Experience:210mg Mirtazapine - Psychedelic Delirium

[Copy-pasted from my Reddit post]

Introduction

This particular drug had been gathering dust on the top shelf of the cabinet for quite some time. In fact, I didn’t even know of its “recreational” potential until I discovered its PsychonautWiki page while taking an inventory of every drug in my house. Upon learning of its quasi-psychedelic and deliriant properties, I became immediately interested. I didn’t have to feel bad about taking the mirtazapine for myself since they were prescribed for my mother, who later discovered she was allergic to them. If not for me, they probably would have been thrown away – I know, I’m so kind.

It was just past 6PM and I knew that it would be wise to wait until the next day to dose, as it was almost certain that I just simply didn’t possess the willpower to resist mirtazapine’s sedation into the early morning. I was slightly tired, but being the impatient, instant-gratification-obsessed teenager that I am, I decided to take the 14 pills anyway. They were taken on an empty stomach.

Timeline

T+00:10 The first effect that manifested itself was a significant loss of motor control. I attempted to stand up to hug my boyfriend goodbye and barely had the coordination to not trip over my own chair. He told me that I was slurring my words, although I personally couldn’t tell. He left immediately after, and I decided to go to the bathroom while I still could.

T+00:15 While doing what one usually does on a toilet, I noticed movement in the lower-left of my vision. I turned my head to look at what it was, but when viewed directly, it was just an insignificant patch of dark stains on the wall. I reached out to touch it, just to make sure it was real.

Sticky.

It was real. Gross, but real. Intrigued, I slowly moved my vision away from the patch of stains. The further away my vision strayed, the more the patch of stains appeared to slowly inch forward. They also took on the distinct appearance of dozens of small, black beetles. I found this particularly interesting because the beetles were the only visuals I got in the bathroom. No other surface, object, or pattern in the bathroom was behaving abnormally. After finishing up, I looked in the mirror while washing my hands. My eyes were bloodshot, or, at least, they looked like they were. They were redder and looked more exhausted than they would on a substance like cannabis. With nothing else to do that came to mind, I made my way back to my room and sat at my computer, messaging people to kill time.

T+00:25 It was at this point I decided to close Messenger. My typing had slowed down to such a rate that it would take me upwards of a minute to finish typing out one sentence. My head space felt rather clear, and I had no trouble articulating myself cognitively, but it took tremendous effort to find and press each individual key when trying to type out a thought. I spent the next 20 minutes or so trying to watch a YouTube video, but I was so tired I couldn’t focus on it for longer than a minute.

T+00:45 At this point, all the core effects that would persist throughout the trip had manifested themselves and would only continue to increase in intensity. I was experiencing even stronger motor control loss, an apparent increase in visual acuity (much to my surprise), overwhelming sedation, time dilation, distinct tracers, mild muscle relaxation, mild throbbing in my neck and head, noticeable short-term memory suppression, increased irritability, and closed and open-eye visuals which I will describe in detail further on in the report. These are all the effects that come to mind, although I am sure I missed some.

I had no particular expectation of what the visuals would be like. I knew the deliriant-like visuals wouldn’t be as intense as, say, diphenhydramine (which, sadly, I’ll probably won’t experience any time soon, being in Australia and all), and I also assumed the psychedelia wouldn’t be as vivid as an actual psychedelic. In retrospect, the latter assumption wasn’t entirely accurate. I expected an even blend of the two, and that’s more-or-less what I got.

The most apparent hallucination, and the only one that remained constant as long as my eyes were open, was what appeared to be numerous small flies darting across my visual field, approximately five centimetres away from my face. They numbered about half a dozen or so at any given time, and were slightly fuzzy due to motion blur. They would mainly move diagonally or horizontally, not vertically, and would individually only appear for a fraction of a second. They moved on a two-dimensional plane, and appeared to be more of a filter over my vision rather than a convincing hallucination. No matter where I looked or what I was looking at, and regardless of whether I was moving my head or not, their behaviour or number did not change.

I found myself staring at my monitor, mind completely blank, unsure of what to do next. I looked down at my keyboard, and noticed the surface on which it was lying was moving. I turned slightly to my right and moved my head close to the white coating of my desk. The once-coarse surface now appeared to be perfectly smooth and covered with a psychedelic pattern one might see on LSD. It consisted of hundreds, if not thousands, of fine lines which varied in translucency. They would travel forwards a short distance and then turn at an immediate right-angle, resulting in the pattern appearing to be made of a myriad of overlapping squares and rectangles. I was absolutely enthralled, partly due to the complexity of the pattern, but also because of how impossible it was to gather the energy to change tasks at the time.

T+00:50 I felt like I had not slept for weeks and started to bargain with myself.

“Okay, for every five minutes you have your eyes open, you’re allowed one minute with your eyes closed.”

And so I did. I rested my head on my desk for some glorious shut-eye for several seconds before I nearly jumped out of my seat. Out of the pitch-black darkness behind my eyelids shone a seemingly impossible flash of white light that vanished as soon as it appeared. Needless to say, I felt much more alert after that.

Even though I was much more awake than I was a minute ago, I remembered the anhydrous caffeine (100mg per pill) in my drawer for emergencies such as these.

“It wouldn’t hurt to take a few,” I thought.

Without much thought, I poured three pills into my hand (300mg) and swallowed them almost immediately. Luckily, I remembered to have a water bottle with me, which I used to take the pills. I usually feel the effects of caffeine within 10 minutes, so I got up to find something to engage me while I waited. It’s worth saying that I did not notice the effects of the caffeine at all throughout the rest of night.

I turned my chair around, but as I did so, something caught my eye. There was a large mass on the wall close to my door. Usually, there’s a small part of the wall where paint is missing, leaving a large brown circle. But what I was seeing wasn’t just a spot of missing paint, it was moving. It was a massive, flat beetle (I’m not sure exactly what kind of bug it was) slowly crawling along my wall. It was roughly 10-15 centimetres in diameter – bigger than any bug I had seen before. But instead of being mortified like I normally would be, I reached out to touch it, and as I did, it just disappeared. It turned back into the dark, paintless circle it was before.

This was not, however, the only thing on my wall.

The paint in my room is cracked in various places, leaving obvious marks all over the walls. At first, I forgot that the cracks were even there to begin with.

“Wait… did my wall always look like this?” I asked myself.

Not only this, but there seemed to be considerably more cracks on my walls than there normally would be. It was like the cracks had multiplied two or threefold. The cracks were also slightly wiggling. It was subtle at first, but it soon became far more pronounced. The larger cracks appeared like huge worms or snakes, while the smaller cracks appeared like smaller worms or grubs. The hallucinations weren’t particularly convincing, but they were quite distinct.

T+01:00 This is when the sense of impending doom first began to develop. I wasn’t feeling particularly anxious or scared beforehand, and the hallucinations didn’t bother me at all, however, I felt as though if I stayed awake any longer, something terrible would happen. Perhaps I would hallucinate a 2 foot wide tarantula, who knows? All I knew is that I had to get to bed ASAP.

I grabbed my sleeping mask, turned off my monitor, and got into bed as fast as I could. In retrospect, part of me regrets not exploring the open-eye visuals further. I feel like there’s a lot of interesting effects I missed out on. However, in saying that, what I experienced in my bed was my favourite and most pleasant part of the trip. I will not be time-stamping the following portion of the trip since my sense of time was heavily distorted, as I learned soon after.

Closed-eye Experience

I knew that mirtazapine produced prominent closed-eye visuals, but, at the time, I couldn’t quite recall what they were. Initially, seconds after I put on the sleeping mask and lied down, there was total darkness. But, seconds after, I noticed white specks of light in the distance that were slowly growing in size. They then stopped enlarging after only seconds. Following brief stillness, there were bright flashes of white light that would happen every second or two. They occurred at various points in my visual field, and seemed to be completely random. The flashes were quite large and would disappear almost instantaneously.

While this was happening, I experienced perhaps the most fascinating effect of the entire trip. Very briefly, my vision would entirely consist of an entirely still image of World of Warcraft. Specifically (for those who play the game), an image of the centre of the druid class order hall. It was from a first-person perspective. For the two or so seconds that the image existed, I was completely delirious. I totally believed that I was just standing in that location in the game. I did not, however, recognise that what I was seeing was from World of Warcraft, or from any game at all. It just seemed to be “real life” for me. It didn’t feel odd at all – I just thought I was chilling out in some forest. Only after the image disappeared did I realise, “What the hell? Was I just in WoW?”. This would happen two or three times every minute, each time with the exact same image and level of delirium, and after the image would disappear, I would be right back where I left off and the flashes in the darkness would continue like nothing had happened, they did not “reset”.

After an indeterminate period of time, another internal hallucination began to manifest. Again, it started at complete blackness, with no objects or patterns in sight, except for a small dot in the centre of my vision which would slowly change colours. It began as red, then orange, then yellow, and gradually cycled through every colour of the visible electromagnetic spectrum. Lines then began to draw themselves, originating from the dot in the centre. These lines behaved similarly to the ones I saw earlier on my desk. They, too, would travel a short distance and then turn at a right angle. They were one fixed colour, unlike the dot in the centre. They were on a strictly two-dimensional plane and had no depth. Travelling fairly quickly, it was not long before they had finished their self-drawn picture. It was a large, multi-coloured, circular maze. It was extremely detailed and intricate, and although I did not have time to solve it, it was subconsciously inferred that it did, indeed, have a solution. It would then collapse and redraw itself in an identical fashion. This particular hallucination did not last for very long and only repeated this cycle a few times before I moved onto the next hallucination.

The final hallucination I experienced would last until I awoke. Like all the ones before it, it would begin in total void. Then, a shape slowly faded into view. I immediately recognised what it was: a large moth that took up approximately a third of my visual field. It appeared as though a red light filter had been placed over the moth because its exterior was comprised of varying shades of red, not the typical brown-cream colour of most moths. It was completely stationary as if it was dead. Immediately upon becoming opaque, however, it became animated and fluttered away, leaving a faint red trail behind it. As soon as it flew away and was no longer visible, another moth, identical in shape and colour, would fade in at another point in my vision and repeat the same process. Luckily, I am not scared of moths, otherwise this would have been an extremely disturbing hallucination. The moths would vary slightly in size and would there would occasionally be a second moth that appeared simultaneously, although, this was a rare occurrence. As stated, no other hallucinations appeared after this one. Compared to the rest, this one lasted a considerable amount of time.

It’s important to note that I felt completely lucid the entire time. There didn’t seem to be any psychedelic mental effects whatsoever. It was just like watching a video, but behind my eyelids.

After this, I think I fell asleep.

T+2:45 After some time (I have no idea how long I was awake in bed before falling asleep), I woke up. It felt like the time must have been 2-3AM. I got out of bed and checked my phone for the time. 9PM. This was beyond shocking. I can’t even recall seeing any open-eye visuals at all at this point. The flies were gone, the snakes and worms on the wall were gone, there were no patterns on my desk and the unpainted spot on my wall was inanimate; nothing.

I was still feeling drowsy and sedated, my motor control was still heavily affected and I was feeling quite nauseous, nauseous enough to vomit, in fact. So, that’s what I did. I got to the bathroom as fast as I could as vomited some half-digested pills and stomach acid into the toilet bowl. After some heaving, I felt relieved and washed my mouth out with water (not from the toilet). I still wasn’t seeing any visuals in the bathroom. I looked normal in the mirror.

Since there didn’t seem to be much else worth exploring, I decided to go back to bed. Although there were no open-eye visuals, the internal hallucination of the moths persisted. They behaved exactly the same and manifested themselves with a similar intensity as before. They remained until I feel asleep again.

T+12:15 I was woken up by my mother at 6:30AM. She reminded me that I had a blood test to go to in half an hour, which I completely forgot about the night prior. I hoped that my large dose of mirtazapine wouldn’t affect the results.

I went into my brother’s room to collect the clothes I had left there. They were on the floor, as usual. Upon bending down to get my clothes, I noticed that the carpet was still moving. I focused on it, and, indeed, the psychedelic visuals were still present. They weren’t very intense, but they were far from subtle. The walls, bed sheets, floor, and anything else with an obvious texture were affected. Primarily, there was just visual drifting and pattern repetition. Also, objects in the dark seemed normal.

I noticed no other aftereffects.

T+12:30 I got in my mother’s car and noticed the small brown and black particles of grime and dirt on the edges of the windshield were moving, but only in my peripheral vision. They behaved almost exactly like the patch of stains in the bathroom at the beginning of the trip. They looked and moved like small beetles and would “reset” if they moved too far from their original positions.

I didn’t notice any other visuals on the short drive to the clinic.

T+12:45 Upon arrival, I took a seat in the waiting room with my mother and looked down the hallway. It gradually began to unnaturally elongate itself until it looked several metres longer than it actually was. The textures of the objects in the hallway also stretched. It would return to its normal length upon looking away and looking back, however, it would just begin to stretch again if I maintained my gaze for a few seconds.

The patterns on the carpet also behaved like the carpet in my brother’s room, albeit with slightly less intensity.

T+12:55 Inside the room where my blood would be drawn, I was too distracted to notice any other effects. The pathologist noted that my blood was like syrup, but I doubt this had anything to do with my mirtazapine dose and more-so to do with my lack of drinking water.

T+13:15 Once I got home, I just went back to bed.

T+17:00 I woke up almost four hours later, and noticed no effects at all.

Conclusion

It was certainly an interesting drug. It wasn’t necessarily “fun”, but definitely novel. I regret taking the drug at the time I did as I feel like I didn’t explore the effects as much as I could have.

Given the opportunity, I would probably repeat my dose but under more favourable conditions. I would likely also employ the aid of a trip sitter to assure me I’d be alright once the feelings of impending doom commence or to wake me up if I fell asleep.

All in all, a worthwhile experience.

Submitted by u/Raaxxis