Nangs, for those who don’t know, is an Australian term for nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas or whippits. I’m not Australian, but I think “nangs” is a great term, easy to say and onomatopoeic with the effect of the drug, so I use it instead of the American words. Anyway, I want to describe a particular thought pattern I notice when I use nangs. Others’ reports of the sensory distortions caused by nangs largely matches my experience, but I haven’t heard anyone talk about this cognitive experience. I suspect it’s idiosyncratic to me, and it appears very consistently in my experience of nangs.

The pattern is a sequence of thoughts that goes like:

  1. I’m noticing my thoughts.
  2. Wait, I’ve been here before.
  3. My thoughts are cyclical.
  4. I’m aware of the cycle of my thoughts.
  5. My awareness of the cycle will fade.
  6. The fading of awareness is part of the cycle.
  7. *get distracted / relax into raw experience*

This writing, of course, does not do full justice to the phenomenology, both because words are in general insufficient to describe qualia, and because it’s quite difficult to verbalize while under the influence of nangs, so I am describing my sober recollections of the experience. Still, I think it’s interesting. One thing that’s interesting about it is that because I keep having this thought pattern, it’s a true observation about my thoughts! I’m not sure how accurate the perception of a cycle is on the scale of a single nangs experience, but in a longer term, I do indeed go through cycles of being aware of a cyclic pattern in my thoughts, followed by unawareness as my mind moves elsewhere.

I’m not sure when I first had this experience of nangs. Now, because it’s familiar, it sometimes takes on an ironic flavor. “Oh, this old thought pattern again.” However, that sense of irony itself gets folded into the notion of the cycle. “It feels ironic, but that irony is part of the cycle, and now I’m aware of the cycle, so it’s real. Later, it will feel ironic again, as I lose this awareness.” I wonder to what extent this pattern naturally arises from the the interaction of nangs with the structure of my mind, vs now arising because I expect it. (Is that even a meaningful question? It arose organically in me once, and now my knowledge of it is also part of the structure of my mind.) I wonder if now that I’ve described this pattern to you, it will be part of your experience of nangs (if you partake) as well, like a benign cognitive virus.

To wrap up this post, I’ll take a big hit with my editor open, and let nangs!Ari write whatever he wants. That may well be nothing, since often when I take nangs I just want to flop. Nonetheless, I create the container:

Wowowoaoaoaoaoawowowowwowo jfiasuhfuf fallllll wowww hard to type woobawoobawooba wooba flop

Thanks nangs!Ari, very eloquent. I did indeed flop onto a nice soft surface after typing “flop”, and that was that for typing while on nangs. Fun times!