Cold Plunging on Ketamine - (just one body part, NOT entire body)

Seriously, seriously, seriously, the M. Perry tragedy should make it very clear to everyone that you should NEVER, EVER enter any kind of body of water while on the influence of Ketamine. Just do NOT go there, please!

What I'm about to describe is a very different: a limited Cold Plunge + Ketamine test that I recently performed on my hand. The results were mind blowing and honestly one of the few Ketamine sessions where for about 1-2 minutes I was very worried that my session was about to deteriorate into a stream of intense hallucinations that was going to be too overwhelming for even my fairly seasoned mind.

I'm going to explore this further in coming weeks and hopefully can shed some more light on it soon. In the mean time, I suspect this has potentially intense implications so I'm going to strongly suggest that folks NOT try this, especially alone for the moment.

That being said, let me share some details on what happened:

Prep:
Filled 1qt pot about 50% water, 50% ice. Set pot within arms reach

Dosage:

185mg RDT, PR ROA (50% estimated bioavailability)
(Note: significantly lower dosage then my prescribed dose of 500mg RDT)

Protocol:
My standing still upright posture (not typical sitting or lying down)

Transcript:

After about 15m of my usual standing straight up protocol, I could 100% feel what I always feel with standing position around this time: a sudden disablement of the brain's systems that normaly block the perception of your vestibular (balance) signals by my cerebral cortex (thinking brain). With these filters disabled, and the fact that the balance systems are highly activated by the act of standing, you feel an absolutely flood of these signals into your cortex and suddenly you can FEEL, SEE and NOTICE everything the vestibular network is doing (body sways, micro muscular adjustments, and the sense that your head is really a kinda of gyro scope with it's semi-circular canals near your ears, etc...).

The other major thing you feel which I understand better now is this: you feel like your hands and arms have this outer layer to them. Initially I described it as like a layer of soft foam around every sq inch of surface area. After researching it I saw others describing it much better as this feeling of an "aura" around all of your hands and to a lessor extent up your arms. I believe this "aura" is actually your brain noticing sensors from the mechanoreceptors in your fingers. These receptors are capable of detecting micro changes in the air pressure around your fingers. People, they sense AIR! And, I believe in addition to Ketamine disabling filtering of vestibular signalling, it also disables the filters that block the mechanoreceptor signals.

So in conclusion: when standing on Ketamine you have the ability to observe the signals sent by your fingers which are in turn sensing the air *around* your fingers. IOW: You can "feel" the empty space surrounding your fingers.

So anyways, feeling this "aura" and also being a cold plunging advocate it gave me an idea that the sensation you would likely feel putting your hand in a cold water bath in this state might be kinda cool so why not try it out.

OK...so I submerge my hand into the ice bath (39deg F). I put my hand in a fist to make it easier to have it submerged and not actually touching the pot. It was in fact very, very uncomfortable/painful--pretty similar to the shock you get when doing a full body cold plunge.

While I held it there, I focused on my nature video and tried to carefully notice if I was seeing distortions creep into what I was perceiving in the video. The effect of standing causes mild distortions as brain filters and auto-summarizations of what you see are relaxed. With the cold plunge, it felt that the removal of these filtering mechanisms was seriously intensifying. The images were not just distorting slightly, the images were COMPLETELY disintegrating into something completely unrecognizable. It felt like the entire reality of what I was watching was disintegrating before my eyes. I have had some very, very intense K-hole, full ego dissolution and near-death experiences on Ketamine (doing higher dosage lying down sessions with secondary potentiators)...I *enjoyed* those experiences. This felt like I was seconds away from being transported into sheer panic. Fortunately, the distortions and anticipation of panic faded very quickly. As I moved my hand around in the ice bath, it's like my body must have been pumping blood to my hand like crazy because all the ice had melted and thus the water temperature of my ice bath had increased substantially. I suspect this is the only reason I had averted a very very bad trip.

So there you go. Hand plunge on Ketamine. Stay tuned.