DOSE:

1 hit

Inhalants

BODY WEIGHT:

210 lb

[Erowid Note: Our understanding of the literature is that there is no such thing as safe recreational use of volatile solvents, aerosols and other street inhalants : their psychoactive effects are inseparable from nerve and organ damage. We have chosen to include these reports to help document the real world use of inhalants, but their inclusion is not intended to imply that they are anything but dangerous.]
This is difficult to explain. However, I will try my best to describe the experience.

I was an art school student in San Diego, and had been working on a project for my perspective class. The drawing was finished and I had grabbed my paper cement to secure my project onto a black backboard. Now, before I go any further, I was living in a very small studio with horrible ventilation.

As I was putting the glue on the board to secure my drawing, I started to get a slightly cold and tingly feeling all through my hands and feet. I figured it was the glue and just continued to work. The effects had spread and started creeping up into my abdomen. It was a very nice feeling. I then decided that I was going to try sniffing the can to see what all my old punk rock buddies were talking about when they said they sniffed glue.

I took the cap/brush off the can and placed it to my nose and began to inhale the fumes for about a minute. At first my entire body got cold and tingly and soon enough the hand that was holding the can to my face started to look like an elephant’s trunk to me. It was amusing so I continued to sniff the fumes from this horrible glue. About 15 seconds later I was looking at my cutting board, which was a big green rubber mat with a grid on it for precise cutting. The pattern started to appear on everything I looked at, a yellow-green grid on everything in my studio.

The sounds of my air conditioner and my refrigerator started to echo and clash with each other and soon, I began to suffer from a spinning effect much like when you drink far to much. The patterns were still placed on everything I saw and was beginning to clash with the sounds from my a/c. The spinning became more of a half spin that violently went back and forth. Soon I felt as though my body was being pulled from every direction. The spinning continued to get worse, it started to spin from several different directions, and the pattern from my cutting board was still present but from all the spinning had started to create new patterns and textures. The pattern soon turned into that of casino chips covered in pool table cloth. Then the casino chips started to spin individually.

All I could think to myself is “Wow… so I just died and this is what the afterlife is like?” Soon, the spinning became much worse and the sounds became that of those little metal balls that are suspended and hit each other, only it was much more rapid and rather disturbing. Out of nowhere it all went away and I was suspended in nothingness. I had no body, no head, nothing; I was just a spiritual essence.

During this time suspended in nothingness, I remember being told the meaning to life and how we all got here. Then, the hell began. Remember the matrix when neo says he needs weapons and those thousands of rows of weapon racks flew into the scene? It was something like that but it was rows of fire and souls. Screams of women and children surrounded me from every direction. Shortly after that, it all just disappeared and then a silhouette of a man in a fedora was approaching, but it was a silhouette made of green code. His head soon flew away and then I heard static. Nothing but static for what seemed like a lifetime. I then hear a voice saying “Your life begins today, please turn your television set off now”. I now feel something cold from underneath me so I look down and see a shiny cold object and then BAM, I am back in reality, but not quite. I tried to move, and I did… but I felt like my body was still sitting down. My legs were moving, but I felt like I was still in the chair, and still felt like I had the can in my hand, but it was not, it was on the table. I sat down on the couch, and my arms felt like they were made of rubber and had sagged to the floor, like an old, abused stretch arm strong. About a minute later I felt normal again, but with a crushing headache.

This experience had disturbed me so badly that all I did for a week was sit in my bed thinking about what had happened and was desperately trying to remember the good details about the experience and what it meant. My friends tried to talk to me but I was so disturbed I could not even acknowledge their presence.

NEVER, EVER, EVER will I make that mistake again. I was once a Christian, but now I don’t know what to believe. Are we a computer program? Are we just molecules in something much bigger? Do we live in a matrix? I don’t know, but I know that every time I go to church all I can think about is this experience and how disturbing it was. Several years later I tried ecstasy for the first time and that has helped me greatly in dealing with this.

I will regret it for the rest of my life.

Exp Year: 2006	ExpID: 71631
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: May 27, 2020	Views: 4,389
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