DOSE: T+ 0:00	531 mg	oral	DXM	(liquid)
T+ 0:15	1 bowl	smoked	Cannabis	(plant material)

BODY WEIGHT:

137 lb

Set and setting:

Conducive to a good trip. I had been in a pretty good mood for the four or five days leading up to the experience. I was tripping by myself (something I hadn’t done up until that point), but my roommates were home and could get help if something went wrong. The trip happened in my bedroom, a comfortable place that I enjoy lounging in.

Dosage:

Dosed at 10:00 p.m. Drank six ounces of Robitussin Maximum Strength Cough Syrup (531 mg DXM) over a period of ten minutes.

After finishing the dosage at 10:10, I sat on the couch and watched one of my roommates play Bouncer on his Playstation II. After a few minutes, remembered that drinking the cough syrup made some people sick to their stomach, so I decided to load my last tiny bit of ganja into my pipe and smoke it outside on the front porch.

It was a beautiful night. It wasn’t too cold, wasn’t too windy, and the sky was clear, giving me a great view of the brilliant winter night sky of Wyoming. I finished smoking the bowl in four or five minutes, but remained outside for a moment because the view was so nice. At this point I was definitely a little stoned... but there was something else there, as well. I didn’t feel completely stoned; I can’t really describe the extra sensation. My arms and legs just felt a little different. I looked back up at the sky. There are two big trees in the front yard, so I have to look through their empty branches to see the sky. As I’m looking at the sky, I see a vapor trail from a jet, hanging white in the sky. Out of the corner of my eye, I seemed to notice two more vapor trails. I looked at them, only to realize that there were large branches of the tree. I’m not sure if this was the DXM starting to take effect or my eyes playing tricks on me. After I looked closely at the two branches, they looked normal… but at first they sure looked like vapor trails.

“Hmm,” I thought, and went inside to wait for the DXM to fully take effect. I sat down and watched my roommate play Bouncer once more. The more I watched it, the stranger I began to feel. I wasn’t getting full-on visuals like on a good acid trip, but things were starting to look a little different. The colors in the video game seemed a little deeper, and there was the odd tracer here and there.

BOOM.

Something feels weird.

I close my eyes for a moment to see if I can focus my mind. I can, but I realize that my perception has shifted slightly, and my mind seems to be working a little differently. I open my eyes and look around the room. Same room, different perceptions. My roommate was still there playing PS2, my other roommate was still sitting on the other couch watching. All the objects that were there a moment ago were still there. I wasn’t tripping yet. But at the same time… just a bit different.

At this point there was one visual that I was getting that I often get after I’m coming down from an acid trip. A few hours after the peak of an LSD bender, but while I’m still tripping, colors seem to take on a different sort of look. Everything looks sort of smooth and pasty, almost like icing one would find on a birthday cake. That's how the walls and ceiling of the room looked. I kept looking around, at the walls, at the ceiling, the floor, trying to see if anything was starting to happen. The walls and the ceiling were the only things that looked different, and it is the smooth, pasty, “icing” quality that made them so. I remember thinking to myself, “I’m in a Dr. Seuss world.”

I noticed then that sounds were beginning to take on different qualities. Louder, tinny. I decided to head to my room since I was starting to notice some definite effects. I stood up from the couch and tried to walk to my room, but found that my legs really didn’t care to do all this sudden exercise. I could control them and walk, but it took some effort. I probably looked a little uncoordinated to my roommates as I stumbled into my room and closed the door.

Before tripping, I had turned on the Christmas lights in my room to give it a trippy atmosphere. I had also loaded a bunch of music into Winamp that I thought might be good DXM music. (I had done this prior to dosing because many people say that they are unable to move or concentrate on anything like a computer while they’re on DXM.)

10:50. So, I make it to my room, close the door. I feel a bit warm. I start Winamp playing. Whoa, something’s different. I turn on Geiss, a plug-in for Winamp, which displays a moving color show on your screen in response to whatever music is being played in Winamp. Weird, my stomach feels upset. I turn out the Christmas lights. Shit, now I feel hot. And sick. I put my trashcan next to my bad, lie down on my stomach, and immediately throw up into the trashcan. This was not pleasant. In addition to the physical effects, I realized that my mind was also under the effects of DXM. I’m tripping. Not really visually, like with LSD, but I was already into the whole personal introspective journey that I go through on acid. There were different voices in my head shouting things at me as I threw up. I remember thinking to myself, “Fuck. A bad trip, and I’ve still got several hours to go.” I’d never had a bad trip on LSD, so this was a bit scary at first. I finished puking, wiped my face off with a sock I grabbed from my dresser, and managed to get under the covers of my bed and watch Geiss.

I felt a little better after throwing up. The stomach irritation was gone, and that’s always a good thing. The DXM was hitting my full on at this point. It was difficult to move my arms and legs; I found it much easier to just lie there and watch the monitor. It was growing more and more difficult to fully control my train of thought, which I instantly recognized as a sine that I was tripping, mentally anyway.

A little history: I’ve studied a few semesters of psychology at college, and I’m an intelligent guy who’s very into all things scientific. “Demons”, “souls”, “God”, “heaven and hell” -- these are not things I believe in. My theory for what happens during a trip, whether the substance is DXM, mushrooms, acid, or whatever it is I've consumed, is that different parts of my mind come floating to the surface. Past experiences, forgotten desires, insecurities I’ve tried to push my your subconscious… this all comes out during a trip. I’m also proud of my strength of will and mind. Even though I felt that the DXM trip made me more susceptible to getting a bad trip than LSD, I was still able to focus my mind on reality, remind myself that this was a drug and that it would be over in a few hours, and talk myself down from a possibly-bad situation.

That being said…

Now the voices in my head were getting more persistent, seeming to become louder and more intense in my mind. This is the point where I focused on reality and maintained control over where my mind and the DXM were taking me. After doing this, I no longer felt that I was going to have a bad trip, but there were still some negative vibes there, which weren’t very comfortable.

About 20, 25 minutes later I threw up again. There wasn’t much more to throw up, so I basically had the dry heaves for a few minutes. After that was over, I felt MUCH better. My head seemed clearer; most of the negative vibes were gone. I felt I could finally relax and see where the trip took me.

I settled back into bed, intent on enjoying myself from there on out. Some of the effects seemed to get more pronounced. I had even more difficulty moving myself around. This was novel, as DXM is the first dissociative I’ve tried. I watched Geiss some more, growing more and more into it until something started to happen. It’s very difficult to describe, but try and imagine what I’m about to describe. Hopefully you’ll get what I’m trying to describe.

My bed seemed to be floating a little bit off the floor, hovering around in the air. It both looked this way and felt this way. As I looked at Geiss, it seemed like the patterns of color were coming out of the monitor into the room, and it appeared as if I were looking down a long, brightly-colored, twisting tunnel of light. Then it seemed that my bed, with me on it, started to float into the tunnel. I blinked my eyes and sat up in bed. Everything immediately went back to the way it was. The colors remained on the monitor, my bed wasn’t going anywhere. I think that was the high point of the trip, and probably the only thing that I can really call a visual hallucination.

After that, I kept trying to get the same thing to happen again, but it just wouldn’t. I would see things that sometimes looked like faces in the changing patters of Geiss, but nothing even remotely similar happened again. I continued watching Geiss for several hours until I finally decided to go to sleep at 2:00 a.m.


After I threw up the second time, most of the bad vibes went away, but my demons were still haunting me. They were as bad as they were while I was throwing up, but they were still there. I feel that I won a victory of sorts when I maintained control that first time, but I hadn’t made them disappear completely. Up until the time I went to bed, my demons were still haunting my mind, pointing out my insecurities and weaknesses. But they didn’t get the best of me. Even under the effects of 531 mg of DXM, I was still able to consciously do battle with my demons, beating my tripping mind at its own tripping game. That was pretty cool.

I woke up at 6:30 a.m., limbs still feeling heavy and sluggish, but I was mostly over it. I went back to sleep and woke up at noon feeling very refreshed. My head had only the slightest hint of a hangover, just a little thickness in the back of my head. Other than that, I felt great. There was even a nice mood lift that day, which I attribute to my own pride at being able to maintain control over what could have been a frightening trip.

I’ve done a lot of research about DXM the last few days, and I would say that I hit DXM’s second plateau. Maybe this is wishful thinking, but I think I was on the verge of hitting the third plateau when it seemed like I was about to get sucked into my computer screen. Had I had a larger dose, I think I would have slipped into the computer screen and into the depths of DXM’s third plateau. I’d really like to reach that point, because it sounds much more enjoyable than the first and second levels of a DXM trip. Next time, maybe at the end of this month, I’ll take eight ounces of the same cough syrup instead of six ounces (708 mg DXM as opposed to 531 mg). Hopefully, the larger dose will bring on that third plateau.

Senses! Physical sensations like touch, hot, cold, pain, itching... those were dulled quite a bit. (Go figure... DXM is a dissociative.) Hearing was enhanced. I didn't have my music turned up very loudly at all, but I felt as if I were surrounded by the music. I also noticed a little distortion in things I heard (everythign was a bit tinny), but I still able to recognize every word of lyric and every nuance of music in what I was listening to. My eyesight changed little. Things looked a little different, and I had a few almost-visuals, but it pretty much reimained unaffected. That's one of the reasons I don't think I reached the third plateau: I could still see everything around me when I had my eyes open. I had closed-eye visuals like a motherfucker, though. Taste seemed... I don't know. I didn't eat anything while I was in robo mode, but it seemed like my sense of taste was diminished somewhat. I say this because I DID throw up a couple times, but it really didn't leave much of a taste in my mouth, which brought me to this conclusion. Smell... ah, now THAT was definitely affected. I've got poor eyesight, and my hearing isn't the best, but I've been imbued with a very strong sense of taste and smell. Even though my sense of taste was deadened during the trip, my sense of smell was supernatural. I distinctly remember how it smelled when I threw up the first time. All I threw up was that horrible cough syrup, which doesn't taste to great anyway. With the heightened sense of smell, the already-strong odor of cough syrup was nearly overpowering. The smell just slammed into me, and even in my altered state, I remember clearly thinking: 'Wow, that sure is Robitussin.'

Even though this account may not make DXM sound very fun, I’m glad I took the trip. It’s a great feeling to know that I am in control of my mind enough to keep myself from getting pulled under in a possibly-bad trip. Even if the trip itself wasn’t that exciting, the feeling of accomplishment after doing mental battle with my own insecurities is fantastic.

Exp Year: 2001	ExpID: 5682
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jan 21, 2002	Views: 33,732
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DXM (22) : First Times (2), Alone (16)