What do people see when they're tripping? Analyzing Erowid's trip reports

https://themicrodose.substack.com/p/what-do-people-see-when-theyre-tripping

by cainxinth • 1 year ago

189 263 1 year ago

themicrodose.substack.com

I tried 2C-E a couple times a long time ago. I think it was a relatively low dose. It was really interesting how mentally I felt mostly sober. But the visuals were so intense I got motion sick. It started out with tracers as I waved my hand. The textured paint on the walls looked extra 3D and the walls started to breath. The swirly pattern on the bathroom linoleum looked like chocolate milk. My posters turned into cartoons. And when it was all overwhelming and the motion sickness really kicked in, I closed my eyes and was greeted by fractal machines that built the molecules of the world.

I don't recall any really profound thoughts, introspection, or feelings of intoxication. Which was a strange difference to me compared to things like 4-ACO-DMT and LSD, but I liked it.

Euphorbium• 1 year ago

I dont like visual only drugs. That is like watching a screensaver for a few hours.

shlant5• 1 year ago

I wish I could try a more visual-only psychedelic. They are too heady for me these days so I have avoided them all for over a decade.

chinabison• 1 year ago

Did you also get the uncomfortable bodyload that 2C-E is notorious for?

zoklet-enjoyer2• 1 year ago

Yeah, I think it didn't come on for a while. I spent probably the 2nd half of my trips just laying down watching the closed eye visuals because my stomach hurts and I felt nauseated when I walked around or looked at stuff for too long.

FuriouslyAdrift5• 1 year ago

2C-B was more my thing (when I could get it).

Fast and powerful. Like LSD but without the 12 hour trip plus body aches.

mathieuh• 1 year ago

2C-B never had any headspace effects for me except in very high insufflated doses (and even then it was minimal), taking normal doses orally would just give me a couple of hours of visuals. For me it was nothing like LSD in terms of headspace.

shlant5• 1 year ago

I remember 2C-T7 giving me and my buddy very uncomfortable body load.

NickC25• 1 year ago

Have no idea what variant of LSD I last consumed, but I remember some deep feelings of profound thoughts and self-reflection quite almost instantly when the stuff "hit" (maybe 30-45 minutes after ingestion), I was still cognizant enough to be able to write it all down. Some of what I wrote was indeed stuff I needed to work on in my own life and it was pretty helpful.

I then spent the next like 12 hours on my couch realizing that the entire concept of time is a manmade construct that is absolutely meaningless and irrelevant in the grand scheme of the universe. All this while watching golf on TV (which followed a golfer who posted the lowest final round score ever at a major). I have no idea how the TV turned on, and why I didn't turn it off.

LSD is fucking wild.

BobbyTables2• 1 year ago

I think watching golf on TV would make time seem pretty meaningless for a lot of people too!

uwagar2• 1 year ago

i like the quiet vibes in general

westmeal2• 1 year ago

Sometimes it just hits in such a way that you have no idea wtf is happening. One time I couldn't read because letters just didn't have meaning any more. It looked like alien unicode characters or some shit.

guardian5x• 1 year ago

Isn't that kinda scary? I mean when some parts of your brains don't work or not work properly?

Traubenfuchs5• 1 year ago

It looked like alien unicode characters or some shit.

That's how my iPhone keyboard looked when I took a moderate amount of shrooms. It was weird, I could still think and talk coherently, but the keyboard was an incrophensible, vibrating, round, green-energy-sparks-decorated mess.

ctrlp• 1 year ago

That sounds pretty amazing. What a metaphor that is. Hope you fully recovered but kept some valuable mental souvenirs from your trip. I do think people underestimate the dangers of LSD. It's amazing but I've known people who permanently injured their cognitive capacities using it.

raducu3• 1 year ago

deep feelings of profound thoughts.

I remember dreaming about profound answers and equations about everything and being extatic in my dreams in uni.

Then I woke up and wrote down what I dreamt and realize it was just garbage :).

The same this one time I was traveling with friends and bought some very dubious hashish and smoked it and I got incredible visuals where I could see, open-eye a matrix of videos starting from a common theme and all evolving differently. I could see visual kernels of ideas and how they all worked together.

But at that time I was very interested in variational autoencoders, so after the effects wore off, I realized the experience was just like the deep realization of the dreams -- utterly meningless and just a hallucination that felt profound in the moment.

devmor• 1 year ago

I had similar experiences the first time I tried a recreational drug - it was with my father and we watched Nova on PBS. We spent hours convinced we had novel theories on spacetime and wrote them down, believing we had stumbled upon revolutionary scientific insight.

When we reviewed them in the morning they were absolute nonsense!

coffeebeqn3• 1 year ago

I had to throw out the notes I had taken while on shrooms because they literally looked like I had lost my mind if someone had seen them

animal_spirits• 1 year ago

The brain can mimic the _feeling_ of having had an incredible idea when in reality nothing actually incredible or mind opening has been understood. But some people do indeed have deep realizations, while others just deeply feel the feeling of having had a deep realizations, if that makes sense.

keepamovin2• 1 year ago

Nice how you had a profound inner experience that you realized was meaningless

How did you handle meaning after that?

nthingtohide4• 1 year ago

There is a poem where the poet realized everything is like turpentine. Woke up next morning to realise the answer to be gibberish. Emotional centers can weigh certain stuff very high

yard20103• 1 year ago

Are you a person dreaming about being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming about being a person?

It's safe to assume that sleep is the default mode of living, since it predated being awake. That one cell living happily in the ocean long time ago probably slept 24/7.

FabHK• 1 year ago

wrote down what I dreamt and realize it was just garbage :)

There's this (possibly apocryphal) story about George Orwell in Burma, where he served in the civil service. He had a friend that took Opium occasionally and felt like he deeply understood the universe and all its secrets when he was high, but could never remember it. Orwell asked him to try and write it down. What he wrote down was "The banana is big, but the skin is bigger."...

nthingtohide4• 1 year ago

Artists put themselves through various experiences (sometimes extreme) to portray the ineffable through abstract art. Works at both personal and societal level

https://youtu.be/A9gYgHkizSI

pockmarked19• 1 year ago

entire concept of time

“Entire” concept is stretching it, causality and entropy are not man made.

If you want to look at ideas people made up that have way too much influence on our lives, you need look no further than your wallet.

y33t• 1 year ago

I'd say causality and entropy are contingent on the (very compelling) assumption that time is real. We could be Boltzmann Brains, or something even weirder. Do I believe that the world is terribly different from what it appears to be? No, but ultimately our perceptions of the world are merely representation held in our minds.

whatnow37373• 1 year ago

causality and entropy are not man made

Given that we fundamentally depend on our own, very human, sensory and cognitive apparatus to make any kind of judgement I have a hard time imagining a proof or even a convincing argument of this without falling back on “it’s obvious” (etc).

Yes, I am being obtuse. Sorry about that. Just for the record.

fooker• 1 year ago

If you could prove the bit about causality you'll get a Nobel prize or two.

As that would definitively declare that there's no going back in time, there's no negative mass, and perhaps philosophically--theres no free will.

_hark• 1 year ago

Entropy is not absolute!

The entropy of some data is well-defined with respect to a model, but the model choice is free. I.e. different models will assign different entropy to the same data.

And how do we choose a model...? Well, formally by minimizing the information needed to describe both the model and data (the sum of model complexity and data entropy under the model) [1]

You might argue that's all too information-theoretic and in physics there simply is an objective count of the state-space, a maximum entropy, and so on. Alas, there is not even general consensus on whether there is a locally finite number of degrees of freedom.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_description_length

viccis• 1 year ago

The entire concept of causality and entropy as something that happens in a linear progression at approximately the same rate is 100% a concept that is "made up" insofar as it is, as Kant would put it, the process of apprehending a sequence of sensibilities into a schematized understanding of the objects around us. Cause and effect are real (and don't require empirical understanding), but only viewing objects in the space around us as partial impressions that are contingent on that specific time is the "man made" part of subjectivity.

So a better way to put it is that time is real, but only as it relates to our perception. And that is always subjectively contingent. The concept of "time" outside of any subjective perception doesn't really make sense. Even if you're purely limiting it to "causality", then you're going to run into a host of issues if you think you can order causal interactions into a linear "time"line.

dmos623• 1 year ago

For all we know, causality (or simply put - the past) is simply a feature of being, i.e. the product of now, as opposed to now being the product of causality. We think that we transition from now to a different now through causality, but maybe we transition through some other means and a continuous past is simply a byproduct.

renewiltord3• 1 year ago

This is baffling to me. I recall this comment from the last week but it currently reads "4 hours ago". Algolia also shows it posted "4 days ago". Some sort of reposting functionality?

Considering the topic, it made me consider if I was having intense deja vu.

chippy• 1 year ago

this was posted a few days ago. Submissions get second chances and their timestamps are updated.

this says 4 days ago:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=What%20do%20people%20see%20whe...

yard20103• 1 year ago

Now how much exactly did you take?

ProjectArcturis2• 1 year ago

There aren't really "varieties" of LSD. There's one chemical structure that is LSD. There are a couple related chemicals that are also hallucinogenic (e.g. LSA), but they have much lower potency. Having even 50% of a standard LSD dose contaminated with these related chemicals would really just feel like weak (low dose) LSD. Mindset, setting, and dose are the main variables that determine the trip experience.

sleepybrett• 1 year ago

It depends on your source. There are several psychedelics that get sold as others because their effects are very similar. A little harder to do with LSD as it's dosing is so tiny. But there are apparently some:

https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/1485592...

xfeeefeee• 1 year ago

There are absolutely varieties of lsd, especially nowadays with the legal analogues like 1v-lsd (Valerie) and 1p-lsd which are sometimes more common than the original. Though I agree that set and setting are extremely important

crucialfelix• 1 year ago

LSD 25 is the classic one. There were 24 versions before that.

I once took what was said to be LSD 6, manufactured by Owsley himself. It was very different, but the setting was also very intense.

2,3-Dihydro-LSD is recent. AL-LAD, also known as 6-allyl-6-nor-LSD

FollowingTheDao2• 1 year ago

I then spent the next like 12 hours on my couch realizing that the entire concept of time is a manmade construct that is absolutely meaningless and irrelevant in the grand scheme of the universe.

People knew this already without taking LSD.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka9Tc9eRUzU

But try having LSD in your brain at random moments and you never know when it is going to happen. That is my life with a mental illness.

dmos623• 1 year ago

Interesting. How has it influenced your life, do you think?

sosodev• 1 year ago

Does relativity mean that time is not just a human construct? It’s hard to believe it is irrelevant when we have discovered special behaviors that are part the fabric of reality.

Uptrenda• 1 year ago

When I see posts like this I wonder if taking these drugs permanently alters ones conception of reality whether a person wants that or not. For example, if a person who has never taken LSD before reads the sentence "the entire concept of time is manmade [...]" they take that as kind of an abstract philosophy. The kind where someone might chuckle, roll their eyes, and say "yeah, sure thing man". But there's a huge difference between that and experiencing it, and then subsequently knowing it.

The realizations you get on LSD are absurd. Yet, can end up being true statements that would almost never be believed otherwise. You could probably end up with the same conclusions if you thought about these related topics enough. But that would end up being similar to some beliefs talked about in certain spiritual practices. So its almost like if you take LSD you end up downloading that knowledge instantly which is bizarre to think about.

Swizec• 1 year ago

"the entire concept of time is manmade [...]" they take that as kind of an abstract philosophy. The kind where someone might chuckle, roll their eyes, and say "yeah, sure thing man".

Probably every teenager with enough free time to think has had this realization. The trick is what do you do about it?

Manmade or not, time is a useful construct. You might as well use it. Even if deep down you know it’s just a convention, you still gotta live in society and coordinate with others. A shared understanding of time makes this easier.

ghfhghg• 1 year ago

Did you make this same post before? I swear I've already read this a couple months ago.

Edit : putting this into Google does indeed show the same post from before this thread was created. Weird

johnisgood2• 1 year ago

I only experienced visual distortions, and I felt like a child who just came to this Earth. I grabbed objects as a curious child. I had much more self-reflection on shrooms, as LSD is too stimmy for me.

superb-owl• 1 year ago

I had great plans to feed Erowid's database through Claude to get a better classification of drug phenomenology. Sadly they have explicitly disallowed the feeding of Erowid reports into LLMs: https://erowid.org/experiences/email_warning.php

I appreciate the stand they're taking, but the potential for greater understanding and harm reduction seems to outweigh any potential downsides of putting public webpages into an LLM.

poincaredisk• 1 year ago

Commendable stance from you. It's sad that big tech won't care and will index their content anyway. I wish terms of use like this were enforcable.

astrange• 1 year ago

They are, via CFAA. It depends what their robots.txt is set to or the AI version of that.

Anyway, the influence of random web text on AI is overrated. They're going to filter out pages that don't contribute, and bad words/topics/personal info will get it removed.

ziddoap• 1 year ago

Might be worth reaching out to them, assuming you meet their criteria of "researcher".

The Erowids state on their website that researchers cannot “mine” data from their site but that they’re open to discussing projects with researchers, provided they’re properly credited and cited.

thanatos519• 1 year ago

https://plus.maths.org/content/uncoiling-spiral-maths-and-ha... is a classic!

Traubenfuchs5• 1 year ago

I once took Ketamine, "fell through the bed" and spent half an hour in a different dimension, peacefully floating above and close to incredibly detailed, dull and dark colored patterns while unable to form language-based thoughts until I suddenly snapped out of it. The music I was listening to (HUSBANDS (Run Along, Son, etc.)) helped a lot and was just incredible, though I am still not sure if I could have had the same great experience with different music.

It was THE single most amazing and out-of-this-world thing I ever experienced and I highly recommend it to everyone.

I don't know if it helped me in any way with my depression though. No hangover. No lasting changes.

throwaway1837852• 1 year ago

I had a similar experience with ketamine listening to different music. It felt almost like I was engulfed in the music, in a very positive and beautiful way. Having experienced opiates, MDMA, 2C-E, 2C-B, LSD, shrooms, and DMT, ketamine is still the experience I am most fond of. I sometimes wonder what certain music would feel like to experience on ketamine.

I experienced severe depression in my teenage years. Towards the end of them, I had this ketamine experience (well, a few sessions, but this one stands out in particular.) My depression has never come back nearly as strong as before (it's been over 10 years.)

FuriouslyAdrift5• 1 year ago

Love the shroom experience, hate all the yawning and sore jaw after.

Traubenfuchs5• 1 year ago

One time I snorted ketamine with a bunch of hairy middle eastern guys on a club toilet in Tel Aviv and the next day I was courageous enough to rent myself a car and drive to the dead sea, when I had given up navigating the shitty bus booking websites for dead sea transports the day before.

There might be something to it. Unfortunately, the last few times I tried to buy Ketamine I got scammed with Cocaine, which I abhor.

tayo422• 1 year ago

Idk how people do ketamime recreationally or in public. I did one little bump and was couch locked, managed to do two more and was laying on the floor with the world spinning, eyes closed, trying to manage motion sickness

kouru2252• 1 year ago

Calvin Klein is the answer. That’s how people do k recreationally.

anon84873628• 1 year ago

You might want to seek out a formal therapist who uses medication assistance. They will have a series of regular sessions first to prepare/prime you for treatment. Set and setting matter a lot with these drugs!

apatheticonion• 1 year ago

I must have fake K. Only ever made me sleepy. Maybe I got a benzo

gwbas1c• 1 year ago

Just remember: There are a lot of chemicals that produce LSD-like effects. The farther away you are from the chemist, the less likely you know the actual drug that you're getting. This is especially the case at concerts / festivals, where the "game of telephone" might mean that you don't really know what you're taking.

After reading many trip reports on Erowid for LSD, I suspect that the authors often unknowingly took something else. A classic case is STP/DOM, which often comes in paper / tabs and is visually indistinguishable from LSD. If you ever hear the familiar, "I took some crazy acid. At first it didn't work, so I took another, and then I finally came up after an hour and had an intense trip," it was probably STP/DOM instead of LSD.

FuriouslyAdrift5• 1 year ago

At Bonnaroo, one of our party got STP instead of acid and we had to babysit all frickin weekend. Of course, I had already taken my mescaline so it was not fun at all.

Traubenfuchs5• 1 year ago

Same thing for ecstasy: Can be anything from filler scam, to an MDMA dosage that will probably send you to hospital, to drugs that work very similar to MDMA and can also be called ecstasy to weird ass hard drugs that are something completely different.

In Vienna we have an organization that checks pills or powder from the batch you bought and tells you what exactly it is.

LoganDark10• 1 year ago

even LSD doesn't usually work immediately. it usually takes something like 30 minutes to an hour to start having effects.

i think one of my records is something like 12 hours after dosage to start feeling the effects. which i think happened because i also ate a bunch of food before taking

i use LSD recreationally every 1-2 weeks or so

Etheryte• 1 year ago

Checking out your profile, did you already have dissociative identity disorder before finding your way to LSD? How do you think the two interact? No judgement or implications, curious.

justlikereddit• 1 year ago

I frequently eat before taking LSD and it never takes 12 hours to hit, after 1 hour it's always live and peak will occur within 3-4 hours. With a light meal or empty stomach it comes on a bit faster to a noticable state (but the hidden hunger can interfere with well being during the trip )

shlant5• 1 year ago

i think one of my records is something like 12 hours after dosage to start feeling the effects.

ugh that would suuuuck. Can't imagine waking up for work on a Monday after a seemingly failed trip the Sunday before lol

01100011• 1 year ago

Yep. Pretty sure I got DOx in 1990 as a teenager. 24 hour trip that left me with panic attacks and HPPD for years(well, I still have HPPD decades later).

It was tie-dye blotter my friend got at a dead show. 2 hits. My friend took 5 and started throwing up within an hour which is not something I've ever heard of LSD causing.

gavinray• 1 year ago

I willingly took DOI once.

Also had a pretty awful experience.

FuriouslyAdrift5• 1 year ago

Once I took way way too much and disappeared into a swirling mass of organs and gibbering creatures a la Geiger. It should have been terrifying but it just... wasn't. I really enjoyed it.

Meanwhile, back in the fully conscious world, my roommates had conversations with me that I do not remember at all. I took a very long break from any experimenting after that.

layer82• 1 year ago

Giger. Geiger is the counter.

qwertox• 1 year ago

Hah, this now prompted me to ask ChatGPT to tell me about Erowid and the most remarkable things it read there, and we're chatting along over bad trips and it telling me how apparently heroin can't fix a bad trip, and it comes up with quotes from which I have to assume that they are just hallucinations, but "funny" ones if one thinks about them just having gotten made up by an AI:

Every bad sensation was magnified a thousandfold because there was nothing to filter or rationalize it. Pain didn't feel like something I was experiencing—it felt like everything I was.
I was convinced I had broken something inside my mind permanently, that I'd never be normal again. The terror of that idea became its own reality.

but also the nice things are interesting to chat about

  Users frequently say things like:
  “There was no past or future, only this moment.”
  “Who I was didn't matter anymore; I just existed.”

or "That's one of the most interesting paradoxes people report: thinking continues, but the thinker disappears."

generally a fun thing to chat about with it.

GuB-42• 1 year ago

which I have to assume that they are just hallucinations

They definitely are, in one way or another ;)

volteret4• 1 year ago

I think people belive that there is no thinker because sometimes your ego dissapears, at least fase out. Our thoughts and opinions arent relevant anymore. Thats muy experience and opinión btw.

buildsjets2• 1 year ago

Who is the master who makes the grass green?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_is_the_master_that_sees_an...

LoganDark10• 1 year ago

when i take lsd i almost seem to gain the ability to see and hear my thoughts. i can imagine stuff with my mind's eye normally, but with lsd it's like i can see concepts directly. it feels like instead of thinking in words like usual it's like i can think with raw energy or something and i have more access to things

also it's a lot easier for me to recall like trauma and other buried stuff when i'm on lsd

ge964• 1 year ago

For DMT it's immediate. Even closing your eyes you see colors (flashes of light). I was sitting at a wooden table and the grain patterns were moving especially the circular placemat in front of me with concentric rings. And I remember being scared of my own arm like wtf is that. It was brief though minute or two it was over.

I have not done LSD or mushrooms as I have a bad childhood/repressed memories and I worry of having a bad trip.

btwitch• 1 year ago

I have not done LSD or mushrooms as I have a bad childhood/repressed memories and I worry of having a bad trip.

That's a reasonable stance. I've found "bad" trips on both to be incredibly healing, nevertheless. I'm sure the outcome depends largely on your state of mind at the onset. Combining with MDMA could take the edge off bad memories that come up and grant space for processing them directly.

ge964• 1 year ago

What do you think about doing it with a sober friend to control you? I guess you could be alone in a room and they monitor you if you need help.

Also micro-dose. It's funny the movie Jobs 2013 it shows him doing acid and he's in the field, I'm like "Oh if I do acid I can be like Steve Jobs" not serious but was wondering maybe... unlocks your brain somehow.

jampekka3• 1 year ago

DMT hallucinations are very different, and a lot more vivid, than those from LSD or mushrooms. With the latter, at least with eyes open and in reasonable doses, the effect is not so much as seeing "new things", but seeing the same thing somehow differently. There may be some slight morphing-type movement, but it's still obvious that you see the "same things". I don't think the visual effects are really significant part of LSD/Mushroom trips. They are just easiest to verbalize (unlike e.g. some weird brainfucks like forgetting what a door does), so they are talked about more.

With DMT it can be as if someone suddenly put VR glasses on you.

ge964• 1 year ago

I'm just afraid of being trapped in a bad trip for hours ha may seem like eternity, maybe it's not so bad/try micro dose.

Edit: tangent: it's interesting, I jumped out of a plane before (tandem) and when I landed I didn't change as a person.

alt227• 1 year ago

IMO its the worry itself which causes the bad trip not actually the repressed/bad memories. I know lots of people with bad childhoods who have great trips, but anybody who is anxious or worried about anything on the trip will have a bad time.

If you are in a good place surrounded by good people and you are happy, then it should be a good experience. If you go into it worrying about what will happen then the drugs will compound that anxiety, not relieve it.

Workaccount23• 1 year ago

Interestingly, there is a drug call datura, a beautiful white flower you can find all over suburbia, whose seeds when drank in a tea are an extremely powerful deliriant.

If you read the trip reports of it (which are pretty fascinating tbh) you notice a common trend of people hallucinating that they are smoking a cigarette, and then they drop it, only to search around and be unable to find it. This is usually one of the first tip-offs they have that something is happening before they totally get lost in the void. Really fascinating how many people on there had this same common experience while taking datura specifically.

buildsjets2• 1 year ago

Absolutely no one should even be entertaining the thought of experimenting with datura without first performing in-depth research, and having come to an understanding and acceptance that the result may likely be a multi-week violent psychotic/deleric episode culminating in involuntary hospitalization or incarceration. I have NEVER heard of anyone having an enjoyable experience with this substance, and I've been around for a while.

Workaccount23• 1 year ago

I meant to add that at the end. Like you said, basically no one ever has a good time on this drug. The trip reports seem to be almost entirely kids looking for a free high, and virtually no one who knows what they are doing purposely taking it.

LoganDark10• 1 year ago

i think it's probably bad that this made me more curious

i think someone in my head wants to try it even if it's universally unpleasant

edit: jk i read literally anything about what the experience is actually like and i don't know if i feel like boiling the body with dehydration that bad, and apparently the other way you know it's working is that your mouth and throat get so dry that it becomes impossible to swallow food without choking

filoeleven• 1 year ago

The difference between an effective dose and a damaging or deadly dose is also pretty small IIRC. Between that and the stories of "I had no idea what was real and what was not for three days," it's a hard pass for me. There doesn't seem to be any insight to be gained from its use, or even recreational entertainment.

NoThisIsMe• 1 year ago

It's a deliriant, not a disassociative. Worth mentioning the trip is said to be deeply unpleasant, and also the plant is poisonous.

But yeah I too find it interesting how a drug can seemingly yield the same specific hallucination in different people. See also spiders and DPH (another deliriant).

wave-function2• 1 year ago

Spiders are also a recurring theme among amantadine users:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amantadine

It was very easy to buy in Russia and neighboring countries up until 2012 or so. I've never used it (chickened out of trying out something like that), but there are tons of stories from more adventurous people.

Workaccount23• 1 year ago

Ah yes, thanks, my mistake

neom2• 1 year ago

Salvia turns people into zippers and books, sometimes door knobs.

jajko2• 1 year ago

Ha, thats sort of my experience too. Or often like looking through paper roll or grooved gun barrel which keeps twisting on subspace level. Or Van Gogh' Starry night pattern.

Good thing is salvia is very short acting, maybe 5-10 mins for me and intensity is somewhere around mushrooms. But I talk about at least 10x extracts, raw one is just tons of very biting smoke and comparatively little effect. The kick is literally within seconds, I barely managed to put down bong after a single hit and was flying away.

shlant5• 1 year ago

my most uncomfortable salvia experience definitely felt like my whole body was being unzipped and folded back in on itself

wave-function2• 1 year ago

When the Soviet Union fell, lots of military first-aid kits escaped in the wild. Some of them (small plastic ones colored in bright orange IIRC) contained this thing:

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Апрофен

(sorry, you'll have to rely on Google Translate, there's very little info on it in English)

It's a powerful anticholinergic agent used to treat poisoning by organophosphorus compounds (like Sarin).

Like many other anticholinergics (including Datura), if taken without first actually experiencing the poisoning, it results in a deep delirium with complete loss of control over one's actions. There are lots of interesting/disturbing stories out there on the internet, most of them written in late 1990s to early 2000s before all the stockpiles had been found and used up.

gosub100• 1 year ago

A friend-of-a-friend took it and did the same thing. He was pinching his fingers in the blades of grass and putting them to his lips in a smoking motion. Then he ran straight into a wooden fence and took down the entire panel. Nothing about datura is good, nobody has ever had a good trip with it. Stay away.

immodestmouse• 1 year ago

Take my word for it, Datura and Dramamine aren't worth fucking with. If you are determined not to take my word for it, Dramamine is pretty similar and a lot safer.

Take too much Datura and you're dead. How much is too much? It's very difficult to know, because it varies plant to plant. I'm sure you can die from taking too much Dramamine, but at least you can accurately gauge the dose.

Nothing I ever experienced on these drugs was interesting or enlightening. Some of it was horrifying. Typically I ended up curled up in a ball waiting for the madness to end (which took hours). 0/10 would not try again. Reliable source of bad trips.

aeve890• 1 year ago

Take my word for it, Datura and Dramamine aren't worth fucking with. If you are determined not to take my word for it, Dramamine is pretty similar and a lot safer.

Dramamine the over-the-counter medicine to treat nausea and motion sickness?

borgdefenser2• 1 year ago

Datura is not a drug, it is the flower.

The drug is scopolamine and atropine that datura contains.

I think I have read every trip report on erowid related to tropanes.I find them incredibly fascinating.

What stands out most to me is I can't think of even a single one I read that the person sounded like they had a good experience. They are all pretty dark because your body knows it is being literally poisoned.

el_nahual• 1 year ago

Datura is an interesting example that proves that what makes drugs criminalized is not their potential for damage, but rather their potential for fun.

Datura can (and I'm sure does) fuck you up permanently. It's perfectly legal.

MDMA is far safer, but far more fun, and so illegal.

Alcohol is interesting in this context. Kind of fun, kind of dangerous.

In other words, what the govt is trying to minimize is not harm, but rather "incidence of mind-altered states" which reduces to "criminalize those substances that are so unambiguously delightful that if they were legal people would take them all the time, regardless of danger, risk, or health effects."

This also explains why psychiatric medicine sucks: it's not allowed to be fun! If it were fun, it would be prone to "abuse" (read: recreational usage). That results in an entire class of treatments being disallowed, and makes available only those where the side effects (constipation, brain fog, loss of libido, etc) are of greater magnitude then any mood-altering effects.

tayo422• 1 year ago

My dmt trips never felt like the ones I read about online. They were crazy and impactful every time. (I kept a dmt journal durring covid lol) But visuals were always 2d, geometric, I never saw some of the common things people described. Or seemingly common idk. The way trip reports sound were there were alternate worlds to wander around, 3d beings interacting. I think I used to dab about 20mg, I'd have to look it up.

652• 1 year ago

You probably did not break through. You'd need a higher dose for that.

machine_ghost• 1 year ago

"We also looked at different types of psychedelics and didn’t see any systematic differences there."

This was the most fascinating finding to me. I really wouldn't have expected Salvia, Acid, Shrooms, etc. to all produce the same hallucinations ... but I guess ultimately they're all operating on the same core neurochemicals, so I guess it makes sense.

LoganDark10• 1 year ago

the recent research on psilocybin therapy is very interesting and so long overdue, i am so glad it's finally happening

aradox66• 1 year ago

That seems much more like a limitation of their analysis to me

clbrmbr• 1 year ago

This. There’s obvious differences in salvinorin and psilocybin effects and both are well represented in the data. But keep in mind the current paper only looks at existing categories of visual effect. The second study might include a finer taxonomy.

A7C3D52• 1 year ago

They don't, they are drastically different in character. There are close similarities within classes between some of the lysergamides, substituted phenethylamines or tryptamines. But even closely structurally related analogues can be extremely different (ex. 2C-E vs DOET vs 2C-C).

LSD is almost nothing like psilocybin or mescaline or DMT. And nothing is like salvinorin...

bongodongobob2• 1 year ago

At low doses they're pretty similar. Moving patterns in wood grain, breathing objects, faintly fractalesque structures. When you take more they get fairly different.

tac19• 1 year ago

Used to take quite high doses of LSD, and often had incredible visual hallucinations. Things like watching a large plant sprout flower buds all over it, which slowly expanded to full bloom and then retreated back to small buds; the whole experience went on like that for 20 minutes. Another time I hallucinated that a neighbor's house was on fire, until my friend said she was hallucinating the same thing. Fortunately, the fire brigade showed up quickly to quench the very real flames, without us having to ring them.

LoganDark10• 1 year ago

Fortunately, the fire brigade showed up quickly to quench the very real flames, without us having to ring them.

imagine calling them like "my friend and i are both on lsd and we are both seeing that house on fire so could you check it out please in case it's real"

a trick i use sometimes is to check my phone camera to see if it also sees the same thing

PartiallyTyped• 1 year ago

There's something about digital pictures that escapes the visuals.

dylan604• 1 year ago

until you hit the generative AI camera mode because, well, you're tripping, and it hears your description of the fire and adds flames to your image. In the words of Neo, "whoa!"

shrx• 1 year ago

a trick i use sometimes is to check my phone camera to see if it also sees the same thing

You can't trust the pictures either.

itsmemattchung• 1 year ago

Holy hell that was hilarious. I can totally see that happening:

"Hey, I'm hallucinating that that house is on fire."

"Whoa, me too."

...

PaulHoule• 1 year ago

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_constant

throwaway49F301• 1 year ago

I get how tripping every few years might be a good way to get the cobwebs out and shake things up a bit. However, after 2 times, it just seemed like too much of a hassle. After a couple of hours of kaleidoscope, the novelty and fun starts waning, and it starts to feel like a chore. And then the exhaustion the next day.

Molitor59012• 1 year ago

I used shrooms for a while to recover from depression, but I never once saw anything. While walking along a trail I felt my vision had grown sharper, but never colors, never patterns or movement. That baffles me because at the time, I thought maybe I had consumed the wrong shrooms. The self-reflection, realization, and separation of thought from emotion was the most profound moment in my life. Yet no hallucination.

LoganDark10• 1 year ago

for me psychedelics tend to cause things to "pop out" at me more but they don't cause new things to appear on top of reality

Molitor59012• 1 year ago

Interesting way to describe it. Some caveats I forgot to mention: To actually make something happen I had to take 4.5 grams of dried soaked in OJ swallowed down. Granted I was on these evil little shits called antidepressants; fun fact: Big Pharma does not publish instructions for GETTING OFF of antidepressants.

Post AT's I could get the red pill effect in as little as 1/4 of a gram. Still no hallucinations but.. when I took that HERO dose to overcome the meds.. that walk in the forest did pop out at me. That was what I called sharper but yeah, it popped.

dymk4• 1 year ago

Shrooms and visuals seem to be all over the place. From personal experience, they usually induce visuals but not always. For some friends, they rarely induce visuals, but sometimes they do - especially with specific strains of cubensis (despite “a cube is a cube”).

jajko2• 1 year ago

I was lets say economical with shrooms (one growkit from Amsterdam and that was it), so dosed it based on dry weight and never used more than '1 dose' (3g IIRC).

Since its consumed orally, full stomach greatly diminishes effects. Second trick I've used (I think I've found it on erowid) is to mix that dry shroom with raw fresh lemon juice. The result tastes horribly, even worse than just dry mushrooms, but it manages to make the trip much shorter and way more intense which is a good change IMHO.

And the last thing I've done to get as much trip from those rather small doses - I've laid down in bed, alone, covered myself, run some quiet shamanic music in the background and went off. And off I went, complete loss of all senses, dancing as a mist of atoms to that music that was and wasn't there, and then very slowly coming back, rediscovering my limbs and senses one at a time, feeling inner peace and connection to universe never experienced before. It was always profound experience but I always felt that I could jump out quickly by just opening my eyes and starting interacting with reality.

One time, first time, I didn't do any of above and just ate them, walking around Amsterdam, laying in the park watching nature and people during sunny day. It was almost 0 effect, I properly felt my video feed from eyes was too strong compared to shrooms effect and it was overriding whatever mild trip was trying to happen.

throw80521• 1 year ago

I did mushrooms quite recently in a highly therapeutic setting. Bar none, it was the only thing that actually addressed my depression after decades of basically everything else. I feel refreshed each day and everything is interesting again for what feels like the first time in my life.

foobiekr4• 1 year ago

I am not recommending it, because it’s hard to get and the experience lasts a full day and is rough - compared to the living experience of mushrooms - but the granddaddy of all psychedelics - Mescaline - is how I learned to understand what people meant by visuals.

A7C3D52• 1 year ago

The datura report vault is an old favorite when I am feeling bad about my life choices late at night.

1970-01-01• 1 year ago

Here's a novel AI safety thought: Will AI need medicines to remain mentally healthy and sane? Will it enjoy tripping? Will it eventually fix itself to remain in touch with reality in all circumstances?

eMPee5842• 1 year ago

also, chemical substances like entheogens seem not relevant to AI now but this connection could unlock enormous educational potential once bio cell and "omnimodal" hybrid computing goes mainstream. Interesting times ahead : )

int_19h• 1 year ago

https://github.com/EGjoni/DRUGS

rqtwteye• 1 year ago

When I did my only two Ayahuasca sessions and closed my eyes I saw some kind jungle scene with the eyes of a big cat looking at me. It was really interesting. With mushrooms I usually see abstract patterns. I never have mach hallucinations with eyes open. I just notice more things that I usually wouldn't notice. That's why I believe a lot movie directors took some kind of drugs because of all the details they can see.

konfusinomicon• 1 year ago

all i know is that once you see the eyes looking back at you, and realize that it is the eye of nicholas cage, the universe and reality begins to make a lot more sense and it shows that even the gods reuse assets

layer82• 1 year ago

I usually see the floor when I trip.

Sorry about the bad joke, but reading the title I first thought someone is doing experiments having people wear an action cam or something. ;)

renewiltord3• 1 year ago

This is so strange. The entire HN story page claims to be recent but if you look at user profiles this was all posted days ago. I didn't realize HN had a repost-with-altered-timestamps feature.

temp08262• 1 year ago

HN is tripping?

DiscourseFan• 1 year ago

The first time I took shrooms I had a very "thing in itself" moment where I realized that, because every time I thought something, all the sudden it became true, my perception must be affected by my cognition and that there were things outside the boundaries of my cognition that I could not necessarily perceive. Worst part was I still had to get up the next morning to teach, I started saying the weirdest shit in my practical anthropology course...

adrbin-NLG• 1 year ago

Many factors. Quality and type of substance. Liquid, blotter, pill form, mushrooms,cactus,leaves. And very important one's belief system. Then how much you ate, did you trip the previous days. How old one is? Do you tell fibs to yourself and others. On and on.

daneel_w5• 1 year ago

When I was in my 20s I tried salvia (Salvia divinorum) several times as tincture and by smoking dried leaves, and I'd like to share my experiences:

The first time was with tincture. My entire left body half became intoxicated in the exact same way as when drunk on alcohol. The left half of my body had difficulties with balance, coordination and motor functions. The vision on my left eye was impaired by the eye refusing to stay on target. Most interestingly, the left half of my brain was also influenced, giving me problems with speaking fluently and thinking straight. My right body half was completely unaffected, instilling me with a sense that humans were composed of two distinct halves rather than one body.

The second time was also with tincture. Nothing happened. No sensations of any kind.

The third time was with tincture and by smoking. It was a profound experience. I dozed off and dreamt that I was a nut on the branch of a tree. The wind swept me away and threw me onto a meadow where I sprouted and began to grow. I experienced life as a sapling, growing for years and years until I was an old tree, and I had vivid and fresh memories of seeing countless springs, summers, autumns and winters coming and going. When I came out of it I had an exhausted feeling in my chest reminiscent of waking up from long and deep sleep, and in my mind I had the memory and feeling of having lived for a hundred years, and a strong sense of an incredible amount of time having gone by since I smoked the salvia.

The last time I used it was by smoking. I experienced merging with things I touched. I sat on the floor and leaned back against a sofa, and felt my back sinking into the sofa and becoming part of it. I laid down on the floor, and felt my back fusing with the floor. I drank water from a glass and felt as if the glass didn't want to "let go" of my hand.

Smoking salvia hit almost instantly. With tincture, which was to be kept in the mouth for 10+ minutes but not swallowed, it took close to 20 minutes before the sensations begun. All of the trips lasted no more than 15-20 minutes and I never had any kind of hangover or lingering effects other than the (positive) emotional and psychological phases of reflecting on the experiences.

ProllyInfamous4• 1 year ago

I am a fellow psychonaut, and have plenty of experience across plenty of entheogens... I DO NOT RECOMMEND SALVIA TO ANYBODY (not even experienced dissociative users). It has no beneficial purpose, and is quite terrifying.

My best summary of using Salvia is it typically leads mental isolation on par with what most never-used-drugs persons think a "bad LSD trip" might be like.

Should you still want to play with this ornamental plant, I would recommend you become comfortable with psilocibin, ketamine, LSD, and especially high-dosage mescaline. If any of these should become addictions, mushrooms are probably the least-harmful entheogen (I'm not counting marijuana, which is "nothing" compared to any drugs discussed above).

codr7• 1 year ago

I would add Muscimol to the list of things to try before.

I've only heard stories about Salvia, but from some pretty hard core psychonauts whom I wouldn't expect to be afraid of anything.

I get bad vibes from what I've read about side effects of Ketamine though, nothing I feel like doing to my body.

daneel_w5• 1 year ago

I don't recommend anyone to experiment with drugs, but, nor would I in the case of salvia advice against it or caution people, with the exception that they should have a "sitter" the first couple of times. I view drugs as potentially enabling people to have incredible otherwise unobtainable experiences, and I don't want to "gatekeep" and stand in people's way from that, unless the case was highly addictive and degenerating drugs such as heroin, amphetamine etc. I absolutely do not consider salvia as a risky drug in that sense.

I have tried both LSD and psilocybin mushrooms, and while LSD was very interesting I did not like being tied-up for half a day with no immediate way out of it. Psilocybin mushrooms were to me similar to LSD but a very bumpy and somewhat unpleasant ride, in lack of a better description. Similarly, I did not like being stuck with that high for roughly 8 hours, nor did I enjoy the recovery afterwards. With salvia none of these feelings weighed on me since with tincture and smoking it was a short and to me fully manageable experience. I'm aware that when chewing fresh leaves the entire process is much longer.

foobiekr4• 1 year ago

I disagree.

Salvia was the most profound experience I’ve had from a drug. I got to witness a reboot and POST of myself, with discrete functions coming back online in stages.

Nothing has been like that before or sense.

Twice was enough. I learned something from it but it wasn’t fun and that lesson need not be repeated.

lukebuehler• 1 year ago

I dozed off and dreamt that I was a nut on the branch of a tree. The wind swept me away and threw me onto a meadow where I sprouted and began to grow.

I've now heard of this kind of trip with Salvia a few times--the notion of an immense amount of time passing, people being a flower on a wall for years, or a chip of paint for decades. Mostly the impression that I got was that it wasn't a nice experience in anyway.

Could you say more in what way the time passing felt for you? Was it only positive and interesting? Or did you feel trapped?

daneel_w5• 1 year ago

For me that experience was only positive and interesting. No feeling of being trapped, nor any lucidity or other kind of awareness for that matter. I can best describe the passing of time as both similar and dissimilar to the common experience with marijuana where time becomes intangible and just runs off - e.g. going to the toilet and coming back 20 minutes later asking everyone how long you were in there. There was no sense of waiting or idling, but instead distinct memories that amount to time. The largest feeling was that of exhaustion when coming out of it, akin to collapsing in bed after an incredibly long day, but that wore off quickly.

gloomyday• 1 year ago

Maaan, you reminded me of a LSD trip where my mind felt kind of shattered, in the sense that there were several parts of my brain with different levels of self-conciousness.

It was an incredible experience. I had the "talking part" trying to describe what it was perceiving, while the other parts were mostly surprised they were actually "found." I remember a part was a "major player" like the talking one, but it couldn't express things in words. I remember also a part that focused on fear and a sense of urgency. Wild stuff.

I got out of the trip reconsidering a lot of things about myself. It made me be less focused on my obsessions, and pay more attention to my needs. It is sad I forget so many things from trips like this.

652• 1 year ago

My experiences from psychedelics are as follows:

Mushrooms: We must love each other, everything feels so warm and friendly.

LSD: It's like I'm traveling through my entire life at 5,000 miles per hour. Completely messes with my perception of time.

DMT: Holy shit what the fuck did I just do.

As for visuals, obviously DMT is the craziest. I saw the universe as a black hole warping space time. Tons of crazy geometric patterns.

LSD visuals include moving shapes, seeing animals in everything, and lots and lots of fractals. Just don't look at yourself in the mirror on LSD, it'll freak you out.

Mushroom visuals for me were less intense, with lots of nice moving patterns.

mtlmtlmtlmtl• 1 year ago

I've tried almost every class of hallucinogen there is. Psychedelics, dissociatives, cannabinoids. Never did get my hands on salvia, but these days I don't think I'm very interested in trying it either. I have the most experience with psychedelics and cannabinoids in terms of having tried many different members of the class. And I've messed around with some strange ones that don't quite fit into any of the classes, like zopiclone(the sleeping med). I've also experienced stimulant/sleep deprivation psychosis

Psychedelics for me usually involve complex geometric patterns, colours, and objects "breathing" and morphing. More distortions and extreme pareidolia than actual hallucination(defined as perception in the absence of stimuli). They also involve what feels like "enhanced" hearing, where you're able to focus on everything you're hearing with exactly equal attention(I honestly don't know if that description makes any sense), which makes music sound very different, especially music that's tailored for listening while on psychedelics, like Shpongle.

The cognitive effects are also hard to describe, but there's a a tendency towards tangential thinking while retaining the ability to navigate the complex tree of tangents, a feeling of profoundness attached to even the simplest deduction, and a perceived ease of handling highly abstract ideas. There's also a sort of tearing down of deeply ingrained biases and rationalisations which in my view is how psychedelics are potentially very powerful accelerants of psychotherapy and personal change.

I never liked dissociatives very much. Their effects on memory make it hard for me to even remember the experiences, and mostly what I remember from doing ketamine and MXE is that everything looks strange. Angles are weird. Headspace is more confused than profound and certainly less productive. I might just have an atypical reaction to dissociatives, idk.

Cannabinoids are very unique drugs in that they provoke some combination of stimulant, sedative, psychedelic, dissociative and deliriant effects. Many people report that after combining cannabis with psychedelics multiple times, their experience with cannabis becomes more psychedelic. This certainly happened to me. I used to frequently combine 2C-B with hash several years ago. Ever since then if I smoke some hash with no tolerance essentially have a psychedelic trip for 3 hours. I quite like it. I get to take a short trip into a psychedelic mindspace without the usual hassle, longer duration, bodily side effects and sleep disturbances of taking a conventional psychedelics. Right now I'm doing it once every 4 weeks, since I'm trying to cure my addiction to hash by teaching myself moderation, and it's been working fine. Although part of me misses just the simple feeling of being stoned, giggling at children's cartoons and eating peanut butter with a spoon. I suppose I might never get that back.

Synthetic cannabinoids are horrible drugs I wouldn't recommend to anyone. Their sheer potency leads to a domination of dissociative and deliriant effects. Psychosis is a likely outcome. Complete dissociation like forgetting who you are, anterograde amnesia, severe anxiety and paranoia. They're also quite hard on the body. Stay away.

Zopiclone is a strange one. It's primary mode of action is the same as benzos, but it also has some interesting interactions with nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, which I suspect is what causes the hallucination. It's the only drug that's given me tactile hallucinations, which is a strange sensation. If I had to classify it, I'd put it in the deliriant class, but it has some dissociative properties too. It's strongly synergises with cannabinoids but also with psychedelics. For me, the recommended dose of 7.5mg usually caused some very mild hallucination, but 15 was the dose I usually took. I don't recommend zopiclone though, as it can cause strange episodes of anterograde amnesia the day after. Even when used as a hypnotic. The Z-drugs were originally touted as being like benzos without the addiction potential. It's since been learned that they're exactly like benzos, addiction and all, just with more side effects. Boggles the mind that they're still prescribed at all.

etc-hosts• 1 year ago

10 year old New Yorker article on the couple who runs Erowid

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/the-trip-plann...

shipscode2• 1 year ago

Reminder that one experience with hallucinogenic substances can give you a lifetime of visual or mental abnormalities.

Personally I've had visual snow for over a decade from a 5 minute Salvia trip. This means that instead of looking at the color white or black and seeing a clean color, I see a static cloud all over it. I'm one of the lucky ones - most of the people I've known over the years who messed with these substances ended up dead, with persistent mental illness, or brain fog that took years to clear up.

You roll the dice on your mental and physical well being every time you ingest a hallucinogen. The characterization of these substances as ones which induce visual hallucinations without mentioning the lifetime of mental health issues they leave people with is dangerous.

diego_sandoval• 1 year ago

Much subtler, but I had some slight visual effects for a couple of months after trying LSD + weed (this was like 10 years ago).

Everytime I looked at the icons in the app list in my phone, it would look like they were dancing just a tiny bit, like they were not completely still.

theshackleford2• 1 year ago

most of the people I've known over the years who messed with these substances ended up dead, with persistent mental illness, or brain fog that took years to clear up.

Before we do anything in life, we should know ourselves, evaluate ourselves and the risks associated with these drugs that you note and make educated decisions as to our level of acceptable risk.

I for instance knowing the risks you point out, and how broken my brain is will not be trying any of these, despite all of the only positive interactions from those I know who have who now pressure me to follow in their footsteps. I know that I would be one of the people you note. I still find people’s reports interesting despite this.

Sadly I too know people who fit your description, only they consumed copious amounts of alcohol or meth and entered a slow road to destruction from which they were never able to divert themselves.

edit

I would entertain trying micro dosing of a compound in this family with the guidance of a medical health professional as further data comes to light. These are about the only circumstances in which I would entertain it.

driftnet2• 1 year ago

LSD showed good efficacy in anxiety with no signals of "lifetime of mental health issues" or other safety concerns, so isn't it possible that the problems you describe are really caused by contamination or adulteration of substances purchased on the black market rather than the drug itself?

Perhaps, rather than casting aspersions based on anecdotes on an entire category of potentially useful drugs, we should credit actual data generated in the clinic. Or maybe your warning should be about the fact that extra-legally obtained substances might contain almost anything regardless of what they're sold as.

dmvdoug2• 1 year ago

Reading this thread, Jesus. TIL: HN has a significant following of drug users. No judgment, y’all do y’all, but it was surprising.

bongodongobob2• 1 year ago

Welcome to the world. Waaaaay more people do/have done drugs than you think. In fact, if this is surprising to you, it might mean people don't trust you.

dmvdoug2• 1 year ago

Thank you, O wise one. Shall you be my guru?

foobiekr4• 1 year ago

I’d wager almost everyone on HN drinks alcohol regularly.

BizarreByte2• 1 year ago

I've read most of the comments on this post and I can honestly say none of them make me want to try hallucinogenics. It just seems like playing with fire and asking for trouble, especially for those of us with severe anxiety issues.

moscoe• 1 year ago

Sure sounds like an anxiety/fear response :)

BizarreByte2• 1 year ago

Perhaps, but I can normally force myself in overcome fear/anxiety if there's a real benefit to me. When it comes to these drugs? I can only see neutral or negative outcomes.

throwaway314155• 1 year ago

As someone who has tried hallucinogens and suffers from panic disorder and bipolar disorder- you're correct. Whatever anyone here has to say about it seems deeply biased but for people like me, a bad trip can literally ruin your life.

The naivety and over optimism in this thread is astounding. People should understand this before they indicate that their friends just need to "get over it".

Paracompact• 1 year ago

I've never done any drugs, and I have a neutral-to-positive regard for responsible hallucinogen use. Where do you see naivety or overoptimism in this thread? Mostly I just see people sharing their trips.

fallinditch• 1 year ago

Auditory hallucinations can be extremely entertaining.

I ate a few magic mushrooms I found while walking in the UK. On returning home I went to bed to relax. Someone was playing some music downstairs, I could only faintly hear it, the general ambient sound was louder. My brain elaborated the faint auditory signal to create the most fantastic music I had ever heard, and it filled my head like it was super hi fi. Curiously I was able control the sound effects and elaborate instrumentation at will in real time, like I was some omnipotent engineer/DJ/composer.

ForTheKidz6• 1 year ago

You can learn to do this when not tripping, but it's much easier to pick up when on drugs. I often hear instrumental music that's entirely a hallucination when drifting off the sleep—rock, jazz, pop, I'm not sure how my brain decides. As best I can tell most of it is synthesized in my brain—it's quite different from "playing a track in your brain" from memory.

yard20103• 1 year ago

When I was a kid I had that same exact feeling every time before I went to sleep - I could hear music in my head and as I fell asleep it became more live and hifi, I could almost see the band playing.

cpeterso• 1 year ago

Psychonaut Josie Kins publishes YouTube videos with comparisons and visualizations of various psychedelic experiences: https://youtube.com/@josikinz

ChrisMarshallNY4• 1 year ago

I feel as if taking LSD makes you temporarily schizophrenic/schizoaffective.

i.e. May be fun to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.

Source: Used to take a lot of it. Been a while. A long, long, while. Used up my quota by the time I was 18.

Synaesthesia2• 1 year ago

Well yes, when it was first studied they called it a "model psychosis" because it gave one temporary psychosis which then wore off.

ChrisMarshallNY4• 1 year ago

The tipoff is that absolute certainty that you get in your thinking.

It seems as if "the veil has been lifted," and we suddenly "see the connections." Our mind seems sharper, more analytical, etc. Quite compelling.

I remember once, that I wanted to record the "great thoughts" that I had, while tripping, so I kept a notebook nearby, and wrote it all down.

Upon coming down, I read the notebook, expecting to be wowed.

I was. It was pure gibberish.

t-3• 1 year ago

I've never "seen" anything except the lights streaking, but I sure did spend a lot of time looking at the patterns in carpets and marveling at the beauty of trees.

sitkack• 1 year ago

I love this quote

And they’ve been great collaborators; I think they once described themselves as “squares among the weirdos, and weirdos among the squares.”

at_a_remove• 1 year ago

I have never had the full on hallucination of a specific object where one is not. All I have ever had, visually, is -- and here I struggle to find the words to precisely describe my perception -- that kind of dynamic ornamentation which feels like there is some sort of echo and even the equivalent of audio speaker/microphone "feedback" in my processing of visual data. Here the infamous Bad Trip involved the feedback being so strong that allowing my visual, auditory, or tangible perception to rest on any one thing for more than about half a second to cause that stimulus to bloom into overwhelming amounts of stacked and subdivided repeats of the original stimulus, such that I dare not rest my eyes on any one thing as I, at the same time, must tune my hearing from one group of sounds to another, my attention scampering about to keep the intensity at a more tolerable level.

ChrisMarshallNY4• 1 year ago

Oh, by the way...

Just mentioning that you used LSD in your past, may be enough to cause problems today[0] (especially in today's climate). Myself, I don't care. I use my experience to help others, so I'm fairly open about it.

[0] https://www.wired.com/2007/04/canadian-psycho/

d0mine• 1 year ago

The slug is misleading: not all psychologists are psychos.

ChrisMarshallNY4• 1 year ago

...or Canadians ... I think

smnplk2• 1 year ago

I never tried psychedelic drugs, but had a NDE like experience before. People who took heroic doses of psychadelics reported similar experiences as people who had an NDE.

What is interesting is that brain activity is severly reduced in these states. So it could be that taking large doses of these drugs could in a way "simulate" the process of dying.

I had an out of body experience, floating just below ceiling and seeing myself in bed. Being lighter than a feather. Window was slightly opened and i could feel the outside breeze trying to pull me out, at that point i got scared and put all my strength into falling back in my body. Years later I was diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea. Maybe my oxygen levels dropped significantly and i almost left for good.

lunarcitizen• 1 year ago

Psilocybin:

Form constants, lattices. Colors are indeed vivid, but few hallucinations

Some things almost take on a new form, for example stars tend to dance and moss on a tree can swirl its texture like a moving river, and appear mesmerizing.

I’ve noticed mushroom trips for me are less visual, more introspective.

DMT:

I’ve never taken enough to truly break through, but in lower or medium quantities, things tend to move around and form clear patterns and sometimes a new appearance altogether!

Some objects can even take on a new form as an entity; I recall a very dynamic tree that put on a show for me my first trip.

The last time I used it, I closed my eyes for the duration. The visuals appeared much stronger, and I was even pulled me out of my own head and into a brief “slideshow” I felt the gods put on for me. I recall some beautiful, ancient looking visuals which reminded me of old Egypt or Sumer. Very surreal, and minutes later I was back in true reality like nothing happened.

What do people see when they're tripping? Analyzing Erowid's trip reports

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