Sonic Phantoms

4-PrO-DMT
nervewing

Context

Name:
nervewing
Trip Date:
November 30th 2019
Age:
24
Setting:
Around my city and my apartment
Gender:
Not specified
Height:
6ft
Weight:
135lb

Substances

Name Dosage Route of Administration
4-PrO-DMT 25mg Oral

Introduction

I had to pick up an online order for someone at the grand Macy’s department store right in the heart of the city. I figured I would dose, run my errand, and then walk around the city as I came up. I went to a nearby 7/11, got myself a drink, dosed outside the Macy’s and began the timer.

Onset

Onset
T0:00:

Dose taken. I walk across the street and find the counter for picking up orders. Thankfully I am not feeling any effects yet. Unfortunately I find out the order is not yet ready and I will have to come back later in the day. Oh well. I decide to keep walking around the store because it’s warm inside and so very cold and windy outside.

T0:08:

I start coming up, the first notes are felt as pangs of nausea and feeling ever so slightly lightheaded and off balance. An anxious stimulation and tension begins to build in my muscles. I decide to go hide in the bathroom for a bit.

T0:15:

The world is rising around me in faint tessellated colors- for now, fairly subtle but still wanting to make themselves known. The nausea builds along with a sweaty stimmy discomfort. There is a general sense of unease relative to the world around me and I am anxiously hiding in a bathroom stall plotting my next move as it builds and builds. I think I am just going to rush out of the store and walk home, I imagine I will not be in any state to ride public transportation.

T0:20:

I break out and start walking through the store. Standing up and walking catches me very off guard- my balance and equilibrium are highly distorted. I am surprised I didn’t stumble and fall. I feel so light and floaty, almost like it’s a dissociative. Despite this my chest and muscles all feel tense and tight. A psychedelic fog envelops the world, bending around me like a gravity well, its residual energy pulsing through my body and overtaking me. I float and flit through a fluid world bathed in intricate interlocking patterns of warm colors, trying to avoid the glances of strangers and hoping loss prevention doesn’t notice how anxious I look. I am sweating profusely but the doors are in sight. I burst out into the city like a bullet exploding from the barrel of a gun, into the shock of the cold grey windy November air, biting and dense with the odor of the city.

T0:30:

The walk home felt like rushing through a billowing cascade of falling leaves, each leaf flashing with concentric neon colors. It was a sense of a busy world swirling around me, bouncing on frantic gusts of wind that battered off my warm glowing core. There is a low rumbling sound burgeoning in the back of my head as I march onwards, and the ambient sounds of the city around me ripple and bubble in my skull. I slip in and out of crowds of people and waited patiently for traffic, praying no one would look too closely at me, see how sweaty I was, see my wild eyes, see my teetering off balance, sense my pounding heart. I wasn’t particularly anxious but there was a sense of urgency to return to the safety of my home and panic as the experience grew more and more within me. In motion the trip felt suppressed by my physical activity and sense of objective- however every time I stopped, it felt like it descended on me, crashing over me like a flash flood I had been slowly outrunning. Each time I stopped it came back stronger and stronger, and by the time I had arrived at home it had all but swallowed me into its twisting tessellated gullet. I had been overcome with its power and I was so glad to be somewhere warm and safe and familiar.

T0:50:

As I walk up the stairs to my bedroom, the most notable effect becomes prominent- a sort of personification of all of the sounds around me- it is as if my brain is recognizing every bit of auditory stimulus as a sentient being. There is a sense of presence that people often carry, a chimera of their other senses that synthesizes into the idea of detecting another sentient being in their proximity. It feels as if my circuits have been scrambled and my sense of presence is being distinctly activated by my sense of sound. Each footstep is fluttery, jovial, laughing. The sound of my jacket rustling as I take it off is shifty and brooding, perched above me, gently watching. My sound of my backpack zipper is stretching and yawning and reclining in the aether. There is no other sensory detection of these sonic phantoms, just this distinct sense of presence and sentience. It is extremely weird.

Aside from that, this trip is extremely active and energetic- I feel like I am radiating heat and energy, and there is noticeable hyperthermia. Despite it being a cold day, I am content to sit in my room in just a t shirt. I want to curl into a ball and think and think and just emit fractal heat into the world around me, but I also want to zoom around my space as quickly as possible, bouncing off of the walls and vibrating the air to shreds. I am thinking about dogs a lot, about how their excitement and energy matches mine right now. I feel like a wild animal, frantic and high strung.

The visuals are kaleidoscopic, buzzing, stepped and zigzagged. They are dominated by warm colors and adorned with pulsing concentric patterns in stark contrasting colors. They too radiate heat and energy, baking and glowing like the coils of an electric stove. Every part of my existence is cooking with a splendid energy right now.

The trip itself feels active and alive and sentient- a trickster spirit lording over me, shocking me, glowering and grinning, it dances around me, casting me with ribbons of light and vibrating my hot hot bones to their core. There is just so much going on at once, it is not exactly overwhelming but is fairly mentally exhausting. But I still have the energy to enjoy it for now. I keep getting pangs of familiar feelings, hearkening back to my first ever experience with mushrooms, an overwhelmingly powerful trip that set the standard for the rest of my explorations. That was a terrifying and jarring experience by all measures and these little nostalgic flutters carry that same sense of anxiety.

The nausea is fairly standard for a tryptamine, though I find myself on the brink of throwing up several times. It is punctuated against a mild nauseous background. I almost threw up on the street several times walking home, but I can suppress it.

Peak

Peak
T1:00:

I smoke some weed to try and soften the nauseous anxious edge. The visuals flare up and increase their velocity, and the steady burn of this trip crackles and flares. There is just so much going on that I really don’t feel like taking notes or stopping to think about it or type about it. So many visuals to see, so many strange sound-people to interpret, so much excitement, my mind is moving so fast! I feel like if I don’t fully immerse myself I am going to miss something interesting. I close my eyes and bake in the rays of the experience, I am greeted by a field of pulsing golden diamond fractals, rippling outwards into an oblivion, both infinite yet entirely encompassed by my nervous, darting vision.

The auditory-sentience effect is still extremely weird and I cannot even listen to music by virtue of it because it’s so uncomfortable. It feels fundamentally wrong. It is the same sense of phantom presences that other very high doses of psychedelics or deliriants have brought about in me, which is odd because otherwise I wouldn’t say I’m tripping extremely hard. These phantasms are very ephemeral, they don’t exist long enough to develop personalities or anything. They don’t necessarily feel alien either, but rather oddly familiar. It feels like an amalgamate glitch in my mental machinery, like assets from other aspects of my senses and mental processing have spawned in the wrong places.

T1:30:

Everything has become extremely funny for me. This is an effect that usually occurs on the comeup of certain psychedelics, but it seems to be burning strong on the peak. Perhaps it has been here all along and simply made itself known as the anxiety slowly recedes. Nevertheless, I am cracking up at internet memes, I feel like I’m seeing so many layers into them (both visually and metaphorically). I am laughing uncontrollably at silly weird twitter tweets and at my own content, laughing until tears stroll down my face. I must look like I’m having a fit of hysterical madness. I cannot pry the smile off my face that impales into my cheeks making them sore. I don’t know if the experience is necessarily euphoric, it’s more that I am being barraged with beams of mad, unrestrained ecstasy, vibrating me into a tessellation upon impact.

I am finding myself clinging to my space heater now as the hyperthermia has steadily slinked into the afternoon. I am curled up before it like a cat, laughing at my own thoughts as they wisp out into the rising warm air of the heater. I am content to languish here, big dumb smile on my face, nuzzling like an animal in its nest, under the watchful but tiring gaze of a million golden eyes locked in a warm incandescent fog. The same kaleidoscopic diamonds continue to radiate concentrically from me like pixelated ripples on the surface a metallic iridescent pond. I’m having so much fun doing absolutely nothing.

Offset

Offset
T2:00:

The sonic phantoms have faded away by now and I can feel the trip cooling off. I bask in the glow of my space heater as the inherent heat and energy of the experience recedes further. I hang out with my big Millipede, Shoes, and let him run around all over me and all over my bed. I have such a big dumb goofy smile on my face, I am happy thinking about him and the little world he lives in.

An empathogenic edge begins to bake into the trip, I just want to snuggle up in my soft covers with all of my sweet pets around me and think nice thoughts about pleasurable things. I feel glistening and glittery like I am riding a warm gust of wind carrying a million little flakes of mica or maybe iridescent butterfly scales. I am so happy thinking about my little critters, I am happy thinking about my friends and people I want to be around. All of this riding the coattails of still fairly intense visuals and a persistent off-kilter dissociation.

There is also this pervasive sense of this asymptotic approach to a maximized state of goodness and comfort- I just feel like I can always feel more comfortable, I can always feel better, and its hard to settle with what I have now, despite it being absolutely ecstatic. It eludes me like a neon dragonfly darting away from a net.

T2:30:

I fold laundry and watch Cowboy Bebop and smoke some more weed. I descend from the trip through a hall of crystals, their adamantine fire catching the late afternoon light and bathing me in a dazzling kaleidoscope of colors. But even this latent energy still pales in comparison to the overclocked maelstrom of the trip that preceded it. It is spectacular but relatively gentle and tranquil. I feel so pleasant, like I am in the right place at the right time doing the right thing.

T4:00:

Things wind down further. Feeling burnt out like the last wisps of steam are rising from me. My brain feels like red hot metal cooling back to black. A headache sets in. I play videogames.

T6:00:

Smoke more weed to see if it stirs things up more. It seems not to.

T7:00:

I am almost completely down and am just stoned now. I go back to Macy’s to pick up what I meant to before, it is warm and dazzling but it’s usually like that.

Conclusion / Aftermath

There is chatter about 4-PrO-DMT being a prodrug to 4-HO-DMT, similar to what is conjectured about 4-AcO-DMT. I will say this one experience differed a fair bit from most of my experiences with 4-HO-DMT or 4-AcO-DMT. (Though to be fair it has been several years since I’ve taken either). Most notable differences were its short duration, the degree of stimulation and hyperthermia, the jagged and angular high velocity visuals dominated by warm colors and bright contrasts, the empathogenic edge to it on the comedown, and particularly, the very strange audio-personification effect, the “Sonic Phantoms”. I hypothesize that whatever part of my brain typically recognized and registered human interaction and presence had gained some sort of associative pathway with my auditory senses. However, some sort of ancestral vestigial relationship to my experiences with mushrooms was felt- there was a powerful sense of clear nostalgia and déjà vu and simulation of sensations and thoughts and flashes from my most powerful mushroom experiences. It definitely felt related in some way. All that aside it is a warm and odd little psychedelic that delivers a fast and furious trip that dazzles the senses.