Dark Side of the Moon by Jorgiim

This last Sunday I made another trip / experiment with DXM. This time I purchased four bottles of the Robitussin Cough Gels for a grand total of 1200 mg of DXM. I made a few mistakes. I always make sure that I’m doing well both physically and mentally before I trip. The truth was that my stomach was upset and I was feeling a little stressed out. But I was impatient to do my experiment so I went ahead. I had some ideas of things I wanted to do but did not set anything out beforehand, thinking that I would be able to do so later on.I swallowed all four bottles around 9:30 Sunday night. My wife and little girl were asleep and I was ready to plunge in. I put in a movie while waiting for the stuff to take effect. Watched ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ – a great movie that was even better with the first rising vibes of euphoria setting in.

About the time that Duke and Gonzo made it to Circus Circus my euphoria suddenly vanished and was replaced by a sick feeling deep in my stomach. It felt as though somebody had punched me in the gut. I immediately realized what was going on. My stomach cramps from earlier in the evening had returned and were now heightened by the onset of the trip. I berated myself for not waiting a little longer.

The stuff really started hitting hard about an hour and a half after I took the pills. I had to stumble into the bathroom. I will spare you the gruesome details. Suffice it to say that upset stomach and tripping do not go well together. I went through a seeming eternity of what turned out to be, in actual time, just a few minutes. I was weak after my ordeal. I grabbed some soda from the fridge and sat down in the living room.

I felt purged after the terrible bathroom incident. I started feeling better after a few minutes. I sat down in front of the air conditioner and let the cool air wash over me. But the drama was not over. Next I got a terrible itching sensation all over my body. O shit, I thought, it’s the robo-itches! It felt like I had hives or something. Realizing I could easily scratch myself raw I made it back to the bathroom and took a couple of Benadryl. These took effect quickly and I was saved from the hell of robo-itch.

I was thinking to myself what a rotten way this all was to start a trip. I was right. After my body started feeling better my mind decided it was time to get sick. I was confronted by all sorts of negative thoughts and emotions. Fortunately I realized this for what it was – the irritability I felt before the trip was now becoming magnified. This is why I don’t trip if I’m not feeling well physically or mentally – the trip can easily turn nasty. But the surest cure for such a trip ailment is to recognize it for what it is, label it, and let it pass. This I did and was feeling better both in body and mind in just a few minutes. The nasty part of the trip was over. By now it was going on 11:30 at night.

I was feeling really good now. The euphoria was back but it was a calming sensation, not a hyperactive type of euphoria. I turned off the tv and all the lights in the house. I was anxious to see what kind of visual effects I would get in the total dark. I remembered one of the things I wanted to do was to listen to music, so I got my cd player and headphones. I put in ‘Sacred Ritual Music of Tibet’ and sat down in the recliner. The music was full and rich and seemed to send vibrations through my body. I got lost in the music – losing all sense of time and place and self. There was only the music. The passage of time continued to slow down throughout the evening.

After listening to most of the cd I decided it was time to get up and have a stretch. By this time the robo-walk had set in and I had to slowly stumble my way back into the kitchen. I had a smoke and watched the full moon. Afterwards I grabbed my tape player and tapes and headed back to the living room. This was the part of the trip I was really looking forward to. When I bought my NovaDreamer over a decade ago, it came with two cassette tapes by Dr. LaBerge. One was a general tape dealing with lucidity topics and relaxation exercises. The second tape was a trance induction program for lucid dreaming. I put the trance tape in. I wanted to lay down in bed but I knew that in my current state I probably wouldn’t make it that far and would end up waking my family. I went back into the living room and ended up falling on the floor. My depth perception was totally screwed.

I laid down on the floor and pressed play. Soothing, ambient music enfolded me, relaxing me as I listened. I was taken through a visualization – each word from the instructor blossomed in my mind as a shimmering, bright image. A spiral staircase came into being, glowing blue, and I saw myself walking down the steps. My mind was in another place and I found it hard to concentrate on the instructions coming from the tape. I could not grasp sentences. Each word caused a brief, powerful image to appear behind my eyes. I felt as if my head were as big as an ocean and each word was like a drop of water that caused the whole to resonate with gentle waves.

I couldn’t grasp what I was supposed to do but realized the main goal of the project. I remembered that this was an attempt at auto-hypnosis and could just hope that my brain was picking up the message. The words seemed to come from deep inside my head -
‘you’ ‘will’ ‘awaken’ ‘you’ ‘will’ ‘see’. Yes, I said to myself. I lost track of where I was. I could not remember if I was awake or dreaming. I didn’t know if I was in bed or in another room. The lines that separated waking, sleeping, and dreaming all fell away. I felt as though I had always been in this lucid state. During brief periods of clear-headedness, I realized that the increase in dosage from my last trip was having a major effect on me. This was a much more intense trip than my last one. I remember thinking that I had initially scoffed at DXM, seeing it as a poor substitute for the ‘real’ hallucinogens. I realized that assumption was wrong and DXM was indeed a powerful hallucinogen in its own right.

The tape ended and I had a lot of trouble switching it to the next side. I kept attempting to stick the tape in my forehead, after all that’s where the sound seemed to be coming from. I gave up and put the tape down. I held the walkman in my hands but could not remember for the life of me what the damn thing was for and what I was doing holding it. I put it down as well and went back to the safety of the living room.

I was talking to myself, trying to get oriented. I began listing things off “It is Sunday. I am in my living room. I have taken a drug. I am tripping”. I sat and did some breath meditation for a few minutes. I have always found this very helpful while tripping –it’s easy to do and easy to remember, even while being ‘far out’ on a trip and it’s an excellent tool to ground one’s self and drive away negative energies.

The breath meditation gave me a clear head and seemed to increase the trip ten-fold. I wondered what to do next. What would Ben suggest? I laughed at the thought and tried to conjure him up before my mind’s eye. I found myself flying through the darkness and seeing bright spheres of light ahead – these spheres were the astral projections of the Dreaming Life website. I floated through these, marveling at the intricate patterns of light that played between the glowing spheres. The text was in a foreign, alien looking script. I pushed on one sphere that had Ben’s picture on it. A glowing outline of a male figure emerged from the globe. The Ben figure put his hand into another globe. He drew it out and his hand was followed by a trail of glowing symbols. He folded these on top of one another and shaped them as if they were clay. He made various figures of the mystic script and finally passed them to me. I caught the ball of glowing symbols and began to reconfigure them. We passed several of these ‘knowledge balls’ back and forth. Each time I caught one of these glowing spheres I had an insight, dealing with the trip itself and the nature of mind. I realized that we are primarily minds – entities that perceive, think, and feel. I realized that tripping, like other means to enlightenment, is a beautiful process of mind revealing itself to mind – a constant unfolding. Before long, everything, including myself, seemed to evaporate into the darkness.

Several hours passed as my mind went out further and further. I lost all sense of self. I wandered through beautiful astral landscapes. I was in awe at the nature and beauty of the human mind.

I played the trance tape several more times and finally started coming down at around 5 in the morning. I fell down twice while trying to get back into bed. I fell asleep in no time. The trip took a lot out of me. My wife was very kind and took care of the little one while I slept all day Monday. I was off of work Tuesday and slept half of it as well.

An amazing experience. There’s so much more that I want to tell but simply cannot find the words for. Tripping is a sacred experience.

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Note: This guest post was written by Chad, who was interviewed previously on Dreaming Life at Exploring the Oneiroverse with Chad Watts: On Lucid Dreams, Entheogens, and the Spiritual Experience.

You can also check out this post describing his first DXM experience.

Photo by Jorgiim.

Photo by Kyle Kruchok

First the basics of a good DXM trip. Found this out by a mixture of web research and personal experimentation.

1. Check your local drug store for Robitussin Cough Gels. These are ideal for tripping purposes. You don’t have to worry about getting sick by having to drink a lot of nasty cough medicine and you know the exact amount of DXM you are consuming. The downside is they are a bit pricey. Here they go for about 4 dollars a bottle and you need three to five bottles for a good trip.

2. Whatever route you take, pills or liquid, be absolutely sure that dextromethorphan is the only active ingredient. Many medications include Aspirin, Guaifenesin, Phenylephrine or other active chemicals that become toxic when taken in high dosages.

3. DXM is a psychedelic but it is also a dissociative. It is therefore grouped with drugs such as PCP and ketamine more often than drugs like LSD or psylocibin. Some people do not like dissociatives and end up having a bad trip. Personally I enjoy the effects. Consciousness seems to extract itself from the body.

4. The two classic side effects of robotripping are the robo-walk and robo-itches. I have not had the itching happen to me but it does happen to a lot of people – a nasty itching sensation covers the body. I’ve heard that an allergy medication like Benadryl can stop this side effect. Robo-walking comes with the territory. Your depth perception gets really screwed and the ground seems far away or really close. You stumble around like a drunk on a sailboat. From experience I suggest just taking it slow and sitting down to pee.

5. Dosage mainly depends on what type of experience you want. Below I quote some excellent guideline from Erowid:

“The chart below shows approximate recreational dosages for pure dextromethorphan, measured in milligrams (mg).

Oral DXM Dosages

Threshold

unknown

Light

100 – 200 mg

Common

200 – 400 mg

Strong

300 – 600 mg

Heavy

600 – 1500 mg

Risk of Death

2,500 – 20,000 mg

Duration : 4 – 8 hours

Some users report that DXM dosages are affected significantly by bodyweight and lighter users should start with lower dosages. Because everyone reacts differently, it is a better idea to start at lower dosages and slowly work up rather than jumping in at a higher dose. Some people are very sensitive to the effects and may be overwhelmed by dosages that are minimal for others.”

For my trip I purchased three bottles of Robitussin Cough Gels. At 15mg dxm per cap and 20 caps per bottle I got 300mg per bottle for a grand total of 900 mg. I took them all at 10 o’clock Saturday night. It took 45 minutes to an hour before any noticeable effects occurred. Caps take a while to dissolve and so the trip doesn’t hit as fast as a liquid induced one would. I read on one web page that you can chew the caps for faster onset but the user is warned this is a revolting process. I just swallowed the caps.

Got the cosmic laughter when the stuff first started kicking in. Waves of euphoria washed over me making me feel good both physically and emotionally. The robo-walk set in quickly and I stumbled around the living room for a while trying to get my bearings. I went outside for a bit and watched the stars. Beautiful.

I was in a heightened emotional state, similar to the kind induced by Ecstasy, and made my way slowly to the bedroom where my wife and little girl were asleep. My wife woke up when I stumbled into the dresser. I gushed out all kinds of love talk. She was happy I was feeling good and returned the sentiments but was happy when I left her alone to go back to sleep. I did my best to kiss my little girl but misjudged the distance and ended up smooching my pillow. I then went out for a smoke.

The euphoria continued and I was anxious to explore more of the trip. I drank some juice and laid down in the dark bedroom. Visuals are not a big part of robo-tripping but you can get them in higher dosages in dark surroundings. I pulled out my cd player and headphones and put on an album I always wanted to listed to while tripping – The Magnificent Void by Steve Roach. The experience was fantastic.

I looked up and saw clouds floating by on the ceiling. This was followed by swirling stars and geometrical shapes – much like hypnogogic imagery. Time seemed to slow as my body became increasingly numb as the dissociative effects set in. I had to move my body around several times to make sure it was still there. My mind felt as if it were floating away from my body. My breathing became deep and still. This phase of the trip lasted several hours. Any trip, especially the peak, is difficult to put into words. My mind soared into unknown realms while my body seemed far beneath me. I received a ‘gem’ (one of my own terms again – a gem is an insight that you have while tripping that you remember and can use once sober again.)

I leveled out for a few hours and finally started coming down about 5 in the morning. Had a bit of a hangover the next day but nothing serious – just tired. My wife was very kind and let me take a nap.

I had a great experience and am looking forward to doing it again. Next time I’m going to try a 1200 mg dose and, if that goes well, make another attempt at 1500 mg. Below are some good websites relating to dxm tripping. If you decide to try it tell me how it goes. I also would really like to buy that book you mentioned. I found it on Amazon and plan to purchase it soon.

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Read Chad’s Part Two post here.

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Good Links on DXM:

http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/dxm/dxm.shtml

http://www.dextroverse.org/index2.shtml

http://www.third-plateau.org/

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Note: This guest article was written by Chad. Thanks buddy! You can learn more about Chad and how his brain works be reading Dreaming Life’s fascinating interview with him in Exploring the Oneiroverse with Chad Watts: On Lucid Dreams, Entheogens, and the Spiritual Experience.

Photo by Kyle Kruchok.

He’s not simply having a subjective journey inside his mind; DXM actually takes him to an objective realm with other beings – some of which are the souls of recently departed friends and associates!

Yes – he’s talking about meeting the dead!

Along the way, he has out of body experiences, witnesses the seat of dreaming and memory, interacts with strange beings, lost souls, and other characters, and of course, has some seriously ego-crushing experiences, forever messing with the idea of the “I”.

Dan writes that DXM takes him to the Hive Mind.

What is this place? Who is there? What’s going on in here?

Dan likens the term Hive Mind to Terrence McKenna’s idea of the OverMind, which is a living Super Mind created through pooling the consciousness of the dead into one group mind. (I find it interesting that he does not see the Hive Mind as an omnipotent God, stating that although it is self-aware, it has problems, learns, grows and changes.)

Once inside, he met with a friend who had recently died. He also saw a friends father who had died in “real life” – yet this fact was unknown to Dan while he was tripping. He sees this as proof to the idea that he is visiting the same realm of the dead.

Within the Hive Mind, he also met Buddhist Monks, who he believes were dead or possibly alive and meditating (!!), and Native Americans. He met people who seemed confused, trapped, unable to move or grown on – hinting at the idea of purgatory.

And he also met the infamous “elves” that also pop up in other psychedelic literature.

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It’s a bit hard to pin down the more abstract run-ins he had in the hive mind, but Dan describes an amazing encounters with dreams, or, a he describes it, the seat of dreaming.

After seeing what he calls The Dream Chamber, Dan recorded the following into a tape recorder:

“I’m flying over a scene that looks like an elaborate model train set. Amazing… what it is is a dream landscape. It’s a three-dimensional scene of every dream I’ve ever had. I can at this point remember/see every dream I’ve ever had. Now I’m drifting down into it. People, animals, archetypes, childhood monsters…they’re all here! And this is not a memory, but a place! Everything still happening – alive – a living hologram.”

Reflecting on this, he later writes: “It seems I was looking at a sentient world of thought – my thoughts! – being the dreams “thought up” by me over a lifetime. I must emphasize: everything in this place was ALIVE still…moving, happening.” What would it mean if our dreams actually existed in some place? And more than that, they permanently existed, living in three dimensions and existing forever?

The only way I could take in something like this would be with the perspective of parallel universes and a holographic universe.

And even then, the idea is baffling and far out.

Psychedelics are known for the ego-crushing properties, and Dan’s experiences with DXM are no exception. He discusses this at various points in the book, trip by trip, stating such things as:

“Initially, my personality was revealed to be not an “I” but an orchestra of “I’s” working in unison to create a sense of one “I.”

I find this interesting because, from what I understand, this notion of multiple selves working together to create the illusion of a single “I” is understood to be true by mainstream neuroscientists and others who study consciousness.

His descriptions of the self get creepy, reminding me of what others write about DMT, when he says things like:“The psychedelic had held a door open into one “me,” allowing another “me” to see in…and “I” was a squirming electric flesh-chemical ant colony.”

And later, almost reassuringly, he writes about what part of him moves on after death, saying that witnessing “these tiny knowing bits of me, by deduction, the “I” in the Anti-Ego state doing the watching, must be incomplete.” Therefore, he concludes that the state he is currently in feels stripped down “because it is existing as a partial self.” This essence, the part that’s left over after everything else is stripped down…”must be the “real” me – the me that crosses into death.”

This brings up the questions I wrote about in this post on reincarnation and what it is that actually carries on after death. Unfortunately, it doesn’t answer them.

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A Psychonaut’s Guide to the Invisible Landscape

All the questions brought up in this book answer to a bigger question, perhaps the biggest question of all:

Can we trust our own subjective experiences?

This innocent-sounding question is one of enormous implication.

At times when I read his words I thought to myself that if I accept what he says, than by the same standards, I should accept the words and experiences of those who profess many other subjective experience, many of which contradict each other. (For instance, the prophets of various religions all claiming that theirs is the only truth and everyone else is wrong.)

On the flipside, if we can’t trust our own experiences, than what the hell are we to do?

Hard-nosed scientists would say that all we can trust is objectively measured data i.e. then science, and only science, in the strictest sense of the word, is the only path towards knowledge and truth.

I agree that a scientific approach yields literally awe-some results but this approach falls short in explaining our everyday experience of the world and that which we know most intimately: the conscious experience, the spiritual impulse, the subjective, inner self… the “I” that we all experience.

So the question is how do we reconcile the subjective experience with the objective measure of science?

The Dalai Lama says it best in his book The Universe in A Single Atom, when he asks:

“Given that one of the primary characteristics of consciousness is its subjective and experiential nature, any systematic study of it must adopt a method that will give access to the dimensions of subjectivity and experience.

A comprehensive scientific study of consciousness must therefore embrace both third-person and first-person methods: it cannot ignore the phenomenological reality of subjective experience but must observe all the rules of scientific rigor. So the critical question is this: Can we envision a scientific methodology for the study of consciousness whereby a robust first-person method, which does full justice to the phenomenology of experience, can be combined with the objectivist perspective of the study of the brain?”

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