DOSE:

2 tsp

oral

Nutmeg

(ground / crushed)

BODY WEIGHT:

125 lb

Mace Trip

I was a junior in college, when a “cool guy” came to visit one weekend. He inquired if we had any dope, but we didn’t. So he suggested we go get some at the grocery store. Three of us went there with him and came back with 3 containers of ground mace. He explained that this substance is prepared from the arillus that grows around the outside of a nutmeg seed, and assured us it is a powerful psychedelic. Back in our dorm each of us took about two heaping teaspoons of the stuff with perhaps 6 oz of water. Nothing happened to me at first, but after half an hour I started to feel a bit dizzy. It occurred to me it would be nice to have some music to accompany the anticipated “trip”. I didn’t have any music equipment, so I locked myself in the room of another friend who had a record player and was away for the weekend, & started up some of his Spanish-American music.

Lying on his bed, my trip started off with abstractions moving across my occipitals. These Technicolor patterns moved with the highly rhythmic Mexican music, stimulating me to respond with rhythmic movements of my own as I lay prone on-the-bed. At some point these gyrations got me sexually aroused and I consummated that state with a hand job. As this approached culmination my occipitals responded, reflecting what my body was doing, and then the imagery broke off to nothingness as I relaxed.

Instead of eventually returning to consciousness, a trance-like state ensued in which I was no longer observing the trip from my usual perspective, but instead was immersed in a dream. This was not like a lucid dream, at all; it was like being the character I was dreaming about, starting out as an infant. I gradually developed into a toddler without having any reflective thoughts about who I was or where I was. Up to this point the trance had lasted four or five hours, objective time, though my subjective dream time seemed infinitely longer. Then, as my dream perspective reached the age when personal memories had begun to form in my actual childhood, at about age 3 or 4, it occurred to me in the trance that I recognized my surroundings. In fact, the trance-dream’s scenery was the interior of the house I had lived in when I was that age. This broke the continuity of the experience, and from that point on for perhaps another hour I dreamed an increasingly speeding-up montage of short sequences, capturing scenes from my childhood and teen age years up to my actual age, which was 20 at the time.

Once back in real life perspective I got up and walked around for a while, went to the hall bathroom and vomited, and then lay down again, feeling awful. My body seemed to dry out like a desert. Eventually it was like I was a sand man with strands of glass running through me replacing the physiology of my nervous system. I began to jerk and twitch; luckily my friend Roy came to my rescue. He gave me artificial respiration, staying with me for at least an hour. Even so, it was like going through hell. Eventually, possibly thanks to Roy, I survived, never to take mace again.

I think the down part of the trip took almost as long as the up part – all told about 12 hours. But the experience taught me that Alexander Shulgin’s well known quote is true: “I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit. We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can catalyze its availability.”

When limited to one’s personal perspective, that entire universe is that person’s entire life experience. This trip retrieved the initial part of my life that happened before I could remember anything, and also many scenes after that, which I could remember and recognize as the trance state proceeded past toddlerdom. All that came rolling across my occipitals.

Did anything like my experience happen to my two friends who took a similar amount of mace? No. They just got buzzy and eventually slept it off.

Exp Year: 1959	ExpID: 107415
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 20
Published: Jun 10, 2016	Views: 16,298
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