A River of Gravel Drowning in my Mind
Context
Substances
Name | Dosage | Route of Administration |
Diphenidine | 125 mg | Oral |
Onset
Dose taken in gel cap.
Feeling chills.
Definitely feel the onset now. A very pleasant warm buzzing feeling creeping up and down my being.
That feeling of dissociative weight sitting inside my skull has kicked in. It’s a feeling of pressure, but not in any unpleasant way. It’s a dizziness, like my brain has been spun by a centrifuge to the edges of my skull, but once again it’s a very pleasant buzzing feeling. It’s an awareness of the weight of this organ in my head.
Everything has a metallic essence to it, not visually or auditorily or anything, the whole world just feels shiny, hard and reverberant. I am frowning very hard but not because I am sad, it just feels good to frown, it feels like the corners of my mouth are sinking into a hot tub.
Proper feeling of dissociation comes on- the numbness in my extremities, the loss of proprioception, the absurd floppiness and extra momentum. There is a buzzing numbness at the borders of my physical existence. I feel as though I am simultaneously floating and sinking.
The OEV’s begin to present- everything is blurry and busy, as if my vision has fragmented into a swarm of insects, all buzzing, landing, pausing, flickering their wings, taking off again and flying nowhere in particular. When I try to read it is as if the words are evading detection, not only blurring themselves and fleeing to the periphery of my vision, but remaining elusive in their meaning, the semiotics of the letters separating from the letters themselves, resulting in a strange jumble of illegible glyphs. With a little focus however, I can pull the words and their meanings back together and it all makes sense. It feels like everything is flowing and vibrating around me, like I am stones in a great babbling buzzing brook.
Peak
This drug brings me a great deal of warmth. Everything in my peripheral vision is strobing and flashing. I am having such a fun time. It feels like the entirety of my existence has been sequestered and pinched off from the rest of reality, placed in its own neat little snow globe, and that snow globe is now being gently swirled, rocked, shaken back and forth.
Everything feels fast, like my movements are faster, my thoughts faster, the entirety of my being is a runaway train on a fast path to a canyon filled with pillows. I feel like I am made of clay, drooping and being molded and pinched by gravity, and being subject to a hot wet wind. It is like the wind that blows through a jungle, carrying the breaths of a million lives on it, all of these breaths colliding with my body like raindrops. I feel weird little blips of pressure on random parts of my body.
I decide to try and focus on the visuals. The closed eyed visuals are compartmentalized and blocky, like lego or stained glass or low-res pixel art. Even with my eyes open this effect continues, lines begin to draw themselves and cross my field of vision. They split it into cells, and each cell breaks off to dance in its own individual essence, some are hot, some are cold, they spin and tilt and entwine and interlock. I begin to physically feel this visual essence of things being reduced to grains and particles- the feeling of gravel flowing past me and around me like a river, like they are the molecules of a liquid.
I feel so heavy, I am couchlocked and have no desire to move. I am being massaged by a river of gravel, the world around me is crumbling into blocks and bricks that join this burgeoning stream, it’s so warm and it feels so great. Something about this strikes at my emotions. I want to cry, not about anything in particular, I just want to feel the emotional release.
Visuals and headspace are still building more and more. I do not know or care when I am peaking. The motion of all these blocks feels like the interlocking moving parts of some intricate machine, as though existence has been pared down and reduced to pixels, the incredibly complicated mechanisms of the world turned into these simple representations. I close my eyes and am presented with a great blue and green landscape that looks painted- it is heavy with broad brush strokes that captured a reduced essence of what must be a more intricate scene.
I suddenly feel like I am floating an inch off of the ground. This is a peculiar feeling. I am tearing up, and it feels great. Despite the fact that I am floating, I feel so heavy, as if my weight has granted me my own gravity that keeps the world in orbit an inch away from me. I feel like I am buried and constrained in a tomb of blocks that roughly surrounds my shape. It’s pretty neat I guess.
I am in a sea of pillars, each is jingling past me and floating in an infinite rushing blue space. I open my eyes and as they adjust to the dark I am presented with a checkerspot world, the edges of my vision fractalized into a great blue variegated nothing. Everything is dominated by blobs. The couchlock, the abstract yet simplistic visuals of the CEV’s, the deeply emotional and introspective headspace, this is probably the most meditative drug I’ve taken. I am feeling some amnesia and have difficulty remembering very recent actions, but with some focus I can maintain a coherent line of thought. This can be a very important therapeutic tool if I properly harness it.
A great deal of meditation later in the infinite plane of blocks has left me with this: I begin to wonder what the source of euphoria is. I am certainly feeling a euphoric glow from this drug, but why? Why does it feel good? This leaves me eventually with the question- Why do I like what I like? I pose the question to several people and it catches most of the off guard. What is the pure essence of happiness for me? I do a lot of things under the guise of them bringing me happiness, immediate or long term, but what exactly is that happiness? Perhaps if I burrow down into the essence of it, I can perhaps find some way around all the tedium of everyday life and learn to harness good feelings in a pure and productive way.
This brings me to think a great deal about my future- what am I pursuing? What is my overall goal in everything? Indeed everything I do builds towards some overall goal, whether it be a happy existence or building a better world for others. But what is the pure essence of a happy existence? A better world? What are the basics of these I should pursue? I realize that it feels like I am blindly pursuing and bowing to some essence that I am convinced is instinctually programmed into me. But perhaps I can dissect what I regard as instinct and discover new ways to alter my behaviors, habits, thought processes, and reactions to stimuli. But that’s enough thinking for now, I feel warm, like I am sitting by a campfire surrounded by a beautiful forest. The glow is accentuated by fireflies and the comfort of knowing that I am where I want to be in that moment.
My hands are heavy and I’m feeling a strong sense of empathy. I want to hug my friends, I want to help them dissect their thoughts to feel more satisfied and happy with the lives they lead, because so many of my friends are so depressed and dissatisfied all the time.
I’m getting restless cooped up in this house. I throw on some clothes, throw some supplies into a bag, and embark on an adventure. I decide I will walk to the Philadelphia art museum. The walk is weird. I am dissed as hell still. People feel alien, like cardboard cutouts, but they are strangers on a dark night. The world seems to give way before me, rising out of the fog that obscures it. It is all pieces that are coming to form and interlock before me, for the pleasure of my interaction. I reach the art museum and realize that I walked that entire distance (~3 miles) without stopping once. My body is frail and I’m not physically capable of much. There are people who can run that distance without breaking a sweat, but me, I am so weak. The exhaustion catches up with me when I reach my destination. I smoke a lot of weed by the river and look at the glow of the city. Everything just feels so right. I decided on what would make me feel good, and I went out and did it, and now I am here, feeling good, doing things. I close my eyes and sink into that same world of swirling blocks and forms. This feels so psychedelic, this entire experience has felt more psychedelic than dissociatives. It has fostered wonderful and comfortable thinking and granted me shining and colorful insight into my mind.
I go to the museum and collect insects near the great spotlights. I listen to music and lie in the grass and gaze at the city, imagining all the lives there, imagining what it is that makes all of those individual people happy. Visually, my vision is still warping and pulsing, and everything has a greenish tinge. It makes the whole night feel dreamy and magical. There are a lot of people there but they pay me no heed. I am coordinated and can walk fine, I was a bit wobbly on the way over but I do not outwardly appear to be on drugs now. My limbs feel like they are glowing and glistening. I decide to go home, but I am feeling pretty exhausted. They are setting up for some huge event in front of the museum, and I have to skirt it as I feel like I would look suspicious as hell wandering through (There were several workmen and security people at work there). It’s a twinge of panic and paranoia, but it fades to the sense of adventure that comes from just walking around at this hour of night, and the wonderful feeling of having the total freedom to do this whenever I want. When I began this trip, I had no intention of leaving the house, but then I decided I wanted to, and I did, and now I am here. How cool is that? Subways do not run this late, so I must catch a bus. By sheer luck I run into the bus just as it passes the street I am walking on. I hop on, count my blessings, and enjoy a comfortable ride home.
Offset
Played video games for a while, listened to music, made some food while coming down. I am back to baseline now. Go to sleep with no problem.
Conclusion / Aftermath
Diphenidine is gazed upon with an eye of suspicion and fear in much of the drug community, or at the very best is seen as a more lacking version of its cousin, Ephenidine. A poor man’s ephenidine. Many people note its fiendish nature, in that it makes people fiend for it like addicts. Others note the potentially carcinogenic effects of smoking it. Most however, note the hardcore amnesia that can lead to serious blackouts and serious behavioral issues with that. Few have nice things to say. I supposed I had an atypical experience. This is perhaps my favorite dissociative I have ever taken. Very similar to 3-MeO-PCE. It is euphoric, incredibly profound and insightful, and tears at the deepest core of my emotions. It grants me a beautiful experience, and instills a sort of mania that always puts me to action, whether it be going for a long walk at 2 AM or contacting my ex for the first time in 9 months (happened last time I did it). I can certainly see how that can be dangerous, and I am blessed that my memory remains intact, as that manic activity combined with amnesia is a recipe for disaster. The body feel is an incredibly pleasant buzzing, a simultaneous heaviness and weightlessness, warm chills and a numbness that feels like a warm bath. Perhaps I am playing with fire, but it’s a beautiful numbing fire that drives the mind to colorful valleys of gemstones.