This is a
trip report describing my second experience with 2C-T-2, at a dose of approximately 20
milligrams, during which I experienced
ego death. We had previously ordered 500
mg of the compound, and had dissolved half of this into 250ml of
distilled water. Of course there was no way to know for sure that we had 250mg of material dissolved in this solution but we were certain that the amount lay within 25% or so of this.
Interestingly, most people who have taken 2C-T-2 find it to be interesting in that it leaves the thought patterns of the user largely intact, compared to say,
LSD or
psilocybin. However, I discovered that in combination with a fair amount of cannabis, the mental aspects can become very strange indeed.
Today was Wednesday, and the previous Monday (nine days ago) had been my first experience with 2C-T-2. I had had a reasonable experience, but with no insights or real sparkle, so I wanted to make this one a bit better. Last time I took 14
ml of our
solution (of about 1mg/ml, though we think it's actually 10-20% stronger than this). This time, I took 16.
I had only had four hours of sleep the previous night, and I was a tiny bit reluctant to take the compound, but I was sure it wouldn't cause any problems.
We took the 2C-T-2 and went out to the park to smoke a
spliff before the
comeup. Last time hadn't given me too much discomfort, but chris had experienced some at 18ml so I thought it prudent to ease my stomach this time. The
nausea was definitely abated by using the cannabis.
Last time I took the 2C-T-2 I had come up in about five waves of increasing effect, similar to
MDMA rushes. But this time I was playing a flight sim at the time I should have been coming up. I finished the game, and as soon as my mind was free of the concentration, I was hit with a huge wave, and had to lie down. At this point I was slightly worried because I was expecting five or so more waves, each one harder than the last, but I soon realised that my playing the game had caused all the comeup to be concentrated into one wave.
Soon we went out to walk round the park.
It was a pleasant day, and the sunlight was giving me lovely rainbow visuals. The stones on the path were beautifully detailed, and I felt like I could have stared at them for hours without getting bored. A cut rock face (this park used to be a
quarry) appeared to be the ultimate
Mount Rushmore, with hundreds of faces appearing and disappearing in the jutting blocks of stone. Lichens on the stone were miniature mazes, intricate details zooming into the surface, and glowing with cycling colours. Bare trees were explosions of light beaming from underground.
Time was altered in an interesting way; it wasn't that it was passing more slowly or quickly than normal, but I found it difficult to tell how far in the past events lay. Our first spliff before we came up felt like last week, and I had no idea whether we had walked along this path hours or minutes ago.
The visuals were certainly intense and beautiful, and I found myself very interested in the spatial relationships between the levels of the ground (in fact, the ground was so discretely positioned in terms of height that I viewed the park as a giant
platform game) but as with my last time on 2C-T-2, the mental was remarkably clear. But after about three hours, this was to change.
Still walking around the park, we took out our second (and larger) spliff, which we smoked, and then walked up to the bandstand with a view over the whole of the bay, and sat down.
One minute I was sitting there feeling progressively stranger, and then bang!
"Nothing."
It was as if my brain had been restarted. I understood nothing, there was nothing.
After a time, my brain began to load its software up again.
"World"
This was the first concept that returned to me. I was aware of the world, and that was all I experienced.
Now concepts began returning more quickly, new ways of deciding what the world meant returned at an
exponential rate. Soon I was aware of:
"World", "Big"
I was aware of the world, or perhaps the whole
universe, and I was aware that it was big.
"World", "Big", "Person"...
"Person-Object"
Now I was aware of an entity called a person, and that all persons had an object associated with them; a body.
"Person/World"
The interaction between the person (and its associated person-object) now made some sense to me. I was aware that a person-object is separate from the world, and there is a complex interaction between the two.
"I"
Now I was aware of "I". Up until now the concepts had all made
fundemental sense. Each new concept could be described using the previously loaded concepts, but this one was strange. "I" made no sense because it was not part of the world, and was not an object. If I had been able to be confused, I would have been confused now.
I knew that there needed to be more information, more concepts, before this "I" entity would make any sense. I finally spoke, saying "Who the hell am I?" Chris carried on looking straight ahead, and asked "What do you mean?"
By this point, the basic concepts (which I will call the level one concepts) had been mostly loaded, allowing the more complex ones (the level two concepts) to load more quickly.
Now I could access my memory, in a rudimentary form. I was aware that the memories existed, and I could "read" them, but they could not run on the hardware of the brain yet.
So I was aware of all my personal details again, but I still didn't know what those details meant. So I replied to Chris; "Ah... It's coming back to me" (interestingly my ability to speak and regulate my body in every other way remained unaffected. Only my actual
consciousness had been shut down and restarted.)
I was now aware of the concept of
fear, but like many of the other level two concepts, it was not yet running. So I knew I was undergoing a frightning experience, but I felt no fear.
As the level two concepts returned to me, the
data stream that my senses were feeding to my brain was interpreted using these concepts as they were added, and my conscious became more and more complex. Soon I was able to examine the experience that had just happened to me, over the course of a few seconds.
It required a fair amount of effort to keep my consciousness running at its normal level. I feel that if I had let go I could have returned to a very strange state of awareness, and I would not have been averse to this, had it not been for the fact that my body could have done anything. At the time I was sitting on a bandstand in a public park, so I didn't want to completely nod out for obvious reasons. I decided that we'd better walk around, which definitely occupied my mind and kept me from slipping back to
strangeness.
We walked around the park for perhaps twenty minutes, and decided to go back to Chris's house before his family started returning so we could sit in his room and avoid having to talk to people. Before I had smoked the
cannabis I think I could have appeared fairly normal, but this state of consciousness was so profoundly altered that I would not be able to guarantee I wouldn't talk utter crap.
A sort of
duality had now appeared; there was a part of me that could walk around, and could hold a normal conversation, and there was the part of me that was incredibly
tripped out. The first part was almost like an
autopilot; it could control my body in a way that would appear to be normal to anyone else, but the fact that the other part of me was totally zonked meant that there could be no
real-time error checking. If the autopilot screwed up and I began talking about the lord of all cabbages, it would be a few seconds before I noticed that I was talking nonsense. The risk of this was too great to be talking to normals.
We watched a cartoon, and by the time this had finished I found myself thinking much more clearly, and soon after this, I took the train home and got a fitful night's rest.
I gained a fascinating insight into the way my brain works through this experience. I believe that the brain is a computer which fits its sensory inputs into certain concepts (
software) which it can understand.
The basic level one concepts are intrinsic to the brain, and are like the "
firmware" of a computer system; the
BIOS, the information built into the
hard disks which tells the
CPU how to access the data, that sort of thing.
Then there are the level two concepts. These are stored in the brain, like the
operating system is stored on the hard drive of a computer. These concepts allow us to make sense of the world, and to compare and contrast data, and to store and retrieve the memories and other data that make us who we are.