PSYCHEDELIC COMPOUNDS
That No One Has Made But I Think I Would Love
— Episode Two —
— ✦ —
Ψ-COLLAPSE
(3,4-Methylenedioxy-N-Superposition-Amphetamine)
"The compound that makes you all possible versions of yourself at once, then forces you to choose which one survives measurement."
— ✦ —
SECTION I: THEORETICAL SYNTHESIS
COMPOUND CLASS
Substituted amphetamine. Specifically, an MDMA analog where the N-methyl groups have been replaced with what can only be described as a quantum mechanical disaster: a superposition moiety designated -Ψ- (psi), which exists in multiple chemical states simultaneously until observed by mass spectrometry, at which point it collapses into whichever configuration the universe finds most narratively compelling.
This should not be possible.
This violates several fundamental principles of organic chemistry, at least two laws of thermodynamics, and the entire Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.
The compound exists anyway.
Theoretically.
HYPOTHETICAL PRECURSOR ROUTE
Synthesis begins with 3,4-methylenedioxyphenyl-2-propanone — safrole's well-behaved cousin, the starting material for MDMA synthesis that every undergraduate chemistry student has been warned about and every graduate student has contemplated in moments of poor judgment.
The proposed route diverges at the reductive amination step. Instead of introducing a simple methylamine, we introduce what theoretical quantum chemists would call — if they had been consulted, which they weren't, because they would have said no — a 'coherent amine superposition.'
This is an amine group that exists in multiple methylation states at once. Not 'could be methylated in different positions' — IS methylated in all positions simultaneously. N-methyl and N-ethyl and N-propyl and N-unsubstituted, all occupying the same spatial coordinates, all equally real, all waiting for something to force them to decide which one they actually are.
The synthesis would require — again, theoretically — maintaining quantum coherence in a macroscopic molecule at room temperature for approximately six hours. This is approximately 10^23 times longer than quantum coherence has ever been maintained in any physical system ever, including the laser-cooled ions that won people Nobel Prizes for lasting 0.0001 seconds.
You maintain coherence by not looking at it.
You maintain coherence by conducting the reaction in a darkroom with your eyes closed while thinking very hard about Schrödinger's cat.
You maintain coherence through sheer pharmacological audacity.
PROPOSED RECEPTOR PHARMACOLOGY
Ψ-COLLAPSE is theorized to function as a non-selective serotonin/dopamine/norepinephrine releasing agent — standard MDMA-family mechanism, nothing unusual, you know this dance. The addition of the -Ψ- moiety introduces a secondary mechanism that can only be described as 'enforced Many-Worlds interpretation at the neurological level.'
The compound binds to monoamine transporters in a superposition of configurations. Each configuration corresponds to a slightly different neurochemical cascade. Each cascade corresponds to a slightly different version of you — the you who said yes to that thing in 2015, the you who called them back, the you who moved to that city, the you who kept the job, quit the job, burned the job to the ground and became a park ranger.
All versions exist simultaneously in your consciousness.
You can feel them. They are not hypothetical. They are not imagined. They are actual parallel instances of your decision tree, fully rendered, fully experienced, all superimposed on the same temporal present.
You are all of them.
Until you look.
Until you measure.
Until something forces a choice, and the wavefunction collapses, and you decohere into whichever timeline the universe — or you, or something that might be both — decides is the one that continues forward from this specific Wednesday evening at 9:47 PM.
PROPOSED DURATION
4-6 hours of active superposition, followed by 12-18 hours of 'ontological hangover' during which you will experience the psychic equivalent of deleted save files — the sensation of all the yous that didn't make it through the collapse, watching from the outside.
STATUS
Impossible. Theoretically elegant. Experimentally preposterous. The -Ψ- moiety cannot maintain coherence in a biological system. Decoherence occurs within femtoseconds due to thermal noise, environmental interaction, and the basic fact that you exist in a universe with a non-zero temperature.
Unless.
Unless the compound doesn't maintain coherence at the molecular level. Unless it maintains coherence at the neurological level by convincing your brain that it does. Unless the superposition is not in the chemistry but in the experience — not in the receptor, but in the reality the receptor is reporting.
Unless the compound is a placebo for quantum mechanics.
I have no idea if this would work.
I would take it anyway.
— ✦ —
SECTION II: TRIP REPORT
SUBJECT: All possible versions of myself / Schrödinger's poor life choices. SETTING: Apartment bathroom, for reasons that will become clear. DOSE: 120mg (estimated superposition load: every decision I've ever almost made). INTENTION: To observe the observer observing and see if the universe blinks first.
T + 0:00 — ADMINISTRATION
I take the capsule in the bathroom because I have a theory about mirrors.
The theory is this: if Ψ-COLLAPSE works the way the theoretical synthesis suggests — if it genuinely induces superposition at the neurological level — then looking in a mirror during onset should produce observable interference patterns. Not optical interference. Ontological interference. The kind where you see yourself and also the version of yourself who made different choices, and they're both equally real, and they're both looking back.
He swallows the capsule with tap water from a bathroom cup that has been sitting on the sink for three days and which he probably should have rinsed first but didn't because washing the cup would delay the experiment and he is committed now.
I am committed now.
[NOTE: Subject's relationship with scientific methodology is best described as 'enthusiastic but dangerously unsupervised.' The bathroom mirror theory is not supported by any existing literature on quantum mechanics, psychopharmacology, or mirror function. Proceeding anyway.]
T + 0:30 — FIRST ALERTS
The first sign is not visual. It's proprioceptive. He becomes suddenly, intensely aware that his left hand is in a superposition of positions. It is on the sink. It is in his pocket. It is reaching for the light switch. It is doing all of these things at once and none of them and the contradiction is not a contradiction — it is simply the default state of the hand now, the hand's natural resting position in a universe where position is a probability distribution rather than a coordinate.
My hand is everywhere.
Not metaphorically. Physically. Actually. My hand is occupying multiple spatial locations simultaneously and I can feel all of them and this should be terrifying but it's —
— exactly what I wanted —
— extremely interesting.
He lifts his hand. Hands. The superposition of hands. They all lift together, diverging slightly in trajectory, a probability cloud of hand-raising that suggests he could have lifted his hand six different ways and has chosen, through the act of observation, to collapse into the one where he's raising it toward the mirror.
He looks up.
T + 0:45 — THE MIRROR SPEAKS
And there he is.
Not one reflection. Not two. An infinite regression of almost-hims, stacked on top of each other like translucent film cells, each one slightly offset, each one representing a different eigenstate of the wavefunction that is his face.
The him with the beard he almost grew in 2019. The him who kept the glasses. The him with the scar from the accident that almost happened. The him who went to the gym. The him who didn't. The him who smiled more. The him who stopped smiling at all.
All of them looking back.
All of them equally real.
Hi.
Hi.
Hi.
Hi.
Oh no.
They all said it at the same time. Not the same 'hi' — different his, different inflections, different emotional weights. The him who is confident. The him who is apologizing pre-emptively. The him who is attempting humor as defense mechanism. All superimposed in the same acoustic space.
This is a lot.
This is exactly the amount we signed up for.
We knew this would happen.
Did we? I don't remember signing off on auditory hallucinations of alternate selves.
That's because you're the version who didn't read the trip report beforehand.
There IS no trip report beforehand. We're writing it. Right now. This is the trip report.
Stop.
They stop.
All of them stop talking at exactly the same moment and the silence is worse because now he can hear them all breathing — breathing in different rhythms, different depths, the full probability distribution of respiratory patterns a person can have while standing in a bathroom looking at their own quantum-mechanically uncertain face.
T + 1:15 — THE BATHROOM BECOMES NON-EUCLIDEAN
I need to sit down.
The bathroom does not have a place to sit down. The bathroom has a toilet, but sitting on a toilet during a psychedelic experience feels like admitting defeat to forces you do not yet understand.
He compromises: he sits on the floor.
The floor is cold. The floor is warm. The floor is both and neither and the temperature is in superposition and his ass is experiencing quantum thermal uncertainty and this is —
This is hilarious.
I am sitting on Schrödinger's bathroom floor experiencing quantum ass temperature and the other mes in the mirror are ALSO sitting down and we are all sitting slightly differently — different postures, different leg positions, different levels of commitment to the sitting — and we look like a Renaissance painting of the same guy having an ontological crisis in multiple artistic styles at once.
We look like we're about to start a support group.
Quantum Mechanics Anonymous. Hi, I'm every version of myself, and I'm powerless over the collapse of my own wavefunction.
Stop making me laugh. I'm trying to have a serious experience here.
No you're not. We're not. We never try to have serious experiences. We try to intellectualize our way through serious experiences so we don't have to feel them.
The laughter stops.
That one landed differently.
T + 2:00 — PEAK. THE FREUDIAN SLIP CASCADE.
This is where it gets complicated.
The bathroom has begun to decohere. Not collapse — decohere. The walls are losing their commitment to being walls. The tiles are suggesting they might be other tiles. The mirror is no longer reflecting in a way that respects causality; it's reflecting possible light paths, probable photon trajectories, the entire quantum field theory of how light could have bounced off his face if he had made different choices about where to look.
And the other hims — the superposition of selves in the mirror — are starting to talk over each other.
We should have called.
We should have stayed.
We should have taken the job.
We should have quit the job three years earlier.
We should have said yes.
We should have said no.
We should have —
STOP.
They don't stop.
We should have been braver.
We should have been kinder.
We should have been someone else entirely.
We should have been enough.
I said STOP.
And then, because the compound has a sense of humor that borders on malicious: they all look at him. Every version. Every eigenstate. Every possible configuration of who he could have been if he'd zigged instead of zagged at any of the thousand small decision points that accumulated into his specific timeline.
They look at him with the same expression.
The expression is: pity.
Oh, fuck you. Fuck all of you. You don't get to pity me. You're not real. You're probability amplitudes. You're decoherence artifacts. You're what-ifs that never iffed. I'm the one who's real. I'm the one who —
— made it through?
— survived?
— collapsed into actual existence while we're still stuck in superposition, watching?
Yes.
And how's that working out for you?
The question hangs in the air like a particle that hasn't decided if it's a wave yet.
T + 2:30 — THE DARKEST MOMENT
I don't know how to answer that.
I don't know how to answer that because the honest answer is: it's fine. I made choices. I lived with them. I'm here. I'm in a bathroom on Ψ-COLLAPSE talking to my own quantum probability distribution and this is objectively absurd but it's also — it's MY absurdity. I chose this. The version of me that exists right now, sitting on this floor, is the version that chose every single thing that led here.
And you —
He looks at the mirror. At the infinite regression of almost-hims. At the probability cloud of all the different ways he could have become.
You didn't choose anything. You're still waiting for observation. You're still in superposition. You're all potential and no actual. You're Schrödinger's fucking cat except you're also the box and the poison and the quantum decay event and you're ALL OF IT AT ONCE which means you're none of it because nothing has resolved yet into something that can look back and say: this is what I am.
The other hims are quiet.
For the first time since he looked in the mirror, they are completely, perfectly quiet.
I chose. You didn't. That's the only difference that matters.
And yeah — yeah, I fucked some of it up. I made bad calls. I walked away from things I should have stayed for and stayed in things I should have left. I am not the optimal configuration of myself. But I am A configuration. I collapsed. I CHOSE to collapse. I forced measurement on my own wavefunction and this —
He gestures at the bathroom, at his body, at the specific timeline that led him here.
— this is what survived.
T + 3:00 — THE WAVEFUNCTION COLLAPSES
And then it happens.
The other hims start to fade. Not all at once. One by one, like lights going out in a city during a power failure. The him who kept the beard. The him who moved to Portland. The him who called her back. The him who didn't.
Each one flickers, holds for a moment — long enough for him to see their face, to recognize the specific fork in the road they represent — and then collapses into probability zero. Gone. Not dead. Never born. Returned to the space of things that could have been but weren't measured into existence.
Until there's only one reflection left.
Him.
The one sitting on the bathroom floor.
The one who chose this.
Hi.
The reflection doesn't answer. It doesn't need to. It's just a reflection now. Regular photon behavior. Regular Euclidean bathroom. Regular tiles that are committed to being tiles and walls that have rediscovered their enthusiasm for perpendicularity.
He stands up.
His legs work. This is encouraging. His hand — singular, non-superimposed, occupying exactly one position in space — reaches for the light switch and finds it exactly where light switches are supposed to be.
The bathroom is just a bathroom again.
He is just himself again.
There is no 'again.' There is only ever the one timeline that persists after collapse.
T + 4:00 — THE COMEDY ARRIVES LATE
I am standing in my bathroom having just experienced ego death via Many-Worlds interpretation and the first thing I notice coming back is that I forgot to flush.
I forgot to flush the toilet before sitting down on the floor and now there's just — there's a toilet with evidence of my pre-trip biological functions sitting there, witnessing my entire quantum ontological crisis like a supportive but confused roommate.
The toilet has seen some shit.
Literally.
He starts laughing.
He laughs in the way you laugh when the cosmic horror has passed and all that's left is the mundane absurdity of being a person with a body in a bathroom that contains plumbing. He laughs until his ribs hurt. Until the mirror steams up from his breath. Until he has to sit back down on the floor — the regular floor, the non-quantum floor, the floor that has accepted its role as horizontal surface and nothing more.
He flushes the toilet.
The toilet, bless it, performs its function with quiet dignity.
[NOTE: Subject has entered the resolution phase. The superposition has fully collapsed. All alternate selves have been returned to probability space. Subject is experiencing the characteristic post-collapse euphoria that researchers might describe as 'relief that you're not every version of yourself anymore because holy shit that was exhausting.']
T + 5:30 — INTEGRATION. THE AFTERMATH BEGINS.
I leave the bathroom. This is harder than it should be. Not physically — the door opens fine, my legs remember how to walk, the hallway is exactly where I left it. But emotionally. Psychologically. Quantum-mechanically.
Leaving the bathroom means returning to the apartment. The apartment contains choices. The kitchen contains the choice of what to eat. The living room contains the choice of what to do next. The phone contains the choice of whether to call, whether to respond, whether to keep existing in the specific timeline I've collapsed into or whether to —
No.
No. I'm done with superposition. I'm done with what-ifs. I experienced every version of myself at once and you know what I learned? They're all exhausted. Every single eigenstate is fucking tired of being hypothetical. They want to collapse. They NEED to collapse. Because existing as pure potential is not freedom — it's paralysis.
Choice is collapse.
Living is measurement.
I choose the kitchen. I choose a sandwich. I choose to sit on the couch and eat the sandwich and not think about whether this is the optimal sandwich or whether there was a better sandwich in a parallel timeline. This is the sandwich that exists. I am the person eating it. We have both collapsed into this specific Wednesday evening and that is enough.
The sandwich is turkey and cheese.
It's perfect.
T + 12:00 — THE ONTOLOGICAL HANGOVER
I wake up feeling like I've been hit by a truck driven by every version of myself who didn't make it through the collapse.
This is the proposed 'ontological hangover.' The sensation of deleted save files. The awareness — not theoretical, VISCERAL — that I am walking around in one timeline while an infinite number of other timelines are playing out without me. Timelines where I made different choices. Timelines where different versions of me are waking up in different beds in different cities with different people and different sandwiches.
I can feel them. Not see them. Not interact with them. But feel them the way you feel a phantom limb. The ghost sensation of lives I'm not living.
He makes coffee.
The coffee is regular coffee. It does not exist in superposition. It is just hot and caffeinated and slightly too bitter because he forgot to clean the machine last week, and this fact — the fact that the coffee is exactly as disappointing as regular coffee always is — is somehow the most grounding thing he's experienced in 12 hours.
I am in the timeline with mediocre coffee.
I chose this.
It's fine.
T + 72:00 — THE LONG-TERM ABSURDITY
Three days later, I am still experiencing quantum aftershocks.
Not hallucinations. Not superposition. Just a persistent, low-level awareness that every choice I make is a collapse event. Every decision — what to eat, what to wear, whether to respond to that text — is a wavefunction selecting one eigenstate out of infinite possibility and condemning all the other states to never-existence.
I have become extremely decisive.
Not because I'm confident. Because I'm exhausted. Because maintaining superposition is WORK and I watched myself do it for six hours and I am DONE. I am collapsing into choices with the energy of a particle that has been stuck in a detector for too long and just wants to commit to being somewhere.
He orders coffee. Decaf. No hesitation.
The barista looks mildly impressed.
He does not explain that he's decisive because he recently experienced ego death via quantum mechanics in a bathroom and learned that all possible choices are equally valid which means it doesn't matter which one you pick as long as you PICK ONE.
He just nods, takes the coffee, and leaves.
I am in the timeline where I ordered decaf.
There is a timeline where I ordered regular coffee. That version of me is slightly more caffeinated. We are both fine.
This is the gift.
— ✦ —
SECTION III: SYNTHESIST'S FIELD NOTES
ON THE COMPOUND
Ψ-COLLAPSE does not exist. The superposition moiety cannot maintain coherence in a macroscopic molecule at room temperature. The proposed mechanism violates basic thermodynamics. This compound is pharmacological fan fiction.
The experience of it, though. The experience of being every version of yourself at once and then choosing which one survives. That's real. That's just decision-making slowed down and made visible. That's what you do every time you choose something — you collapse all the other possibilities into probability zero and commit to the one that persists.
Most of the time you don't notice. You choose coffee over tea and you move on and you never think about the timeline where you chose tea.
Ψ-COLLAPSE makes you notice.
It makes you see all the yous you're not being. All the choices you're not making. All the timelines you're not living. And then it makes you pick. It makes you collapse. It makes you CHOOSE, and the choosing is terrifying and also the only thing that lets you be a person instead of a probability distribution.
ON THE MIRROR
The bathroom mirror thing worked better than expected. I genuinely saw multiple versions of myself. Not hallucinations — not in the sense of seeing things that aren't there. But perceptions. Possibilities. The full probability cloud of who I could have been if I'd made different choices.
They were all me. They were all equally valid. They were all equally tired of not existing.
The mirror didn't judge. It just showed. And then I chose to be the one looking, and they faded, and that was that.
ON THE FREUDIAN SLIPS
Every struck-through sentence in this report is something I thought but tried to rephrase. The compound doesn't let you rephrase. It doesn't let you smooth things over. It makes you say the first thing — the true thing — and then deal with the fact that you said it.
We should have been enough.
I typed that and crossed it out three times before I let it stay.
The compound made me keep it.
ON THE ABSURDITY
The long-term effect — the quantum decisiveness, the collapse-into-choice-and-move-on — is not what I expected. I expected to be more paralyzed. More aware of the weight of choosing. More terrified of picking wrong.
Instead, I'm lighter. Because I understand now that there is no wrong. There's just the choice you make and the timeline it creates. And all the other timelines — the ones where you made different choices — they're not worse. They're not better. They're just not yours.
You don't have to live every life. You just have to live this one.
And flush the toilet when you're done.
ON WHETHER I WOULD ACTUALLY TAKE THIS AGAIN
No.
Absolutely not.
Once was enough. Once was perfect. I saw what I needed to see — that I am one collapsed wavefunction out of infinite possibility, and that's fine, and I don't need to be all of them, and the sandwich I made is the sandwich that exists, and I'm okay with that.
Taking it again would be greedy.
Taking it again would suggest I didn't learn the lesson.
The lesson is: collapse happens once per timeline. You don't get to re-roll. You get to be the version of yourself that made it through measurement, and you get to keep making choices that keep collapsing you into more specific versions of that self, and eventually you're so collapsed — so specific, so committed to this timeline — that you're just a person.
Just a person is enough.
Also, I don't think my bathroom can handle another trip like that.
The toilet has seen enough.
END OF EPISODE TWO
Ψ-COLLAPSE (3,4-Methylenedioxy-N-Superposition-Amphetamine)
Status: Impossible. Observed. Collapsed into this specific trip report
