DOSE: T+ 0:00	140 mg	oral	MDA	(capsule)
T+ 6:00	160 mg	IM	Ketamine	(liquid)

BODY WEIGHT:

160 lb

I’ve had quite a bit of experience with psychedelics over the past 10 years. (I’m 36) Most of my experience has been with LSD, mushrooms, 2-CB and MDMA. My trips are usually fairly positive, and I’ve learned about different aspects of my psyche from the various trips that I’ve taken with these substances.

A group of my male friends and I decided that we would spend a Saturday tripping together. It was my friend Ron’s idea. Ron suggested that we take some MDA in the early afternoon, and then do some ketamine at the tail end of the MDA trip. Of the six of us, only Ron was an experienced ketamine user. Tony had tried ketamine once, and every one else had never tried it.

We met at Fred’s apartment downtown at about 1 PM. We all took 140 mg capsules of MDA.

It was a sunny day, so we went out for a walk. I hadn’t eaten since 8 AM, and a number of the other guys hadn’t eaten at all. So we decided to go get some sushi. We went to a sushi restaurant and ordered a bunch of sushi. A few of us had miso soup and seaweed salad as we waited for the rest of our order. By the time the sushi was ready, the MDA had come on in full force, and we weren’t in the mood to be inside anymore. So we asked the waiters to pack up all the sushi to go. We figured it would be good to have the sushi later on, after the drugs had worn off. We went back to Fred’s and put the sushi in the fridge.

I won’t go into much of the details of the MDA trip. We had a nice time bonding with each other, having warm conversations and enjoying each other’s company.

The main part of the MDA trip was over by 6 PM. I could still feel tension in my muscles and jaw, but the mental effects had largely subsided. The sun had gone down, and the energy in the group had become very mellow. We sat and listened to some music, without much conversation.

At this point, Ron decided to dig into the sushi. He was pretty hungry, but no one else was. I didn’t feel hungry at all, but I did realize that it had been 10 hours since my last meal, so perhaps eating something would be a good idea. I sat down at the dining room table and eyed the sushi. One piece looked particularly good, and I picked it up and took a bite. It tasted great, and I felt good that I was nourishing my body. I ate three more pieces, and was done eating after that.

Meanwhile, Ron was preparing the needles of ketamine. We would be injecting 160 mg of ketamine intramuscularly. I had some nervousness about the needles, but Ron assured us that it was easy and that he would walk us through the process.

When the needles were prepared, we all sat down in the living room. I sat down on an easy chair. Charles and Ron were on the couch to my right. My other friends were across the room, not easily in my field of view. Ron guided us through the injection, and I was fairly surprised to discover that injecting myself with the needle was not as difficult as I had envisioned.

Within 30 seconds, my body felt very heavy. I was very relaxed. Charles, who was next to me, said, “Wow. My body is dissolving.”

The entire K trip lasted for about an hour, but I can only recall a small fraction of it, so the following narrative is fairly fragmented.

My eyes closed. I saw some very intense visual hallucinations. The closed-eye hallucinations that I’ve experienced on other psychedelics are reminiscent of the screen savers from the mid-90s: color-cycling neon fractals against a black background. The ketamine visual hallucinations were much more sophisticated. There was no black background. What I saw was an entire world of exquisite fractal shapes. Things flowed and morphed in a very liquid way, and they went really fast. I felt as if I was on a rollercoaster, tumbling forward from one cool graphical world to the next. There was no chance to get a grip on one place before it morphed at breakneck speed into something else.

I totally lost my sense of self. There was no “me” having the experience. I did not know that I was a person having a drug trip. It felt as if the experience of tumbling through fractals was all that I was. This was slightly disturbing. (Sometimes I have trouble “just letting go.”) I also had no idea that there were other people in the room with me (or that I was in a room at all).

I do recall some of the thoughts that I did manage to have.

One thought went something like this: “I do drugs. But isn’t there some time between the drug trips when there is some other non-drugged reality?” As I thought that, the underlying assumption was that the experience I was currently having was how it always had been and how it was always going to be. Again, I found this somewhat disconcerting. But, since I had nothing else to compare it to, I did not find it frightening or terrifying.

Another thought that I had was related to my occupation as a software engineer. I pictured the manager at the company I work for, one of my co-workers, the computer program that I work on, the computers that run the program, and the users of the software. I saw all of these and myself as being the same – just interchangeable elements of the graphical matrix that I was swimming through.

Then I opened my eyes. Seeing the room completely changed my reality and was a very intense experience for me. I certainly didn’t recognize the room as being Fred’s living room, but I did recognize the room’s “reality” as having some special significance and familiarity, and being in the uncontrollable tumbling in that reality was quite unsettling. I tried to hold on to being in the room, but whenever I tried to grasp onto that reality, I tumbled back into the multi-dimensional graphical world. This was a bit frustrating and somewhat unpleasant.

Eyes closed again, I stayed in the graphical universe for a while longer.

All this time, I had no feelings of having a body. All of a sudden, my body made itself known to me. I felt some clenching of my stomach, and tried to utter some words. I think I tried to say “not good.” I felt some nausea, and then vomited. After that I returned to the eyes closed graphical universe once again.

Eventually, I noticed that mixed in with the cool graphics, every once in a while I would notice a flash of the living room. At first it didn’t have much significance; it was just part of the whirlwind scenery. As time passed, the living room appeared more often, and I recognized that that room would be a nice place to be.

I settled into the living room somewhat and looked around. I noticed that my hand was wet. I saw that there was a bowl in my lap, and that there was a stain on the left knee of my jeans. I realized that I must have thrown up, though right at that moment I had no memory of actually vomiting.

The world was still moving at breakneck speed. I would be in the living room, would zone out again, and would then re-discover that I was in the living room again. I looked to my right and saw Charles and Ron on the couch. For the first time I grokked that there were other people in the room, but it didn’t register with me that these were people that I knew.

Charles squeezed my hand. This did a lot to bring me back into reality. (Days later, Ron told me that Charles had been talking to me a quite a bit, saying calming things to help bring me safely back to reality, but I don’t recall any of that.)

The others in the room started talking. I could tell that they were sharing about their experiences, but I was unable to actually tune into the conversation.

I occasionally looked down and noticed the bowl and the vomit and recalled (again) that I had vomited. I started thinking that I should clean myself off, but I couldn’t fathom moving. (Tangential note: Fortunately, since the sushi had only been in my stomach for about half an hour, it wasn’t very digested, so it didn’t have that familiar vomit smell.)

Gradually things became more and more real. I was becoming more focused, zoning out less and less. I asked Fred if I could borrow a change of clothes, and he brought out some fresh clothes and placed them next to me. (By this time, everyone else was up and around. My trip was about 20 minutes longer than everyone else’s.)

After about 30 minutes, I managed to stand up. The first thing I did was to undress and put on the fresh change of clothes. The next few hours were spent being very low key. I was still very queasy and threw up again (into a bowl this time), emptying my stomach completely. We watched some reruns of the Daily Show, which helped bring me more and more back into the real world.

I got home a bit after midnight. I could still feel some of the energy from the MDA, and knew that sleep would not be easily attained. So I took some valium and a slept like a baby.

I felt a bit sluggish for the next few days, but fine otherwise. My mood was generally good.

In retrospect, the ketamine experience was a neutral one. There was lots of interesting novelty to it, and that was balanced by the psycho-spiritual uneasiness and by the vomiting.

Would I try ketamine again? Perhaps. But if I do, it will definitely be on an empty stomach, and it will not be in combination with another drug. And I’d probably go for a slightly smaller dose as well.

Exp Year: 2004	ExpID: 38293
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Dec 4, 2004	Views: 42,779
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Ketamine (31), MDA (34) : First Times (2), Small Group (2-9) (17)