#Like yeah seeing the kraken would be freaky but what if you decided to take out your respirator for funsies

[theidiotabides]

Listen. This is a fun story, but it is not real. You cannot take the tall tales your dive instructor tells you at face value. Dive instructors are basically that one grizzled old pirate at the end of the bar trading ghost stories for shots of rum. They ARE fucking with you.

Nitrogen narcosis is dangerous, but it's not shrooms. It's more like being tipsy. The primary danger is forgetting how to operate your dive equipment because you are a stupid drunk person. Divers call it "Martini's law" because once symptoms start, you feel about a martini drunker for every 10 meters deeper you go.

Nitrogen narcosis happens to everybody to some extent, but the severity of reaction varies between people and between dives, largely determined by things like body weight and blood chemistry. It's like anesthesia or alcohol tolerance. Solving a math problem once at depth doesn't demonstrate that you're narc-proof; it just means you didn't get narc'd that time. You can be totally fine at 100ft on one dive and then get narc'd at 40ft on another. And if you go deep enough, it WILL happen to you. There's even a set hand gesture that means "I've got nitrogen narcosis" (it's the "crazy" one, with the index finger circling your ear); that's how common it is.

We also know exactly why it happens. It's because most gases have some narcotic properties, and the way air compresses at depth means that when you breathe down there, you're taking in a larger amount of all those gases per breath than you would be at the surface (this is also why your tank empties faster the deeper you go; the same tank that lasts an hour at 20ft will only last like 15 minutes at 90). Like most drugs, more intake means stronger effects, so regular air starts affecting you like laughing gas when you breathe it under pressure. Nitrogen is the one that kicks in first. This is why deep sea divers use a different mix of gases than casual divers do; if they tried to use the regular stuff, they would all be high af on nitrogen, and you do not want to be high when your life depends on being able to maintain neutral buoyancy and accurately track time and depth.

For context: nitrogen narcosis has happened to me personally! I am advanced open water certified, meaning I can dive to 100ft, and I have done so on several occasions with no issue. I have also been narc'd twice, both at 60ish ft. For me it basically felt like a panic attack, because it is very scary to be 60ft underwater and suddenly notice you're kinda drunk. But I still knew who and where I was and that all I had to do was ascend a little bit. It's not LSD.

I know people on tumblr looove stories of underwater cave diving, but I haven't seen anyone talk about nitrogen narcosis aka "raptures of the deep"

basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.

she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.

if you can solve it, you're good. that is the hardest part of the test.

because here's what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they're not dying, they're not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.

a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he'd told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he's at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can't go down there, but he saw the woman go.

instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.

she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.

when their masks are off and he finally asks her what happened, and why was she swimming like that, she says she fully, 100% believed she was a mermaid, had always been a mermaid, and something was hunting her in the dark 👍