DOSE:

60 mg

IM

Ketamine

(liquid)

BODY WEIGHT:

75 kg

Let me start by saying I’m not a big drug user or anything of the sort, I have a drink occasionally and I used to smoke marijuana on a regular basis, but since high school, that changed. College and life got really busy and I ended up not doing it very often. However, my interest for different types of experiences never really vanished, and I often looked around to learn more about drugs. This all became even more interesting when I got my current job, which coincidently gives me access to a large array of drugs to learn from academically. So I became even more interested in different chemicals and their physiological/neurological effects in humans and animals.

After a lot of reading on ketamine, both scientific and experiences from users, I decided it is a compound I would be willing to experiment with and I felt it was a compound safe enough that I am comfortable trying out. But as with any drug there is always a chance of something going wrong, so if anyone is thinking about trying ketamine or any drug for that matter, that person should do thorough research first and know what you are doing to avoid hurting yourself. Also avoid excess, as with anything in this world, moderation is key.

The first time I tried K, I had pharmaceutical grade ketamine in powder form, and I insufflated 30 mg of it (I can measure these very accurately) as a way to just get a sense of how my body reacted to a small dose. Well it was interesting, nothing extremely foreign, but after ~10 minutes I felt a strange loss of spacial perspective, similar to being relatively drunk. I decided to dim the lights a little bit in the room and as soon as I got up I noticed my legs felt very strange, and it felt like my walking was slightly uncoordinated. I then just watched some comedy on the TV, which I fully understood but somehow didn’t have any strong urge to laugh at funny parts, even though I thought they were funny.

Well at roughly 50 minutes after my dose I was almost back to normal, and slightly disappointed. After reading so much about ketamine I was expecting something more drastic than a mild buzz. So I made myself some dinner and waited around 3 hours for my big experience. I knew I shouldn’t be doing K after a meal so I made sure to wait long enough. For my second dose that night I wanted something a bit more intense so I decided to do the entire 70mg that I had left. I had read that at higher doses it is often a good idea to have dimmer lighting and often soothing music works well. So I made sure I had some Sigur Ros accessible and almost all the lights were off. So at roughly 11PM I dosed myself.

The onset of the drug was very similar to my first time; it took roughly 10 minutes to get that strange feeling. Very soon after I began to feel all these things more intensely and I noticed my interest in watching television was gone so I turned it off. I felt that this time I was going to get a much better sense of what this NMDA antagonist is capable of. I felt like I needed somewhere a lot more comfortable to have my experience and if I were to reach my bed I would have to do it fast, so I got up, turned everything in my living room off and went to my bedroom with my mp3 player.

There I lied down without turning any lights on. I started staring at the ceiling and noticing the shapes and lights coming from outside my window, it was then I really started to trip. It was a bit strange as I had never done anything like K before. My mind was racing a lot and my thoughts were very intense, I felt like there was nothing else there for me to do besides flowing through my mind, very few outside stimuli had any effect on me at this point.

In that state of mind I started contemplating my place in life, by that I don’t just mean geographically but in a bigger sense. I started thinking about my past, present and future, it was very interesting to realise how I fit in the big scheme of things, how my fairly eventful life at this point converged into that moment and how everyone that knows me is affected in small or big ways by the things I do. This was really something I had never been able to fully appreciate while sober, but something that made a lot of sense when peeking at it through the k-hole (not that I was quite there yet).

The more interesting part of all of this was the fact that this experience made me consider one aspect of my life that I have been unsatisfied with, but have been avoiding for years. I don’t want to say what this is, but I felt that this whole experience would have been much more enjoyable if this little problem wasn’t there. The next day, for my own surprise, I actually took action and dealt with this issue that I did not have the guts to do for years. Ketamine actually had a positive effect on me. Overall the whole experience had been very interesting and pleasurable. The drug is potent but I never felt anxious on it, and I never felt sick either. I think part of the reason was my extensive homework prior to use.

My story didn’t end here however, last night (a few months after my first experience) I finally decided to try K again as the opportunity emerged. This time I wanted something different, I wanted to see if I could finally get to the K-hole. I know in my first experience I was probably under a strong dose but nothing like the K-hole. So this time around I decided to try an IM injection of the drug. I sonicated about 60 mg of the drug in half a cc of saline, and I was ready for another interesting experience. I decided to only try 60 mgs because I am well aware of the differences between routes of administration, and I know better not to assume 60 mgs insufflated is equivalent to 60 mgs IM.

To prepare myself for the experience, this time I made sure to leave at least 3 hours between the dose and my dinner, I made sure I was relaxed and had no responsibilities for the rest of the night. I wanted to have my experience on my couch this time, so made it very comfortable and made some water accessible and of course my sigur ros (music). Everything was ready for my experience, so I injected the solution into my left arm using a relatively high gauge syringe (27). I am not used to injections so I wanted to be careful with that part as well. Well, it was done and I was slightly anxious this time around, I think that was partly because of the route and the fact that I wasn’t sure how this would be a different experience.

It was around 11PM when I administered the dose, and in about 2 minutes I had already decided to turn off the TV. At roughly 5 minutes I started to really hear various sounds around me, my computer and refrigerator were almost bothering me with their sounds and even the dim light started to feel too bright for me. Now that I think about it, I wonder how a daylight experience would compare since light seems to be such a big issue for me.

Anyway, back to the experience, I decided then to play my music to avoid having to get up (if I could even do that) and turn off my computer. Let me just say, if you don’t know about Sigur Ros (I know I’ve mentioned them enough), please consider picking up one of their CDs/MP3s before an experience with K or anything like K. Their music is absolutely perfect for that kind of mood and their songs lack structure, which seems to really help me guide myself through my mind. A good CD suggestion is Ágætis byrjun.

This time around my experience was indeed very different than my first time, it was a lot more intense, and contrary to what I believed it didn’t seem much shorter than my insufflated experience. This time I finally understood a bit better what dissociative means when you talk about the effects of K. It wasn’t much time after my dose, I would ball park it around 10 minutes, but time does seem to be lost when you are going down, I began to get very mellow and my thoughts started to go a direction of their own.

In a way, I can see now how the experience was similar to my 70mg (insuf.) experience, in how I generally start thinking about my placement in the universe, but this time I went slightly beyond that, I almost felt like as I started to think about those things I took myself out of the picture. I got a much more universal perspective of my existence. At some point for whatever reason (maybe some trace of anxiety from the experience) I started to think about the possibility of dying in that moment. It was strange because I often really dislike thinking about death and what comes after (or what doesn’t), but this time it was different. I felt indifferent to the inevitability of death, but in a good way, it wasn’t that I didn’t care, it was more about me being comfortable with everything, and just being OK with how I had shaped the world around me, in small ways of course, in a way I can not only live with myself but I almost feel like I brought enough positive things to my world that I feel meaningful enough.

I could get really philosophical here, but I am afraid of writing a bunch of stuff for readers that aren’t interested in my nonsense. At some point in this particular part of my trip I did have a feeling of a few things that I would be missing before dying, and I don’t think I should share with the world what these things are, but it really made me understand my priorities in life. As I progressed through the trip I eventually got to a point where it wasn’t as much about my thoughts, but the trip began to turn into more of a sensorial experience. Having said that, it seems a bit contradictory to explain that this sensorial experience relied very little on my senses. It was more like my brain creating different sensations and allowing me to experience them in ways I had never done before.

I knew that my vision was very blurry, because I could see the digital clock in my living room but I could barely read it, I also had an extremely bad sense of space, and felt like I was somewhere completely different, my living room felt very large and the ceiling looked so high above me. The chandelier refracted strange shapes of light from the outside. All this combined with the sounds of my music and the strange feeling that my body was alien, it was a blending sensation. It was a like a big sensorial transposition where light would have a tactile feel on me and where sound was controlling my field of vision. It is very difficult to explain, but I suppose people that have tried psychoactive compounds like this will understand more or less.

After that I don’t think there was much else I can think of. The only other remarkable observation I can remember was the feeling I started to have when I was coming back. I remember breathing, I was thinking about how I had completely forgot I had been breathing the whole time, so I took a big deep breath and even though I felt my lungs inflate, I could not feel the air coming in or out. I swallowed and my throat felt very weird as well, I felt like it was dry, but I somehow knew it wasn’t, and I also knew that I was still incapable of reaching for a glass of water. I also recall thinking about sharing this experience with others. It’s a bit of a strange thing for me because I am a relatively social person and I consider myself to be quite honest with others as well, but I have no one in my life I can share these experiences for a variety of reasons. In a way I do have a very private side that no one really knows and this is what made me decide to share this experience here. Overall, the trip was very good, and I can’t exactly say how long all of this lasted, but I would say I was almost back to normal by 12:30AM (1.5h from administration). It felt much longer than 1.5 hours.

I feel like every experience I have had with K so far has brought me some sort of interesting new perspective in some part of my life. I often read people’s experiences with other drugs and I don’t necessarily relate to how some compound changed their life, but now I sort of understand. Ketamine didn’t really change me or my life, but instead did something that I consider much more real and useful to me, which was to shed light into something that was murky about myself. I could always just chose to ignore these things, but so far I have to say nothing negative has come out of it, at least that’s how I see it.

I hope this account of my experiences with ketamine is useful to others, or if anything I hope it is an interesting read. Moderation, is my mantra.

Exp Year: 2010	ExpID: 84215
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 23
Published: Nov 1, 2010	Views: 29,192
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Ketamine (31) : Retrospective / Summary (11), Glowing Experiences (4), Therapeutic Intent or Outcome (49), Alone (16)