One tab in the mouth. Bitter taste, numbing flavor, pretty much like any NBOMe.

One tab in the mouth. Bitter taste, numbing flavor, pretty much like any NBOMe.

Start to notice visuals-blank surfaces appear to have more depth and texture to them and things begin to look more colorful. I start getting a more intense bodyload in the form of slight nausea and really intense shaking. My jaws are beginning to clench and all my muscles are starting to feel twitchy and uncomfortable. Soon, it feels as if the building energy and the building psychedelia have overflowed and spilled over-the dam breaks and it hits me all at once. I am buffeted by the surge as the faint patterns and spiraling grow in intensity. dancing over every surface. I’m shaking so hard I begin to get paranoid I’m noticeably shaking the entire house. I feel cold and shivery but hot and sweaty at the same time.

The bodyload becomes extremely uncomfortable. I have read a lot of trash talking on the NBOx series before this and I’m starting to understand where they were coming from. My body just cannot sit still, it feels like there is lightning coursing through my veins and muscles. The patterns continue to grow in intensity. Spirals twirl across every surface, splattering the world with rainbow tracers. The white lights of my keyboard are spinning off rainbows as the text and images on the screen begin to warp and melt and leak even more colors. I decide to lie down under blankets to try to take some deep breaths and stave off the bodyload.

I begin to breathe deeply and focus on keeping my body still, and for the most part it works. I close my eyes and am greeted by an infinite 3 dimensional world of colorful fractals and spirals. I open my eyes and the dark room is dominated by flashing bullseye patterns and snowflake patterns in a rainbow of contrasting colors. Mentally, I don’t feel very different. I am still lucid and thinking straight, all my thought processes are proceeding as normal, just with intense visual stimulation. I stand up and return to my computer, floating the whole way there amidst a galaxy of pulsing colors.

The visuals turn synesthetic and begin to dance with the music, dots and colors and circles spinning and swirling and pulsing to the beat. The music begins to take on a strange tinny artificial sound like it’s being played through the chopping of fan blades. I am overcome with a wave of great sweet euphoria that I could only describe as “colorful” due to the fact that the bodyload seems to have fallen away.

I begin to feel more impaired. The room is swirling and rocking like I am on a boat. Every thought suddenly explodes into a chain of more thoughts, my mind becomes scrambled trying to pursue each one. The fountains of thought are exploding in turn from each one to obscure any sort of conclusion- it is an inescapable mess of a positive feedback loop. I close my eyes and allow myself to become immersed in intense closed eye visuals to try and sort this out. While my eyes are closed it feels like I am repeatedly having a really bright light flashed against my eyelids. I sit there for what seems like half an hour with my eyes closed, eventually stringing my tangled thought processes together into straight cut paths where they can flow freely and no longer redundantly coil in on themselves. I open my eyes, calm and focused, and notice only 3 minutes have passed. Oh.

Auditory hallucinations become marked. I turn off my music which is beginning to echo and sound unnervingly robotic and artificial and sit there to appreciate the sounds of the world. There is a beeping sound that resembles the chirping of birds resonating through my room. The sound of my fan which is usually one steady block of white noise begins to raise and lower in pitch, sounding like its pulsing through the room in sine waves. More strange beeping and chirping noises begin to crawl out of the corners of my auditory environment, entering my ears and bouncing off each other and dancing and synesthizing into visuals around me. For the next half hour or so I alternate between using the computer and lying on my bed when the body load comes back. I notice it coming in waves and alternating in strength. Eventually, the people I’m talking to begin to drop off and go to sleep. At one point I’m lying on my bed, my laptop is closed and my phone is no longer buzzing, and I suddenly feel so alone. The last time I tripped alone in my room I was talking to people until sunrise. This time however, there is no one, and nothing. I suddenly realize how alone I feel without technology. Without this constant connection to people, everything feels cold and desolate, and I realize how addicted I have become to constant human interaction.

I go downstairs to grab my jacket. I don’t feel very impaired and my thought processes are proceeding logically and normally, but I have a lot of trouble walking and balancing. My living room, lit up only by streetlights, becomes a world of red and blue double images, like in old 3d movies. In my basement, everything is overtaken by rainbow ghost images. I run upstairs and grab my cat on the way up, his fur swirling and warping. Climbing the stairs in the dark holding a cat while tripping too hard to have balance proves to be exceedingly stressful. I pretty much hold my breath the whole way up, heart racing with what is probably unhealthy intensity. By the time I finally reach the top, I have to collapse in a chair and I am hyperventilating. In the darkness of my room, my cat’s entire substance soon becomes a field of chomping teeth, sinister and dark. This freaks me out so I put him down, but the hallucination spreads, and all around me in the dark are mouths of glimmering white and faintly red teeth biting at me. This doesn’t really bother me that much anymore and it eventually fades.

My thoughts are beginning to uncontrollably chain again, and I browse the internet taking extreme interest in every little detail and every little thing that could possibly distract me. In the end I have about 10 tabs open to various things that have caught my interest. It’s the same attention to detail and insatiable that weed gives me, amplified a thousandfold. I end up focusing on one thing-a random girl’s instagram. I forget how I found it, I think I was just clicking the comments in an advertisement I saw. But I soon find out that I am pretty much able to witness her entire life unfold on this one piece of social media. I watch her begin as an innocent teenager taking pictures of her pets, who then gets really into partying and raving. Soon are pictures of bong hits and acid tabs and sweaty scantily clad people at music festivals. Then pictures of large sums of money from dealing drugs and stripping, and the large amounts of drugs she moved. Then her as a full time professional stripper. I just found it so fascinating and I connected so empathically with this random person. It amazed me how easy it was to witness every detail of a total stranger’s life, and I was just amazed at how it felt like I knew exactly how her life unfolded. The most absurd part is through all of this, I wasn’t even able to discern what her name was. Bodyload is all but gone at this point. Visuals still powerful and universal. Auditory hallucinations are gone.

After that whole adventure, the next 3 hours are just more chasing random details and distractions. Visuals are still going strong. Not all consuming as they were before, but impossible to ignore. Aztec like patterns breathe on every surface and emit impossible rainbows of color.

I decide to smoke a bowl as I watch the sun rise. This kicks everything back into gear. The visuals suddenly become prominent and solid again, appearing bright and 3-dimensional. The clouds outside that are lit by the glowing rising sun begin to dance and form into shapes and recede into the distance. I take a shower. Each drop of water is a sphere of rainbow colors and I become entranced by an architectural visual in the floor of my bathtub-it appears like I am lying in a courtyard looking up into the sky, the roofs of buildings framing it, except I am standing up and looking down, making it appear like the sky and buildings are in the floor. I finish up and dry myself off with a towel that is swirling and crawling around me. I bundle up and decide to take a walk on this frigid winter day amongst the snow. It is about 8:00 AM now.

I walk around town. Visuals are only apparent anymore when I stop and stare at anything. I feel very lucid and in control, but while walking I am struck by a tidal wave of empathy. I suddenly feel immense guilt and sadness for past actions and unfair ways I have treated people (mostly a certain person) in my past. I started tearing up while walking around (which became pretty uncomfortable when the tears froze). The rest of the walk was alternating intense sadness and remorse and explosive confidence and unfounded feelings of self worth. When I get back to my house I look to the sky to see the clouds appear to be rushing and shrinking and receding into the distance.

Visuals still dance around my field of vision. I am talking to several people and trying to present myself as moral or empathic or something. I feel like I have the confidence to understand people’s feelings and connect with them (it really doesn’t end up working). I drift around on my inflated ego.

I can say I’ve returned to baseline at this point. Feelings of confidence and connection and empathy have been replaced with dulled feelings of bleak sadness and regret and deepset boredom and self loathing, as usual. I guess nothing ever sticks.