Experience:2C-P (approx. 35mg) - Asymmetrical Terror and the Geometric Sea

   "It all made sense
   in this deep unrest
   how the Earth cements
   
   my realm rent clean
   bonds broken
   with worlds in between
   I've been awoken."

Context
Had been excited to take this historically relentlessly intense phenethylamine after a short summer of cosmic fuckery. Previous to this experience I had taken a high dose of DOC (another long lasting and highly intense phenethylamine), and was able to handle the level of mental intensity. Fast forward six weeks and we have me, in class, taking a capsule of 35mg. I’d like to leave a disclaimer: this was a level of physical and hallucinatory intensity of which I had never and have never since experienced. My initial dose was 30mg but I eyeballed an added "5mg" by tapping in some HCl from another capsule, I imagine this was more around the 40 mg+ mark. I would caution anyone against eyeballing with such dose sensitive chemicals like this. For the majority of this experience I was completely unable to perform basic human tasks, and I do not really recall negative or positive emotions, only surprise. I would classify this dose as an overdose, and would not recommend dosing over 30mg unless you are very certain of your capabilities.

T+00
I weighed out 30mg on my scale, having woken up and prepared myself to go to class, and filled a gelatin capsule with it. Before leaving, I spent some time deliberating whether or not it would be enough, so I eyeballed some extra HCl into my cap (oops). I was planning to start peaking right as I left class, and to come up during. I figured the experience would be interesting and that if it got too intense too fast I could just get up and leave for home. I ingested at 12:30 and recorded some notes, but I can’t find them. During the onset I recall experiencing stomach cramping, having not really eaten anything that day it seemed surprising, and for the first hour and a half of the onset I experienced virtually no effects other than gradually increasing uneasiness and mild discomfort. I never experienced violent nausea, nor did I experience intense physical pain. By T+1:20 I decided I was getting bored, so I got up and left the class, walking home. I remember consuming some kind of candy or something, and buying a bottle of water, most of the onset is pretty hazy.

T+1:30
This was when I first started noticing psychedelic anything, I had taken a different way home and was walking up the street perpendicular to mine when I suddenly noticed vague geometric patterns wrapped over specific objects, which didn’t overlap to other objects, and strong color enhancement. By the time I was in the door the geometry was moving and changing. I got my shit together in a corner and prepared myself to peak. I packed a bowl, smoked, and hopped onto IRC. I recall typing to the people that it wasn’t very intense quite yet, and they assured me that it would hit me soon. I suppose I was kind of worried that it was bunk stuff, or that, for some reason, 35mg wouldn’t be intense enough. After smoking the bowl, things picked up pace pretty quickly until at around 14:12 I remember the physical intensity really starting to build. My body felt denser, but not heavier, like I was experiencing a different level of gravitational force than I was used to, and then it hit me, really hard and really fast.

T+2:00
Nearly instantly I remember the trip turning from quiet befuddlement to obscenity in every sense. Around me my walls were suddenly turning counterclockwise, going above my head in my peripheral vision. My monitors’ bezels oozed onto my desk, spilling with it the contents of the screen, I felt my muscles all tense at once and I nearly threw up, but my stomach didn’t feel uncomfortable at all. I remember typing “‘wow” into the IRC chat box, my swirling walls were flashing and popping with rapidly changing alien monstrosities, colors were spinning out of control and expanding across my vision. I tried to stand up, it was difficult, my legs didn’t feel like legs anymore. I opened my door.

I didn’t understand what I was seeing. In front of me there was my world, and there was no music in the world, everything kind of soundlessly exploded. It seemed as though there had been a new material order imposed upon the world, everything was now built out of circles. Objects, textures, and their directions were all now encased individually within a seething mass of constantly shifting circular shapes, reorganised into smooth edges and expanding surface areas. With the sun beaming down onto the busy street, I let my vision aimlessly wander into the infinitely expanding hallways of sensory information that was being splayed out in front of me, and as my eyes drifted out of focus the world seemed to be slowly covered with a layer of opaque geometry, all mingling together in repeating and impossible confabulations of what not even the maddest scientists would dare to call organic. As this film coagulated it expanded itself in 3D, over the environment. There was a sea of writhing geometry in front of me, an ocean of horrendous shape shifting protrusions. As cars whizzed by they went in slow motion, as each passed through the surface of the sea they ripped holes in space, allowing them normal passage. Sounds didn’t make any sense. With every little change to the physical demeanor of my environment, it seemed to be broken down and rebuilt in an instant. I was watching the world collapse and expand with every passing second. The cars, which looked more like colossal tangles of unfathomable matter than cars, made these horrible screams as they careened by.

T+ 4:30
At this point I was back inside, trying to deal with the massive amount of intensity that I had suddenly been dealt with. From this point on my trip was fraught with frenzied repetition and delirious mumbling, I spent most of the time changing my position from standing up, to sitting down, to lying down, and then back to standing up. I ground up a couple grams and smoked two joints over the course of the peak, the THC helped my muscles relax and increased a sense of openness in my chest. By peak time my body felt as though there was a huge vibrating massage tool over specific regions of my muscles, it was very heavy, like being punched by a bunch of tiny little rotating hands. This nearly debilitating sensation shifted randomly from region to region, and this is what affected my ability to remain comfortable. I was completely unravelled, loudly muttering to myself, repeating myself. I couldn’t handle music, nothing made me comfortable, I was fading in and out of debilitating stimulation and soaring euphoria.

My timeline after the peak is pretty confused, I don’t really know what happened when, so I’ll just list out the experiences during the trip that stood out. I was uncomfortable, so I laid down on a futon that I had spread out in the living room. As I stared up into the ceiling I felt myself being removed from my body, the physical stimulation and euphoria disappearing into a sensation of disjointing nothing. I was on a runway, there were giant, but simplistic, geometric shapes moving around me, and the runway was covered in similarly themed shapes. I was moving, slowly, towards some infinite end, beneath me I could see planets that I did not recognise, a galaxy that was not my own. Just as quickly as I was taken from my body was I feeling the tingling sensations spread to my throat, so I had to get up to not throw up.

During one instance in which I thought I was going to throw up, with the tingling sensations unfortunately moving back to my throat area, I was holding myself over my sink, mouth agape, trying to catch my breath. As I was staring into my sink, the sink’s colors and lines began interlocking and repeating themselves, until the sink had begun to wrap around my vision, twisting itself into a giant web of interconnected, mangled, rehashed sink texture. As the web grew larger it covered my vision in such color that I went to black, removed, again, from my body. I closed my eyes, I was in a giant room, built out of what seemed to be bookcases embedded within a magnificent starscape, full of beautifully colored gaseous clouds and strange, looming light, gleaming behind massive asteroids. I was at a table, a large, obsidian looking table. Before me there were three large heads, similar in style to the Moai statues, only they were textured in a similar fashion as the starscape was. They all hummed around me, buzzing and rumbling the ground, their hums changing tone and organisation based on a rhythm I could not understand implicitly. It seemed to me as though these beings were somewhat ambivalent, if not surprised at me, like I had suddenly appeared in their dimension. They looked at me, I felt no judgment, but a peculiar sense that I was somewhere I shouldn’t be. I opened my eyes and moved my head into a different position than it had previously been. My dark bathroom buzzed back into thin existence. At this point in the trip (between T+7-10) I don’t remember what the visual intensity was like, only that every single molecule of visual information was a world of deep context that I could not even begin to try to understand.

I vividly remember trying to watch Scrubs, but when I turned it on and pressed play the hair of JD (John Dorian, the main character of the sitcom) started tracering around the screen. I didn’t understand any of the emotional context of the episode since I could not remember what had previously happened in the show. It felt incredibly unreal, like really bad acting. The screen started bleeding into the world and projecting itself into 3D like objects in front of my vision. The tracers and distortions were too intense, I turned it off and didn’t attempt to watch anything else. I figured it was just too much energy. At some time before T+6 I went to my computer and turned on the song Replica by Oneohtrix Point Never. The song presents a slow piano loop, with strange protrusions of synthesised computer (or of any other-worldly origin) samples, the song sounds very organic and slow, almost serene in its melancholy. The simplicity of the song, having very little progression or multiplicity of layered effects, was the only sound that had, since I started peaking, agreed with my ears. It seemed to fit the state of unrelenting befuddlement that I had been placed in. I left the song repeating for over five hours.

At another instance of insanity, I decided that I should take a shower, that it would give me something to do and that it would probably feel good. I was right about one thing, it felt incredible. Waves of warmth rippling down my addled form. While I was inside the shower I couldn’t really remember what the shower head was, was it a snake? It looked at me, I looked at it, the screeching of hot water running through the pipes, but that noise didn’t make any sense, it sounded almost like a bird cooing. Wait, where was I? Why are there birds here, it’s not that time of year. Wait, is it? Oh. It is. I stared into the corner of my shower and the tiles of my shower’s wall parted into two separate walls standing between a beautiful view of some European countryside.

Wait. What.

What? I’m in Europe? Who am I? What? I looked down at my body, it wasn’t mine, it was tanner, older, courser. It felt less alive with confusion, it felt more certain. I was scrubbing myself, the sun was rising in front of me, illuminating an expansive, peaceful field of green. The mountains in the distance, the morning air was crisp, but soothing. Steam billowed out into the air from my warm shower, god how alive I was! How beautiful of a place this is. But I was so confused, this wasn’t my beautiful home, this wasn’t my beautiful meadow, and so on and so forth. I realised, no, this wasn’t REALLY happening. I pulled myself out of this incredible fantasy, and kept trying to shower. It was difficult, my body felt prickly, I looked at myself in the mirror and witness my complexion, facial structure, everything, change in and out from old to youthful, it was terrifying. When I stepped back I saw myself standing on edge, I looked like I was some kind of spiked lizard or something, but I looked human! Or something? I wasn’t really sure what human meant.

T+12:00
My friend came over, I had completely forgotten that it was Halloween. Facts were crossed. She remarked at how calm and composed I seemed to be. She told me that I could present ideas to her in a completely intelligent and normal (to my mannerisms) way, but that when she would try to ask me complex questions I would stare at her and not open my mouth. I was unable to interpret new auditory information, basically, but I could understand the facts of her words and piece together basic instructions and questions. I was more able to articulate my deep personal experience, and unable to relate to the external object’s experience. She hangs around for a while and then we decide to go to the store to get food and things, because I realised that I indeed did need to eat things, that it was very late, and that I had no real food at the immediate ready.

Being in a vehicle was very intense, it felt as though we were moving at the speed of light, but incredibly smoothly. The car felt gigantic around me, and what textures I could understand around me lurched out into strange distortions, repeating or shrinking at varied speeds. Consistently detailed embedded geometry presented great amount of detail over the dark skies around me, animals and people and ideas popping in and out of the stars, streetlights expanding themselves into beautiful arrays of blinking metal bouquets. When we arrived at the store it was nearly closing time. Strange aliens (people in halloween costumes) were scrambling around trying to repair this great dying organism that they were locked inside. I was ambivalent about also being locked inside of this giant dying organism, I simply accepted that that was the reality of the matter. The sounds that the store was making, from people moving around to bleeping sounds of computers, all came together in this beautiful crescendo that reminded me of a dwindling heartbeat. It almost sounded like an emergency room. My friend tried to ask me what I wanted to eat, but I kept reminding her that I had no idea what she meant, even the idea of trying to decide what I would want to eat was too difficult for me to comprehend all in one instant.

We got out of there and drove back to my place. After this I started to come down, effects decreased slowly over the next five or six hours, I took 5mg of Xanax in the morning, at about T+17:00, and that helped me relax a bit. I did not sleep until 52 hours post ingestion. Afterglow was very pleasant, the next day I felt normal. While I was coming down I experienced a multitude of finally symmetrical thought patterns and came to conclusions about aesthetic, and why the asymmetry was unnerving, yet valuable.

Afterthoughts
This compound is very interesting to me, I have had this dose, as well as an 8mg dose. The 8mg (what I would consider supremely low) dose as momentously less intense than 40(?), but had very powerful stimulation. This chemical is incredibly dose sensitive and should not be taken lightly, I think it definitely has the potential to be the deepest phenethylamine. It is unforgiving, relentless, incredibly long, and magnificently hallucinatory on a level that far outmatches what I’ve experienced with classic tryptamines. This is big boy stuff, it is not to be messed around with. I will repeat an experiment with 25mg at a future date, as the intensity and length seem really promising, but after the experience illustrated above I quit consuming all brain altering substances for an entire month. The amount of fear it struck in me is unparalleled in my other experiences. It taught me a lot about respect and aesthetics. One fundamentally upsetting factor of 2C-P that left me so uneased was the complete lack of symmetry. Most psychedelics that I have taken have produced symmetrical or at least realistic transformations, most geometry has been something that I have been able to follow intrinsically and not something that has frightened me. In this experience I was removed of all cultural filter and experienced severe short term memory failure, looping thoughts for literal hours. The asymmetrical nature of the geometry terrified me because it reflected an internal self that was disorganised, confused, and unstable. I experienced this state of obliteration without much emotional reaction, I was very stable throughout, but it was incredibly unnerving.

Submitted by Phantasmagoria

• Colour enhancement - "I suddenly noticed [...] strong color enhancement."
• Pattern recognition enhancement
  • Flowing - "Around me my walls were suddenly turning counterclockwise, going above my head in my peripheral vision."
  • Morphing - "my swirling walls were flashing and popping with rapidly changing alien monstrosities"
  • Melting - "My monitors’ bezels oozed onto my desk, spilling with it the contents of the screen"
• Recursion - "I was moving, slowly, towards some infinite end"
• Environmental orbism - "It seemed as though there had been a new material order imposed upon the world, everything was now built out of circles."
• 3-Dimensional textures - "the screen started bleeding into the world and projecting itself into 3D like objects in front of my vision."
• Tracers - "the hair of JD (John Dorian, the main character of the sitcom) started tracering around the screen."
• Geometry (level 1-7) - The visual geometry of 2C-P, in this instance, presented an artistic style similar to what I have experienced with LSD, DMT, and LSA. Other than the similar algorithmic nature, it was completely unique in comparison to all other psychedelics I have tried. Effects manifested themselves into object specific wraps of distortive effects. Highly detailed and fast paced in motion, the structure of the geometric webs were amorphous and self generating masses of sections of repeated external textures as well as internally stored concepts that I could understand as being conveyed in embedded geometry.
• 8B - Perceived exposure to inner mechanics of consciousness
• Autonomous entities - "It seemed to me as though these beings were somewhat ambivalent, if not surprised at my appearance, like I had suddenly appeared in their dimension. They looked at me, I felt no judgment"
• Internal hallucination - "I was scrubbing myself, the sun was rising in front of me, illuminating an expansive, peaceful field of green. The mountains in the distance, the morning air was crisp, but soothing. Steam billowed out into the air from my warm shower, god how alive I was! How beautiful of a place this is."
• External hallucination - "Consistently detailed embedded geometry presented great amount of detail over the dark skies around me, animals and people and ideas popping in and out of the stars, streetlights expanding themselves into beautiful arrays of blinking metal bouquets."
• Settings, sceneries, and landscapes - "Why are there birds here, it’s not that time of year. Wait, is it? Oh. It is. I stared into the corner of my shower and the tiles of my shower’s wall parted into two separate walls standing between a beautiful view of some European countryside."
• Transformations - "As this film coagulated it expanded itself in 3D, over the environment. There was a sea of writhing geometry in front of me, an ocean of horrendous shape shifting protrusions."
• Emotion suppression - "I do not really recall negative or positive emotions, only surprise."
• Amnesia - "experienced severe short term memory failure"
• Personal bias suppression - "I was removed of all cultural filter"
• Anxiety suppression - "I was ambivalent about also being locked inside of this giant dying organism"
• Thought loops - "looping thoughts for literal hours."
• Stimulation - "I was fading in and out of debilitating stimulation and soaring euphoria."
• Changes in felt bodily form "My body felt denser, but not heavier, like I was experiencing a different level of gravitational force than I was used to"
• Physical euphoria - "I was fading in and out of debilitating stimulation and soaring euphoria."