Nos: because you don’t have to be conscious to explore consciousness

What to expect

There are levels of nos experience. Plateaus, if you will. The first notable distinction between oxygen fuelled perception and nos-fuelled perception comes when you become unable to comprehend the 3rd dimension., In the right atmosphere with the appropriate music it takes about 2-3 bulbs to reach this state. Once this first plateau is reached, you become very easily distracted and amused. You will find that the displacement and extension of your limbs will have a huge effect on your “world”, because your world is merely a 2-d image of your field of view. Thus, if you bring a hand really close to yourself, you will be dumbfounded by your apparent ability to increase in size. It is easy to be distracted by this stupidity and forget the task at hand, i.e. the consumption of more nos. Also, with such a simplified understanding of the world, motor skills become a problem and screwing in bulbs proves challenging. I find that I can only do one thing at a time, whether it be controlling my breathing, thinking clearly, or moving my hands. Here I relinquish the machine to my designated helper and prepare for further inhalation, free of the demands of the physical world. It is crucial to be in a lying position if you are to fully let go of your body. Ensure that no muscle is being clenched, no limb unsupported: there is nothing worse than being awakened from the depths of the 3rd plateau because your body is swaying back and forth and demanding conscious governance.
After 4-5 you should lose the ability to perceive time consistently. Things could be slowed down into snapshots or suddenly sped up until everything around you is buzzing around twice as fast as usual. Don’t focus too much on looking at easily recognisable things like people; instead let your gaze drift to something obscure and nonsensical. You can cop out of reality altogether and close your eyes, but then you can’t enjoy interacting with your surroundings.
Music should be controlling your perception of movement. Everything begins to move in sync with the music, in robot-like jerks, which pass through objects and people in a continuous line. Like a current that animates a single object or limb at a time, synchronised to the music. This is the first sign of sense-disassociation. Nos is a dissociative anaesthetic. Consciousness, at least partially, is constructed by a series of associations that help us make sense of the world. Being dissociative and all, nos severs these connections. Sense-disassociation occurs after extensive continuous inhalation. Objects lose the associations to their identifications first, becoming unrecognisable to the tripper. Then sense experience loses the connection to the appropriate stimulus. One starts to feel music, hear vision, see touch. It’s an insanely overwhelming experience, but despite this intensity you can learn to control and synchronise your senses. This is the 3rd plateau, this is “wonderland”. Much like that Motorola add where all of reality folds into a phone, reality folds and unfolds with colours, shapes, sounds and sensations. Visual imagination is unleashed upon an unsuspecting and uncategorized reality free of the restrictions of our pre-conceived associations.
Too bizarre? I’ll elaborate. It’s not like my eyes suddenly learn the ability to hear, nor does my skin actually react to music. The stimulus still enters the appropriate organs, sight via the eyes, music via the ears, touch via the skin. But somewhere between the reception of said stimulus and my experience of it, the wires get twisted, and the messages are received and experienced in a manner most distinct from my normal perceptions of reality.
“What’s the point? Sure it’s fun, but obviously you’re just escaping reality and fooling yourself, surely your perception of the world is more accurate without nos.”
Not necessarily. I’m not escaping reality, I’m escaping my current conception of it. Who’s to say that it is entirely correct? Our senses have not evolved to facilitate the most accurate experience of reality, they have come about as a result of what the most functional experience is. Functional in terms of mating and procreating, surviving and the like. If reality were to be as complex as what I see in wonderland, and I were able to see it thus, I would not feel the need to reproduce. I’d just sit there gawking in amazement at it’s intricate beauty. Which is why this trait would not be supported by natural selection. Is it not possible, nay, probable, that our perception of reality is a thoroughly simplified version of the truth? If such a simplification was beneficial for survival and reproduction, then it is indeed possible.
Imagine reality, free of subjective interpretation. Free of our limiting manner of categorising and classifying things, forming associations to further simplify things. Imagine the possibilities.

For me it’s like consciousness is made up of a few little “guys” who have different motivations and skills. Logic is one of them, and a real spoil sport. There’s a jerk one who likes to make snide remarks and then there’s the apologetic one which arrives a semi-second after the jerk and has to clean up after him. Then there’s imagination, who is most powerful but also incredibly pissed off for being forced into near-banishment in everyday life. He gets off on creating. Logic gets off on solving complicated puzzles as dictated by the music or invented by the others. Jerk guy gets off on being a jerk, and him and apologetic guy are always battling for control of the mouth. Nos opens up the possibilities for non-sexual orgasms, for intense pleasure from satisfying a particular chunk of the brain.
There are other trips, characterised by entirely different experiences. I’ve had a recurring one where I think in music, rhythm and noises instead of language. I’ve always wondered how kids can think before they learn a language, because it’s obvious that they need basic thought mechanisms. Now I’ve experienced it. Nos can put you into a primitive state where you revert to a simplified thought system. This often leads to hilarious misinterpretations of reality, which are realised when the trip is over, and you rethink your surroundings with your brain yet again fuelled by oxygen.
If you look at people when you regain consciousness, you will form a theory as to what is going on, generally one which is very far from the truth. When reasoning capacities return to normal you realise what’s really going on and that’s when you exclaim something to the effect of “what the fuck”. But these nos trips, mind-blowing as they are, remain on a superficial level that exploits blatant misinterpretation, like with the absence of the 3rd dimension in the first plateau.

Nothing beats wonderland. Nothing explains it either. With all other trips it is clear that the mind is working worse and this is what brings about the experience. In wonderland I understand the 3rd dimension again, and seem to also know things beyond my normal scope of knowledge. For example, there’s a particular way I twist the nos machine when loading which creates an intricate pattern of triangles. I also know how many twists and turns need to be carried out to unscrew a bulb, exactly. If I regain consciousness whilst performing such a task I usually drop the machine because I have no idea what I’m doing, but my nossed self is entirely confident in complex manoeuvres with the machine. Perhaps it’s a matter of not being self-conscious because I’m not conscious. Maybe I know how to do these things now but fear failure to the extent that it inhibits my abilities.
There have been philosophers intent on researching nos. I wonder if they experienced or thought anything vaguely similar. Most people I know don’t follow the basic rules of tripping out and those who do don’t think twice about it.

I think there could be a planet with nitrous oxide being the dominating atmospheric gas. Everyone would be breathing nos all the time. They would have similar machines capable of cracking open illicit bulbs of oxygen, which they would inhale and too exclaim “what the fuck!”. I hope to migrate there one day.

For the pros and cons of taking nitrous, go here, for information about owning a machine, read this.