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.
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.
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.
the visceral realization that something feeling incredibly deep and meaningful doesn't necessarily mean it's actually incredibly deep and meaningful, can, itself, be incredibly deep and meaningful. an opportunity to reset and recalibrate what you feel you want out of life.
Thats why this stuff works the best of very deeply depressed people or people struggling with trauma because it shows them their brain can be happy / not in a bad state again in a demonstrable way.
It's also why many bros are super confident in whatever crap they believe though, because they thought about it while high and even though they can't explain it, they feel very strongly it has to be true because of the strong feelings felt during.
Yeah, that's common. Only slightly more common than having actual mind blowing realizations that help people see how others see them, give them empathy they never knew, and give the motivation to fix their lives before they die unhappy.
The big problem is that there's only so many actual realizations you can have, but it feels big every time you take it. So the people that take acid every month inevitably end up with a mind full of so much "incredible importance" that it turns into mysticism and the realizations are at best buried, at worst completely lost. If you take shrooms one every 3 years i bet your gonna have actual realizations every single time, and they're gonna help you reevaluate and plan your future. If you take it every week you're gonna go insane.
There are also other problems: while on acid once I came to a realisation that really changed how I experienced things later on. My realisation was that most of my perceptions of things were really "coloured" by a layer of society. For example, during that trip I found some husks of dead lobsters, that were sundried and quite rotten and gory. But during the trip they were this amazing structure of iridescent craziness on a dimpled hard and shiny shell, combined with dried out half rotted soft meat on the inside. I knew that I should keep the germs away from my mouth or cuts/wounds and I think I played and analysed it for a bit, being amazed by its structure, textures and colours. After that the trip got a bit stronger and the focus was on other things, however. Some hours after the trip I came by the same place that I had happenstanced the lobster husk. The same lobster was lying there. It was ugly and disgusting. I had washed my hands thoroughly after playing with it but really had an urge to wash my hands again.
I laughed at how my amazement of the dead lobster had felt so profound just hours earlier.
But. The next day after a nice rest I actually started to see that many things are actually very special and beautiful but our upbringing has destroyed the ability to experience this beauty. Society has teached us that rotten things are ugly. But that is just a layer on your perception. The materiality of things has their intention embedded in them and if their intention is of great beauty, then the materiality tends to be beautiful as well.
What I am trying to say is that first order dismissal of "deep insights" might not be warranted. You might have really had a deep insight, but you cannot correctly assess it because the setting has changed.
I did know a guy who claimed to have lived years of family life with a wife and kids once on DMT. I doubt it was actually years but it probably felt like it and it did fuck him up a bit. He had to mourn the loss of the perfect family life he'd gotten used to. He knew all of their names and favorite foods and sports and colors and what happened at school and first kiss and pregnancy announcement and wedding and stuff. Honestly kinda scared me. He just started reciting a whole life, and then he refused to talk about it again
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!
I believe it is a misapplication of entheogens to try solving "IQ problems" with them. I've found them to be incredibly valuable for personal development and solving "EQ problems" - the kind that my sober mind didn't ordinarily process much at all by default, being on the autism spectrum. Psychedelics for me allowed me to become intensely aware and attuned to the emotional and psychological state of others and allows me to imagine myself in their shoes and empathize with their struggles in life (even if entirely unrelated to anything I've ever personally experienced). This altered state of mind introduced me to an entirely new way of thinking that had led to me being a kinder, more compassionate, more considerate, more socially capable person in a persistent, lasting way that has long outlived the psychoactive effects of the psychedelics.
Psychedelic culture has this notion of "reintegration", where in the week(s) after a trip it can take some time to fully internalize the epiphanies and lessons from the trip. During my first reintegration, I realized that I kinda used to interact with everyone in the world in a manner roughly analogous to really advanced NPCs in a role playing game I was forced into called life, and had no realization that I was doing this and lacked full appreciation for the depth of other people as human beings for the first quarter century and change of my life.
Accordingly, I see psychedelics as a profound tool of interpersonal growth and development, but never the kind of thing I'd take to try solving a vexing technical problem - that's a different job that takes a different tool.
PS to anyone else reading: this should not be taken as an endorsement or recommendation for anyone to attempt to procure and use psychedelics. There are serious mental health risks involved for vulnerable populations, risks of contaminated or laced products if procured from untrustworthy or disreputable sources, and more. If you are unsure of whether you're a part of certain vulnerable populations, I'd urge you to consult with a qualified, licensed therapist or mental healthcare provider to get a less-biased second opinion on whether or not you're at elevated risk, just to be sure, but remember this is just one of several risks.
> I see psychedelics as a profound tool of interpersonal growth and development, but never the kind of thing I'd take to try solving a vexing technical problem...
May work for some folks[1]:
> A number of subjects had worked for weeks or months on their chosen projects without being able to find a satisfactory solution. Various psychologic tests and tests of creativity were administered before and after the drug sessions, which involved administration of 200 mg mescaline. Participants were prepared by presession interviews and instructions regarding how to approach the drug sessions. The results reported are rather remarkable. Of the 44 problems brought by the subjects, 20 had new avenues opened for further investigation, 1 was a developmental model that received authorization to test the solution, a working model had been completed for 2, 6 had a solution that had been accepted for construction or production, and 10 had partial solutions that were being developed further or being applied in practice. No solution was obtained only for four of the problems. Although lacking detailed specifics as well as a follow-up, this early report does suggest that psychedelics might acutely improve creativity.
> ... Another incidence of psychedelic drug–induced creativity from the scientific community comes from Nobel Prize–winning chemist Dr. Kary Mullis, the inventor of PCR, who is quoted as saying “Would I have invented PCR if I hadn’t taken LSD? I seriously doubt it… I could sit on a DNA molecule and watch the polymers go by. I learnt that partly on psychedelic drugs.”
> 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."...
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.
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
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.
> 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.
That happened to me as well. Pretty cool effect. I also remember trying to order “human food” off my phone but couldn’t figure out what anything on the app was
It being scary is kind of the point. Or rather, if you’re going to do LSD, you need to be in the mindset that 1) this is temporary, and you’ll feel fine tomorrow, and 2) the experience you’re about to have will be extraordinarily novel and impossible to fully describe, even after having experienced it. It’s an intense hallucinogenic, and is the most potent mind altering substance that we know of. It’s also one of the safer ones, if you’ve done your research and aren’t predisposed to a certain category of mental illnesses (schizophrenia, bipolar, anxiety).
Knowing that it’s temporary is the best tether to this world that keeps me from having a bad trip, if it feels like that could happen. As others have said, an LSD trip is going to take you places you might not expect to end up. Meditation can be good preparation leading up to a trip.
LSD is one of those chemicals that gives you a glimpse at what it’s like to process the world with a completely different category of consciousness.
Microdosing (or rather 1/4-1/10th a normal dose) works quite well. You get much of the mental flexibility without serious disorientation and serious physical reaction (jitteriness and nausea, which is also why I avoid shrooms—too physical).
It's also worth noting LSD is quite pleasant on the come down. You're just very comfortable and calm. Typically self-soothing through the angst of the first half of the trip is straightforward. Also a great reason to be in good mental health before hand.... if you're not prepared to face something you've been avoiding or deluding yourself through, LSD is a very, very bad choice.
It's an interesting thought. I have had a similar thought about AI and consciousness while tripping. But there are many pros and cons that just end up in speculation. Which is interesting but not very productive?
I suppose we could simulate tripping in that fashion but it would seem easier to affect a distributed activation function or other parameter to the simulation.
what basis would you recommend? Given the rate that chatbots engaging in making stuff up you can't just ask them. At least as humans we can take the substance ourselves to verify there's something happening. I think there will always be an insurmountable barrier to deciding if computers can be conscious, at least in our lifetimes. We're not even sure other humans experience similar consciousness.
Nope, but as others have said - you must commit and realize that once you dose you're in for whatever it is. You must assure yourself that this is temporary and will pass. As a matter in fact our lives are much the same, nothing ever lasts forever. Just gotta roll with it.
Anyway, it's not that the brain isn't working properly it's just that the brain is working differently. That's how I see it.
It's only scary if you try to hard to hold on. Relax and float down stream... In the moment, it does not feel like your brain is not working properly. I tend to feel more clearheaded (even when confused) than I am on alcohol.
> I consider life and reality incredibly, painfully boring.
Interesting. The main benefit I've gotten from psychedelics (mostly mushrooms) is that all of life / reality is impossibly miraculous -- even, paradoxically, when it seems dreadfully boring. And also that I've somehow always known this, even when it feels like I've forgotten. It's always right there, just waiting (begging) to be noticed. It's the ultimate cosmic joke.
Also, your website (https://www.lifeismiraculous.org) is awesome. Echoes of Bertrand Tolle and Alan Watts. Thanks for publishing it and putting it in your profile!
I like watching videos of how our cell biology works. This makes me realise the spiritual perspective of why everything is miraculous. Clockwork channel is good.
This framing never made much sense to me. It's incredible to be alive at all of course, but miraculous compared to what? I've found it best in these situations to quietly appreciate rather than trying to reify some ontology for contemplation—which is, after all, a distraction from appreciation itself in the moment, something largely akin to meditation.
The easiest way to experience some of the feelings you get from tripping is, in fact, meditation. The LSD mostly just forces you to be more honest with yourself by smashing barriers you would normally dismantle through allowing your mind to rest.
Granted, I've never experienced anything like eg a blurring of the sense of self with meditation. Theoretically it's possible. Maybe I'm just too content with myself to pursue it.
Indeed, meditation is the best approach I've found as well. It can be seen clearly -- not as an idea, but a direct realization -- precisely why the mind's attempts to pin "this" down are futile. I don't have a better word for that experience than "miraculous."
A lot of people are well aware of how much they are deluding themselves (into thinking they are happy and deserve to be so) that they should avoid psychedelics at all costs. It's like their ego knows it's in danger.
> It's always right there, just waiting (begging) to be noticed.
Summary of my conversation with Claude.
# The Universe from Every Point: Scale and Consciousness
Our conversation has revealed two profound conceptual frameworks that offer unique perspectives on reality, consciousness, and our place in the cosmos.
## The Scale Numberline
Imagine standing on the surface of your skin. This boundary serves as "point zero" on a vast bidirectional scale. In one direction stretches all that exists within—cells, molecules, atoms, subatomic particles, quantum fields—extending down to the Planck scale (10^-35 meters). In the opposite direction extends everything outside—our environment, planet, solar system, galaxy, galactic clusters—out to the observable universe (10^26 meters).
What makes this concept particularly compelling is imagining that every point in the universe can serve as its own "zero" on such a scale. Each location, no matter how seemingly insignificant, can be the reference point from which both the infinitesimally small and the immeasurably vast are contemplated. This framework relates to fiber bundles in mathematics, where each point in a base space carries its own associated "fiber"—in this case, a bidirectional scale line.
When we place ourselves on this cosmic scale, we appear to vanish into mathematical insignificance—just a tiny blip on a numberline of inconceivable magnitude. The human experience becomes merely a point when viewing the entire spectrum. Yet paradoxically, we're the observers capable of conceptualizing this entire scale.
## The Observer Gradient Numberline
The second framework involves consciousness and observation. At each point in space-time, we can conceptualize a spectrum of awareness ranging from the most elemental form—the feeling of having "just awakened from the void"—to complete cosmic awareness encompassing all of existence.
This relates to everyday experiences that suddenly strike us as profound. Watching something as simple as a short video can sometimes trigger a sense of freshly emerging into existence, reminiscent of Feynman's observation that "to create an apple pie, you must first invent the universe." Each experience isn't merely happening within the universe but represents the entire cosmic order converging to create that specific configuration of consciousness.
This observer gradient suggests different degrees of integration with reality—from the most basic awareness to complete cosmic comprehension. Like the scale numberline, this framework could be conceptualized as existing at every point in the universe, with each location harboring its own potential spectrum of awareness.
## The Intersection
These two conceptual frameworks share a parallel structure. Both posit that each point in the universe can be the center of its own framework. Both involve spectrums extending in opposite directions from a central reference point. Together, they suggest a universe where every location is simultaneously the center of its own physical scale and its own consciousness gradient.
This perspective resonates with various philosophical traditions while finding mathematical expression in structures like fiber bundles—where each point carries its own unique fiber representing either scales of physical reality or gradients of conscious observation.
These frameworks invite us to reconsider our place in the cosmos—not as insignificant specks, but as unique vantage points from which the entire universe, across all scales and states of awareness, can be accessed and contemplated.
Surely you do not want to experience EVERYTHING. It's better to not exist than to experience all the dark things in life. Although, according to my onthological beliefs it's not possible to not exist and therefore I do fear death, not just the process of dying , but death itself. Because there is some uncertainty there.
HAving had a similar experience, I have found it somewhat useful.
I've often found that my brain hasn't been working or working properly, and it's good to know that a) that happens, b) it can be transitory and c) even when it feels like it's working, I might still be fooled.
As I grow older, it's been a lot more difficult speak in absolutes.
At the same time, the contrast to observing when my brain actually -does- do something useful has also been useful and I have felt a lot better about leaning into that feeling.
This culture is insane and will gaslight the hell out of you, as will many of its constitutive members, so having some data on what it feels like to vividly hallucinate versus to have a different view on something has been very validating.
I am sure that sounds dumb, and that there are plenty of folks (especially on this social media forum) who would say that I am probably worse off for feeling like I have a better handle on "correct" and "incorrect", but hey, "enjoy the water, boys".
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.
The 25 in LSD-25 refers to prior efforts by Hoffman to combine lysergic acid with various other organic moieties. https://archive.vn/vaKCX
The first 24 are not hallucinogenic.
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
Like taking quite a high dose, having no visuals, no interesting thoughts just an endless itch in the throat, that gets progressively worse and worse until it consumes you completely. Haha
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:
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.
But it is closer to absolute than you make it sound here. There are information theoretic models which are “universal” with respect to a class; that is, they are essentially as good as any in that class, for every individual case you apply - even if different cases are best described by distinct models from that class.
E.g. the KT estimator is, for each individual Bernoulli sequence, as good as the best Bernoulli model for that sequence with at most 1/2 but difference (independent of sequence length)
It is undecidable/uncomputable, and only well defined up to a constant, but you have a “universally universal” model - Kolmogorov complexity. In that sense, entropy IS an absolute.
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.
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.
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.
Presumably the probability of a brain appearing as a disordered psychiatric monster is far higher than the probability of arriving as an Earth-normal tenured cosmologist.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Artists put themselves through various experiences (sometimes extreme) to portray the ineffable through abstract art. Works at both personal and societal level
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.
> 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.
Very creative, and spiritual. At first I was making bank, almost $190k a year, but now I am homeless living in a minivan. I am free however, more free than some of the richest people I know, which I think is the best outcome.
It made me realize that most people do not like creative people because we do not reactivity prop up their paradigms.
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.
> "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.
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.
> 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
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!"
I have the opposite problem: i try to watch scripted entertainment and all I see are actors in makeup on a set. Very hard for me to immerse myself when I keep getting distracted by bad wigs.
This happens to me on any amount of cannabis for some reason. It becomes immediately clear in a way I can not shake. It breaks the illusion. It only happens with live action, I can watch animation etc without issue.
> You don’t need acid for that. Just imagination. That was my first entertainment as a child.
While I'm on LSD it looks like any picture/art/etc is literally alive. I don't really know how to explain it.
> But LSD and related psychedelics are uniquely able to help one reconnect with that part of themselves.
LSD absolutely helps me reconnect with many parts of myself. I have dissociative identity disorder and certain memories or even certain perspectives of memories can only be recalled when I'm on LSD.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 )
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
It seems likely that HPPD, if it doesn't go away by itself, can be cured by 50-200 hours of practicing focusing on the noise and then trying to consciously move it, changing its colors etc.
I wish tech people would stop using the term "FUD". "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt", or "FUD", is how you don't ruin your life in one shot: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=shipscode
> I tried salvia after years of reading about people's experiences with it.
No, it really is about everyone else and not forfeiting their chance to experience something new by dissuading them with misinformation or some cautionary tale about an isolated fate that possibly was not at all about salvia.
I didn't bumble into salvia with no information on hand. I went there after reading about it, its effects, potential risks, chemistry, first-hand experiences etc. for years. A lifetime of side effects is not something associated with salvia.
Salvia is the closest thing to witchcraft I have experienced.
After a few incredibly strange experiences, the last time I smoked it the trip came on then it told me "don't ever come back here" and that was it. The whole trip was like 30 seconds. That was almost 30 years ago.
A bad LSD or mushroom trip is scary in a much different way. I was pretty fearless when younger with these things but never wanted to see what that salvia demon thing would do if I went back.
Anything amanita related never sounded much fun to me.
I've never tried Muscimol (don't even know what is), but psilocibin is the only entheogen I'd recommend anybody experience more than just once / casually.
Cannabis is a daily part of my life, for two decades. In the same way I'm "trying to drink less coffee," I'm trying to vape less, too... but everybody should try LSD and/or DMT at least once in their lifetime (but not before becoming comfortable with psilocibin).
Ketamine is that but it's not just that. One enantiomer (esketamine) is FDA-approved (as Spravato) for acute suicidality. It's dosed as an intranasal spray.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
I only ever vaporised 2C-B. usually I would get a full intense trip that lasts about 30 minutes and then very little after effects. A hit was also about $10 at the time (decades ago). Quality was good considering I was at one the top chemical engineering schools in the world.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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:
(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.
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.
>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?
You can get all kinds of (very questionable) highs from tons of OTC drugs: diphenhydramine (benadryl/zzzquil), dextromethorphan (Robitussin), doxylamine (NyQuil)...
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.
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.
It's one of the few I've not tried. Personally I believe all the psychoactive plants are tools with distinct purposes (to be prescribed if you will) - salvia is the one that I'm not sure what it should be used for, I guess it's a good tool to show very literally that everything is everything, that seems to be what it basically does?
Traditionally you chew the leaves and experience a moderate antidepressant effect. Apparently traditional practioners are somewhat appalled at the idea that people would smoke it to trip. I'm not sure if there really is any utility at high doses
The more traditional way to use it is to chew on leaves, which is a far less intense and slower way to use it. Probably the approach you'd take if you wanted to get something useful out of the experience.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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?
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 : )
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
A sober, or an experienced trustworthy, tripsitter is almost a must. A small amount of MDMA (especially if you're not familiar with it) before taking a psychedelic can be helpful as mentioned. Having some sedatives just handy just in case may itself lessen the probability of unpleasant effects.
Micro-dosing is mostly placebo. But a good idea is to start with small doses (check e.g. the "threshold limits" at Psychonaut Wiki), and maybe faster shorter acting substances like 2C-B or mushrooms rather than longer acting like LSD.
Also good to acknowledge that psychedelics just aren't very enjoyable experiences for many, and even for most they are rarely unambiguously good.
Psychedelics aren't necessarily as anxiety/paranoia inducing as weed, and even the effects in general aren't necessarily as intense. Of course it depends on the dosage, the person and the setting, and paranoia from weed most likely correlates with difficult psychedelic experiences.
benzos end LSD trips, so if you are worried about a bad trip, just have a xanax with you when you do it and if you want out, take one and in 30 minutes you will be okay.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
I think watching golf on TV would make time seem pretty meaningless for a lot of people too!
i like the quiet vibes in general
> 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.
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.
the visceral realization that something feeling incredibly deep and meaningful doesn't necessarily mean it's actually incredibly deep and meaningful, can, itself, be incredibly deep and meaningful. an opportunity to reset and recalibrate what you feel you want out of life.
Thats why this stuff works the best of very deeply depressed people or people struggling with trauma because it shows them their brain can be happy / not in a bad state again in a demonstrable way.
It's also why many bros are super confident in whatever crap they believe though, because they thought about it while high and even though they can't explain it, they feel very strongly it has to be true because of the strong feelings felt during.
This is very true.
Hallucinogens trigger all sorts of pathways in ways they aren’t triggered in sober life.
I think it’s pretty common to have a mind blowing realization during a trip then once sober realize it wasn’t that mind blowing.
Yeah, that's common. Only slightly more common than having actual mind blowing realizations that help people see how others see them, give them empathy they never knew, and give the motivation to fix their lives before they die unhappy.
The big problem is that there's only so many actual realizations you can have, but it feels big every time you take it. So the people that take acid every month inevitably end up with a mind full of so much "incredible importance" that it turns into mysticism and the realizations are at best buried, at worst completely lost. If you take shrooms one every 3 years i bet your gonna have actual realizations every single time, and they're gonna help you reevaluate and plan your future. If you take it every week you're gonna go insane.
There are also other problems: while on acid once I came to a realisation that really changed how I experienced things later on. My realisation was that most of my perceptions of things were really "coloured" by a layer of society. For example, during that trip I found some husks of dead lobsters, that were sundried and quite rotten and gory. But during the trip they were this amazing structure of iridescent craziness on a dimpled hard and shiny shell, combined with dried out half rotted soft meat on the inside. I knew that I should keep the germs away from my mouth or cuts/wounds and I think I played and analysed it for a bit, being amazed by its structure, textures and colours. After that the trip got a bit stronger and the focus was on other things, however. Some hours after the trip I came by the same place that I had happenstanced the lobster husk. The same lobster was lying there. It was ugly and disgusting. I had washed my hands thoroughly after playing with it but really had an urge to wash my hands again. I laughed at how my amazement of the dead lobster had felt so profound just hours earlier.
But. The next day after a nice rest I actually started to see that many things are actually very special and beautiful but our upbringing has destroyed the ability to experience this beauty. Society has teached us that rotten things are ugly. But that is just a layer on your perception. The materiality of things has their intention embedded in them and if their intention is of great beauty, then the materiality tends to be beautiful as well.
What I am trying to say is that first order dismissal of "deep insights" might not be warranted. You might have really had a deep insight, but you cannot correctly assess it because the setting has changed.
Did you at any point in the story stared at the lamp, and someone called to you…. And you had a wife and child?
I did know a guy who claimed to have lived years of family life with a wife and kids once on DMT. I doubt it was actually years but it probably felt like it and it did fuck him up a bit. He had to mourn the loss of the perfect family life he'd gotten used to. He knew all of their names and favorite foods and sports and colors and what happened at school and first kiss and pregnancy announcement and wedding and stuff. Honestly kinda scared me. He just started reciting a whole life, and then he refused to talk about it again
that story still sticks in my brain to this day. The human brain is wild
“This is not my beautiful wife…”
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!
I believe it is a misapplication of entheogens to try solving "IQ problems" with them. I've found them to be incredibly valuable for personal development and solving "EQ problems" - the kind that my sober mind didn't ordinarily process much at all by default, being on the autism spectrum. Psychedelics for me allowed me to become intensely aware and attuned to the emotional and psychological state of others and allows me to imagine myself in their shoes and empathize with their struggles in life (even if entirely unrelated to anything I've ever personally experienced). This altered state of mind introduced me to an entirely new way of thinking that had led to me being a kinder, more compassionate, more considerate, more socially capable person in a persistent, lasting way that has long outlived the psychoactive effects of the psychedelics.
Psychedelic culture has this notion of "reintegration", where in the week(s) after a trip it can take some time to fully internalize the epiphanies and lessons from the trip. During my first reintegration, I realized that I kinda used to interact with everyone in the world in a manner roughly analogous to really advanced NPCs in a role playing game I was forced into called life, and had no realization that I was doing this and lacked full appreciation for the depth of other people as human beings for the first quarter century and change of my life.
Accordingly, I see psychedelics as a profound tool of interpersonal growth and development, but never the kind of thing I'd take to try solving a vexing technical problem - that's a different job that takes a different tool.
PS to anyone else reading: this should not be taken as an endorsement or recommendation for anyone to attempt to procure and use psychedelics. There are serious mental health risks involved for vulnerable populations, risks of contaminated or laced products if procured from untrustworthy or disreputable sources, and more. If you are unsure of whether you're a part of certain vulnerable populations, I'd urge you to consult with a qualified, licensed therapist or mental healthcare provider to get a less-biased second opinion on whether or not you're at elevated risk, just to be sure, but remember this is just one of several risks.
> I see psychedelics as a profound tool of interpersonal growth and development, but never the kind of thing I'd take to try solving a vexing technical problem...
May work for some folks[1]:
> A number of subjects had worked for weeks or months on their chosen projects without being able to find a satisfactory solution. Various psychologic tests and tests of creativity were administered before and after the drug sessions, which involved administration of 200 mg mescaline. Participants were prepared by presession interviews and instructions regarding how to approach the drug sessions. The results reported are rather remarkable. Of the 44 problems brought by the subjects, 20 had new avenues opened for further investigation, 1 was a developmental model that received authorization to test the solution, a working model had been completed for 2, 6 had a solution that had been accepted for construction or production, and 10 had partial solutions that were being developed further or being applied in practice. No solution was obtained only for four of the problems. Although lacking detailed specifics as well as a follow-up, this early report does suggest that psychedelics might acutely improve creativity.
> ... Another incidence of psychedelic drug–induced creativity from the scientific community comes from Nobel Prize–winning chemist Dr. Kary Mullis, the inventor of PCR, who is quoted as saying “Would I have invented PCR if I hadn’t taken LSD? I seriously doubt it… I could sit on a DNA molecule and watch the polymers go by. I learnt that partly on psychedelic drugs.”
[1] From section IX. Potential Therapeutic Value for Psychedelics, H. Creativity of David Nichols' 2016 article Psychedelics in Pharmacological Reviews https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4813425/#s43
> 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."...
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.
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
Nice how you had a profound inner experience that you realized was meaningless
How did you handle meaning after that?
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
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.
> 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.
That happened to me as well. Pretty cool effect. I also remember trying to order “human food” off my phone but couldn’t figure out what anything on the app was
Heh, yes I remember something similar with an old Nokia.
Isn't that kinda scary? I mean when some parts of your brains don't work or not work properly?
It being scary is kind of the point. Or rather, if you’re going to do LSD, you need to be in the mindset that 1) this is temporary, and you’ll feel fine tomorrow, and 2) the experience you’re about to have will be extraordinarily novel and impossible to fully describe, even after having experienced it. It’s an intense hallucinogenic, and is the most potent mind altering substance that we know of. It’s also one of the safer ones, if you’ve done your research and aren’t predisposed to a certain category of mental illnesses (schizophrenia, bipolar, anxiety).
Knowing that it’s temporary is the best tether to this world that keeps me from having a bad trip, if it feels like that could happen. As others have said, an LSD trip is going to take you places you might not expect to end up. Meditation can be good preparation leading up to a trip.
LSD is one of those chemicals that gives you a glimpse at what it’s like to process the world with a completely different category of consciousness.
Microdosing (or rather 1/4-1/10th a normal dose) works quite well. You get much of the mental flexibility without serious disorientation and serious physical reaction (jitteriness and nausea, which is also why I avoid shrooms—too physical).
It's also worth noting LSD is quite pleasant on the come down. You're just very comfortable and calm. Typically self-soothing through the angst of the first half of the trip is straightforward. Also a great reason to be in good mental health before hand.... if you're not prepared to face something you've been avoiding or deluding yourself through, LSD is a very, very bad choice.
> (jitteriness and nausea, which is also why I avoid shrooms—too physical
Try psilacetin. It is shrooms without the shroom matter, meaning there is no nausea at all.
a category of consciousness AI cant reach.
It's an interesting thought. I have had a similar thought about AI and consciousness while tripping. But there are many pros and cons that just end up in speculation. Which is interesting but not very productive?
On what basis are you comparing?
Wouldn’t we be able to give AI all kinds of random bytes and code eventually to make them “trip”? Much easier then engineering novel psychedelics
I suppose we could simulate tripping in that fashion but it would seem easier to affect a distributed activation function or other parameter to the simulation.
Not sure why you're asking me.
what basis would you recommend? Given the rate that chatbots engaging in making stuff up you can't just ask them. At least as humans we can take the substance ourselves to verify there's something happening. I think there will always be an insurmountable barrier to deciding if computers can be conscious, at least in our lifetimes. We're not even sure other humans experience similar consciousness.
I didn't make the claim and have no interest in defending or building it.
FWIW I appreciate the epistemic humility.
Nope, but as others have said - you must commit and realize that once you dose you're in for whatever it is. You must assure yourself that this is temporary and will pass. As a matter in fact our lives are much the same, nothing ever lasts forever. Just gotta roll with it.
Anyway, it's not that the brain isn't working properly it's just that the brain is working differently. That's how I see it.
It's only scary if you try to hard to hold on. Relax and float down stream... In the moment, it does not feel like your brain is not working properly. I tend to feel more clearheaded (even when confused) than I am on alcohol.
I like the phrase "on alcohol". Indeed it is also a psychoactive drug.
I am not pro LSD (I don't think I'll ever try this or similar).
But I would say sleep is similar in this regard especially dreams.
Depends on your attitude.
I consider life and reality incredibly, painfully boring.
That's why I LOVE alternate states of mind, even if they are scary.
Nothing excites me more than the prospect of feeling thing and seeing things I have not experienced before.
> I consider life and reality incredibly, painfully boring.
Interesting. The main benefit I've gotten from psychedelics (mostly mushrooms) is that all of life / reality is impossibly miraculous -- even, paradoxically, when it seems dreadfully boring. And also that I've somehow always known this, even when it feels like I've forgotten. It's always right there, just waiting (begging) to be noticed. It's the ultimate cosmic joke.
+1 Insightful
Also, your website (https://www.lifeismiraculous.org) is awesome. Echoes of Bertrand Tolle and Alan Watts. Thanks for publishing it and putting it in your profile!
I like watching videos of how our cell biology works. This makes me realise the spiritual perspective of why everything is miraculous. Clockwork channel is good.
Your Operating System | Eukaryotic Transcription
https://youtu.be/HZAmbbTcQ3M
Phototransduction: How we see photons
https://youtu.be/NjrFe7JHY1o
How hearing works: auditory hair cells
https://youtu.be/b_3AngVJzp8
This framing never made much sense to me. It's incredible to be alive at all of course, but miraculous compared to what? I've found it best in these situations to quietly appreciate rather than trying to reify some ontology for contemplation—which is, after all, a distraction from appreciation itself in the moment, something largely akin to meditation.
The easiest way to experience some of the feelings you get from tripping is, in fact, meditation. The LSD mostly just forces you to be more honest with yourself by smashing barriers you would normally dismantle through allowing your mind to rest.
Granted, I've never experienced anything like eg a blurring of the sense of self with meditation. Theoretically it's possible. Maybe I'm just too content with myself to pursue it.
Indeed, meditation is the best approach I've found as well. It can be seen clearly -- not as an idea, but a direct realization -- precisely why the mind's attempts to pin "this" down are futile. I don't have a better word for that experience than "miraculous."
Excellent response, thank you.
A lot of people are well aware of how much they are deluding themselves (into thinking they are happy and deserve to be so) that they should avoid psychedelics at all costs. It's like their ego knows it's in danger.
> It's always right there, just waiting (begging) to be noticed.
Summary of my conversation with Claude.
# The Universe from Every Point: Scale and Consciousness
Our conversation has revealed two profound conceptual frameworks that offer unique perspectives on reality, consciousness, and our place in the cosmos.
## The Scale Numberline
Imagine standing on the surface of your skin. This boundary serves as "point zero" on a vast bidirectional scale. In one direction stretches all that exists within—cells, molecules, atoms, subatomic particles, quantum fields—extending down to the Planck scale (10^-35 meters). In the opposite direction extends everything outside—our environment, planet, solar system, galaxy, galactic clusters—out to the observable universe (10^26 meters).
What makes this concept particularly compelling is imagining that every point in the universe can serve as its own "zero" on such a scale. Each location, no matter how seemingly insignificant, can be the reference point from which both the infinitesimally small and the immeasurably vast are contemplated. This framework relates to fiber bundles in mathematics, where each point in a base space carries its own associated "fiber"—in this case, a bidirectional scale line.
When we place ourselves on this cosmic scale, we appear to vanish into mathematical insignificance—just a tiny blip on a numberline of inconceivable magnitude. The human experience becomes merely a point when viewing the entire spectrum. Yet paradoxically, we're the observers capable of conceptualizing this entire scale.
## The Observer Gradient Numberline
The second framework involves consciousness and observation. At each point in space-time, we can conceptualize a spectrum of awareness ranging from the most elemental form—the feeling of having "just awakened from the void"—to complete cosmic awareness encompassing all of existence.
This relates to everyday experiences that suddenly strike us as profound. Watching something as simple as a short video can sometimes trigger a sense of freshly emerging into existence, reminiscent of Feynman's observation that "to create an apple pie, you must first invent the universe." Each experience isn't merely happening within the universe but represents the entire cosmic order converging to create that specific configuration of consciousness.
This observer gradient suggests different degrees of integration with reality—from the most basic awareness to complete cosmic comprehension. Like the scale numberline, this framework could be conceptualized as existing at every point in the universe, with each location harboring its own potential spectrum of awareness.
## The Intersection
These two conceptual frameworks share a parallel structure. Both posit that each point in the universe can be the center of its own framework. Both involve spectrums extending in opposite directions from a central reference point. Together, they suggest a universe where every location is simultaneously the center of its own physical scale and its own consciousness gradient.
This perspective resonates with various philosophical traditions while finding mathematical expression in structures like fiber bundles—where each point carries its own unique fiber representing either scales of physical reality or gradients of conscious observation.
These frameworks invite us to reconsider our place in the cosmos—not as insignificant specks, but as unique vantage points from which the entire universe, across all scales and states of awareness, can be accessed and contemplated.
Surely you do not want to experience EVERYTHING. It's better to not exist than to experience all the dark things in life. Although, according to my onthological beliefs it's not possible to not exist and therefore I do fear death, not just the process of dying , but death itself. Because there is some uncertainty there.
> Nothing excites me more than the prospect of feeling thing and seeing things I have not experienced before.
absolutely same
HAving had a similar experience, I have found it somewhat useful.
I've often found that my brain hasn't been working or working properly, and it's good to know that a) that happens, b) it can be transitory and c) even when it feels like it's working, I might still be fooled.
As I grow older, it's been a lot more difficult speak in absolutes.
At the same time, the contrast to observing when my brain actually -does- do something useful has also been useful and I have felt a lot better about leaning into that feeling.
This culture is insane and will gaslight the hell out of you, as will many of its constitutive members, so having some data on what it feels like to vividly hallucinate versus to have a different view on something has been very validating.
I am sure that sounds dumb, and that there are plenty of folks (especially on this social media forum) who would say that I am probably worse off for feeling like I have a better handle on "correct" and "incorrect", but hey, "enjoy the water, boys".
Whose to say my brain works properly to begin with? We live in a collective delusion and any time I can see outside the delusion, sign me up.
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.
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
The 25 in LSD-25 refers to prior efforts by Hoffman to combine lysergic acid with various other organic moieties. https://archive.vn/vaKCX The first 24 are not hallucinogenic.
As I said in my earlier post, there are analogs to LSD with psychedelic effects. However they are much less potent. 2,3-dihydro is roughly 1/7th the potency of LSD. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...
And it is not recent. The paper linked above is from 1964.
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
Yeah but they're quite similar. LSD trips just vary a lot naturally, all kinds of things can happen on them.
Like taking quite a high dose, having no visuals, no interesting thoughts just an endless itch in the throat, that gets progressively worse and worse until it consumes you completely. Haha
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...
> 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.
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
But it is closer to absolute than you make it sound here. There are information theoretic models which are “universal” with respect to a class; that is, they are essentially as good as any in that class, for every individual case you apply - even if different cases are best described by distinct models from that class.
E.g. the KT estimator is, for each individual Bernoulli sequence, as good as the best Bernoulli model for that sequence with at most 1/2 but difference (independent of sequence length)
It is undecidable/uncomputable, and only well defined up to a constant, but you have a “universally universal” model - Kolmogorov complexity. In that sense, entropy IS an absolute.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We could be Boltzmann Brains on drugs.
Or worse.
Presumably the probability of a brain appearing as a disordered psychiatric monster is far higher than the probability of arriving as an Earth-normal tenured cosmologist.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
I didn't realize they rewrite comment timestamps.
Now how much exactly did you take?
> 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.
Interesting. How has it influenced your life, do you think?
Very creative, and spiritual. At first I was making bank, almost $190k a year, but now I am homeless living in a minivan. I am free however, more free than some of the richest people I know, which I think is the best outcome.
It made me realize that most people do not like creative people because we do not reactivity prop up their paradigms.
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.
> "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.
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.
> 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
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!"
plentiful whoas ahead x D
> 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.
it’s a great trick and even some schizophrenic people can use cameras to ground themselves. I trust the computer, and it will never lie to me.
There's something about digital pictures that escapes the visuals.
I dunno about that, everything turns into a wildly animated gif when I’m tripping
i had a friend who told me that on high enough doses every picture becomes like a movie, you can just stare into it and imagine that whole world
I have the opposite problem: i try to watch scripted entertainment and all I see are actors in makeup on a set. Very hard for me to immerse myself when I keep getting distracted by bad wigs.
This happens to me on any amount of cannabis for some reason. It becomes immediately clear in a way I can not shake. It breaks the illusion. It only happens with live action, I can watch animation etc without issue.
You don’t need acid for that. Just imagination. That was my first entertainment as a child.
But LSD and related psychedelics are uniquely able to help one reconnect with that part of themselves.
> You don’t need acid for that. Just imagination. That was my first entertainment as a child.
While I'm on LSD it looks like any picture/art/etc is literally alive. I don't really know how to explain it.
> But LSD and related psychedelics are uniquely able to help one reconnect with that part of themselves.
LSD absolutely helps me reconnect with many parts of myself. I have dissociative identity disorder and certain memories or even certain perspectives of memories can only be recalled when I'm on LSD.
Holy hell that was hilarious. I can totally see that happening:
"Hey, I'm hallucinating that that house is on fire."
"Whoa, me too."
...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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
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.
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 )
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.
I willingly took DOI once.
Also had a pretty awful experience.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
A sitter isn't going to save you from a lifetime of HPPD or visual snow.
It seems likely that HPPD, if it doesn't go away by itself, can be cured by 50-200 hours of practicing focusing on the noise and then trying to consciously move it, changing its colors etc.
There's at least anecdotal evidence of that
https://www.reddit.com/r/CureAphantasia/comments/1cc01zl/why...
Spare me and others the FUD. I tried salvia after years of reading about people's experiences with it.
I wish tech people would stop using the term "FUD". "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt", or "FUD", is how you don't ruin your life in one shot: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=shipscode
> I tried salvia after years of reading about people's experiences with it.
So it's all about you.
> So it's all about you.
No, it really is about everyone else and not forfeiting their chance to experience something new by dissuading them with misinformation or some cautionary tale about an isolated fate that possibly was not at all about salvia.
I didn't bumble into salvia with no information on hand. I went there after reading about it, its effects, potential risks, chemistry, first-hand experiences etc. for years. A lifetime of side effects is not something associated with salvia.
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.
Salvia is the closest thing to witchcraft I have experienced.
After a few incredibly strange experiences, the last time I smoked it the trip came on then it told me "don't ever come back here" and that was it. The whole trip was like 30 seconds. That was almost 30 years ago.
A bad LSD or mushroom trip is scary in a much different way. I was pretty fearless when younger with these things but never wanted to see what that salvia demon thing would do if I went back.
Anything amanita related never sounded much fun to me.
I've never tried Muscimol (don't even know what is), but psilocibin is the only entheogen I'd recommend anybody experience more than just once / casually.
Cannabis is a daily part of my life, for two decades. In the same way I'm "trying to drink less coffee," I'm trying to vape less, too... but everybody should try LSD and/or DMT at least once in their lifetime (but not before becoming comfortable with psilocibin).
I don't know much about Ketamine. I thought it was just what they use to knock you out for surgery.
Ketamine is that but it's not just that. One enantiomer (esketamine) is FDA-approved (as Spravato) for acute suicidality. It's dosed as an intranasal spray.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
I dont like visual only drugs. That is like watching a screensaver for a few hours.
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.
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.
I remember 2C-T7 giving me and my buddy very uncomfortable body load.
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.
Agree - my experience with 2C-B was that it was almost entirely visual (tracers and such), with a very subtle mood lift, akin to very weak MDMA.
2C-E on the other hand sent me to some extremely trippy places. 2C-P is a fascinating one to read about too (though I've never tried it.)
I only ever vaporised 2C-B. usually I would get a full intense trip that lasts about 30 minutes and then very little after effects. A hit was also about $10 at the time (decades ago). Quality was good considering I was at one the top chemical engineering schools in the world.
Did you also get the uncomfortable bodyload that 2C-E is notorious for?
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Love the shroom experience, hate all the yawning and sore jaw after.
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
Calvin Klein is the answer. That’s how people do k recreationally.
That wasn't very helpful...
It’s a riddle
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!
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.
Sure sounds like an anxiety/fear response :)
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.
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".
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.
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/
The slug is misleading: not all psychologists are psychos.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
The datura report vault is an old favorite when I am feeling bad about my life choices late at night.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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?
That's the one.
You can get all kinds of (very questionable) highs from tons of OTC drugs: diphenhydramine (benadryl/zzzquil), dextromethorphan (Robitussin), doxylamine (NyQuil)...
Diphenhydramine/Benadryl is extremely effective if you're looking to be permanently thirsty with a side of terrifying thoughts.
Dextromethorphan is sometimes combined with Paracetamol where an overdose can kill you.
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.
Salvia turns people into zippers and books, sometimes door knobs.
my most uncomfortable salvia experience definitely felt like my whole body was being unzipped and folded back in on itself
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.
It's one of the few I've not tried. Personally I believe all the psychoactive plants are tools with distinct purposes (to be prescribed if you will) - salvia is the one that I'm not sure what it should be used for, I guess it's a good tool to show very literally that everything is everything, that seems to be what it basically does?
Traditionally you chew the leaves and experience a moderate antidepressant effect. Apparently traditional practioners are somewhat appalled at the idea that people would smoke it to trip. I'm not sure if there really is any utility at high doses
The more traditional way to use it is to chew on leaves, which is a far less intense and slower way to use it. Probably the approach you'd take if you wanted to get something useful out of the experience.
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.
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).
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.
Ah yes, thanks, my mistake
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.
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.
10 year old New Yorker article on the couple who runs Erowid
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/the-trip-plann...
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.”
"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.
That seems much more like a limitation of their analysis to me
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.
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...
the recent research on psilocybin therapy is very interesting and so long overdue, i am so glad it's finally happening
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.
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
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?
https://github.com/EGjoni/DRUGS
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 : )
Psychonaut Josie Kins publishes YouTube videos with comparisons and visualizations of various psychedelic experiences: https://youtube.com/@josikinz
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_constant
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
A sober, or an experienced trustworthy, tripsitter is almost a must. A small amount of MDMA (especially if you're not familiar with it) before taking a psychedelic can be helpful as mentioned. Having some sedatives just handy just in case may itself lessen the probability of unpleasant effects.
Micro-dosing is mostly placebo. But a good idea is to start with small doses (check e.g. the "threshold limits" at Psychonaut Wiki), and maybe faster shorter acting substances like 2C-B or mushrooms rather than longer acting like LSD.
Also good to acknowledge that psychedelics just aren't very enjoyable experiences for many, and even for most they are rarely unambiguously good.
Yeah I'm wondering if you can tell like I can't smoke w because I get paranoid/scared of people. I just drink in a social setting
edit: tell as in if you can't handle w, shouldn't do acid/psychedelics ha
Psychedelics aren't necessarily as anxiety/paranoia inducing as weed, and even the effects in general aren't necessarily as intense. Of course it depends on the dosage, the person and the setting, and paranoia from weed most likely correlates with difficult psychedelic experiences.
benzos end LSD trips, so if you are worried about a bad trip, just have a xanax with you when you do it and if you want out, take one and in 30 minutes you will be okay.
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.
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.
You probably did not break through. You'd need a higher dose for that.
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.
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.
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.
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”).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
i met jesus christ he told me slavery happened to test the slaves and it was all cool and god had a fire umbrella
https://plus.maths.org/content/uncoiling-spiral-maths-and-ha... is a classic!
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. ;)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well yes, when it was first studied they called it a "model psychosis" because it gave one temporary psychosis which then wore off.
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.
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.
Giger. Geiger is the counter.
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.
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.
HN is tripping?
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.
Reading this thread, Jesus. TIL: HN has a significant following of drug users. No judgment, y’all do y’all, but it was surprising.
I’d wager almost everyone on HN drinks alcohol regularly.
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.
Thank you, O wise one. Shall you be my guru?
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.
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
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.
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.
Who is the master who makes the grass green?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_is_the_master_that_sees_an...
> which I have to assume that they are just hallucinations
They definitely are, in one way or another ;)