The Softening Pool
3-Cl-PCP
Citation: nervewing. "The Softening Pool: An Experience with 3-Cl-PCP (exp115030)". Erowid.org. Mar 15, 2021. erowid.org/exp/115030
DOSE: |
150 mg | sublingual | 3-Cl-PCP | (powder / crystals) |
repeated | smoked | Cannabis | (plant material) |
BODY WEIGHT: | 130 lb |
Preface:
Per usual, there’s a tl;dr at the end.
This was one of a suite of new arylcyclohexylamines to debut this year. It was the second attempt at a 3-halogenation with PCP as the base structure – for those not chemically inclined, a halogen atom (Fluorine, Chlorine, Bromine etc.) is attached to a certain place on the familiar PCP molecule. That first attempt saw a Fluorine- 3-F-PCP, a compound that was received with initial interest but ultimately dismissed as being lackluster. I personally found it to be short, intense, and quite neutral and boring with little useful to offer. Just a dumb smack upside the head with dissociation. It also dosed higher than many users found economical. 3-Cl-PCP appeared a few months later, but met little fanfare, perhaps due to the lukewarm reception of its fluorinated counterpart. In the months that have passed, very little information has trickled in about this compound, beyond noting similarities to 3-F-PCP and an even lower potency. The reviews didn’t have me enthralled as those for MXiPr, which was released concurrently and likely helped to overshadow humble 3-Cl-PCP, and I was in no rush to obtain and test this compound. However, I got around to it eventually and was pleasantly surprised by some if its unique qualities! I found it to be interesting and enjoyable and I believe it is worthwhile to investigate and has something to offer to psychonauts of any experience level. This leads me to believe that further development of 3-halogenated arylcyclohexylamines is warranted and will produce worthwhile compounds.
My initial experiences with this compound were with intranasal doses, starting at 50 mg and stepping upwards in what were initially 10 mg increments every ½ hour, but I eventually lost track of the doses and timing and found myself in a pleasant and unique dissociated state after several hours and an unknown cumulative dose >100 mg. Later trials with intranasal and sublingual administration in the range of 80-120 mg showed promise but were still lacking, so I settled on a 150 mg sublingual dose to fully feel out the character of this compound.
A note on the different routes of administration: It seems to be the same potency no matter how you take it, though I have only tried intranasal, oral and sublingual. I imagine rectal dosing would be a similar dose. Intranasal dosing is simply not worth it- it’s a large volume of powder with a strong unpleasant odor and a lingering irritating burn that I could feel into the next day-not quite the sharp instant sting some compounds will impart but something drawn out and torturous. Intranasal doses also appeared to have a shorter duration than other methods. Details on sublingual dosing are in the body of the report.
The setting of this experience was not my usual house, but rather a luxurious apartment in the upscale downtown of the city where I live, where me and my partner were briefly staying. It was an architectural wonder on a quiet block, towering over most of the surrounding houses, affording spectacular views of the skyline and the surrounding cityscape. All of the floors were accessed by a spiral staircase and there were grand windows looking out onto the city in all directions. My partner and I had to vacate our home for a week but were fortunately allowed to stay here during that time- a little vacation in an opulent and luxurious space.
T0:00- Dose poured under my tongue. It tastes bitter, not as much the bitter and familiar arylcyclohexylamine petroleum flavor, but fairly rancid and a little sickeningly sweet. Despite the fact that it's in my mouth I feel like I am smelling it more than tasting it.
It's definitely bitter and unpleasant but not like some drugs that reflexively induce retching from the flavor. Unpalatable but entirely manageable. Interestingly, I notice when drinking a lightly flavored seltzer as a chaser, the sweetness seems significantly magnified- a mild and subtle drink suddenly becomes something delicious and tantalizing.
There is a slight tingling sensation directly on the mucous membrane, and just a bit of localized anesthesia. There is some slight corrosion of the mucous membrane but it was fully healed by the next day, unlike compounds like 3-MeO-PCP which can wear a spot on a user’s gums If they’re not careful.
T0:30- Onset- feeling a bit warm, heavy, lightheaded.
T0:45- It’s hitting more and more, I am feeling faint and distant, like the volume has been turned down on all of my senses. It is a lightheaded and dizzy sinking sort of dissociation, like a pebble spiraling down as it sinks into a river. There is a soothing and calming numbness gently running down my extremities in light blue pulses, it’s cold but pleasantly so, like a cool shower on a hot day. I am bathing in this pleasant dissociative mist, getting thicker and thicker by the second to form into banks of luminous fog.
There is no rush or stimulation, but there isn’t any particular sedation or couchlock either. Getting up and walking around is fun and interesting, I am fairly functional and able to move without issue, just a bit of looseness and excess momentum in my limbs. Lying down on a big soft bed is heavenly too- neither state is necessarily motivated or preferred, it all just feels tranquil and sublime. No matter where I am or what I’m doing there’s this sense of a lukewarm dissociative bath filling up around me, the water a miraculous icy turquoise in color.
I can communicate with my partner without issue for right now, I feel mentally lucid though it feels as though that is starting to wane. I am for the most part in awe of the physically euphoric sensations washing over me like ocean waves and just desire to communicate it effectively with them.
T0:50- Feeling it stronger and stronger now, it seems to be building momentum without showing any sign of stopping. I wonder how intense this is going to get- intensity perhaps not being the correct word to describe this experience, it’s an intensifying of a state of bliss and relaxation, sinking into comforts of an increasingly newfound magnitude. Open eyed visuals begin to present- the typical fleeting visuals from dissociatives that just fade into the background. There are gridlike quadrilateral patterns, offset like bricks, ringed in glowing mortar of teal and pink and purple. There is a persistent flashing and strobing in white spaces, like on my computer screen or the white walls of the house.
T1:00- It’s building and building, there are dams blocking my flows of thought now as conversation becomes more and more difficult. These dams are big shiny white blocks, wedging themselves into my thought processes, getting in the way. But I am content with this.
While I still feel very relaxed and tranquil, there are paradoxically stimulant side effects I am observing- a shortness and shallowness of breath, constant finger stimming. In contrast to most of my experience with stimulants, I feel quite comfortable and at ease, and despite these little side effects, my heart rate feels normal and I am entirely at peace with lying perfectly still, fingers tapping away at each other. I declare to my partner that I want to hang out in the penthouse/office on the top floor of the house, that I want to play with my pet millipedes (we brought them along on this little vacation because they need to be misted every other day), that I want to go out onto the roof and look out over the skyline, then hang out in the big soft bed downstairs, and then maybe lounge around in the living room. All of these are sensible and attainable goals, easily within my grasp.
T1:09- This is delightful! Too much even! It feels like more than I should be feeling, like an absolutely aggressive blockade of my NMDA receptors, like a furious divorce from reality- yet at the same time, it is still so calm, so gentle, so utterly blissful. I find myself mostly in a joyous shock at this contradiction- that I can feel so intensely tranquil. My notes become sparse beyond this point, the timestamps become jumbled as my cognitive function loses its sense of sequence and continuity. I need to close one eye to read letters, and even then, they are an assortment of symbols that I have a hard time parsing meaning from. I am a being of pure senses now, and all of my senses have been dulled and replaced with an alien dissociated euphoria. I feel like I am levitating, constantly rising higher and higher into ascendancy. When I sit still I lose myself to the power of this drug, I lose my sense of body, I feel like I go entirely numb. I can stand up and walk around still, but it feels automatic and aimless. Ascending and descending the spiral stairs is challenging and in the dim light they are taken with flashes of magenta and teal patterns on the walls, swirls and spirals constructed from right angles, washing their way down into the earth. So intense, but what a delight, I feel so happy about this. Whereas 3-F-PCP was cold, grey, absent of color or emotion, this is a subdued festival of the neurons, not necessarily warm, but pleasantly cool, intense but without a rush, visual and colorful and awash with pleasant emotions.
T1:18- I have made it up to the top floor somehow, I have opted to just curl up in the corner on the wood floor. I am wearing several soft warm layers and I am quite cozy here in my little space. My body feels like it has absorbed into itself, that my entirety is just as small as I am while curled up like this, and it is as large as I will ever be. My proprioception has become more and more vague and scrambled. The short and shallow breathing from before had now given way to slow, soft, deep and gentle breaths. Every part of me was at peace. My memory gets hazier past this point. My partner brings up my pet millipedes to play with, I don’t recall taking them out at any point though I’m sure the tactile sensation of them crawling on my skin would’ve been lovely.
My notes at this point are hard to decipher- they are laden with typos and seemingly keyboard smashing gibberish, a testament to my rapidly declining motor skills. My physical form feels like it’s drooping and dripping and literally physically melting at points, like a candle. At some point my phone ran out of battery and I couldn’t piece together the process of finding a charger for it, which further unanchored me and particularly made it hard to readily keep time. It’s hard to type, hard to think, hard to move, all I can do is just melt in the corner, and frankly it’s still a joyous carnival of total inhibition, I am still feeling calm and tranquil and awash in euphoria, I am still having a great time. At points my eyes drift shut, I allow myself to sink into the hole of this dissociation and there is a sensation of my body melting into a puddle that seeps into the floor, it’s weight stretching the surface like a bowling ball dropped onto a trampoline. I am greeted by endless spirals and blossoms of tangled forms in silhouette, backlit by a shifting cool light. Everything is spinning and swirling and drifting, slowly and deliberately, everything gentle and just as it needs to be.
At some point my partner brings up a book that is a collection of plates done by the legendary artist-naturalist Ernst Haeckel- opulent and intricate depictions of the diversity of life in this world, embellished with symmetry and sublime composition. His style can render even familiar species as unrecognizable, while a certain alien quality is also inherent in many of the obscure invertebrates and odd microbes that he illustrated. I feel like I am gazing upon a bestiary of another world- even the species I recognize, my memory falters and I fail to remember their names. I decide to take joy in resigning to the separation from the familiar, to simply revel in not knowing, in just assuming that yes, these are indeed novel life forms the likes of which mankind has yet to encounter or describe. Even cognitively, this drug seems to force me to settle for the least stressful option, to always assume the best. Anxiolysis is certainly a trait that can be explicitly and uniquely ascribed to this dissociative.
T1:40- At some point I manage to go down the stairs to go pee. I sit in the dark and distinctly recall marveling at how vivid the visuals are in this setting- Everything is tinted in deep violets and vivid electric blues- everything is in a constant downward motion, like the visuals are a liquid cascading down every surface in the room. They swirl like the clouds of Jupiter, they are fringed with tendrils and fractals like a tangle of vines, always in flux, always in motion. I am nothing at this point, I am hardly even aware of what I’m doing or why I’m in this room right now, beyond a vague suggestion from my body. Never before have I quite reckoned with the simple biological fact that every animal, save for some highly evolved parasites, is ultimately nothing more than a glorified tube, sometimes branching at points, but nonetheless the body of each creature is constructed around a basic in and out dynamic. My appendages, my organs, my senses, all suddenly seem superfluous in the face of this fact- what is a tube to do other than sit completely still? I couldn’t keep exact track of time due to my phone still being dead, but I was presumably in there for quite a while after I was done what I needed to, just reckoning with my facts of my biology and staring in awe at the vivid drifting visuals, like a constant shower of branches, a garden of translucent vines, or perhaps a bed of seaweed undulating in the waves. I eventually manage to stand up, wash my hands, and navigate myself back upstairs, with a distinct memory of crawling up the spiral stairs on all fours. I believe my next objective was to go out on the roof deck and gaze at the scenery, though my memory is especially foggy around this point. I recall fiddling around with bundling up and gathering what supplies I may need. I recall grappling with various technological challenges- my laptop’s touchpad failing (as it will occasionally do), it failing to connect to a speaker, my phone still being bafflingly dead (I seemed to have kept forgetting this and checking its blank black surface time and time again)- after struggling with what would have otherwise been quite simple tasks for some amount of time, I managed to settle in successfully- laptop still there for notes, hooked up to a nice bassy speaker, my external mouse somehow successfully established, water and cannabis at the ready, and warm soft layers to shield me from the cold. Perhaps being on a rooftop 5 stories up sounds ill-advised in this state, and perhaps it is, though I was confident it wouldn’t be an issue for me.
T2:20- I feel a sudden sense of clarity now that I have settled down and worked through the confusion of technology and small objects while heavily dissociated. It’s hard to grasp what I need to do and why when my short term memory is faltering and my sense of cause and effect has been stunted. I take a few hits of cannabis from my one hitter as I usually do, though this seems to have little effect on the experience beyond perhaps adding a bit more definition to the visuals. I lie on my back first and gaze into the night sky, rows upon rows of violet-blue clouds illuminated from below by the city lights. Great pulses of waves and ripples pass through the clouds in regular patterns, their fronts not curved but constructed from a series of right angles. These jagged step-by-step undulations leave washes of color in their wake, little flashes of iridescent lightning. I truly get a sense of the sky being a great dome above, it feels like it seals me in where it meets the horizon, I am not truly outdoors but simply enclosed in yet another vast space. Lying here in all of my soft layers is heavenly, I don’t even notice the bite of the December air or the cold tarmac of the roof- my eyelids grow heavy and drift shut from the weight of my bliss under this great hemisphere. I hug my speaker against my body as a nice bassy pop pulses into my body, the vibrations massaging my abdomen.
I wish I could lay like this forever, in the darkness of the back of my eyelids, a shimmering gossamer spiral of blue cellophane rippling and pulsing to the vibrations of the music, extending into the infinite walls of the great sphere that encloses me. I feel my body sink straight downwards, melting and drooping into the abyss until it is conjoined with the pulsing membrane, and suddenly without a body I am a being of pure vibration and vitreous blue energy. Changes in the music elicit slight changes in the visuals like flashes of color and light in the distance, taking various patterns and aligning to various synesthetic themes and emotions. Ultimately, the hallucinatory space remains abstract, predominantly dark with small flashes of cool colored lights, and mostly unchanging, in steady and gentle motion like ocean waves lapping up on a beach at night, laden with bioluminescent plankton.
It’s quiet here- my mind is blank and I am not really delving into coherent thoughts-ruminations on memories or emotions or the self, it’s just a quiet tranquility, the sensory pleasure of such a vivid yet ultimately cryptic and subdued forms in the endless dark. I could be here forever, but eventually, as time passes, the drug’s effects begin to wane, thoughts of the world beyond this space begin to invade, I begin to feel bored and impatient, I want to open my eyes.
I sit up and begin to really take in my surroundings- skyscrapers tower over me in one direction, their peaks lit up by an array of prismatically colored lights, their bodies a constellation of pockmarked windows lit windows. It is around 1 AM and very quiet. In another direction, the distant twinkling of vast industrial fields and refineries, smokestacks and plumes of steam illuminated by the lights bellow, to one side, a single massive building with a grand art deco topper towered particularly close. As I took in the scene, they would blur, split into double images or mirror themselves, be accompanied by shadow forms that would shoot up infinitely into the sky as beams of light and shadow. What was once the familiar skyline was soon becoming a dense jungle of phantoms, pillars of light and glass piercing into the dark, cloudy heavens. I sighed, the same slow and heavy breaths as had taken the peak of this experience, and felt so at peace. This city was beautiful, all of this, all of the glass and light intentionally constructed to be deliciously consumed by my hungry eyes, it was a wall of pure rippling sensation that tore through me. I was taken yet again with cresting waves of euphoria.
T3:00- I come back inside- I can walk a little easier now, I am a bit more lucid and aware of what I am doing and how time proceeds and the nature of cause and effect. I stumble around looking for my partner, finding it odd and lonely that the room is empty when I come back in, before finding them in the living room downstairs. The stairs are a bit more navigable by this point. There are still strong visuals in place, abstracted patterns in gently lit relief settling into various surfaces, still usually along the lines of a simple gridwork. In the dark coming down the stairs I was still greeted by the same drifting and flowing curtains of vines and tangles of tendrils that I was treated to before, flowing down the walls like the light cast through a window during a heavy rainstorm at night. My head is still spinning and I find myself tending to sink into wherever I come to rest- not fully disintegrating into a hole but becoming still and immersed in what sensations come through.
T3:30- What a soft and comfortable dissociation- at this point what remains of it feels like a gentle plush pressing in on all sides of me, a steady pressure that pulses and beats with my heart. I am so cozy, at no point has this drug made me feel any semblance of physical discomfort, no matter what my body is doing or what position it’s in or what surface it’s resting on. After a point we go up and hang out in the bedroom. Lying on the bed is as heavenly as it was when I was coming up. I am steadily coming down now, my thoughts are becoming steadily more lucid and coherent and I can hold conversation better as time passes. I notice there is still a loss of proprioception around my lips and tongue, causing me to stumble over words as I speak and mispronounce things. I realize now how important the feedback of being able to feel one’s mouth is to the ability to speak clearly and articulately.
T4:20- Mostly down- there is a lingering numbness in my limbs but my brain feels like it has mostly returned to normal, with maybe a slight persisting short term memory loss.
T6:00- The effects of the drug are no longer discernible. I try to sleep but find myself lying awake well into the morning, despite lacking any marked stimulation. Perhaps it was just the setting and my overall health that kept me up all night, as I felt in a state of sober anxiety the entire time. It would appear those distinct anxiolytic effects do not last. I eventually fall asleep around 9 am.
Conclusion: 3-F-PCP was received by many (including this author) as lackluster and just a surge of pure neutral dissociation. Thus, expectations were fairly low for 3-Cl-PCP, which initial reports indicated was similar in character. For me personally however, my expectations were far exceeded. So much pleasantly surprised me about this drug, but chiefly, it was how novel and unique it felt. It was really incomparable to any other dissociative I’ve taken, due to several factors. The first is simply how soft and soothing and supremely anxiolytic it is- it is a gentle plush dissociation, pleasant and euphoric the whole way through abound with delightful physical sensations. It feels like lying on a king size bed made of clouds. Yet it was absent of any noticeable sedation or stimulation. There was no mania, no rush, no intense motivation to do things- but there was also no couchlock, no mental inhibition that just left me drooling in a daze for hours. It was simple and matter-of-fact- if I wanted to get up and move, I could, and it felt good and soft and melty- if I wanted to sit still, I had no issue with doing so for long periods of time, and that too was soft and good and melty. A dose of 150 mg was sufficient for a deeper out of body experience for me, other users may find such a dose a bit intense. A dose from 100-120 mg orally or sublingually should still present some degree of the soft and pleasurable dissociative anxiolytic effects. A dose this high was, for the peak of it, largely non-functional and cognitively inhibiting, though still greatly enjoyable. The comeup and comedown were sociable and warm. Add to that a distinct character for the visuals and sensory aspect of the trip and it yields a uniquely pleasant experience, ideal for a night at home alone with soft surfaces and some music or with a loved one. Perhaps not an ideal drug for going out for a walk during the daytime. If I had to compare it with anything, it would in fact be Ephenidine, or another diarylethylamine- they share a similar still, sinking dissociation, as opposed to any kind of rushing sensation. But it is ultimately something unique and worthwhile of its own. My only complaint is the fairly high dose required for desired effects.
Exp Year: 2020 | ExpID: 115030 |
Gender: Not Specified | |
Age at time of experience: 25 | |
Published: Mar 15, 2021 | Views: 5,035 |
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3-Cl-PCP (928) : Various (28), Music Discussion (22), Glowing Experiences (4), General (1) |
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