wake up. I focused on keeping my breathing steady, and things I remembered from lifeguard training about keeping the body alive, but everything was going numb and tingly at once and I was forgetting how to move . I thought if I moved anything anyway I might die. My only other thought was criticism at Public Safety for such a slow response to an emergency situation.

Public Safety asked what happened and we didn’t mention the green thing, because even though I thought I was dying, I didn’t want to get in trouble. I could have just as easily collapsed from lack of food and sleep and stress overload at that point anyway. They asked if I’d like oxygen and I said yes, and we waited for an ambulance. During this part some of my terror subsided into curiosity. I’d never had oxygen before, or an ambulance ride. The oxygen was helpful but decidedly unpleasant. It made me feel dry and crackly. I thought it was giving me papercuts in my nose and throat.

As they wheeled me out of the campus, the world moved by incomprehensibly fast, but I felt like I was going nowhere. I saw flashes of people I recognized looking rather alarmed, but I couldn’t comprehend why. I felt as if I didn’t exist.

When I was in the ambulance, however, the panic came back. This time I was convinced I was dying of AIDS, and that my doctors had all been very negligent to me in the past and had conspired not to tell me so I would live a happy life of oblivion. I thought the green thing had accelerated the virus a thousand fold. I did tell the people in the ambulance about the green thing, though. I think they just sort of chuckled and said I’d be alright. I had a split body experience, as if I was actually back in my dorm room listening to the sirens of the ambulance that was taking my body to the hospital.

The AIDS delusion morphed into ebola as I lay in a waiting room full of gurneys. I shifted uncomfortably because I felt like I was bleeding out of my ass. A woman in the gurney next to mine was screaming from burns all over her arms. I couldn’t turn to see her, but I remember thinking “this is not a very soothing place for people like me who are dying. Hospitals should fix this.” The fear became secondary without my noticing. It belonged to someone else. I began shaking uncontrollably, teeth chattering, though I wasn’t cold. I still couldn’t feel my body under the overwhelming tingling. My mouth was the driest it has ever been. I couldn’t swallow. I remember asking a guy for water, but I don’t remember if he brought it or not.

It was a little past 11pm when I started hallucinating. I specifically remember looking at the clock at 11:05pm because the next ten minutes were the longest of my life. The walls began melting, and the ceiling clicked in and out of place in thousands of colors and pieces like a kaleidoscope. It was really nice at first, but I found myself drifting off into these shapes for what seemed like hours, and that scared me. I tried to rip myself back into reality by reminding myself “I am in a hospital in Providence. I ate something funny. This is not real,” but I could only hang onto it for a few frustrating moments before falling back into my trip. The patterns made my head hurt to look at them, and it was worse when I closed my eyes. But it was easier to look at them than it was to fight them. I couldn’t tell if hours or years had gone by, so I was incredibly surprised to find it was only 11:07pm.

The patterns on the ceiling suddenly became some sort of language. Actually, they turned into robots. An entire city of robots in the ceiling. I watched as the robot culture evolved and devolved over thousands of years. I saw a hundred civil wars and nuclear explosions and middle class robot families. I saw baby robots and old robots and robot pets. Then all of the robots formed together into one giant leering robot face. This wasn’t like iRobot type robots or Star Wars. They looked more like the creeper zombies from Minecraft than anything else. It started dissolving into sand. The giant face scared me, and I struggled to find reality again. It was only 11:09pm.

One of the times I dragged myself back to coherency I remembered I should probably tell someone I was in the hospital. I still had my phone on me, so I tried to text my significant other, but I couldn’t tell if I was actually holding my phone or if it was just another hallucination. I forgot how to form thoughts into words as well. I had to check nine or ten times to make sure I’d actually sent a text to him, but the messages were ridiculous. One said “hospital. Hit hot nurse.” The other said, “eternity grotesque.” I am sure this is referring to the standstill pace of time I was experiencing and my anxiety that it would never return to normal.

After using my phone, I forgot how to move and speak again. I found myself struggling to do a simple task such as raising my arm, and I couldn’t do it. I wanted to talk to one of the medical staff chatting by the wall. I didn’t know what I wanted to say, but I was thinking, “Why aren’t they concerned that I am dying?” With great effort I could finally lift my arm, and I moaned until one of them came over, but then I still couldn’t form words or sentences. I think I wanted him to help me stop tripping, but he seemed really confused, so I must not have used my words correctly. I gave up, and eventually they wheeled me into a separate room.

I continued hallucinating, and believed I was in another dimension with Batman watching the universe destroy itself inside my heart. At one point I became aware that my heart was racing extremely fast, but I was more interested in what Batman was saying about the galaxies fighting over my body. I came back to reality one more time when a doctor came in and said something in a disapproving voice about making poor decisions, which I found extremely funny. Then a nurse tried to hook me up to an IV and take some blood samples, but I found my veins had turned to glass, and I could feel the crunch of him breaking my veins as he tried to find one to hook with the IV. I screamed for a while because I didn’t know how to tell him he was breaking my veins, and some people came in to hold me down. They didn’t look like people, though. They looked like black fuzzy shadows in scrubs and I screamed louder because I thought they were trying to kill me. Or maybe I had stopped screaming and was just imagining I was screaming. I couldn’t tell.

After this, they left me alone for a while. I was still scared I was going to die, and so much of my night alternated between moaning for help and falling back into the metallic swirling rainbow that was the ceiling. A few times I thought I had switched rooms without realizing it, or people had come in and moved things, but in retrospect, I don’t think this happened. Eventually I settled into my limbo state, and zoned out, completely losing contact with my body. I was only the buzz of my brain at some high frequency radio wave that looked like the aurora borealis.

I must have fallen asleep like this, or time must have warped again, because the next thing I remember is being gently shaken awake by one of the nurses. Now it was 7am, and I had stayed at the hospital the entire night. Everything was still surrounded by shimmering halos, and I felt exhausted and drained, but I was much more with it. I was able to leave the hospital as soon as my heart maintained a normal pulse without the aid of IV meds. I left around 9am.

I skipped my classes that day and slept. I experienced almost constant chest pressure similar to my episode for the next month or so, but when I visited the doctor, I was told it was only anxiety, and it would subside. Sometimes I still see Batman in my peripheral vision. I wonder why that part of my experience always comes back to me, especially since it was so brief. To this day, I still don’t know what I actually ate. It seems most logical that I accidentally consumed a load of hash. My friends like to make jokes about the green thing since they had originally told me not to eat it. Fortunately, I feel fine now , and suffer no physical or psychological damage. But I guess the moral of the story is,

Don’t put things in your mouth if you don’t know what they are, and always make sure you are in a good set and setting before trying any drug, because you need to be okay with yourself before giving up that kind of control.

Exp Year: 2011	ExpID: 91919
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: 20
Published: Nov 19, 2025	Views: Not Supported
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Cannabis (1) : Hospital (36), Post Trip Problems (8), Hangover / Days After (46), What Was in That? (26), Train Wrecks & Trip Disasters (7), General (1)