DOSE:	300 mg	oral	Pharms - Gabapentin
	2400 mg	oral	Pharms - Gabapentin
	1800 mg	oral	Pharms - Gabapentin
	4200 mg	oral	Pharms - Gabapentin

This trip report is not going to be incredibly long or detailed, but I have gotten to a point of experimentation with and appreciation of this molecule that I felt I needed to get my thoughts about it down so far and make a log of what I have already experienced. Thus far I haven't really been keeping track of my gabapentin use in the way that I would something like a psychedelic or dissociative, but I'm hoping to change that now that I have more respect for what this class of drugs can actually do, at least in myself; so far, though I'm not completely confident, I want to say I've taken it six times in total, so I suppose that's where the official count will begin from now on.

I've found pretty much all of my experiences on gabapentin enjoyable, though my first one gave me sort of a 'too drunk' or possibly even 'too DXM'd' feeling at the beginning, though this was with a shockingly low dose of 300 mg, and I suspect that this was simply a result of me having to adjust to this new state and just happening to have it hit me weird in the set and setting I was in. Luckily, I have taken far higher doses now without that weird feeling ever returning. In addition, despite this strange feeling causing me to not really enjoy this 300 mg experience as a pure recreational drug, it is notable that when I went to bed that night, still quite high, I meditated while smoking cannabis and was presented with the sorts of quasi-psychedelic visuals I frequently do get in such a situation, and especially did at the time when I was more actively getting myself into that state, but it was immediately obvious to me that they were much more colorful, animated, and abstract than they would have been without the gabapentin. This experience caused me to become much more interested in this molecule than the high did alone, and though I then ended up shelving the bottle for quite some time, I never forgot the potential that I witnessed here.

By the time I had decided to give it another go, I was a bit more read up on just what gabapentin can do. I had read that staggering the doses was a good idea to help absorption, and that some people were indeed reporting hallucinogenic effects from higher doses, as they were from the closely related drug pregabalin, so I decided to see just how much of that aspect I could really explore myself, in the most efficient way possible. Over the course of the night I began slowly working my way up 600 mg at a time, I believe dosing more at every hour and a half, and by the time I had reached 1800 mg and it was really kicking in I felt pretty good. The high was far more pleasant than my strange 300 mg experience had been, though still not in any way overwhelming; it basically felt like a moderate novel depressant high, more intense than most benzodiazepines I've taken for sure but less intense than carisoprodol when I was new to it, though that one has become sort of mild for me now. I was not yet getting any significant hallucinations, but I did however close my eyes for a brief time and noticed that the colorful visual noise that I always see behind closed eyes if I give it a minute to emerge was now immediately present, becoming much more noisy, and almost felt as though it was pushing towards me , and I felt quite confident that this would be the beginnings of any closed eye visuals if they were to come. Excitedly, once the next hour and a half had passed I took another dose which bumped me up to 2400 mg. However, as it was kicking in I was watching TV just to enjoy the buzz and pass the time for things to kick in, and I went to lie down on the floor just in front of it to relax a bit and zone out, but this turned out to be a mistake.... The depressant effects overpowered me, and I promptly passed out, and woke up much later still on the floor with no particularly significant effects remaining. Ah, well, next time, I thought.

The next time that I did take it was with my roommate, who wanted to try it out a high dose for the first time. I didn't really keep track of how dosing on this occasion because I was busy hanging out with him, but I believe he said he dosed every couple hours on 900 mg, and I think I dosed at about the same rate as him, but on 600 mg. I stopped at 1800 mg and he at 2700 mg, so we had three doses each and then just chilled for the rest of the night. To my knowledge he did not get any hallucinogenic effects himself, or at least he didn't mention it if he did, but I don't think he actually looked for them anyway. I really wasn't either in this particular instance, partially because I was just focused on what we were doing and partially because it was the same dose I had last time that only gave me mild suggestions of closed eye visuals. Nonetheless, at one point in the night I was lying on a large pillow with my eyes closed while I was waiting for him to do something that I forget now, and out of nowhere I was presented with an actually fairly impressive array of visual effects, though still not incredibly vivid or intense. But, that didn't stop them from being very complex and powerful.... In fact, the entire time I was witnessing I was left with an extremely strong impression that these were the exact same kinds of visuals that I have specifically gotten many times many years ago in my experiments with diphenhydramine, but never saw on any other drug period, though I never took a full dose of any other deliriant either.

Given that I have now given up on deliriants all together and decided to simply appreciate my diphenhydramine experiences in retrospect, I had resigned myself to the fact that I would likely never see these bizarre but incredible hallucinations again, and made peace with it. However, out of nowhere, here they were again.... The high felt nothing like a deliriant, and I do not believe there is likely any direct pharmacological overlap, but somewhere down the line I feel there must be something they do the same in the brain, because here they were, just as I had known them before. Things flashed by quickly and it's hard to remember it all now, but what I do recall is some very realistic faces, animals running around, and flashes of bright white light, along with a more elementary visual effect that was actually one of my favorites on diphenhydramine, where staring at the visual snow in the background causes it to first start being covered in grid lines, and then rapidly get closer and closer to my face until it is suddenly massive and engulfs me, and the next thing I know I'm suddenly emerging from some strange delirious state a few minutes later. This gabapentin high was still not enough to reach that level of delirious hallucination on a level that would break through with eyes open or anything, but quite notably, I allowed my visual snow to engulf me just like I did then, and suddenly found myself coming out of a weirdly dissociated state where I had no concept of anything for just a moment. At this point, I was now extremely confident that there is at least some connection between them....

The next couple of times I took it were not incredibly significant, but I wasn't really hoping they would be; these experiences actually happened in very close proximity to the last one, and I figured that tolerance might get in the way of seeking out anything truly deep, so I took them just to get the buzz that I was finding increasingly enjoyable. However, it's notable that I could also tell that I was quickly adjusting to the state, and in the same vein as other mild depressants it was becoming the kind of high that you might not even notice if you don't really look for it. But, I also didn't use particularly high doses for this. The next time I actually did try to go a little deeper was just last night, and that's what prompted me to get the information I do have on it down for now. I took 4200 mg in total, but honestly probably rushed the dosing too much as I was trying to get as high as possible by midnight so that I could get up early in the morning for some plans I had, though those ended up canceling anyway. Nonetheless, that hadn't happened yet when I made my dosing plan, so I ended up taking 600 mg every twenty minutes until I reached my final dose, and I hoped that pushing it as high as I did might help offset the less staggered dosing as well. I spent much of the time waiting for it all to hit socializing with my roommate and his boyfriend, and as it was approaching midnight they retired to his bedroom and I had the living room to myself. The TV was still on and I planned to finish watching it before retiring to my own bedroom, but I decided to close my eyes at that point and see what could be found there.

I was mainly expecting more deliriant-like effects, but something very interesting happened instead: the normal visual static that I see and that had been strengthened before was now actually entirely replaced with a series of transparent but still clearly defined and detailed colorful geometric patterns, not exactly on the level of detail that a strong psychedelic would have but undeniably of a psychedelic-like nature nonetheless. I allowed them to grow, and though I still wasn't able to bring out anything extremely stable, I did start getting some brief flash of deliriant-like visuals such as before, only this time they were merging with the psychedelic-like qualities as well. There were a few different things that went by, but the only thing I remember very vividly was an image of a man floating above a cliff with his head leaned back and facing up towards the sky with his arms outstretched to his sides and back behind him, his legs just hanging. Clearly this was all quite visible to be if I can describe it to this degree, and yet, I must note that there was still very much a shadowy and half-defined quality to it, like I couldn't necessarily see every detail, and in fact with the man I felt that mostly was I saw was actually just the edges of his body, but not in an outline sort of way, totally visible and realistically detailed, just not fully realized yet. But, what I did see impressed quite a bit, not even just because of this powerful hallucinogenic effect in itself, but because it too was blending with the psychedelic effects, and I felt that this man I saw was brimming with some kind of magical power, which was visible through the colorful patterns streaming around his body that I could see and in the sense of him wearing some sort of abstract clothing that I only had an instinctive feeling of, and I also felt it was clearly expressed through his pose which to me came off as some sort of 'ultimate power' expression, like he was rising into the sky and in that wide open position to release his full magical capacities on the world. This all vanished as quickly as it came, but obviously made me incredibly excited to see what else the gabapentin had in store for me now, so I shut down everything in the living room and turned off the lights and such, moved into my bedroom, got in bed, and started meditating....

And, of course, I passed out. I slept like a baby and woke up almost exactly seven and a half hours later, and notably, when I woke up I had one of those weird moments of delirium you can often get when first emerging from a dream, but it actually was strangely psychedelic in nature, very abstract and with some of the shiny latex visual imagery I've gotten on tryptamines, and I don't recall what delirious thought I had exactly related to it, but as soon as the thought completed a smile spread over my face and I suddenly started becoming fully lucid again and really waking up. Luckily I was at least still a little high at this point, and still am now as I'm typing this, but unfortunately it appears that I missed the opportunity to get any more hallucinogenic effects out of this dose, as right now I can barely even get anything more than pure darkness to appear behind my eyelids. That is a shame, but I can always just try again, and next time definitely space out my doses more appropriately in the hopes of getting the full impact of the trip, because I feel that that 4200 mg probably would have been even stronger and possibly more fully hallucinogenic if I had treated it like that. In addition, I am starting to worry that I may be developing some of the rapid tolerance that I have heard of from this and other related molecules from having these explorations relatively close together, so I think I will put a bit more time between this experience and the next one, in the hopes of truly maximizing any effect that I am able to get from it.

Anyway, that's about all I have to say about my experiences so far, but I felt that it would be worthwhile to get it down for now. I am definitely becoming highly interested in the potential of α2δ subunit voltage-gated calcium channel blockers, if that is indeed the primary shared mechanism of action between these molecules, things like gabapentin and pregabalin, that causes these hallucinogenic effects. Quite honestly, I have absolutely no problem treating gabapentin primarily as a hallucinogen after these experiences, at least in myself; the visual effects I have gotten may have been mild so far, but they were no more mild than any of the other effects consistently are at the same dose, and that's actually not even something I can say about dissociatives, which are far more powerful highs than they are trips for me at most doses. In particular I am incredibly intrigued by the potential that gabapentin has to blend both these deliriant-like and psychedelic-like effects for me, as I can only imagine that what I have seen so far will become even more detailed and bizarre when pushed further, and quite truthfully I had already reached a point where I really wasn't expecting to be able to explore with any really new types of hallucinogens anymore, so all of this actually has me quite excited for the possibilities. Nonetheless, I am aware that these drugs are also not entirely benign, and supposedly also come with some pretty nasty withdrawals when taken regularly, so I definitely do need to take a break now and make sure I continue to treat this molecule and others like it with the respect they deserve, much like I would treat any other powerful hallucinogen.

But, that's all I've got for now, so I'll end this here!

Exp Year: 2017	ExpID: 110836
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: 26
Published: Feb 17, 2018	Views: 19,281
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Pharms - Gabapentin (183) : Retrospective / Summary (11), Various (28)