I played it once and we called it “knock-out,” and yeah you have a vivid dream as you come out of the unconscious state.
Normally depriving the brain of oxygen for a short while isn’t harmful, but we stopped after this smaller girl woke up, except she didn’t. She walked around the room in a trance like a zombie for a good two minutes before finally coming to full consciousness. She didn’t feel too well afterward either. Ahh, camp…
Anyway, the whole thing makes you think. Do people in comas have these dreams? What the hell was that zombie state about? This could be a fountain of clinical research, if only not for those stupid ethics, lol.
I remember a fad for this at my school, round about 1973. The kids used the bear-hugging technique. It died the death pretty soon, but fortunately nobody else did.
ETA: I once or twice did much the same to myself simply by having a bad habit of drawing a deep breath when I stood up quickly after being sedentary for an hour or two. Most spectacular was when I went right out on my feet, to the general alarm of my parents - I came round a little later still on my feet, but with very confused memories of the last few seconds.
I was in middle school the same year and that’s how I saw kids do it. It was called a “red devil” because of how red their face would get. I never tried it.
Nutmeg I did try, in the late 70’s. Only in was ingested, not smoked. Don’t ever, EVER do this. Ever! It made me and everyone I know who did it so god damn sick! I felt like I was going to die and was afraid I wouldn’t! Absolutely horrible!
Whippits are nothing like strangulation, at least in terms of inherent danger. As long as you take the proper precautions: adequate ventilation, making sure to breathe between hits, don’t use the stuff they make for racecars, etc. The key difference is that the hallucinations are (IME) enjoyable, even educational (each one building on the last one, even if a few months pass between uses), always transcendental, incredibly immersive–and that there are actually proper precautions that will eliminate the danger, whereas the only sane precautions available in the choking game are “don’t do it” and “have EMTs around if you do it anyway”.
BTW, I’ve never played it, nor am I aware of it having been played by my peers in particular, but when I was in 7th grade (1998ish) there was a fad sweeping the school where kids would hold down “pressure points” on each other that would make them pass out/trip out/whatever. Never tried it–I was a cautious kid.
whippits are nothing like blacking out, period. I don’t understand where the comparison came from. Whippits = you hold your breath, things start to feel/sound different, then you laugh your ass off for 30 seconds. Blacking out = you have this sudden dream/vision/hallucination, wake up on the floor, and think, “holy shit, I just blacked out.”
Your sensitivity to whippits increases the more you do it, and it doesn’t decrease very much even if you don’t do it for months or years. I haven’t had one in several months, but if I had one now I would still go on a hell of a trip. Back in high school I built my sensitivity up so high that I would trip vividly for 20-40 minutes on each one.
fetus, your sensitivity to hallucinogens increases with time if you are prone to schizophrenia. You trip out on whippits for 20-40 minutes? That’s unreal. Do you also trip out or have strong visual hallucinations on weed? If so, stop immediately!
Moot point, as I haven’t either in a while, and I haven’t done either regularly for any length of time for about three years. But to answer your questions:
I tripped out on whippits for 20-40 minutes a small handful of times, and then stopped for a long time. That was over 3.5 years ago, and I’ve never come even close to that since. But a psychedelic response to nitrous is very common; it’s a dissociative, and everyone who uses it for long enough eventually gets to a point where they disassociate completely from their bodies and (at some point) the world in general.
I’ve had visual hallucinations on weed, but not strong ones (ie, nothing compared to nitrous or DXM; slightly more intense than ketamine, but I never hit the K-hole; haven’t had LSD or mushrooms); also, it depends on the strain, and I haven’t had OEVs for at least 3 years, and if I’ve ever had CEVs I never particularly noticed.
Cite?
No history of mental illness in my family whatsoever, although I’m sure there has been undiagnosed depression and, to a lesser extent, anxiety.
Really? I never heard that about nitrous. I always heard/read that it’s super-safe with no side-effects. You can go buy it in a grocery store, for chrissakes.
Re the hallucinogen-mental illness link. Just google “lcd schizophrenia” or “marijuana schizophrenia.” Hallucinogens don’t seem to cause schizophrenia in those who aren’t going to have it, but for those who are it makes the onset much quicker. I met a kid (~18yo) who smoked a lot of weed and was already getting a pretty heavy onset of symptoms (usually it hits you closer to 40), even when sober. When he smoked, he’d talk about the vivid hallucinations he’d be having. No one around him tried to stop him, unfortunately, and I guess it was already too late.
Oh, well, sure, psychedelics will bring the onset of schizophrenia in sooner if you’re going to have it anyway. This, I knew. But you seemed to be saying (maybe I misread you) that the effects of hallucinogens themselves can be read as foretelling schizophrenia if they have a certain character to them.
I think they can, but to be honest I’m extrapolating from that schitzo kid I knew, things I heard elsewhere, the fact that hallucinogens will lead a schitzo to hallucinate even when sober, and what seems like common sense to me. Now I’m not going to claim “if you’re schizo, you will always have more powerful hallucinations.” But since effects aren’t supposed to increase for most drugs at all, I’m pretty confindent in saying “if they do begin to increase significantly, which they shouldn’t be at all, a likely cause is a general onset of schizo symptoms.” Of course there’s probably a hundred people right now screaming “how can you believe something you haven’t read somewhere else.” Whatever. My only message is to stop doing drugs if you think you notice this.
Fair enough. But nitrous is recognized as being unusual in its tendency to increase the user’s sensitivity over time–it’s just a plain fact; the first couple of times you use it you might hardly notice a difference at all, and it gets trippier and trippier every time. I’ve used lots of other things in my day and I have not reliably gained sensitivity to anything else.
I was part of a group of girls who used a hyperventilation technique at the age of 9 or 10 sometime between 1952 and 1954. We had no prior concept of “getting high.” It just made us feel a little funny and lose enough of our consciousness that we would fall down.
Anything more than that and you are asking for trouble. If something is used to choke you, that is very, very dangerous.
I’d never heard of this “game” until a question showed up on a CPR test (I teach CPR and First Aid) and I asked the first class if anybody was familiar with this. One student knew all about it and explained how it was done to the rest of us.
I immediately came up with my own version of the game… I stand against the wall, you try to choke me and we’ll see who passes out FIRST!
I’m sure it still is a group activity. Most deaths are solitary for the same reason that most erotic asphyxiation deaths are solitary: there’s no one around to stop everything when it starts getting out of hand.
What surprised me is that kids even do it alone. In my day it was very much group behaviour at work; we kids did dumb things in a group that we wouldn’t have dreamed of doing by ourselves (no one around then to see us chicken out!)
