I ate a 5.5mg THC gummy in the early afternoon. Figuring it was lower then the “standard” dose of 10mg, I expected to just be a little bit laughier than normal and go on with my day. I was unprepared for the introspective journey that followed.
About half an hour in, I started making lunch because I hadn’t eaten all day. I threw something in the oven that was going to take an hour to cook and made a quick salad to hold me over in the meantime.
By the time I finished the salad it was about one hour in and the high had just kicked in immediately in full force. The motion of standing up felt like I was moving through time frames. This feeling has often happened to me when I’m too high, and I really hate it because it’s so disorienting. I also immediately started doubting myself – do I really feel this way? Am I suuure? Maybe I’m just imagining it. Wait, haven’t I always felt like this? Isn’t this just reality??
But I was still lucid enough to remind myself that this happens sometimes, and it will go away. I turned the oven off because I didn’t think I’d be in a place to handle it very soon. I went into the other room to tell my boyfriend (who was eagerly awaiting to hear the results of the edible for his own intended consumption) that I was “ok but felt a little weird and going to lay down but definitely ok.” In my prior couple of experiences with edibles I just slept very soundly without feeling high, so I wanted to try to nap it off. I took my contacts out, closed the blinds, and went to lay down on my bed.
Once I closed my eyes, I felt the anxiety I’d been (ironically) trying to alleviate start to go into hyperdrive. In my mind I saw infinite slips of paper flipping by, all stacking and piling on top of each other. I had the sensation of them making a paper rifling sound. The papers and their images were all the thoughts in the universe from all beings. For a few moments at a time I could see all thoughts across all of time and space all existed at once, which was overwhelming and smothering. It was like every parallel universe existing on top of each other, a fifth dimension beyond time. I wondered if I could heal the universe with reiki energy, but I couldn’t because it didn’t exist.
If all thoughts had always existed for all time, then there was no such thing as a thought because there was no inverse of thought. Non-dual concepts can not exist conventionally. I could see that the papers were just paper on paper on paper, and there was no form or substance to the paper. Underneath the paper/thoughts was more paper/thoughts and it was inherently empty. Nothing existed because there were no things, just infinite thought. I came to the horrifying realization that I didn’t exist.
At the same time, I had the sensation of malevolent muppet-looking entities from a 70s style childrens show being the ones who were showing me all these images. They were amused by how terrifying it was to me.
I felt a panic attack coming on. I thought that I had done something irrevocable and terrible. It was a primal type of panic as if I was an infant that had made my parents angry. I lacked the logical capacity to understand what happened or why, but could only feel the terror of having done something to earn disapproval. I wondered if I was going to feel this way forever, or if I was going to die or become schizophrenic.
My heart was pounding loudly and I could feel it in my entire body and around me. My tongue felt like it took up my entire mouth, and the food I’d had for lunch filled my torso. All my physical sensations were heightened and amplified. I had a thought that I supposed that this was why I heard that people like to have sex while they are high? I also felt very lightheaded and panicky. The feeling of either that I was dying or just straight up didn’t exist was very profound. I didn’t think I could sleep and I didn’t want to see any more visions. I thought that being alone in a dark room was probably making my panic attack worse.
I walked back over to where my boyfriend was working and laid down on his bed. It had probably only been 20 minutes prior that I told him I was “ok, but going to lay down.” As he turned around to eagerly get an update as to why I was back so soon, I thought of how to word how I was feeling without sounding dramatic or insanely high. I told him I didn’t feel right and my anxiety was bad. I asked him to sit next to me since he has a calming presence. I tried to explain about the infinite paper thoughts of the universe and how I didn’t exist, but I’m pretty sure it came out as rambling nonsense. It was frustrating because I was fairly lucid inside my mind – my memories were clear – but I just had trouble forming sentences.
My heartbeat was so loud and fast that I felt like I was inside a drum. I asked my boyfriend to check my pulse and he said it felt normal. I asked him to check again because I was sure it was racing. He offered to get my Garmin watch that would measure my pulse as proof. I was surprised that I had absolutely no trouble putting on the watch unassisted, clasp and all, and that my motor skills seemed completely unimpaired. I turned the watch on and it measured my pulse in the highs 60s, which is my normal resting heart rate. I stared at it for a few seconds in disbelief, but ultimately I couldn’t deny the evidence and so I took the watch off. Then I started to worry that maybe my problem was actually that my pulse was too low, like it gets before I faint. I felt like I was struggling to breathe, like either my heart or my lunch was taking up all the room in my torso and I could only get shallow breaths.
My boyfriend needed to get back to work so he turned the tv on to My Little Pony so I could try to distract my brain while I waited out what we both thought was the peak of the high. I tried to hold onto the optimism that it would only get better from now. I tried to watch the episode, which I’d seen before and remembered the plot. The closed captioning was on the tv, and I couldn’t follow a single sentence. Every time the text changed, I forgot the prior half of the line. The letters also looked like they were all backwards but I could still read them. I gave up on the tv for now and got up to walk around.
I still felt super dizzy and my boyfriend said that laying down was probably making me feel worse. I got up to walk around and I felt slightly better when I was moving. When I took a step I felt every skin cell touching and lifting off the floor. It felt like every neuron was firing and like my muscles were shaking. But when I looked down, everything was still, so I kept reminding myself that it was just a sensation in my mind and that nothing was happening physically.
I paced back and forth in the kitchen and then sat down in a chair. It felt better to tap my fingers or feet just to discharge some anxious energy. At one point I went in my room to stretch and do some light yoga poses because that seemed to make me feel less dizzy as well. I repeated this process of pacing and sitting and tapping for a while, even though I felt like I was being super annoying and weird. I had also been hearing music the whole time since I had first laid down in my room. I didn’t hear it with my ears, and I knew I was imagining it but I had sensations of different melodies in my mind, a lot like when I hear music in my dreams. It felt more soothing to tap along with it, but it also felt like I was acting too crazy.
I got the idea to lay down on the laminate floor since sitting and standing were exhausting me. It was now about 3-4 hours in, and I spent most of the next hour or so like this. For some reason laying on the hard floor took the panicked feeling away (I often want to lay on the floor if I get too drunk, so it must feel safe to me). I brought a water bottle and a notepad with me, and tried drinking water and writing down my thoughts to help me focus on coming down. I started keeping a timeline of how I was feeling hour by hour, so I could keep myself in a positive mindset.
The first thought I had, while I was at my highest, was “if I had to choose between this and cancer, I’d choose the cancer.” I imagined telling this to my boyfriend and what his befuddled reaction would be, and started laughing excessively to myself.
I still had my contacts out, but I was staring up at the ceiling and walls and seeing patterns. I looked up behind me and out the window and the clouds were racing by like whoooosh! The ceilings in my apartment are smooth but I saw soft geometric fractal patterns overlaid on it. The pattern started out all green, then later in the day was yellow, and eventually orange the last time I watched it. I thought that the colors were for each chakra, and it was guiding me though where I needed to focus energy in my body to get out of this trip.
I looked over at a stone column on the wall and saw swirls of colors and melting patterns. There were two patterns overlaid and one was shifting under the other. I normally get pareidolia, seeing little shapes out of patterns and clouds, but it’s way more detailed and three dimensional if I’m high. When I looked at the column I saw an upright lion cub wearing a suit and tie. He had his hair in a side part and slicked over. Behind him was Thomas Jefferson holding a wine glass, and behind both of them was a steamboat with 3 or 4 columns emitting smoke. I looked away, then looked back. It was the same scene but I was wrong about Thomas Jefferson – it was actually a buddha holding a large glowing oval egg. When I stared at the entire scene of lion cub, buddha, and steamboat, the buddha would point the glowing orb at me, which would turn into the center of a flower. Every time I looked away and back, the scene would reset and I kept seeing the orb being pointed at me and turning into a flower.
I was getting frustrated because I knew it was just my brain doing all this and I wanted the melting images to be over already so it would mean I wasn’t high any more. I stared back at the ceiling, which was yellow at this point. The fractal patterns looked like running down an endless tunnel. I wondered if this was a neural pathway in my brain that I was seeing, or maybe an astral plane. I followed it for a while to see where it would go (spoiler: nowhere) and to give my brain something to do.
In spite of this I was starting to feel better and started to sit up and write more in my notepad. My boyfriend had been walking over to check on me every 20 minutes or so, and each time told me I was looking better, which was reassuring and made me feel better. I wrote that I was “better, laughy when talk, not anxiety on floor, very sleepy.” I alternated between sitting in a chair and laying on the floor, and finally felt able to focus on listening to a podcast. I described the following hour as “fog lifting, light headed” in my notes.
I had avoided my bunny this whole time because I didn’t want to accidentally do anything that might hurt her since my hands felt weird. While I was laying on the floor I saw her a few feet away from me and slid over to try petting her. She felt judgmental and dark. She normally licks my hand if I put it in front of her but she wouldn’t. I thought that she knew what I did and was angry and wanted me to move away, so I did. I wrote “petting the bunny high is NOT like petting the bunny drunk and they know things!!”
Eventually I felt able to move around the house more, didn’t feel so fidgety, and wrote “can pass for normal, still weird body sensation internally” in my timeline notes. I felt able to follow a storyline so I ate chips and watched tv for a few hours. The hallucinating feeling had faded away by about 6 hours in. I felt just laughy and hungry for the next 4 hours until I went to bed. I was extremely sleepy by the end of the night and my bunny finally licked my hand. I managed to sleep fairly soundly without any nightmares or vivid dreams. I didn’t feel totally normal for a few more days. And I still wonder if I really don’t exist.
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