DOSE:

15 mg

smoked

Bufotenin

(tar / resin)

BODY WEIGHT:

150 lb

I weighed out 15mg of sticky, brown bufotenin resin and placed it in the pipe, playing the flame from a lighter over the tiny bead of material. It vaporised easily and cleanly, the hot smoke pungent with indole and the fishy amine aroma characteristic of bufotenin.

There was time to turn off the light and settle back in anticipation - typically bufotenin isn’t as fast as DMT. The room was illuminated with two candles and the ambience of Harold Budd’s ‘The Pearl’ completed the sense of intimacy.

It began with an intense prickling – like stinging nettles in the back of my head and neck, moving rapidly down my arms and culminating in persistent pins and needles in my hands.

Gradually this was replaced by a strong tingling in my face, which was vaguely unpleasant but not distressingly so. These effects I assumed to be due to bufotenin’s serotonergic properties resulting from the introduction of the 5-hydroxy group into the DMT molecule.

I knew what was coming next and braced myself for the nausea to hit my stomach. It built in waves but, after ten or twenty seconds, passed away.
Although I was familiar with the unfolding stages of the experience, the intensity was beyond anything I’d yet experienced and I was having some trouble adapting. This wasn’t helped by the fact that I was alone and my awareness that the literature is ambiguous about this substance. Because of its structural similarity to serotonin the effects are quite physical and there have been occasional reports of situations requiring medical intervention. I was breathing consciously but somehow it didn’t feel as though the oxygen was getting in.

The tinnitus began – not the rasping screech of a high DMT dose but I knew I would imminently be sliding into the tryptamine space. The walls and ceiling turned butter yellow and I was there.

It’s very hard to define how this place differs from my normal perception as there were no morphing colour streams or fractal patterns superimposed on the visual field as one might encounter with psilocybin or LSD. This absence, combined with the tinnitus and a sense of expectancy or threat, made the feeling tone more DMT than psilocybin.

Looking around the room I noticed that pictures became windows into other worlds and a silver bag on the bookcase radiated the cold malevolence of an alien presence.
I was disturbed by a picture showing a snowy avenue of trees which seemed conceptually reduced to vertical black sticks against a white background. My brain seemed unable to comprehend the detail of complexity and I wondered if my vision was temporarily impaired.

My ability to think coherently seemed to be similarly truncated.

Another black and white photo of Douglas firs in the New Forest also appeared minimalistic but here, at least, my attention was caught by its three-dimensionality and a clump of bushes in the corner of the picture was gyrating wildly in multiple dimensions. Everything else in the room looked fairly normal, if a little cartoon like, and then the purple lightning began!

I’ve never encountered anything like this on any other psychedelic. A vivid, sinuous electric- purple lightning which seemed somehow sentient, or perhaps simply seductive and reminiscent of that Olympic sport in which lithe young women gyrate with streaming ribbons.

At this point I remembered I should be closing my eyes!

On doing so, my visual field was immediately filled with rapidly metamorphosing patterns – organic forms, largely contained within the simpler geometries of swirling Lissajous patterns and rotating Platonic solids, intermittently permeated by discharges of the purple lightning.

At apparently random intervals words or phrases would be superimposed on these patterns like subliminal flash cards. There seemed neither sense nor continuity to this.

In yet another space there were flashed images, brief vignettes of startling lucidity. These were always of unknown people who, as the experience unfolded, seemed to gradually become aware of my presence. Like unruly teenagers they would occasionally tease me by stabbing at me with their fingers, penetrating the veil that separated our two worlds. The effect was similar to watching a 3D film with stereoscopic glasses, in which the monster suddenly lunges out of the screen and involuntarily you gasp and draw back.

Regrettably this phase of the experience was too brief and as the tinnitus diminished, so the visions began to fade. I opened my eyes but there was only the faintest projection of eidetic imagery onto the ceiling and the lightning flashes seemed to be losing their voltage.

I began to enter the euphoric state that characterises the late stage of the bufotenin experience and once again closed my eyes. I perceived a shimmering curtain, slightly drawn, beyond which existed another world so vivid, that on entering into it I seemed to be stepping into another coherent reality.

This space was inhabited by gyrating ribbons in shades of scarlet and purple and their dancing evoked in me the most marvellous sensations of awe and euphoria. As with a flickering candle flame, carefully studied, there seemed a sense of living sentience.
In the bufotenin world, there seemed little doubt that I was in the presence of an alien entity. I seemed to have finally broken through into another phase of the experience, facilitated by the increased dose.

That the entity was female seemed self evident and she seemed to be trying to communicate through the mathematics of curves and colour, sinuously interwoven into choreography. The effect was luscious, entrancing but, unfortunately, ultimately meaningless to me. I felt awed and blessed.

Slowly the vision faded, to be replaced by the sleepiness which appears to be a distinctive and unusual feature of bufotenin intoxication, rare amongst the tryptamines, and no doubt an effect of its serotonergic tendencies.

The whole experience, to this point, had taken about thirty minutes.

Exp Year: 2009	ExpID: 79324
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Oct 29, 2011	Views: 26,042
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Bufotenin (62) : Entities / Beings (37), General (1), Alone (16)