DOSE:

85 mg

oral

Pharms - Memantine

(liquid)

BODY WEIGHT:

145 lb

Addendum: 15-month follow-up

This disaster of a trip is largely my own fault. I did not heed any advice I read online, went into it under the worst possible conditions, and took a higher starting dose than recommended.

I've tried to piece this all together from chat logs with my friends and random notes I left on my laptop, so the timestamps aren't perfect but pretty close.

I assumed that because I have a lot of experience with DXM and nitrous I'd initially be able to handle a higher dose of memantine just fine. I was wrong. Perhaps under better conditions this would be true, but when I dosed it I was 1. Deeply stressed about an upcoming exam and 2. Sleep deprived.

I attribute the hellish nature of the trip mostly to the latter. I had received only 4 total hours of sleep within the prior 24 hours.

I have depression, anxiety, OCD, and ADHD.

The setting was an environment I'm very familiar with - my single dorm and my university's tiny campus.

At the time I dosed I had no drugs in my system and no tolerance to dissociatives. I am not currently medicated.

---
T+00:00: Can't get to sleep. I didn’t want to wait until tomorrow morning to dose so I took 85 mg of memantine HCl in a solution I bought online. I expect a quiet night alone in my dorm.

T+00:30: Dissociation ramped up fast. I know where I am, but there is a pleasant sense of novelty to my environment. It's quickly become clear that this will be a confusing trip. I've decided to shower and get my shit together in case I don't have the ability to later.

T+00:35: Showered. Found my senses dulled, like the hot water wasn't even touching me. Coordination and balance are poor. There is an paradoxically familiar dissociation, like I am an alien in my own body and my brain has stepped into a comfortable place just outside reality. I feel slightly manic. As I move around my room I clean and cannot help but dance. This headspace is not at all unlike DXM.

There is a rapid and slightly worrying tingling up and down my spine, but it quickly disappears. Oddly euphoric.

T+01:00: Been flipping between watching trippy music videos and YouTube videos and struggling to follow them. Heavy confusion. My hands feel both itchy and tingly. I am tired, slow and anxious. There is dramatic time dilation. The videos I watch feel like whole movies but actually only last a few minutes. Music sounds alright, there's some slight enhancement. There's also very familiar dissociative 'looseness' in my body when I listen music and let my body move with it. This gentle bobbing/'dancing' sensation is pleasant in a way reminiscent of N2O.

T+02:00: Music now sounds neutered, tinny, and distant. Still experiencing a lot of confusion.

T+04:00: Peaked, I think. I walked around campus for several hours while listening to my usual dissociative playlist. There was an inescapable anxiety that followed me as I frantically walked around campus. I walked past some people smoking and saw some other folks through windows and felt terror that they were watching me and resented me. Humans looked hideous and seemed to be dressed in the garish clothes of a carnival barker.

I found myself almost lost multiple times on my own very small campus. It had rained recently and the campus was covered in a beautiful, dense fog.

There were some distinctly psychedelic effects. As I walked, the ground seemed to warp around me, sometime like I was rolling on a very small sphere; other times like I was shambling through in a huge bowl. The sky seemed like an incomprehensibly vast dome. The environment around me seemed to be so foreign. Planes were tilted at unusual angles, buildings were warped and stretched, impossibly vast distances appeared between where I was and where I was going.

I sat for a time feeling very worn out and just closed my eyes and dissociated into the music. With my eyes open, I felt like I was in a world just slightly different from my own. With my eyes closed, I felt just gone, not floating in space but having become a void. I could visualize the soundwaves merging, and encompassing 'myself' in an isolated bubble.

I've return to my dorm, exhausted. I've been trying over and over to sleep but can't. I've tried watching some standup comedy on Netflix but found it nonsensical. Everybody sounds like they're trying and failing to imitate a foreign accent and jokes don't make sense.

T+08:00: Been tossing and turning in bed trying to sleep. My dimly lit room is unfamiliar, everywhere I look is disorienting. My blinds shift and seem to grow, encompassing all of my vision. Without listening to music, I get intrusive thoughts. Some dark visuals, all very cluttered and dense. It all has a writhing, gritty texture. Occasionally there are awful, violent images that pop into my head. Some are just terrible, like cartoon characters or even people I know suffering violently. Others are haunting, but visually interesting body horror and technology that I'd otherwise be intrigued by.

I am desperate to sleep and am experiencing symptoms of delirium. When I try to sleep I lapse into surreal and intricate thought loops that have no bearing on reality but feel like the entirety of my existence. I have no sense of self when I close my eyes, but come back as soon as I open them.

T+16:00: More tossing and turning. Sluggish and delirious. The moment I close my eyes there's a fictional bureaucracy governing every aspect of my bodily function, with a stifling history and culture that I must abide by to operate it. I do not feel in control of my breathing, or even like it's my breathing to control. For what feels like hours I believe I have become a 'ginko pot', a 100% fictional vase from Japan that you install in your throat to supplement your breathing. My brain made up an apparatus, sold it to me, and I became it. It had a little unimaginative tagline - 'Ginko pot, the pot that breathes for you!'

Every moment I spend awake I am exhausted, miserable, and anxious. There is an all-encompassing malaise cranked up to 11.Every moment my eyes are closed reality crumbles and my thoughts become surreal and incomprehensible.

T+16:30: I walk outside. I am still uncoordinated and frustrated that I still feel so dissociated, like I'm no closer to the end of this hellish trip.

T+17:00: Got some food, drank two bottles of cranberry juice, and tried watching some more videos on YouTube. Food helps and I feel a bit better. Dissociation is uncomfortable but manageable.

T+22:00: Slept for four hours. I feel so, so much better, though when I walk outside again I'm still very dissociated. Going to eat again and try and stay distracted until it's over.

T+30:00: Been eating, napping, and dicking around online. I slowly returned to baseline. It feels good to have my body back.

---
By the next day I was extremely grateful to feel sober and present in my environment. I felt the urge to exercise and implement some healthy new habits in an attempt to take advantage of this newfound love of my body. I didn't realize just how much I take it for granted until I lost it for so long. This afterglow lasted a day, and I was deeply depressed and anxious for the two days after. My sleep schedule had been thrown for a loop and it severely impacted my ability to keep up with classes. I've tried to maintain the healthier changes, though.

Several days later I took 1.6 g of phenibut and I found it to be particularly intense. I suspect this memantine trip reset my tolerance.

---

ADDENDUM [Added in 2020]

15 months later

I did maintain the lifestyle changes for several months after. I haven't kept everything up since then, but the trip gave me a new outlook on life that I still carry. Even if I'm not doing all the things I should be doing to take care of myself right now, there's a persistent desire to be better that wasn't there before. Over a year later and I genuinely think this trip put me on what will be a lifelong journey to being a healthier, more functional human.

I'm getting there.

Exp Year: 2018	ExpID: 112468
Gender: Not Specified
Age at time of experience: 20
Published: Oct 25, 2018	Views: 9,665
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Pharms - Memantine (309) : Various (28), Hangover / Days After (46), Difficult Experiences (5), General (1)