Is this really strong for you guys as well?
I can hear myself say it but it doesn’t feel like me talking. The air is getting thick, I’m dizzy and the whole world feels like it’s starting to float in ether. It’s only been five minutes.
We’ve gotten a hold of some ketamine and mixed up the oral and nasal doses. We don’t find this out until later, but what’s meant to be a “light/common” dose when swallowed becomes “strong/heavy” when you take it through the nose.
My friend squats down next to me, wide-eyed and grinning, staring up at me with the blank and happy expression of a dog wagging it’s tail.
It starts to feel like my point of view is being pulled back from reality through a long dark tunnel. Like I’m watching my normal experience from a distance, through a glass window or the bubble of a TV screen.
I ask my friend if he feels something similar and he shakes his head no, still grinning widely and squatting on the floor. Later he tells me he thought I was joking.
This is what dissociation feels like, apparently. I’ve just come off a 30+ hour plane journey with hardly any sleep and I felt almost high before we even took anything. It seems to be increasing the intensity of the effects.
“It feels good to move around,” I hear someone say. I stand up and start shaking my body – there’s a strange loose energy and they’re right.
The four of us now stand in a circle in the living room, a little unsure of what to do next. No one was quite expecting this – it’s so strong, onset so fast and just so weird.
It’s hard to keep track of time and there is serious size distortion going on – my friends are giants in the living room that has shrunk to the size of a dollhouse. The taste of the ketamine is still in the back of my throat, dripping down unpleasantly.
Still, we’re all in a good mood. We start telling each other how much we like each other – we’re all great guys, apparently.
A song comes on and it reminds me of a girl who used to play it in her car. Can we change the song, please, but it’s too late now and I’m thinking about her and how I might never see her again.
This thought goes through my head:
You know a person and then you don’t and maybe you see them again and maybe you don’t and that keeps happening again and again until you die.
I express this out loud to my friends and death darkens the mood. We go quiet for a minute and I get down on myself for being negative.
Then someone goes out on the balcony and the group splits up. Silent spell broken.
When you take a psychedelic like mushrooms or LSD it feels like you’re connecting with something universal and eternal – a greater collective consciousness that reminds you powerfully how you’re part of something bigger than yourself.
It can feel like your psychedelic trips are strung together by their familiarity to you – but also that you’re joining some sort of shared trip experience many others have had as well.
Ketamine’s not really like that. Terence McKenna’s described it as being like there’s “no one there”, and that is what it feels like.
Not in the psychedelic sense of loss of ego but rather that there really is no one there – not you, not blissful oneness or the loving universe playing its cosmic joke – just a kind of vacuous space between you and what’s going on.
Ketamine onsets fast but it wears off fast too. Within an hour we’re mostly back to normal. Objects have returned to their normal size, the air is air and not molasses and for the most part I’m back in my body.
Interesting experience, but probably won’t be going back there anytime soon.
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