I find ketamine to a be a grossly misunderstood drug, ranging from its associations with rave culture, to its proper use as a horse tranquilliser. But to me ketamine is probably the most important drug in terms of its psychedelic properties.

The Talk to Frank website describes Ketamine as being “a hallucinogenic dissociative normally sold on the street as a grainy white powder”^[1], the key words here being hallucinogenic and dissociative, these two differing effects, and their combination, that make it far more important than it is usually considered in drug culture.

My own K-hole is a moment of enlightenment, a moment during which I understand the simulation, understand it in a way I’m not able to explain now that I’m sober, I accept it as reality. It culminates in an overwhelming sense of calmness and closure, accepting that your life is what it is, and your place in the simulation is what it is, and you simply feel complacent in it, accepting and indifferent.

The beginning is a slow building drunken haze, tumbling towards its chaotic middle during which there’s no clear association with your surroundings or anything that lead up prior to the situation, finalising in a plateau during which you find a harmony. This makes the journey of Ketamine both a humanising and a harrowing experience. There is an equilibrium in the disorientation.

Mother (2017) – Darren Aronofsky

The importance lays in the disassociation. It’s hard to fully accept an experience when under the effects of LSD or Psilocybin Mushrooms, I find myself far too aware that the audio and visual hallucinations I’m experiencing are simply effects of the substances I’ve taken, but with ketamine this awareness strips away from my mind, I become immersed in the experience. The chaos builds to its crescendo like the plot of a Darren Aronofsky film, I recently watched Mother and found myself perceiving the films unfolding as though they appeared at the peak of a Ketamine fuelled encounter. The reality of life increases in intensity, to the point in which the experiencer becomes both complicit, and accepting of the horror that surrounds them at which point a sense of euphoria plateaus the entire experience. This same journey occurs in other films, such as A Ghost Story (2017) David Lowery or Climax (2018) Gaspar Noe, it could be that my own interest in death and the macabre that pushes me to find these links, but it’s the acceptance that comes with a Ketamine trip that really sets the experience aside from other psychedelic experiences.

I’m aware that not everyone will appreciate the importance of the psychedelic experience in a ketamine trip, I’m also aware that not everyone’s experience will be the same or as settling as my own, perhaps my own levelling experience lays somewhere deep within the folds of my personality, but I strongly feel that the experience is important. The short-livedness, and the dissociative affects make a ketamine trip one of the safer means of exploring your own personal politics. If you take acid or mushrooms you’re trapped in your minds reality for ten to twelve hours, subject to dosage, however with ketamine the experience, dependent on the manner of taking, ends after a couple of hours, allowing you to return softly to your surroundings with no major overbearing issues.

Perhaps the reasons why ketamine is being tested as an antidepressant is due to the overwhelming acceptance that comes hand in hand with the experience. The horrors of the anthropocentric reality are temporarily eased and washed away in to reveal a fresh enlightened understanding of the world, this then subsides and I’m once again miserable.

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^[1] Ketamine – Talk to Frank Website 2019. Accessed at: https://www.talktofrank.com/drug/ketamine

Image Sources

header image: Shade/Shave/Shame (remixed album cover) -(g)irl/Declan Ackroyd (2017) -https://girlpresents.bandcamp.com/album/shade-shave-shame

Mother (2017), Darren Aronofsky – https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYjU4YTgwYWQtODU5OC00NTlhLTllMjYtMzAxNGIyN2RkMDMyXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNTI4ODg2Mjc@.V1.jpg