DOSE:

30 mg

IM

Ketamine

BODY WEIGHT:

180 lb

A friend of mine recently administered ketamine via intramuscular injection late one night at the veterinary clinic where he works. He typed this narrative of his experience and shared it with me; here, I reproduce it verbatim, unedited:

// Begin text.

3:15 injected ~30mg K in torso muscle/fat. Mild pain, really not as bad as I had expected. Also, after all these years of injecting dogs and cats, this is the first time that I have injected something into myself - cool!

3:17 difficult to read. Eyes fail to focus on text, as with ethanol
intoxication. Typing is fine still.

3:18 can feel the heartbeat in my head. Definitely some typing psychomotor errors. Thought process is unraveling. Wow. I wish I could explain this lucidly. Visual attention is very fragmentary. Mild burn at the injection site, now feels more like a warm glow.

3:20 reminds me of dextromethorphan, but not as cloudy (yet). Can't track objects when making visual saccades, turning head. Definitely effective stuff. Yep. Even the bouncy Robo-walk. Yeah! This is fun, not too scary. (I type as the text slides left and right. Fun fun fun.)

3:21 trip to bathroom mirror and tiles, and something to drink from the fridge.

3:24 lots to report. Drinking Diet Coke out of a cup was fun. Couldn't discern volumes, just poured programmatically and it didn't spill. When I drank, it felt as though *I* were being engulfed by the cup (diving into the Coke!), rather than me engulfing the Coke. Cool. Bathroom was a bad scene. Turned on hall
lights, immediately these neon fixtures start humming totally eery (sp?) shit at the fluorescent frequency, then I step into the bathroom, see shadows of myself all over the tiled walls, and look in the mirror and see . .. and see . . fucking bloodshot eyes. Damn, get some Visine! I flee (well, turning off the lights and all) in horror, with hints of schizophrenia trailing behind me. I
have the faintest glimmer of what it must feel like to be stalked by a doppleganger.

3:26 head is really swimming now. Every little creak and bump sounds like a person coming to bust my ass for doing a drug. Noticeable time delay between when I make the command to type and when the type appears on screen. Also, my hands are ridiculously fucking small when I view the screen, but when I view my hands the screen is ridiculously small. Interesting. Attentional recruitment to the center severely impairs peripheral attention. I feel so fucking nauseous that I am tempted to close my eyes.

3:28 Part of the problem is binocular alignment. It's so much easier to see shit straight with only one eye open while in this state.

3:35 music doesn't sound much better. I feel pretty stupid drunk. let something new happen, or let this end. extremely sleepy now, but the fruit-flavored neon CEVs distract me :) falling asleep. subtle somatic effect (drifting, floating sensation) is difficult to resist. I see so many CEVs: components of objects being interchanged, replaced as breakneck rate, all very machinic and orderly, even the people look like stick figures, molded out of wire, like paper clipsl.

3:39 seems like a long time, but apparently I've only been drifting
half-awake/dream for ~4 minutes. Music has a very somatic presentation in K space. Music itself is not changes, so much as its associations with other things. THought process completely dead. I am SO sorry guys.

3:47 typing is very difficult. i am spacing out, thinking that i am at home, yes, this is my officee, i hava an office on a tower with a window view - oh, no, that's just a hallucinated skyline, there's no view from that windows. Crocodiles, raptor birds, all close thier jaws upon me.

3:49 tried masturbating - impossible to get any fun of it.

3:58 holy shit. disco lights. I thought for a moment tht I had been discovered at an underground rave. Some paranoia. Do I detect activity outside the door? Wishpers? The security guard's key jangle? I know it's crazy, but I feel it in my l... whatever.

4:02 This is gettting slow and annoying. I want to go home and drink tons of orange juice. Those damn crocodiles again. All right, fuck it, I'm getting up and donig shit.

4:21 feel nauseau, bitterness. No insight, no euphoria, no (major) perceptual aberrations. I suppose that ketamine is a drug that is truly appreciated only in quasi-anesthetic doses. Well, not I. I don't wish to be drugged into transcendence. I only ask the drug to give me a lift so that I can go the rest of the way, until my own volition and with an intact sensorium. This ketamine experience is more delirium than insight. And, my mouth is VERY dry. I

// End text.

My friend said that he eventually blacked out and had a vivid and long-lasting dream (which explains he abrupt end to the narrative).He also told me that he felt extremely lethargic, dizzy and anhedonic for the next 36 hours or so. He told me that he would never try ketamine again, because the drug provided no cosmic insights or CEVs that he could not more safely obtain while meditating or dreaming at night.

Exp Year: 2002	ExpID: 16119
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jul 19, 2002	Views: 18,150
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