Dissociative Induced Hyperthymesia?

[thatguy69]

Hey guys. This is gonna sound FUCKING WILD, but I think y'all would be interested in this. I keep trying to post this to Reddit and other places to get genuine answers, but my posts are always getting removed. I'm gonna sound like I'm full of shit, but I swear to you this happened. It's a long post so TLDR.

TLDR: I did too much 3-HO-PCP and ended up reliving my ENTIRE LIFE in vivid detail. Am I bonkers?

So I'm not a stranger to 3-HO-PCP. I had been messing with it since about 2020 (right around COVID times). I ended up overdoing it with O-PCE, was hospitalized (they ended up only giving me advil, because I had already self-administered a proper amount of benzodiazepines), and swore off the dissos for 5 whole years. If I'm being honest, though, I never meant to stay off of them; I like what they do to my brain (In moderation, of course). Let me explain why:

I have two advanced STEM degrees, I'm ABD (all but dissertation), and I held a Confiential security clearance for 3 years as a graduate student research assistant. The entirety of my education I was severely addicted to long half-life, ultra potent benzodiazepines. Flubromazolam was my drug of choice. I was doing upwards of 5mg a day at my worst.

I did Phenazepam daily for an entire year. I vividly remember being so barred out at my 22nd birthday party that I couldn't walk straight. However, I remember the look my ex-girlfriend's mother shot the kid who showed up with needle marks on his arm.

This was before the 3-HO-PCP. I tapered off the benzos shortly before the COVID pandemic, and I have zero self control problems with them now.

I got my new batch of 3-HO-PCP about a month ago, and I was admittedly a little irresponsible. I didn't remember it taking so long to kick in (for me it's like a cannabis edible: full force about an hour and half after oral ingestion), so I ended up doing about 20mg over the course of 4 hours. Not an absolutely ridiculous dose, but definitely not something you'd recommend to anybody. Once it got to be a bit too pushy, I took 2mg bromazolam and managed to fall "asleep."

Once asleep, I dreamt my entire life (nuance here - see edit) in vivid detail. I even unearthed a memory that had been previously lost: the night I got alcohol poisoning freshman year of college and had to be carried across the street by two friends before the ambulance arrived. I remember what color pants I was wearing, and where the puke stains were.

All in all, the experience was not at all frightening. Physically, I never felt like I was in dangerous territory. In fact, I was having a blast. However, it seems to have lingered. I now have access to all of those memories, and can recount to you any event in my life in vivid detail from the very first memory I have from when I was 2: I looked outside a window at night to see a pair of cat eyes staring back at me and proceeded to wet my pants.

Does anybody have anything to say about this at all? It's ok if you don't. And it's ok if you don't believe me. I just felt like I NEEDED to write this down somewhere.

EDIT: "Entire life" may be a bit of an overstatement. The experience was certainly focused on the most emotionally charged core memories, but there was a lot there. Smells, tastes, colors, poems, the solutions to a Sunshine Math worksheet I did in the 3rd grade, and the short story I won an award for in the 4th grade.

 

[necromedic]

Although I’m betting cases like yours are certainly rare, it doesn’t strike me as particularly outrageous. I think it’s been pretty well established that the various aspects of our memory and their interplay with our limbic system and prefrontal cortex are modified to keep us functioning. If we were to remember every single detail of our lives, especially the more traumatic events, the psychological toll would eventually pile on so much as to make us so risk-averse that we could barely move from our own beds in fear of what might happen. This is no more evident than soldiers returning from down range with crippling PTSD. If you were able to dissociate your emotional attachment to the objective facts of a memory, your psyche would have no reason to bar your access to them. I believe this is why there has been so much success in recent years with the use of ᎠᎥᎦᎦ0Ꭶ and ᎧᎣᎢᏜᏣT0Ꭶ in the treatment of PTSD.

 

[thatguy69]

Although I’m betting cases like yours are certainly rare, it doesn’t strike me as particularly outrageous. I think it’s been pretty well established that the various aspects of our memory and their interplay with our limbic system and prefrontal cortex are modified to keep us functioning. If we were to remember every single detail of our lives, especially the more traumatic events, the psychological toll would eventually pile on so much as to make us so risk-averse that we could barely move from our own beds in fear of what might happen. This is no more evident than soldiers returning from down range with crippling PTSD. If you were able to dissociate your emotional attachment to the objective facts of a memory, your psyche would have no reason to bar your access to them. I believe this is why there has been so much success in recent years with the use of ᎠᎥᎦᎦ0Ꭶ and ᎧᎣᎢᏜᏣT0Ꭶ in the treatment of PTSD.

This is a marvelous response, and I think you're spot on.

Sort of related anecdote, but more just another fun story:

I did 300mg of ketamine and listened to the audiobook portion of Cixin Liu's Death's End, in which the solar system is two-dimensionalized and all but two humans perish peacefully. I quite literally *lived* this scene from the perspective of Cheng Xin (SORRY for the spoilers. I don't know how to do spoiler tags here), and now I'm dreading the Netflix adaptation of the third book because I know it will never be as good as my own visualization.

My favorite movie scene ever is from Doctor Sleep, in which Rose the Hat goes through Abra's memories as if they are physical file cabinets. O-PCE actually DOES THIS on doses as little as 10mg. I do not keep that one around; it makes me too manic. It is, however, the reason why I chose to include it in my cocktail of stimulants and nootropics designed to armchair chemistry my way into the "Limitless" drug. It really did add something, and all my memories were laid out like a library for me to access on a whim.

I don't believe in God, or woo, or psychic phenomenon, but damn do dissos make it feel like that could actually be a thing. That's definitely just the crazy talking. I only do them sparingly, because of it, but I probably shouldn't be doing them at all.

 

[necromedic]

I do believe in God, wholeheartedly. This is, by no means, directed at you or meant to offend, but I believe a lot of people who profess not to do so contrary to their own experiences and evidence because of the often vehemently antitheistic nature of modern science. I’ve grappled with my own faith through my life for various reasons including fear of ridicule or rejection, but I could no longer deny what I know in my heart to be true. Modern science tends to start from the presumptions that God doesn’t exist, that life is purposeless and that chaos begets order and discards any inkling of evidence towards the contrary. This is not science, it’s dogma.

 

[thatguy69]

I do believe in God, wholeheartedly. This is, by no means, directed at you or meant to offend, but I believe a lot of people who profess not to do so contrary to their own experiences and evidence because of the often vehemently antitheistic nature of modern science. I’ve grappled with my own faith through my life for various reasons including fear of ridicule or rejection, but I could no longer deny what I know in my heart to be true. Modern science tends to start from the presumptions that God doesn’t exist, that life is purposeless and that chaos begets order and discards any inkling of evidence towards the contrary. This is not science, it’s dogma.

I know of this. Feels like there's a puppet master at the end of time pulling the strings of causality. When you try to interact with it, it feels almost like a reflection of yourself, or maybe a parent?

I'd consider myself agnostic. However, I've lived so many "synchronicities" that it's a bit too much to ignore.