Experience:250mg MDMA (oral) - Pareidolia & paranoia

• Age: 18
• Gender: Female
• Height: 175 cm / 5'9"
• Weight: ~53 kg / ~119 lbs
• Date: 23/11/2021 – 24/11/2021
• Setting: Wandered from apartment to apartment and around the city
• Additional substances consumed:
  • 1250mL Beer
  • 500mL Bitters

I have had many experiences with cannabis, one experience with ketamine and one AL-LAD trip. My previous dosages of MDMA had been 100mg six months prior (during the comedown of my AL-LAD trip) and another 100mg five weeks prior.

Author's note: all dates shown are approximated.

Context

8:30 pm - After getting out of class, some friends and I decide to go out to the pub and have a drink.

11:00 pm - I've had two beers. Everyone else decides to head home, so two friends (whom I will call N and L for clarity) and I decide to grab something to eat and return to L's apartment.

11:30 pm - At L's apartment, I drink another beer. Another friend (whom I will call A) calls us to go out. L decides to stay home, so N and I meet up with A.

12:00 am - After some meandering around the city, A, N and I sit down at another bar. I drink a pint of bitters, and N tells me he's got 600 mg of MDMA on him. I figure that he's not going to take all of it by himself, so we agree to share while A decides to remain sober (well, not counting beer of course).

Trip

12:30 am - N gives me 100 mg while he takes 200 mg, which we both administer orally. It tastes sour as usual, so we chase it with some bitters.

1:30 am - It has been around an hour since administration, and the only effects I'm feeling so far are a slight warm feeling in my legs. I convince myself not to redose, as in my experience MDMA has always taken a little over an hour to kick in. As the bar closes, the three of us head back to A's apartment.

1:45 – 2:00 am - This is around when I started feeling the effects come in, namely my hands being extremely sweaty. N and I are sitting on A's couch while the three of us talk about life and other things. My speech is significantly faster than usual and I sometimes forget what I was just saying. Despite this, I learn a lot about A (whom I didn't know nearly as well as N) and tell him that, while we may not be very close yet, I could feel that we were well on our way to be. I am so focused on our conversation that I forget for a moment I was high on MDMA.

By this point N starts getting antsy and goes to the bathroom for a short moment. He would later tell me that he had redosed at this point. A is getting tired so N and I decide to bid him farewell for the night.

2:30 am - After some more meandering, N and I arrive back at L's apartment (N had grabbed the keys before we left). L is sleeping, so we sit down on his couch and decide to settle down for some time.

4:30 – 5:00 am - The timeline begins to get fuzzy by this point, but I know the following events happened within this time frame.

After I feel the comedown of my initial dose, N offers me some more, which I accept. I take 150 mg orally around this time.

During this time frame, I check my eyes in a mirror and notice two things: my pupils being very dilated, and a strange grey spot between my pupil and my iris. I would later check my eyes again the next day and the spot would be gone, so I will assume that it was merely a hallucination.

5:00 – 6:00 am - While sitting on L's couch, I begin seeing humanoid figures in various places. Someone sitting in his office chair, fast food bags resembling someone sitting at his table, a figure outside the window, a face in the dark and someone hunched over N, who is sitting next to me. I have this overwhelming feeling that they are watching me and get so frustrated that I get up to check if what I'm seeing is real, and I even angrily throw the fast food bags in the trash. By this point I am getting increasingly agitated and tell N that "I'm seeing people". Rightfully worried, he offers to hold my hand, which I do.

After some time, I am still unable to ignore the hallucinations so N decides that we should go out to get some air. We wander around the city (it's a weekday, so the streets are empty at this hour), I have very little difficulty walking, aside from the occasional loss of balance. It's at this point that I begin to realise these hallucinations are probably my brain's pattern recognition being enhanced, since it is misinterpreting inanimate objects as humanoid figures instead of conjuring them from thin air. This helps make some sense of this situation, but I still get paranoid when I do see them, which causes me to ask N for confirmation that they aren't real everytime I see them. One reassuring way I had to ignore them was that I noticed the difference between real humans and pareidolia: real humans were walking, moving and sometimes talking, whereas the figures were immobile.

Looking at him, I sometimes see some parts of the buildings behind him dragging on, like a mix of scenery slicing and after images.

7:00 – 7:30 am - N and I get to a convenience store, where I grab some fruit juice as I am getting dehydrated. After this, we get back to our school.

7:30 – 10:00 am - I sit in the student lounge with N for a while, where I update my friends online on what is happening. I notice that I am almost completely unable to type a coherent sentence.

10:10 am – 12:10 pm – The reason we went back to school is because I had a class to get to and didn't want to skip it. We sit in the back of the class, and I am definitely still high. N tells me my pupils are still very dilated.

I struggle to focus on the lesson due to a mix of being high and being exhausted (I had been awake for over 24 hours by this point). I'm not sure which of the two is responsible for the following, but at some points I notice Drifting in the texture of my desk and the words on the whiteboard floating and distorting. I also have trouble writing within the lines of my paper. These visual effects all remind me of psychedelics, which I was not expecting to see on MDMA. I also look up at some point to see what looks like a cobweb covered in dew gently floating through the classroom towards me before dissipating. I would only realise later that this had been a hallucination.

12:10 - Class ends, and I talk with my other friends outside school. N tells me my pupils are mostly back to their normal size. At this point, I mostly feel intense physical fatigue and head home.

Aftermath

1:30 pm - I am at the train station, where I still experience some visual hallucinations. I see and sometimes hear N in my peripheral vision, but when I turn my head he disappears.

2:30 – 7:00 pm - After getting home I immediately go to sleep and experience a completely dreamless sleep (I usually remember my dreams almost every night). I am only woken up by my father asking me if I want to eat dinner. All the effects are gone at this point, only leaving me with some pain in my jaw from constantly grinding my teeth.

Submitted by Cloud Zero