DOSE:

16 mg

oral

2C-E

(liquid)

BODY WEIGHT:

165 lb

Greetings fellow psychonauts, I bring news from the vast frontiers of Inner-space.

The materials & participants:
180 lb Caucasian male 16 mg 2C-E
165 lb Caucasian male 16 mg 2C-E
180 lb Caucasian male 120 mg MDMA + 80 mg @ T+02:00
135 lb Caucasian female 120 mg MDMA + 40 mg @ T+0:200

I am including all of the IMPORTANT details.

Introduction

I was on a camping trip on the edge of the Appalachian trail, with four trusted comrades. It was a three day weekend for our group. We were nestled in next to a large lake with a diameter of about a mile. My four friends were actually two couples, and together we had three tents, one for each couple and one for me. We spent the first day hiking, collecting and chopping wood, cooking, fishing by the lake and in general just relaxing and enjoying the environment. The campsite was deeper in the woods than I had ever been before and as a consequence I saw more wildlife up close than ever before. The forest and lakeside area were literally crawling with red salamanders with black speckles, snakes, all manner of rodents, deer and black bears- yes black bears.

Everyone present had plenty of experience with hallucinogens so we all felt comfortable with a virgin 2C-E experiment in the woods. Four of us decided to trip the second afternoon, with the fifth person acting as a sober sitter. One of the couples who had decided to trip together had decided to abstain from the 2C-E in lieu of MDMA. This I thought was a better idea, because this meant fewer first time experiences to deal with if things became complicated- 4 tripping ppl is a lot to handle in the woods for only one sitter. The girl from the other couple would be our sitter, and had been our sitter before. So launching from the 2C-E pad would be myself, and my good friend, “Ken”.

The 2C-E I had on hand had been characterized in my very own laboratory (by IR and melting point and spot TLC for you chemists out there) and was in fact very clean 2C-E. One half hour before dusk, the couple, we’ll call them mary and jay took their E tabs, and Ken and I drank cups of 2C-E solution. I always prepare my drug salts the same way - I dissolve a dose in water, with a powdered vitamin supplement and then drink. In this case it was 16mgs 2C-E and one packet of EmergenC brand vitamin drink in about 1.5 cups of warm water. I have grown to hate this taste. 3 hours prior we had eaten small wood grilled steaks and I was concerned that it might delay the onset time. Twenty minutes after we drank the solutions, the sun began to descend and the oranges and reds of the fire began to take on a richer, deeper color- this was the first alert.

The Trip: Chronology

Let me digress for a moment to clarify the rest of the description. In real-time based on accounts from all involved, the trip unfolded in the following chronology:

T +00:00 We drink the 2C-E solution
T +00:20 First alert, sun goes down, fire brightens
T +00:45 Colors, body high, begin to intensify.
T +01:00 The five of us decide to walk around the lake.
T +01:30 We stop by the side of the lake and watch the water, the sky and lights from other campers in the dark.
T +02:30 We get back to the campsite after the walk. I immediately collapse in my tent.
T +03:00 I emerge from my tent, and I begin to complain.
T +03:30 I begin an hour of “into the tent, out of the tent” behavior.
T +04:30 Mary and Jay decide to go into their tent for the night. Our sitter announces that she is tired.
T +05:00 Our sitter feels comfortable about our safety without her, she retires to bed.
T +06:00 Ken and I begin to have an eternal conversation.
T +08:00 Ken and I decide that it would be a good idea to cook 12 lbs of steaks over the fire.
T +09:00 Ken and I decide that it would be a good idea to each eat a steak.
T +09:05 Ken and I each eat one and we agree that the steaks taste exceptionally good.
T +09:06 Ken and I have systematically shredded, eaten and scattered 12 lbs of beef like animals.
T +10:00 The sun emerges, signifying an exodus from our trips. We continue talking, sleep is not possible.
T +11:00- 18:00 effects at a level of +/++ continue until sleep.
T >24:00 Next day I am tired, but not fried.

The Trip: Subjective account

The first alert occurred during dusk. 5 large logs formed a pentagonal perimeter around the fire. The wood in the fire was shaped like a three pronged teepee. This divided the interior region into three distinct areas. During the first alert, I noticed the three regions were different shades of orange, yellow and red. The increase in the presence of the colors reminded me of a similar effect I have noticed with 2C-I. The pentagonal shape was very sharp and clear. I walked around the fire to look at it from different angles. The combination of angle change, and shadowing (the sun had set fully by this point), changed the character of the pentagon, even though the pentagon itself remained. For example, it began as more or less equilateral. All the sides and angles looked the same; it was symmetrical. As I walked around to look at it from alternate positions, and as the sun descended and the shadows became more prominent, the sides of the pentagon became unequal in length; it began to look more and more like a simple 1-story house, a square on bottom, with a triangle on top.

I began to look into the forest, which was very dark at this point and looked EXACTLY like the artwork from the book “Where the Wild Things are”. I could see corridors in the tree-lines, and my sense of time was beginning to get disjointed. I was spending more time seeing in my mind’s eye than I was in my field of vision, and it would take me longer than normal to recognize this and “snap out of it”. I am basically walking around the campsite examining everything.

Around the one hour mark the group decided that it would be a good idea for us to walk around the lake. Ken and his girlfriend walked to the outhouse/water station and told the remaining 3 of us that they would meet up with us on the foot path (which was well worn by park ranger vehicles. So I am being looked after by the couple who is rolling. We are walking down the road and it feels like we’re in the “Wizard of Oz” for a while. The two of them keep talking to each other (as was to be expected), and I keep picking up vibes. It was as if I could empathize as well as they could in their states, but everytime I did, everytime I felt an emotion, it would lead to non-emotional, purely logic driven associations. Basically, having empathy was making me trip. When I wasn’t picking up emotional cues from the two of them I could think, when I was doing this, my mind would flood for a few seconds, triggered by the impact of the emotion/or emotional realization. I felt rather disconnected from these two partners.

I kept getting the sensation along with the image, that there were fields of consciousness around each of us and that whenever we acted to intersect them, I would feel empathy, and then the intersection of the two fields would intersect with some other thought-space, some other conscious state, and I would be flung into a state of flooding. This at the time was tolerable because the flooding only lasted for short bursts.

Somewhere along the way, maybe at the half way mark around the lake, I looked up at the trees. The leaves started to vibrate- (as yes my body was vibrating heavily by this point- almost buzzing- very tryptamine like) and in vibrating they formed new shapes above my head. They were squares and pentagons and then irregular boxy shapes like the wooden pieces of a jenga set. They were all interconnected to the trees and other leaf-shapes and this continued- this connecting process until my entire field of vision was a quilt of irregular boxes. It was similar to an intricate boxy looking maze in 2 dimensions, only this was 3-D and the shapes had a vague yellow tint to them. The outlines of these shapes would shake a bit from time to time, like a plucked guitar string.

At some point which I regard as the half way point (although I have no actual idea how long it took us to get there or how far we had walked- it seemed like hours) we found Ken and his girlfriend seated by the lake in a small clearing. Several hundred meters to our right across the water was a campsite with a blue colored lantern hanging from a tree. This blue light bathed everything in area with the hint of the neon palette. The smooth unmoving lake surface looked like shining obsidian, reflecting blue. The campsite in the distance had the look of a gold miner’s camp from the 1850s. This was my drug-addled impression at least. I looked up at the stars and instead of being met with the familiar blue points, instead I saw red squares with smaller green rectangles attached. They looked like wrappers of the strawberry flavored sucking candies my grandmother used to love, and which I’ve seen are still around in office waiting rooms. It was supremely serene. Ken smoked a cigarette and commented on how nice the most grass felt on his feet. He had taken his shoes off, and his girlfriend stood smiling; holding from the heels between a few fingers.

We eventually got up and continued our walk around the lake. At maybe another quarter of the way back to the campsite I realized that the trip was getting more and more intense. I was finding it difficult to stay focused on the activity around me, the people around me, the scene, or even my body. I was staying longer and longer in my mind’s eye and less and less time paying attention to my visual field - which was difficult for me to interpret. What I realized was that I would live through a part of the walk around the lake, and then I would imagine it or relive it in my minds eye. I could not distinguish between the two experiences and what scared me at this point was that I didn’t know whether what I was experiencing was a relived memory in my minds eye, or the actual experience. As the trip continued, the chronology of the minds eye experienced mixed out of order and I became extremely confused as to what was real, what was imagined what had happened and what had not actually happened.

About 150 yards from our campsite we came upon the outhouse/water station and decided to stop for a drink. While we were there a park ranger in his pickup stopped by to say hello. With all of my will I stayed back, and drank from a spigot hoping that the couple would talk to him and that he would be on his merry way. He passed us without incident, but later when we got back to the campsite, I would relive the experience and then intermix it with purely imagined scenarios - like our arrest and interrogation.
I reiterate that because the memories or apparent unfolding of events were non-sequitur. I believed at one point that I was in police custody. My body was completely useless to my conscious self at this point because it was so preoccupied. I felt control over my bodily functions slowly slipping away and I ran to my tent. That is when I felt the most intense flooding of the trip. It felt like an earthquake of signals in my brain. I was in multidimensional hyper-Cartesian coordinate system and at its center was “the source”. The vibrating noise of so much stimulation was really intense like heat emanating from the source. I willed myself into it and became one thing. A vibration. I was a vibration.

This felt better and provided me some relief. Once I passed out of the source, I remembered that I was a human being and that I had a name. I also remembered that the source experience must have been the peak, and I was happy and relieved to think that this would end eventually. During the source experience I felt as if I were in a vibrating stasis - as if my soul was being frozen for safe keeping for a while. I thought this was death, or ego-death. I could feel my ego kicking and screaming to exert control and it could not, it was afraid that giving up control would mean I would be dead. It was trying to protect me from what it perceived of as harm, and it was scaring the shit out of me with all of its screaming and fussing.

Upon waking from the source experience (I have no idea how long this lasted for) I emerged from my tent still feeling very fragile. I saw the 2 couples and felt a loss at having passed through “the source”. I felt deep-rooted insecurities bubble up from my unconscious as an exposition of what I was feeling. I felt unloved and unwanted and this feeling like the empathy experience was becoming all encompassing. A sense of self-loathing would trigger a thousand associations of misery all pointed at me, thought, sensed, felt all at once, it was what I would imagine the tortures of hell to be like. I tried to fight these feelings knowing that they were untrue, they were old childhood feelings and nothing more. It was terribly hard to walk forward against the winds of that kind of hurricane. I tried to convey my sense of internal doom to my fellow comrades. I was afraid that I would ruin everyone’s vibe and I was especially concerned with triggering bad thoughts in Ken who I thought was just as susceptible to these patterns of thinking as myself. I was told later that my internal machinery converted my hope – “guys I need some positive conversation to get my mind off of these hellish images and associations”, into “guys, please say nice things to me, please…I mean it, I need you to say nice things.”

Ken’s girlfriend put her hands on my shoulders and reassured me “you’re fine, you’re with friends.” This seemed to do the trick and I could feel my heart rate go down a few hundred beats a second. I looked at the fire and my memories of the fire in the beginning kept interfering with my current visual field. This made me wonder whether I was still standing there at the beginning looking at the fire, imagining all this- the walk around the lake etc. The pentagon was still there and the colors remained. I wondered how much time had passed and I asked. The response I got was “it has been 2 hours”. A feeling of dread hit me. I knew this was going to be a 12 hour trip and I worried that the “peak” I had experienced might not be the peak. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to handle much more. But then I realized that I was thinking about the first time I had asked what time it was, and I looked at our sitter again and asked. “Almost 5 hours, I’m going to go to bed soon, if you guys think you’ll be ok.” I realized that I understood the logic of the hallucinations more and so I felt much more comfortable. I could feel the effects lessening.

I was sitting in a fold out camping chair and Ken was standing on a rock with his bare muddy feet. Rubbing his feet on lichen he would occasionally exclaim his love for the soft, cool velvet. His shirt had disappeared at some point and in his filthy state he looked like a sort of huckleberry finn in his rolled up jeans. We talked for a while about how much of the evening we each remembered together. It was at this point that I recall how much I had vomited. Every 10 minutes like clockwork I had been walking behind my tent to puke or piss. This puking lasted 3 hours or so. I just couldn’t stop dry heaving. I wasn’t concerned though - I was treating it like you would a sneeze in conversation. I would pause, excuse myself, puke and then return.

I was in much better shape mentally, but my sense of time was still jittery and very out of sequence. Ken looked like a satyr to me. I could see little bulbous horns on his forehead. Each time he scratched his feet against the lichen covered rocks, those feet would transform into hooves. His rolled up jeans were muddy and browned, and they looked like appropriately placed fur. Ken declared that he was hungry. At T+01:00 he had vomited up his dinner and now it was close to T+07:00 or T+08:00. He lumbered off into the woods and towards the road where our car sat parked. He removed about 12 pounds of skirt steaks and stated his intention to cook it all. We set a grill over the fire and laid all of the beef down on top. We talked more, being more cognizant and lucid. Every now and then one of us would flip a steak. When it was finished, we eat took a steak and bit in. The juices flowed over our chins- I have never enjoyed beef as much as I did at that first moment. We chewed flesh and spat gristle, the grease and cooked blood covered our hands and our lips, it was primal and delicious. After we finished our first steaks we decided to continue. A few minutes later we had eaten or spat all 12 pounds for obvious reasons I suspect we spat most of it. After the food I felt much better, sedate even.

It is truly remarkable looking back, that with all the food we had strewn across the camp-site, we were not approached by black bears. I’m not sure what I would have done in that situation. Anyway, we collapsed in our folding chairs and watched the sun slowly rise up to illuminate the camp grounds.
I was physically drained when the sun rose, but my brain was still dramatically over stimulated. Still, I tried to sleep, laying down in my tent. I tossed and turned for several hours, resting, but not sleeping. When I stepped out of the tent once again I was very nearly baseline and feeling very dirty. The others were all up except for Ken. Everyone was making shish kabobs. I looked at the food filled skewers and marveled at how crisp the color of the red onion was and how vibrant the yellow of the yellow pepper was. Clearly I thought to myself, the drug effects had not ended.
Those previously familiar red salamanders were almost glowing red during the last waning hours of the comedown.

The Trip: Discussion

What I found most remarkable about the experience were several things. First the elimination of the boundary between what was real experience and what was remembered experience was startling. Due to the extreme nature of such hallucinations I feel that this level of intoxication SHOULD NEVER BE ATTEMPTED without sober minders. Also, the flooding I experienced at the peak was so intense I had suicidal thoughts. I wanted so badly for the stimulation to go away that I thought about asking for the hospital, I thought about shooting myself, I thought about demanding thorazine, I wanted to claw the walls and climb out of my brain because the buzzing and rush of thoughts was so fast and voluminous. Granted, this represented a short maybe 30 minutes of the entire trip, but I think without supervision, I could have gotten myself into trouble. All of these negative feelings and the fear that the flooding would intensify lead to the temporary period where I demanded positive feedback from the group in order to get on top of it. I feel that a person with less hallucinogenic experience or who is less self aware, might not have been so fortunate to escape self-harm.

Ok so now a note about several features of this material- I’ve noticed that different materials trigger the experience of “tripping” through different avenues of stimulus. For example the intense sensations inherent to a moderate to large dose of DiPT is most pronounced when there is sound to induce the tripping. Without the aural stimulus there are very minimal effects. With the introduction of sound however, it can become every bit as heavy as other tryptamines. In the case of 2C-E, I felt that this was also true, but with emotional stimulus. Like ecstasy, I felt that observed emotion in others triggered a greater than normal response in myself, but unlike ecstasy in which the response is pleasurable, in the case of 2C-E, observed emotion in others triggered an intensification of the flooding and tripping. No other external stimulus boosted the power of the trip like seeing others emote. This created an especially potent situation being that I was not only around 2 couples, but that 2 of them were rolling on MDMA.

Also, I would like to describe something I call the “trip cyclone”. It was a feature of this trip and has been a feature of my LSD experiences as well. I would describe it not as the “mind fuck” which most would agree is the tangled string of thought where trying to find the end of the knot either visually, or through the use of logical arguments is useless. The trip cyclone is an expansion of this idea. During come up I would say that if I were a stationary figure, the trip would move over me like a cyclone over a town. I would describe the eye of the storm as being over my head as the peak hit and then the eventual passing of the tail of the storm as the comedown. The reason I use this analogy is this - at a similar time radius from the peak (eye of the storm), during both the comeup and the comedown, I experience the same level of effect, and in fact during comedowns I get déjà vu from the comeup. In the cyclone analogy, windspeeds are identical at a given radius regardless of whether you are standing at the eastern radius or western radius or what have you. Only near the center is the intensity the greatest, and only in the exact center where there are no radial forces is it supremely calm.

Ok so in addition I kept getting the sense that my conscious awareness was being pulled into the center of this storm toward the eye (the source). I couldn’t move directly at the eye however. The progression of the trip moved me in a spiral pattern edging slowly toward the center until I hit the peak. On the comedown it was the reverse process. I moved out of the circular storm in a spiraling motion - like a cyclone, or tornado or hurricane. This sense of motion was generated by the changing of thoughts, which were all linked along the length of string one would follow if one were thinking in the logic of a “mind fuck”. In this sense, the mind fuck for this trip was shaped like a spiraling string, which melded into a central knot and then spiraled outward again. Thoughts, which occurred to me on the come-up, represented a sort of “ying” and during the come down had a representative “yang” thought. On the comedown when I would realize that a “yang” thought had appeared (which was instantaneous) I would re-experience the original “ying” thought and this was much like deja-vu. What I can clearly say is that it seemed to me as though there was an awful lot of structure to the progress of the trip.

The color enhancements continued long after the body high had left. Shish kabobs as I said were almost moving in their colors. My mood was excellent on the following day. I was relieved and upbeat about my life. My body was drained; I was very tired but I think that the lack of sleep was at least half as responsible for that as the drug, if not more. My eyes were still sensitive to bright lights on the day after the trip.
I hope I have added some clarity, some insight, some excitement, and some caution to the literature. Be smart, be safe, be happy.

Exp Year: 2004	ExpID: 36560
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Apr 5, 2005	Views: 49,927
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2C-E (137) : General (1), Difficult Experiences (5), Small Group (2-9) (17)