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Faces
Cacti - T. pachanoi & Cannabis
Citation:   Frozenfire. "Faces: An Experience with Cacti - T. pachanoi & Cannabis (exp72895)". Erowid.org. Sep 27, 2009. erowid.org/exp/72895

 
DOSE:
T+ 0:00
12 in oral Cacti - T. pachanoi (liquid)
  T+ 1:30   smoked Cannabis (plant material)
  T+ 0:00   smoked Cannabis (plant material)
  T+ 0:00   smoked Cannabis - Hash (tar / resin)
BODY WEIGHT: 160 lb
July 25-26 2008

It was a warm sunny day, I woke up rather late on the final day before I was forced to depart to Alabama and I wanted to try some kind of drug before I left. My friend 'D' had recently told me that he had come into the possession of some San Pedro cacti and he had used them to trip. I decided to try the cacti because I realized that I may never come into contact with them again and didn't want to miss my chance. I went over to D's house at about 3 pm and he was already chilling there with some other friends. By the time I got there he already had the cactus chopped up and was getting ready to blend it for the boiling procedure. Once the concoction had begun to boil my friends rolled a fat dutchmaster blunt and I indulged myself in getting stoned about two hours prior to ingesting the cacti. By the time the cactus juice was ready to be consumed, most of the high from the ganja had worn off.

Dose: 12 inch cactus cuttings extracting into juice
Approximate time of consumption: 6:00pm

After gulping down the disgusting tasting liquid which I chased with limeade, I almost instantly began to feel that something was different about my buzz. However this may have just been a placebo buzz similar to the feeling I get before I smoke pot.

+30 minutes

I began to notice colors seeming more vibrant such as the blue shirt I was wearing and D’s red tablecloth. In addition object were feeling different to the touch and the grapes that I was eating to get the taste out of my mouth felt somewhat strange.

+1 hour

[Erowid Note: Driving while intoxicated, tripping, or extremely sleep deprived is dangerous and irresponsible because it endangers other people. Don't do it!] We decided that I should take my car home before the trip really kicked in so that I wouldn’t be stuck having to drive it home later, I drove home fine only feeling buzzed at the time. My friend Daniel and I decided to go for a walk in the woods so that the trip would set on in a more natural environment.

+1.5 hours

We drove to the woods and walked inside, I began to notice that colors were becoming brighter and more contrasty, I felt throughout my trip that it was almost as if someone had turned on a backlight and everything had become more vibrant. We walked to a creek where I ran into some friends I hadn’t seen in a while. They lent us their lighter and we smoked a very small bowl of marijuana. It was at this point that I began to feel slightly queezy. The bud enhanced my buzz a little but at this point it was mainly just bright colors and different perceptions of distance. Everything felt father away. We walked back to the car as I began to feel more and more sick, we ended up going back to D’s house and he gave me some food and water to hold back the nausea. I was afraid to be alone and D was a perfect trip sitter encouraging me throughout the night to push myself and not be afraid.

+2 hours

We went into D’s room and listened to some trance while I waited for the first real visuals to come on. The first visuals I noticed were strange ripples and distortions in the comforter on his bed, I began to see small faces-one like the face of a monkey and the entire comforter seemed to be rippling to and fro with the music. These visuals were not too overwhelming for me because they only occurred when I attempted to zone out and really feel the drug. As soon as I looked around or talked to people they would somewhat fade away.

+ 3-8 hours

I began to lose track of time with what happened next but I will recall the events as best I can. Two more friends came over, 'E' and 'J' and we made plans to go smoke at a friend of ours house with of whole bunch of other people. I was still lying in the bed when my nausea finally went away completely and my body was beginning to feel quite buzzed. It was somewhat of a rushing feeling which lasted throughout the trip, I would describe it as a strange combination of relaxing, tingly and stimulating. I continued to watch the hallucinations on the ceiling and remember having the feeling that there was a group of people looking down at me, I also remember seeing a bubble grow and pop on the ceiling which revealed an eye underneath. It left behind a bunch of psychedelic looking twisting patterns of color changing goo, yeah it’s very hard to explain. After that I got up and remember looking into a mirror and remarking about how incredibly large my pupils were, they were pretty much as dilated as they possibly could be for the whole night. My face began to bend and twist in the mirror and it gave me a very unsettling vibe but I was still having fun.

So eventually we went over to our friend S’s house and sat down at the picnic table in her backyard, it was now sunset and I began seeing tons of shifting faces in almost everything I looked at. Occasionally I would make eye contact with one of the faces and it would give me a strange vibe. There were a ton of people at the house and more people kept coming, I ran into a lot of friends while also meeting a lot of new people whose names I don’t remember. So we basically talked about how I was fucked up and how everyone else wanted to be for a while until a bunch of people left to go pick up some hash from a dealer we know. I just chilled sitting in my friend’s back yard enjoying the visuals. It felt almost like I was wearing 3d glasses there were tracers from everything I was looking at and faces and eyes were popping up in every shadow. Night fell and I remember looking up at one tree in particular and seeing an angry face, the tree then took on the shape of a large ominous figure looming over me almost like a wraith with arms raised high. I looked away as the beast was extremely intimidating

At some point my friend J and I went to go lie down on my S’s trampoline. The visuals I saw there were very extreme I remember the sensation that the trees above were getting closer and that there were thousands of eyes leering at me, for some reason I was not afraid. S had decided to try to mess with me and was creeping around behind the trampoline and throwing things into it which eventually creeped us out enough that we went back to the table with everyone else. I was a little annoyed when I found out that it was really was my friend and not the trees throwing things at us.

D came back with some hash and we smoked a few bowls of weed topped with hash in S’s bowl. This is when my trip experienced its peak. The hash boosted my high and my vision suddenly became very hazy and it almost appeared slanted at times. Different sensations of gravity affecting my vision combined with intense hallucinations of eyes and faces shifting into different objects began to push me to the verge of ego death. At one point I began to slip into it while starring into the darkness beneath the table, the sounds of my friend’s voices blurred together as I felt my consciousness leaving my body. In this new reality time had no meaning and neither did anything from the realm we live in, it was almost as if I were simply a bodiless consciousness floating through the eternity of the universe. It was easy to escape from this reality when I was ready and while I found this feeling similar to salvia this drug does it much smoother without the discomfort. A little while later I began to feel the sensation ego death tugging at me again but I was quickly able to pull myself back to our world when my friends attempted to talk to me.

Another experience I vividly remember was when at some point I began staring at a streetlight which began to have crazy twisting illusions around it. The light actually turned into a beautiful creature that was dancing amid a sea of illusions, it was something straight out of surrealist art which I assume must be at least partly influenced by hallucinogenic drugs.

We then moved inside to S’s bedroom. My body was feeling increadible and tingly it was a very nice sensation. I was also still tripping nuts and seeing strange twisting patterns and faces with my eyes closed. At one point I even saw a transforming perfectly rendered 3d image in my mind and I was able to rotate it freely in my head.

We left somewhere around 2 am and the drug had still not worn out yet. We went to E's house and chilled for a bit and I got very close to one of the hallucinations of an eye at one point, it seemed to be looking around and was pretty crazy. Later while I was in J’s mini van I had a shocking hallucination that there was a woman inside part of J’s seat belt that was reaching her arm out and playing with his hair, I could actually see her fingers moving through his hair. This was probably the most horrifying of the hallucinations but I was able to maintain my cool and being around friends made me more interested in how I could be seeing such a crazy sight. Soon after this everyone decided to go home

+9-13 hours

I immediately encountered my mom when I got home but was able to hide the fact I was fucked up despite my eyes still being heavily dilated, another reason why I enjoyed this drug. it wasn’t hard to communicate and when I later talked to my girlfriend on the phone she couldn’t even tell that I was fucked up. I then went to my sister’s room and talked about the crazy trip I just had and was still having. She agreed to stay with me until it mostly wore off and we went into my room and listened to trance for a few hours. Eventually my sister went to bed leaving me awake. I didn’t notice the drug really starting to wear off until 6 am when the faces had faded away but the colors still seemed super bright and saturated to the eye. The drug didn’t completely wear off until I woke up later that day at 12 am with side effects of an overall sensual dullness and a little bit of mental slowness which lasted half the day.

I think it took a couple days for me to fully recover from what the mescaline had done to my brain because the day after I had a very strange lucid dream and when I awoke from it in the middle of the night I was freaked out and I began seeing faces again, However I think this may have just been a psychological effect due to myself worrying whether or not I would ever feel completely normal again.

All in all I enjoyed this drug a lot for my first real psychedelic experience even though it lasted longer than I expected and the after effects were quite unpleasant for me.

Exp Year: 2008ExpID: 72895
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Sep 27, 2009Views: 8,111
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Cacti - T. pachanoi (64) : Small Group (2-9) (17), First Times (2), General (1)

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