Are Orgasms Better When You’re High?

I’ve smoked pot maybe five times in my life, and ingested it once in an edible form. So I’m not exactly a pothead.

But I have a lot of friends who are, and recently a friend gifted me a little baggie of weed. I’d never actually possessed my own before; I’d always bummed it off friends at parties. Naturally, being a total geek, I started researching and planning what I could do with my little stash: how best to use it, as well as, of course, what I could write about the experience of using it.

When I was in high school, I dated a girl who smoked pot multiple times a day, every day (which was only one of multiple reasons why that relationship didn’t work out). I abhorred the idea of smoking with her, being relatively straight-edge at that time, but she kept telling me she thought I would like it, for two reasons: it stimulates creativity, and it makes sexual stimulation feel way better.

I wasn’t sure whether to believe her, but that seed of an idea lingered in my mind: if I ever did get high, I thought, I’d have to remember to get off, too, and compare and contrast. But the first several times I smoked up, I felt too tripped-out and lethargic to even fathom pushing my panties down, let alone getting myself to the point of orgasm.

After a bit more practice and acclimatization, though, I finally managed it. Here’s what went down.

I smoked for about ten or fifteen minutes, I think (time assessment is hard when you’re intoxicated!), making sure to hold in each breath for as long as I comfortably could before exhaling, to maximize the effects. Then I put away my pipe, got into bed and waited until that telltale haziness hit me a few minutes later.

As soon as I could tell I was high, I started masturbating, using the same circular motion with my fingers that I always use when I’m not using toys. But the circles were different this time. It was like my fingers were stirring up a whirlpool that got bigger and bigger until it surrounded me, and I became dizzy as I spun around. I could feel my body actually lurching side to side as if I were really stuck in a vortex, but I was just lying in bed. And still touching my clit.

At some point my cat came into the room, hoisted herself up onto the bed, crawled under the covers, and nestled between my thighs, pressed up against my crumpled, half-lowered pajama pants. Normally I’m not bothered by a feline presence while I jerk off because it’s so commonplace and unavoidable, but while high, my senses were heightened and I could vividly feel the cat’s breath against my vulva. It felt creepily like a lover’s breath, like that moment when someone is about to start giving you head. I felt freaked out and uncomfortable and kept trying to push the cat away but she came back again and again. It did not occur to me to get up and forcibly remove her from the room. Eventually, after multiple attempts to push her away, she settled down a few inches from my thighs and stopped causing me distress.

As I continued trying to masturbate manually, I found that my fingers felt wooden and robotic, not sensual at all. So I leaned over the side of the bed and felt around on the floor for my Eroscillator (the cat had knocked it off the nightstand while climbing up onto the bed). I found it, turned it to the first setting and put it on my clit.

Nothing felt particularly mindblowing but I was certainly seeing things I don’t usually see when I jerk off. Every motion I made and every individual pulse of the vibrator seemed to set off or continue some strange, psychedelic visualization in my mind. I’d see a crew of men paddling a long boat, or someone doing a cannonball into a deep well, or several unidentified people climbing a mountain. My internal visualization of the vibration was at once a jackhammer, a waterfall, and the bathtub where I learned to masturbate as a child. There were bright colors, swirling patterns, streaks of light and smog.

I turned up the vibrator to its second speed because I felt a bit numb on the first one. Then I started getting closer to orgasm, and the imagery ramped up even further. A lot of it was water-based: waves, splashes, streams, fountains.

My mind began to wander to unhelpful thoughts (including “I need to remember what this feels like so I can blog about it!”) so I started trying to refocus it by envisioning sexual fantasies. One particular crush came to mind and I thought about him going down on me, fucking me, pinning me down. Then my mind wandered to sex offenders and other scary people doing the same stuff. I shook it off and thought about my crush again, and managed to stick with that thought until finally I reached orgasm.

Again, the weirdness and excellence of it was unrelated to sensation – for the feelings themselves were not really remarkable – and instead all about the visuals. At the moment of my orgasm, I saw my clit as a huge, Northern mountain; someone had scaled the peak and was now standing at the top. The aftershocks of the orgasm showed me coniferous trees, softly avalanching snowbanks, and cold crisp air, and I genuinely felt that I was on that mountain for a few moments.

After the orgasm finished, I was unable to pull up my pants, as they felt endlessly far from my hands. I turned on my side, the cat nestled up against my back, and I lay there in the darkness, feeling more awake and alert than I had thought I would.

For the next hour or so, I felt out of touch with my body. Parts of it would start to twitch uncontrollably – fingers, feet, thigh muscles, shoulders – and the twitching would rise and fall in fits and starts. At one point I started doing kegel exercises in rhythm and a whole symphony of music grew up around that rhythm, until I felt like I was kegeling in time with a song from some nearby radio.

When the twitching and other motor weirdness stopped, I wanted to eat and be entertained, so I went downstairs, gorged on some Halloween candy, and then eased the accompanying nausea with a ginger ale while watching Gossip Girl. When I felt sane enough, I came back upstairs and wrote this.

So… It wasn’t really better. It was definitely an odd experience, but not one that I’ll rush to repeat.

What about you? Are your orgasms better when you’re high?