Hey --

I took oral ketamine from this December until July.

It does have strange effects. When I got up to 75mg over the course of the day, I had exactly what you've well described as feeling like the flu. I had a similar feeling of exhaustion, where I crashed every day around 8:00-ish. It was a like a wave coming over me, which I guessed was analagous to having mono (though I've never had mono).

During the day there was a sluggishness, but the dreams were the most salient side effect. I tapered off at night, actually, when once or twice I felt paranoia, really needing to make sure the bedroom door was shut and locked kind of thing. The effect on dreams was pretty pronounced. It was weird. My usual state is a fast CUT, static-y dream state. With Ketamine, my dreams slow downed markedly. I felt every frame (I work in films, so I was telling people they became like Italian neo-realist cinema). And they were straight forward metaphors, all dealing with my feeling of physical loss and impotence. All fascinating if it wasn't me experiencing this.

I knew that the studies said oral ketamine really doesn't help on its own, but I had wanted to try. It's clear it wasn't working in my case, as I have continued to get worse this whole year. The good thing is that almost immediately on stopping a few weeks ago the exhausted feeling lifted. I became much more clear headed, and realized just how 'under' I really was and didn't realize while taking it all that time. I was able just like that to get back to writing (not that it's any good...)

-- Dennis