DOSE:

400 mg

oral

Ibogaine

BODY WEIGHT:

86 kg

I had planned to take a gram or so of ibogaine, but the friend who was going to be my sitter had to cancel. Finally I decided to take a smaller dose, and took 400mg. one morning by myself. That works out to approximately 5 mg/kg, about half the dose I'd originally planned on.

The first thing I noticed was subtle body sensations, ramping up to powerful pulses over half an hour or so, especially in my arms. I've heard that muscles at rest have a rapid rythmic pulsing that we are not normally conscious of, and I speculate that I may have been sensing that. The sensations became more pervasive, like currents of energy throughout my body - sort of like ants crawling all over me, but I chose not to dwell on that comparison. It felt to me as though my subtle energy body (I may be speaking metaphorically here) was beoming active, expanding and unfolding. My visual field didn't alter much; I kept expecting a visual, dreamlike sequence to start but it never quite did. However, I noticed that my thoughts were becoming quite bizarre, and that's when I realized I was in fact tripping fairly hard. It was as though dreams were happening in my mind, and I could sense them but not quite see them - as though they were separated from the part of my mind that I was consciously identified with by a dark curtain. I've had this sort of feeling before, both under the influence of psychedelics and in other altered states, such as in the hypnagogic state.

The dreamlike thought that triggered my awareness that I was tripping was the following. I 'saw' two men facing each other on a city street, making eye contact. They suddenly jump in unison into a void - an infinate black nothingness. Just as suddenly they are back on the street, still making eye contact, at which point they run screaming in opposite directions.

For two to three hours I was in a very fluid dreamlike space. I would imagine all sorts of things, often very personal - e.g. the autopsy of someone I loved who died a couple of years ago, followed by my own autopsy. My thoughts ranged all over the map, from that sort of personal material, to the evolution of consciousness, to how politicians distract us from important issues with spectacular trivia. At the point I was thinking about that, I remembered reading that people will have visions under ibogaine that seem to be about global events, but can more usefully be analyzed as a sort of dream, being symbolically about your own life. (For example, someone might imagine a horrible impending war, but it could really mirror a conflict in their own psyche.) I started asking myself if that was true in my case, and thinking about how I might use these same sort of distraction techniques. Around this time I started getting a strange fluttering distortion in the upper left periphery of my visual field, and began to divert my attention to it to see if it would unfold into something more revealing. Then I realized that this was an excellant example of distracting oneself from more important matters. The next day, still thinking of this image, I realized that I often use intellectual thought as a way of distracting myself from a more direct confrontation with my issues.

I feel I was only scratching the surface of the ibogaine state, but I can see the potential of this substance as a tool for self-exploration.

I did not experience nausea per se, but during the peak of the trip my head felt strange, and I felt somewhat disconnected from my body. I was able to walk to the bathroom when necessary, slowly and with a bit of difficulty. I felt spacey and lethargic for quite a while after I took it, not recovering fully in that sense for about three days.

I felt quite capable of dealing with this doseage alone (fortunately, since I didn't have a sitter), but I think at a significantly increased dose a sitter would be a really good idea. Also, based on the strange sensations in my head (especially when I moved) and my problems with balance and coordination, I suspect that at higher doses nausea would become a factor for me.

Exp Year: 2003	ExpID: 26381
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Aug 25, 2003	Views: 32,558
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