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Dissolving of the Ego
Ketamine
Citation:   NHCOCh2Ph. "Dissolving of the Ego: An Experience with Ketamine (exp109202)". Erowid.org. Feb 19, 2018. erowid.org/exp/109202

 
DOSE:
150 mg insufflated Ketamine (powder / crystals)
BODY WEIGHT: 75 kg
I could sense that the only thing separating me from this experience were these intricate white shards that lay on a plain sheet of paper. I crushed up the shards into a fine powder and proceeded to insufflate the final 150 milligrams of ketamine. I then lay in bed, headphones and blanket on.

Even though heavily dissociated at this point, I could rapidly feel myself losing control of my limbs. I was starting to feel fully anaesthetised. I started to sink into my bed very deeply. The music, the only worldly sensory stimuli I was experiencing, started to distort and (as I found out later) time had started to dilate. As I sunk a state of anxiolytic confusion started to overcome me. Where was I? How did I get here? Who was I? The world as I knew it started to get jumbled up. It's sort of like when you repeat a word too many times that it starts to lose its meaning. This started to happen with a lot of my perception of the world. People significant to me, my friends, my family, lost their meaning and connection to me. They sort of became their own bubble, completely disconnected from me. As that last question dawned upon me, about who I am, it was almost with some sort of force that I was being separated from me, my identity or myself. I quickly lost a lot of association I had to myself. I couldn't really associate my name with myself anymore. It's definitely an extremely peculiar concept to grasp if you haven't ever experienced it, this fairly strong ego loss.

The loss of myself was rewarding and liberating, albeit extremely confusing. I'm still rather surprised how I didn't feel any fear while the concept of my self was dissolving quite rapidly
I'm still rather surprised how I didn't feel any fear while the concept of my self was dissolving quite rapidly
. It kind of made me take a step back and allowed 'me' to view myself in the much bigger picture (of the entire universe I guess). It made me feel small, powerless and insignificant, but not in a negative way at all. I kind of just realised that is how life is and it might just be better to accept it like that.

I shouldn't really be using the word 'I' from here because at that time the concept of 'I' had dissolved. I'll now refer to myself as my point. At this point I should also mention that since the start of this experience and throughout, I always felt a calm undertone and complete lack of anxiety even though I would probably start to panic quite hard if I was experiencing all this normally. From here on my point was in a very psychedelic headspace and anything my point imagined would start to be perceived in my brain with fluidity. My point was in an dark plane with white tiles alternating to infinity. My point saw myself from my disconnected form, laying in my bed going through this experience. It was strange, to say the least, and my point seemed as if it could've directly been viewing me from another soul, higher up. This made my point think about death. My point thought about what would happen if I died, right there. Due to the anxiolytic undertone of the trip, this question was easily and openly addressed. My point was very accepting of the death of my physical body, especially having just been separated from it, and even though my point knew that today I would not die.

From complete blackness, a growing and bulging purple circle started to emanate until it completely took up all the vision my point was capable of. It then burst upon my point into a infinite repeat of fractals, and it felt as though my point started to speed through this fractal-type infinity that would never really reach the end. This continued for a while with the fractal pattern changing occasionally.

My point then thought about how a molecule of ketamine could interact inside the brain to cause such a profound experience. Atoms were coloured in the usual way; grey for carbon, white for hydrogen, blue for nitrogen, red for oxygen and green for chlorine. Ketamine molecules started to appear, taking on a ball and stick appearance. They were extremely tiny in comparison to these massive ion channels which sat embedded in the membrane. Every time ketamine would come in close contact and try to bind, immediately my point's visual perception would change to a human having his skin come off to reveal his bare bones. At that point, my point didn't really know what to make of that, but it was nevertheless a spectacular and grounding sight.

There were more of these types of visual representation which I feel were less significant and some quite even hazy in the memory, but these sorts of visuals seemed to continue until the end of the trip. As I slowly regained the ability to move my body parts with more and more control, I got up for a moment. I thought over how profound what I just experienced was for a short while, now in a much more sober state. I then slept for around 6 hours.

The next morning as I started to think about what really happened in that quite confusing experience. I realised that acceptance was probably the main theme of this trip, probably driven by the very anxiolytic nature of ketamine which allows one to access and address some questions we might not like to normally. Thinking back to the most significant part of the trip, the loss of ego, I felt as though that grounded me a lot. Just realising the tiny proportion I contribute to perception of the universe was probably why I was able to quite easily face death when normally I don't like to think about it. Normally I get caught up and try to over think how I can change such and such, when a lot of times it is probably better to accept that I have done all I can and that what happens will happen. Being able to view death in an accepting way like that will probably let me be a bit more chill about life.

Exp Year: 2016ExpID: 109202
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: 18
Published: Feb 19, 2018Views: 2,216
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Ketamine (31) : Alone (16), General (1)

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