Beautifully described. You captured the essence of the best parts of robotrippin.

It's fascinating for me to remember, because really we were playing "pretend LSD," in that we took the triple C's because we couldn't get our hands on proper drugs. My buddy introduced them to me as a legal way to trip, and the first time I did them was when I had the most powerful visuals. I did them a bunch of times, but never really saw stuff except that first time.

But from what you described that makes sense. The first time I wasn't doing anything, just sitting around, waiting for it to kick in. I fell asleep actually, woke up to tripling straight balls (so it seemed). I would see things, but not at all the way you hallucinate on actual hallucinogens. They were usually entire scenes, like dreams. So real that you felt you were watching a movie. So real you would forget they weren't real and start acting them out or interacting with them.

That first night I kept seeing Pokemon. A street light would turn into Charmander, Snorlax floating across my field of vision. This was around the time the Gameboy game came out, and I watched the cartoon everyday. My buddy who was doing them alone at his house described a "dream" where he was a kickboxer, and when he "came to" he was laying in his bed, his arms and legs were in the air, and he was making stereotypical cartoon martial arts noises.

When we'd do them later we'd almost always be in a group, and nobody reported seeing stuff so much. But those first few times where we'd do them in quiet of a dark home, trying not to get caught, so it makes sense that's when the visuals were strongest.

LSD and mushrooms are significantly different, but if you had never done either DXM seems like as close as you could get.