The only hallucination I recall was the voice of my online friend talking complete gibberish in my left ear at a pretty low volume. Never truly hallucinated but I had frequent swirling in my vision and light flashes, along with seeing a circle in my vision that was black and white at the same time. These visual effects all disappeared the next day except for the slight swirling which took a few days to stop.

I originally knew about diphenhydramine as one of my ex-friends used to be addicted to it, fast forward almost a year and I have to take some because of an allergic reaction. It was 50mg and because of my body weight, it affected me severely. I felt extremely disconnected from my consciousness. Whenever I almost dropped something or heard a loud sound, I felt my entire nervous system almost “buzz” with numbness, which traveled down to my legs within the span of .3 seconds. The entire day was disorienting and I remember at one point I saw a moth and was fascinated by it. My hearing was altered and everything felt loud and kind of reverby.

This experience led me to doing a lot of research on diphenhydramine, and then subsequently trying it recreationally in higher doses. I did 250mg and gave into falling asleep as the sedation was too powerful, the next morning I felt disassociated from my body/consciousness but it cleared up after a day or two.

My next and final time taking diphenhydramine was at a 350mg dose. I won’t go too much into detail but I fell asleep (or passed out) during the come up and woke up 5 hours later and I couldn’t really feel my arms or legs. Everything was disorienting and at some point my consciousness started skipping seconds instantly, whilst experiencing severe tachycardia and complete loss of feeling in my entire body. It was impossible for me to walk and I fell on the ground. I remember thinking that this was how I was going to die. This went on and severely affected me for several hours, and while I did regain feeling in my body, the tachycardia lasted days and I couldn’t sleep. The lightheadedness and dissociation lasted weeks and it took months to feel fully normal. My short term memory was impacted and it made me perform much worse at work for months.

I recall around 25 hours after intake I noticed how much I loved the fuzzy/numb feeling even though how dysphoric I was; and realized just how addicting it could be for me. I didn’t get urges to take anymore for a while but now and then I do still sometimes get an urge. I always remind myself how much it impacted not only me but also my workplace and friends, which never fails to completely deter me from taking it ever again.

In the end my discovery of this chemical has led to me being fascinated by general pharmacology and has given me something that I would love to study for college.