>Nothing that I’d heard about ketamine sounded appealing to me,” recalls James, who had tried it before in tiny doses, just enough to feel a bit loopy and drowsy. “But something in my mindset switched that night, and I was just like: fuck it, I’ll just go wild and plunge full in, and I took the biggest bump of K I’d ever taken.”
Technically speaking, ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic, meaning that it numbs your body and makes you feel apart from your environment — like you’re watching your own life happen instead of living it. But that doesn’t begin to capture the weirdness of what it feels like to get high on K. As one friend put it to me: “It’s like walking from your kitchen to your living room, and from your living room to your kitchen, and it’s uphill both ways, but you’ve never had so much fun walking up a hill.” It’s true that K can make both you and the world feel tilted — as if you’re walking on an underwater treadmill pitched at a 45-degree incline. Thought-trains jump their tracks, anxieties float off like helium balloons, and everything becomes silly and warped, like filming a movie through a camera with a fish-eye lens. At least, that’s one possible outcome.
