Listening to music during ketamine infusions usually helped me generate a flow of images connected by associations that were often mysterious to me when the infusion was over. Sometimes, I would be faced with settings or items that had made recent appearances in my life, and other times, the things I saw seemed entirely random. It was always different.

However, there was one commonality between many of my infusions. I often felt as though I were sinking in deep water. It was peaceful but also evoked a feeling of hopelessness, which is what I wrote in my posts at the time. Some of those infusions gave me the sense that water held some significance to my subconscious. I tried to draw some meaning from it – to spin it in a positive way or discern some kind of symbolism. I could only guess that the unsteadiness the ketamine made me feel was connected to the sensation of being underwater, and that my day-to-day sense of hopelessness was intruding on me during my infusions. It made me feel like I was drifting down through a vast body of water, and there was nothing I could do about it.

At some point, the water-based visions stopped, only to be replaced by a similar experience in which I was buried in sand at the bottom of an empty well. I concluded at that time that “my perception of depression [was] manifesting itself as unbeatable natural forces in my ketamine infusions. In my visual experience of ketamine, depression feels like sinking alone in the dark, open ocean. It feels like being buried in sand at the bottom of a well while people far away can only watch.” I don’t know for sure why I had so many experiences like those, but I felt the comparison was apt; depression was pulling me down, and it would be easier to not resist.

I found myself in a similar place when I took the ketamine troche the other day. Deciding which playlist to start proved to be difficult, so I removed my earbuds for the first half and just listened to the sounds of the room around me. Allowing my thoughts to wander on their own without the influence of music might not be the best option for me. Although my mind touched on dark topics during infusions, the progression of one song to the next helped keep my thoughts moving, and frankly, the intensity of the ketamine made controlling my thoughts difficult. They floated from one image to the next automatically. With nothing to pull me along and just enough mental control of myself to not get distracted by random stimuli when I took the troche, I became stuck. Eventually, I found some music to listen to, but my mind was already trapped in a negative space and it seemed to be too late to change it.

I’m planning to find a guided meditation or an audiobook to listen to next time. Perhaps if I begin with a positive intention and impose a framework of some kind, I can herd my thoughts toward something more helpful.

So far, the dissociative effects of ketamine have been limited to a roughly one to two-hour window. Thankfully, it seems that the extended visual and auditory hallucinations that I experienced after a few infusions (notably, this one and this one) were due to the combination of ketamine and Emsam, which I’m no longer taking. I haven’t noticed any giddiness or restlessness after taking the troches, either, which troubled me toward the end of my time getting infusions. That may have also been because of Emsam.

The plan is to increase the dose and continue taking them twice a week. Hopefully I’ll start to notice something positive.