Drowning in Its Throat

3-HO-PCP
arylcyclohexylamine
dissociative
nervewing

Context

Name:
nervewing
Trip Date:
04/2018
Age:
22
Setting:
My apartment
Gender:
not specified
Height:
6'0
Weight:
130 lbd

Substances

Name Dosage Route of Administration
3-HO-PCP 10 mg Intranasal

Onset

Onset
T0:00:

I cut a line of powder and snort it. This substance is painless, as though I wasn’t snorting anything. No pain, no bitterness, no discomfort even, it was just like breathing air. What an odd premonition of the void to come.

T0:12:

The first notes hit, a light and floaty feeling. Even the drip from this substance is manageable. It disperses quickly and doesn’t leave a lasting bitter taste.

T0:24:

Feeling so slightly distant and dizzy. My motor skills feel less precise. My extremities and skin are beginning to feel numb, pulses of anesthesia synced with each lull of the gentle rocking of my equilibrium. Standing up, I feel at once very heavy and shorter than I really am, as though I’ve been compacted and made denser. Everything looks like it’s very slightly flashing, or it just looks blurry. I can feel the weight of my teeth in my gums and I feel as though the world’s been tilted and I am slowly sliding down the slope.

T0:45:

I feel dizzy and faded, but it’s still light. This is definitely a very slow burn. I am numb and heavy and any motion feels like an absurd ordeal, with any movements I make being punctuated and exaggerated. I am experiencing “Alice in Wonderland Syndrome” more than I have with any other substance, in which the perceived size of my body is at odds with its actual size. At times I feel like my limbs are shorter and I have shrunken down into a miniature version of myself on my bed. At other times it feels as though I feel the opposite, cramped and tightly tucked into my little room. The shifts come randomly in no discernible pattern, it’s just different strands and streams of thought competing for attention. It is an odd sensation that does not entirely make sense, but seems to harmoniously accompany a burgeoning sense of confusion. When I close my eyes it is hard to open them again, as though they have locked shut. I find myself falling into trances and periods of stasis, it is like my consciousness is slipping away without me noticing, it feels like I am nodding off.

Peak

Peak
T1:00:

It is beginning to crash down on me, drag me out like a riptide. I feel so distant, distant from my fingers, distant from my body, distant from my mind; Icy pure dissociation. My limbs feel so heavy and my room feels so small. The distance grows; I have been severed from the world.

T1:20:

The intensity of this experience has completely caught me off guard. I am entirely incapacitated, my reality has shattered into a roaring waterfall of dissociation that pounds me into swirling icy waters. I am quietly occupying space in my room, things are happening around me, but I cannot discern or comprehend what they are. I am so cold and I feel a crushing pressure around me, as though I am deep underwater. It feels like I am sinking, suffocating, drowning. The feeling starts in my mouth, in the weight in my skull and in my teeth, and it slowly drags down like cascades of tar, the weight pulling my shoulders down to crumple into the rest of my body. There are great cavities opening up in my mind, voids that the ambient pressure of my thoughts rush to fill, and soon these cavities scream open into soaring landscapes, towering monoliths and languid vistas stretched beyond the scope of my vision. I am shivering a great deal, I am so cold yet so warm.

T1:30:

I can feel the weight of my brain in my head, it is like someone has installed a brick in my skull. My entire body has gone numb and I can hardly recognize my limbs as my own when I see them move in front of me. My fingers are so skeletal and alien, surely these odd appendages cannot belong to me? The world is doused in a dreamy haze and my mind is being eroded while my body is being blown away by relentless screaming gusts, wailing into eternity, yet drowned and subdued. The trip thus far has felt like I am climbing steadily uphill against some rushing antagonistic force like a mudslide. All my clothes feel rough and stiff on my body.

T2:00:

I decide to take a big hit of weed from my gravity bong, despite how intense this experience already is. I figured I might as well cap it off. The weight in my teeth sets in deeper and deeper as I am sucked into the hole. It is as if the world has been pulled out from under me like a carpet, and suddenly, there I am, in the void, a void with a distinct and powerful gravity that is sucking me towards its center. I am sinking and being pulled down and folded over and tucked in, with metal bars spanning my thoughts and keeping me in place. Towering temples are caressing my existence with iridescent beams and trusses, adorned with glowing oozing gardens. The entire feeling is that of oozing, drooping, leaking, suffocating under a fluid weight. It feels like I am drowning in flower petals and being hit with a train simultaneously. My memory and consciousness and sense of linear existence have been betrayed into ephemerality- every breath I takes feels like waking up from a long nap; I exhale and fall back into the infinite endless hole; I inhale and I am back. It’s jarring and disorienting, unsettling and dizzying. Large looming patterns and large shapes splatter and scatter my mind, aerosolized into a phosphorescent mist. I am a statue, held still at odd angles at the mercy of gravity, my skull is throbbing and lurking and pulsing, it feels like my head is being smeared. I feel so smothered and enveloped, so blurry and blank and fuzzy, as if my entire existence is lo-fidelity. Everything I can see with my open eyes looks washed out, overexposed, and faded. I haven’t moved or stood up for a good bit now, my jaw can only hang open, I can only be numb. I am incapacitated beyond words.

T2:30:

I am still so forcefully numb and I feel like I am fading in and out of consciousness, or like I am fading in and out of a state where my memories are recording. I am slowly crawling out of the intensity of the hole and back into myself, but it is barely noticeable at this point, just like the long, slow, subtle comeup. All signs point to me weathering this storm for a good bit. This feeling of abandoning my body and casting myself to the turbulence of the roiling tempest is cathartic almost. It feels like toxins are being centrifuged from my body. There are crisscross patterns across the ceiling of my mind, gazing at my swirling madness.

T3:00:

The experience is slipping away, but it still maintains a strong and very imposing presence. I am still heavily dissociated, but it lacks the elaborate color and sensation of before, it’s just been a long desert of half-conscious, lazy nodded-out dissociation. I have not stood up for almost an hour at this point.

Offset

Offset
T3:30:

I finally stand up, it feels like waking from a long nap. I stumble to the bathroom, I feel much shorter than I really am, or like the ceiling is stretching high above me. I am stumbling like a drunk, or like I am on a boat that is being tossed about on rolling waves. I don’t feel particularly stimulated, and I don’t feel particularly sedated either. I find myself getting locked into whatever state I’m currently in- this substance seems to be intent on maintaining a sort of homeostasis.

T5:00:

I am more conscious and functional now. The experience is a residual dissociation in my limbs- numbness at the tip of my fingers and across all of my skin, and a considerable loss of equilibrium, balance and fine motor skills. I feel more alert than before, but am also content to let myself fade in and out.

T7:00:

I go to sleep. I am still feeling dissociated but manage to fall asleep without any trouble.

Conclusion / Aftermath

Unlike every other exclusively 3-substituted arylcyclohexamine I’ve tried, (3-HO-PCE, 3-MeO-PCE, 3-MeO-PCP), this was not functional or stimulating in the least. It was a powerful, all encompassing, annihilating experience that thrashed me about like a raft in a hurricane. I was wholly incapacitated and smothered with sheer dissociative intensity, a thrashing morass of all-consuming colors and forms. There were several things that stood out to me- First was the duration- the comeup was over an hour long, I am so so glad I didn’t attempt to redose. At ~10 mg, this is an extremely potent substance. Secondly was the recurring feeling of entirely fading in and out of consciousness, a sort of nodding. While many dissociatives lend this effect with respect to dipping in and out of the hole, this felt more like falling asleep or simply blacking out for brief islands of time. This could be troublesome in the wrong setting. Lastly was a persistent feeling of pressure, of being compressed, smothered, and impressed on at all sides. It was suffocating, though I knew I wasn’t actually in any danger the whole time. It was very reminiscent of mixing 3-MeO-PCP and 3-MeO-PCE in the sense that it was an overwhelming and relentless dissociative storm, but it lacked the stimulation and mania. It was an esoteric removal from reality.