Apparently being stuck in a K-hole can be distressing, which kind of makes sense because I definitely lost the perception of time passing and I can see someone thinking they're going to be stuck for eternity and getting upset.
Sounds like opioids but without the horrible withdrawal symptoms and ravenous craving. At least the result does.
Is there any other drug you could compare the feeling to?
not the guy you're replying to, but dissociatives like ket are a fairly different beast from opioids. there's similarities, but there's also stuff that's completely unique to either. spoilering the next part because i have a way to write about drugs that makes people want to do drugs, so take everything with a grain of salt, do your research, know your dosage, test your stuff and stay safe.
spoiler
i used to never get much out of ketamine until friends of mine figured out you can smoke the freebase in a glas pipe, like meth or crack. it's ... quite something, coming up on the stuff when you consume it this way is like flying, like an incredible force picking you up and catapulting you into the stratosphere. and then you're floating in space, feeling like an intergalactic empress, omnipotent and above everything. or it's as if you're completely out of your body and have to operate all your limbs via remote control. you're detached from the world, both physically and mentally. out there in your space capsule. when you take too much, it can get really dark, cold and scary, so be warned, this stuff can fuck with your head a lot. all fine motor control goes completely out the window, too - i've never encountered a drug that fucks harder with your ability to move like a normal human being. we're talking mad cow disease levels of wobbly legs. it does incredibly weird things with time and music, too. i asked my more experienced friend to put on some fitting music before i took a hit. he went with placebo and it was ... i've never seen any other drug do that with music. it was as if the track was running through a leslie, slowing down and speeding up in this weird, otherworldly way. i was literally screaming with laughter throughout the song, i couldn't believe what was happening.
btw, if this sounds too good to be true, it is. ket use is still pretty rare, but there are some people who overdo this stuff, like a lot, and that's really, really bad for your kidneys and bladder. destroying the parts of your body used for peeing is unfortunately a very real side effect of ketamine abuse, and there's the usual problems that apply to all drugs that act as an "idgaf" button for your problems.
oh, and one last thing: When i say ketamine makes you move like a cow with BSE, i'm not overstating things. I've never seen a drug that's worse for parties. not from the perspective of the user, there's people who love to dance on ket, but ... you're probably trampling on everybody's toes, you may fall over people without even realizing (not kidding, i've had k heads fall on my lap and not understand wtf is going on, it happens) and the detached state you're in on k can really weird people out. this is something to use at home with good friends you trust imho.
If acid makes you feel connected with the universe, ketamine sort of does the opposite - it's a deep dive inward where you forget about the concept of existence entirely. It's isolating because your reality is completely your own, but it doesn't feel lonely because you hardly remember that there was ever a shared reality to begin with. It's comforting and familiar like a womb, yet somehow ordinary things like walking through a doorway into another room feel like a completely novel experience. In between the moments of confusion, you get this tremendous sense of discovery - I'm talking first man on the moon - from even the most mundane activities. If you get the dosage low enough, it is the perfect drug for a bike ride at an empty park in the middle of the day. If you get the dosage high enough, it's sort of like a 30 minute nitrous high followed by a pleasant trippy kind of relaxation. I guess the number one adjective I'd use to describe the feeling is "cozy."
It can also be extremely psychologically addictive for people who crave escapism, though. During that big ketamine revival during the early 2010s, I definitely lost a lot of time to drug use. I was also pretty happy and content and doing well socially and in my career, but like... I was totally disconnected from reality and would come up with all sorts of elaborate pseudo-spiritual conspiracy theories. I stopped spending much time with people who weren't also on ketamine because I got all the social interaction I needed in that liminal space that you visit on ketamine. Hell, I'd practically bought a timeshare there.
I realized what was happening and ditched my stash, but a lot of people I knew didn't have as easy a time with returning to the real world. One of my friends had to move to a country where she didn't have any plugs and start over, another one got heavy into dealing and lost his life to some crypto mob guys, and my partner spiraled into a hidden PCP habit for a while. Most people were fine, but if you're already susceptible to whims of fantasy... just be careful.
lost his life to some crypto mob guys
That is some serious cyberpunk shit. I'm sorry about your friend.
I don't know if IV is different from snorted but I didn't experience is as being much like painkiller. You can still feel everything, you just don't care. it also distorted... umm... you know how, sometimes, you become aware of yourself thinking? That got really intense, like I was thinking about myself thinking about myself thinking about myself thinking about myself until it felt like I was stuck in this totally stable, motionless, endless place. I could still carry on reasonably coherent conversations, like I was still awake, just not aware if that makes sense? idk it's profoundly fucking weird.
I experienced no desire to do more right away. It was strange, and not unpleasant, but there was no euphoria or rush or ecstatic feeling. Once most of the effect wore off it... made me feel like I had the balance issues of being drunk, while my mind was clear and alert. Like, I could carry on a conversation without any trouble, but I needed to look where I was going to walk or sit down and pay attention to my balance and my feet. That lasted for several hours, though I usually went to sleep as soon as I got home so I don't know how long it took to wear off.
I would do it again if I could do it safely. It was just such an experience, like seeing the ocean or looking off the edge of a very tall building, or diving in to the water. There wasn't anything euphoric or ecstatic about it, but it was such a wildly different experience from normal perception that it was interesting in and of itself. It paired really well with music. And it was good for introspection, I felt like I had a vast span of time to think about myself and reflect on memories and events in my life.
The way you put it makes it sound psychedelic which tracks with most other descriptions I've read about it.
Almost like the best introspective parts of LSD without the potential for panic and anxiety due to Ketamine's dissociative nature.
It was very different from shrooms. I found shrooms really made colors stand out and become, like, not more vivid, but I was extremely aware of the different between each hue and shade and gradation of colors. And shrooms also... idk how to explain this but it kind of broke down the conceptual categories that I used to identify things? Like a rug was no longer a rug but a mass of color and texture and distance and other information that wasn't connected under a single label anymore.
Ketamine wasn't like that. Perception was still pretty normal but I had to concentrate to focus on any given thing that I was seeing or I'd lose track and stop looking at it, even though I my eyes were still aimed there. Everything felt very pulled back and zoomed out, kind of like that famous shot in jaws where they moved the camera forward while zooming back.
idk, trying to describe a mind altering drug with words is a fool's errand, we literally don't have the words, so that's the best I can do to explain it.
Yeah I'm starting to see the problem here in trying to compare it to other types of drugs.
Have you ever done laughing gas, also known as whippets? If I remember correctly it is the same type of drug as ketamine having a similar mechanism of action. Laughing gas would be my all time second favorite drug if it lasted hours instead of 30 seconds.
Nah, whippets never did anything for me. Idk if I was doing them wrong or what, but I never really got a strong effect from them. I have been on "laughing gas" for dental surgery but I think they just put me on high concentration oxygen and told me I was on nitrous and the placebo effect was enough to get me to relax. Oh wait no there was a time when I was on laughing gas. I God I forgot about that. it was for some dental work and I was totally on a different planet. All I remember is hitting on the dental assistant (which I'm sure was very seductive with my mouth jammed open by dental equipment and blood everywhere) and then being spacey and goofy for about an hour later.
Yeah that sounds like a placebo that first time. Trust me, when you're breathing laughing gas through a mask you'll know for absolutely certain within seconds.
When I got my wisdom teeth removed I had to be put under general anesthetic. Thing is I've always had an extreme phobia of needles, especially in veins. I literally cannot control myself if someone is going to put a needle in me and so I needed heavy sedation for them to put my IV in.
They used laughing gas and it was so much more intense and longer lived than whippets because instead of taking hits out of small canisters I had a mask continuously administering a mixture of laughing gas and oxygen.
I felt like time slowed down, as if the neurons in my brain were behaving the same, just at a much slower rate and without producing any anxiety whatsoever. It cut through my needle phobia like a hot knife through butter.
When the nurse was getting ready to put my IV the doctor tried distracting me so I wouldn't notice, but he didn't need to. I noticed he was trying to distract me, and I knew they were putting the IV in. I said with slurred speech "I know what you're trying to do you little shit" but I didn't feel even a twinge of panic and just accepted them putting the IV in like it was no big deal.
It was fucking awesome and I wish I could get a giant tank of the stuff. It's not illegal but the assholes who make it won't sell it to non-companies.
You know I used to have a severe needle phobia too, but when I got put on anti anxiety medication it pretty much got rid of it? Same with a couple of phobias. I used to be terrified of spiders and the dark and being on anti-anxiety meds for a few years got rid of it entirely.
Drugs are wild.
I also got the sense of spatial distortion. I felt like I was sitting inside my head looking out, and my arms were impossibly far away and needed to be manually controlled if I wanted them to do anything.
On a smaller dose its a bit like MDMA minus the speediness and a bit weirder. The k hole is more like almost opiate-y but with a sorta psychadelic clarity some times
I did IV Ketamine for depression (Didn't work, I think I have a bold new strain of depression unknown to science) and while the experience wasn't unpleasant I can't see how people do it recreationally. For me it was like forty five minutes of my of self and sense of time being sort of smeared around. Strongly recommend listening to Pink Floyd's The Wall if you ever go in for it.
even the :centrist: emoji checks out, coming up on k always feels like
:pog-dolphin: :centrist: :pseudorca:
Man I really wish I had some ketamine. I've always wanted to try it.
From how people describe it I imagine it's kinda like if laughing gas/n2o/whippets lasted for hours. That'd be perfect.
i was on it once for surgery and it made me very uncomfortably happy. Like, heard the best joke ever but the room is completely silent and everyone was looking at me concerned
Yep, that's why they call it laughing gas. The very first time I used it was me huffing it out of a whipped cream canister and I literally started laughing uncontrollably. But after the first few times you become more accustomed to what's about to happen and the laughing stops.
Edit: I'm not sure if you were referring to the ketamine or laughing gas now that I think about it
I only took it a few times, once just a small amount and listened to aphex twin flim and got a bit giggly and floaty but it didn't last long, and another time at a party but it was mixed with booze and coke so I was just generally fucked up and threw up on the sofa. Would like to experiment more but its hard when mid 30s with a baby and a wife who doesn't really like drugs. Planning on a chemical renaissance in my 50s but well see how that goes.
Used to occasionally get a RC called MXE that was a derivative of Ketamine, probably the best chemical I've ever encountered but it hasn't been manufactured in like a decade since it was banned in China.
I remember that going around years ago back when I was much more heavily into drugs. People were so saddened when it stopped being manufactured and those who had some left from previous batches treated it like it was worth more than gold (probably because it was at that point).
I feel like I really missed out since I never got the opportunity to try it. All of these cool RC drugs that keep appearing and disappearing almost make me wanna pursue a degree in organic chemistry so I can do "chemical research" as a personal hobby.
It was the "This drug is so good it will ruin your fucking life." chemical for me, I considered it a mixed blessing when it became nearly impossible to get.
RIP to a real one. I know I just wrote a long screed against the dangers of dissociative addiction, but just seeing the letters MXE makes me want to take it all back. That was a real wonder drug for me - it could reliably induce a kind of hypomanic state that would last long after the dissociative effects wore off. I accomplished so much for myself and my family was constantly telling me how much more pleasant I was to be around...
Easy come, easy go. It's a bummer, though, because I feel like MXE could have been even more effective than ketamine for treatment resistant depression and mood disorders.
I used to call it Awesome Powder, would go for runs after taking a bump and just marvel at the trees as they went by.
Yesterday i learned that they use ketamine for the treatment of depression in the US?
That's why I was doing it. The way it worked was I'd go in to a room and sit down on a big padded chair and a nurse would run an IV line in to my arm. Then the doctor would put a syringe loaded with a ketamine solution in to a machine that squeezed the syringe at a very precise rate, so it would infuse ketamine in to my system over about 45 minutes. My job was to sit in the chair and trip balls. I described the experience as best I can further up the thread.
The course of treatment was that you did six treatments. You'd do three in one week, then one a week later, then like every two weeks for the last two. I forget what the exact timing was but it was something like that. And then after that, if it worked, you'd do a follow up every six months.
And supposedly, for a lot of people who have not benefited from other treatments, it can be like a magic bullet and get you out of depression and keep you out. It didn't have a lasting impact on me, personally, but I'm starting to think that my depression is less of a neurochemical illness and more of a divine curse of some kind, since nothing works on it.
The benefits are that doesn't fuck with your system very much, Ketamine is extremely safe when administered in a controlled setting, and you don't have to worry about weight gain or libido like you do with a lot of antidepressants. And, as mentioned, it works well for a lot of people who have otherwise had difficulty with treating their depression.
It was expensive. It cost 600$ per session for me, and as far as I know few if any insurance plans will cover it. But it's becoming more mainstream pretty rapidly, too, so hopefully that will change.
domino meme: some guys trying to ride an animal in Kazakhstan 6000 years ago >>> k-hole
i'll add my own best description of the ketamine experience (100 mg +). it's like entering a lucid dream state while still completely consious that is also pretty euphoric on top of it which makes things less scary since you feel pretty nice. since you lose contact with your body it's also like being in a float tank. you can let your mind wander and enjoy the experience or direct things pretty well once you've been in the hole a few times.
I'd settle for some of that sweet, sweet black market ethinylestradiol. :meow-knife-trans:
