Hi everyone!!
I guess it's about time I made an account here. I've been a long time (for me at least) lurker, ever since I smoked cannabis for the first time in 2012 and became interested in the world of psychedelia. I remember spending hours in high school perusing these forums and taking in all the captivating stories of astral travel, spiritual awakening, and true healing.
I had my first LSD trip that summer of 2012. I felt it was uneventful at the time, I was expecting more. I would later learn, therein lied my problem. I was, however, fascinated by the headspace even though I wasn't able to yet comprehend its potential benefit to me. I remember vividly how during that experience, all my preconceived notions about the world around me and my relation to it was brought into question. I suppose without realizing it, this was exactly what I was looking for, and would later be the effect that saved my life. This acute awareness of my thought patterns.
Later on when I was in university (we would eventually graduate), I ended up getting into opiates. I'll keep the long story short. I was self-treating generalized anxiety instead of developing coping mechanisms and doing the hard mental/emotional work of individuation. I ended up heavily physically addicted, my girlfriend (now wife!) and I both. We knew we couldn't keep this up. Our "buddies" were dropping like flies, there's now fentanyl in the tar (unusual for the time).
Soon after, one of my old buddies was coming up my direction to go to a music festival. Asked if my girlfriend and I wanted to go with, they had camping space we just needed a ticket. Said sure, I like music. Well we get there and it's a massive rave, essentially. Friend offers my girl and I 2 tabs of LSD. When in rome, I thought.
About 2hr later, I was in literal heaven. I'd never listened to this type of music before, but god was it magical. I felt as if the pressure waves from the speakers were washing over me, cleansing my soul. I looked out and saw groups of friends smiling, laughing, dancing without a care in the world. Everyone I seemed to talk to offered me nothing but love and acceptance, an acceptance I've never felt before by a group of strangers. While I was lost in the love sauce, I forgot to get well. I started feeling BAD. All that "magic" melted away, and I was left with soul crushing illness, quickly building. As I'm in that porta potty, I got to experience doing my thing, with NO preconcieved notions that this is an acceptable thing to do. It was if I was a non-drug user, who was being forced to take this evil drug by their own body. My girl went through this as well.
We were in the suboxone clinic the next week. Again, long story short, we worked our program, and in 18mn time tapered off. Been clean for 3yr now.
Fast forward to a year ago. In between these times I kept up the music festivals. It became like a church to me, as silly as that sounds. I met tons of great people, many of whom were at my wedding. My favorite of these people though, is J. I met J while failing to inflate my friends inflatable couch. I ask this guy in the campsite over for help. J helps. We get to talking (well my wife and him got to talking, they were like instant best friends haha) and we end up deciding to hang out all day. He gives us 2 tabs of L each (this again!). So we're listening to music. J pulls out a blunt, but it was no ordinary blunt. It was a mix of cannabis and DMT. 100mg in there he said. Not that I knew what that meant at the time. He asked if I had done it before. I lied and said yes. He lights and passes, i take a couple hard drags. It tastes sweet, a taste I've never before tasted but seemed to recognize, somehow. Like a taste bud deja-vu. Less than a minute later I was tripping HARD. My hands.. it's like they were made of silicone and my fingers were 10ft long. I became the music. As I came down, I started heaving. No sweating, no pain, no vomit. Id fall into the music, heave. Fall into the music, heave. When this was over, i felt SOOO GOOD. It was as if my soul puked up all its bad energy. Yep, this is my new thing.
Fast forward to a month ago, J comes over for the weekend (we live across the country from each other). He tells me it's time for me to learn how to extract my own DMT (he's like my shaman at this point). I assemble necessary materials, and we get to it when he gets here. 500g extraction, using what ended up amounting to the lazyman tek. It definitely felt more like alchemy than chemistry to me. We ended up with around 7g, which I take as a sucess. I'll probably salt most of it, as there's no way I'm getting through that anytime close to soon. I've tested it at 20mg and 50mg doses, with incredible results. I've been spending way too much time on this forum just exploring all the different ways people work with it, I couldn't be more excited to be on this path in life.
I know that was a long read, but I think it explains how I got here and why I continue to come here. Thank you for reading, and thank you for all the information, advice, and laughs you've already provided.