The Big & Dandy Psychedelic Thought Loops Thread

[busted bones]

Reading this fucks me up!

The irony of this post with Johnny Depp from Fear and Loathing as yur avatar is great.

I do find all of this intriguing and do believe alot of thought loops are the mind trying to keep itself from the final level of just letting go. I think people are hard wired to hold onto that sense of self and it freaks out when on the verge of losing it unexpectedly

 

[busted bones]

The only loops i've experienced in my short tripping career were on DMT and N20 (with weed on the comedown of some MDMA)

The DMT loop was on my first time with it, I took perhaps more than i should have as i wanted to breakthrough, which i most certainly did. As i broke though i was pretty damn scared by the intensity and the body buzz.
The visuals consisted of 3 "scenes" that continuously looped into each other and it felt like I (my being/soul/consciousness) was being forced through an infinitely fine mesh. That feeling is what scared me most, it wasnt painful, but very uncomfortable. I now think this was my ego struggling for survival, and it certainly wasnt going down without a fight. At this point i could barely "think with words", if that makes any sense, it was just emotion.
Once i managed to "let go" the visuals and body "feeling" changed immediately and i was in a strange, beautiful, colourful, amorphous landscape for the rest of the trip. I'm definetely keen, though a little nervous, to delve back into dmt space soon.

On nitrous, i get an incremental loop as i call it. Its a thought loop that progresses slightly with each iteration. It feels like each progression steps closer to knowing how the universe (the ENTIRE universe) works, how everything interacts and the encompassing of all knowledge. The only problem is i always seem to come down just before reaching the goal. One interesting thing is that with each balloon i seem to get closer, another step towards enlightenment.
Thats certainly what makes nitrous so addictive for me.

I would be very very careful with the nitrous if I was you, just read this entire trip report because he was having a similar type of feeling and he gets messed up
http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/showthread.php?t=445374

 

[Choronzon333]

Yeah, this happened to me on LSD. It's because you're trying to reach an answer, but everytime you get close to finding it, you get distracted by something. Once that's over with, you remember what you were thinking about and try and find the answer, but get distracted again. After a while, we start to think the same thing is happening over and over, which it is, but not in the way we think. In this sense, we never figure out what it is we were trying to, because we get so caught up on the thought of time repeating itself, thinking time is fixed to playing forward, when it is not.

Uhh this happens to me in normal life... even before i ever tried psychs... of course not to that extent.

 

[nearjat]

Oh man my first acid trip was ALL about loops and the infinite, like every aspect of it. Only one example of the "thought loops" we're talking about though.

• Everything that had "extensions" (my hands, trees) seemed to branch of infinitely
• Our discussions always ended up leading to how something will only loop around infinitely, no matter what the subject.
• The path in which we walked around the nature reserve was almost exactly like the infinity symbol XD Not intentional, I didn't realize this until later.
• The three of us drove ourselves euphorically insane trying to follow the branches of infinite tangents and connections, as they looped back into eachother against our will.

LSD

 

[Mr. White]

I would be very very careful with the nitrous if I was you, just read this entire trip report because he was having a similar type of feeling and he gets messed up
http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/showthread.php?t=445374

i'm not too worried, my nitrous use is a box or two while tripping/coming down of pills, which happens about once a month at max. Everything in moderation

 

[love_sex_desire]

On nitrous, i get an incremental loop as i call it. Its a thought loop that progresses slightly with each iteration. It feels like each progression steps closer to knowing how the universe (the ENTIRE universe) works, how everything interacts and the encompassing of all knowledge. The only problem is i always seem to come down just before reaching the goal. One interesting thing is that with each balloon i seem to get closer, another step towards enlightenment. Thats certainly what makes nitrous so addictive for me.

(Mindset while writing this thread: Just coming off a wonderful night of MDMA, small bumps of ketamine throughout, a few shots of liquor and I just took a rather large 2 whole fucking mg of clonazepam to fall asleep right now)

From my dabbles with nitrous oxide I have noticed there seems to be a theme related to the thought loops I have experienced on LSD, and for me it is on a different level. It's been awhile since I've done nitrous oxide, and your reminder speaks volumes of my memory apparently! So I thank you for reminding me of their context within the psychedelic loop. I, too, have felt as though nitrous was showing me a glimpse of knowing the universe and there have been times where my mind has felt like nitrous oxide is the most "psychedelic" or the most "revealing" drug that my mind had been exposed to. Unfortunately I always came back from the nitrous high feeling as though something were on the tip of my tongue, but I never fully grasped it. I have much more experience with LSD, and therefore I feel as though I have "grasped" what the LSD high has been conveying. Whether this message is the same and different psychedelic are simply different vessels to convey the same message would be interesting to look into.

 

[marakhan]

I had intense thought loops when i smoked salvia. It is hard to explain exactly what happened. But each time i smoke salvia, and i did it a lot, i would start the trip exactly where the last trip had left off.

In front of me i was able to see numerous planes of existence. Usually about 6 but sometimes more and sometimes less. These planes of existence were all microcosms of my existence. If on a particular trip I witnessed 6 planes of existence, any action i took would have to be repeated 6 times. Anything i said, any body movement, and thought would repeat as many times as there were planes of existence.

If i tried to stop these though loops I was breaking the law of salvia land and i would be punished. Everytime i entered salvia land I was stalked by a giant machine. This giant machine would dole out the justice if i didn't follow the rules. The machine was square and circular at the same time and was composed of thousands of spinning scissor blades.

Needless to say the fear of not following the thought loops was intense...so I always did.

 

[Changed]

I can say that I'm in a thought loop right now from mescaline. I feel as if I'm never going to get out.

 

[love_sex_desire]

The brain (perhaps through its serotonergic system) serves as a filtering valve that only allows us to experience the perceptive data that it deems practically important at any given moment.

Another function of the brain's serotonergic system is to work in conjunction with the midbrain to preserve our continuity of perception. When this continuity is questioned because of a loosening of our "perception valves," we begin to experience the world as a seemingly discontinuous thought loop. Perhaps these loops are our brain's last ditch efforts to make the infinite a finite experience, or perhaps we're being given a glimpse into something transcendent.

The full study from which my quotes have been taken may be found here:

http://www.maps.org/research/cluster/psilo-lsd/cns-neuroscience+therapeutics_2008-passie.pdf

believe alot of thought loops are the mind trying to keep itself from the final level of just letting go. I think people are hard wired to hold onto that sense of self and it freaks out when on the verge of losing it unexpectedly

I was revisiting this thread and was reminded of an intense thought loop I experienced on LSD. This experience agrees with the above statements that thought loops "are the brains last ditch effort to make the infinite a finite experience", and "thought loops are the mind trying to keep itself from the final level of just letting go".

This particular thought loop kept looping from a difficult trip to an ecstatic trip. Certain cues would signal the transition back in forth between feeling amazing and feeling anxiety. It seemed like a switch would go off, and these cues (which unfortunately I can't remember) would lead me into the next phase, back and forth. My mind was allowing myself to let go into the beginning of a state of nirvana and ego dissolution, which would transition me to the ecstatic phase, and as my mind would comprehend the implications of experiencing the paradoxical nature of the infinite, my ego would pull me back out.

As my mind began to question what it was beginning to grasp, I would become overwhelm with paranoia and fear through my direct understanding (ironically, yet again!) that the entire framework of our perception of reality is flawed, which would transition me to the phase of anxiety. This seemed to happen indefinitely until I realized that I could control the phase that I was experiencing through wu-wei (action through inaction) and once I realized and fully understood that I could control the loop by letting go, my mind automatically submitted and simply gave in to the ecstatic phase of ego dissolution.

I say (yet again!) because I have experienced profound trips which have ultimately influenced my outlook on reality many times and it seems no matter how long you integrate these experiences it is very difficult to recall exactly how the psychedelics caused these revelations, and when confronted with this massive sensory overload, one is often left unprepared, and the ego tries to resist.

It's very hard, if not impossible to learn or teach how to let go, it seems one must come to their own subjective realization, but once you understand that you ultimately have a choice over positivity or negativity you intuitively submit to the positive, and truly let go.

 

[Jamshyd]

The last memorable thought-loop I had was on Ketamine, not psychedelics. People who read my last K trip report in TR may recognize this as I mentioned it briefly. It was one of those interesting Ketamine experiences where some level of logic is retained while the whole universe is rearranged into something entirely different.

I basically experienced an alternative life, that seemed be pretty small. It comprised of three scenarios... one of "toil" (lots of hard work of some sort that doesn't make sense when I think of it now), one of looking for something or someone in vain, and one of what seems to be respite or death or sleep. This world seems to have lacked any sense of direction. This kept repeating on and on and on, all the while I had some level of inner-dialogue retained. There was a sense of urgency and it wasn't a particularly happy existence... sort of like a cliff-notes of our world.

Basically, I seem to have been thrown randomly into this existence some 10mins after I IMed a decent dose (forgot how much). When this happened, I lost all memory of this life, and the above existence was all that was. I basically spent a lifetime there, which seemed several decades longer than the typical duration of Ketamine .

I eventually snapped back to reality pretty suddenly, as if waking from a dream.

This was one of the most vivid Ketamine experiences I've ever had. In fact, it is one of the five or six times (out of hundreds) that I've ever had semi-concrete visuals on K.

 

[socalBUD]

lol i was caught in a crazy loop before on mushrooms (well actually every time,but this one is the most memorable)
i was literally caught in a 5 ft area inbetween this chair i was sitting in and the front door
for what seemed like hours
i would get up to go to the door
then for some reason i would always end up back in the chair
never making it outside
every time i got up i new what was happening
that i kept getting up and sitting down,getting up and sitting down....and on and on
but i just couldn't stop it
fuckin hillarious when i finally got out of it
but damn

Same exact thing happened to me on an acid trip one time. I was in this dudes basement and he had a big, loud dog that wanted to chew the room to pieces. Anyway, we end up tripping with the dog in the room and the whole night I kept thinking it was never going to end. Time seemed to stretch for eternity and I wasn't even sure the outside world still existed. The whole time I felt like wanting to explore the outside world at some point down the line, but I felt too lazy to get up. The dog was aggravating, knocking our stuff over, and barking at us, but I couldn't bring myself to leave the basement. It felt as though I kept having the same obvious realization over and over: "I'm going to have to leave this basement at some point..." I could only sit in amazement as the acid tickled my brain...

 

[Catalystic]

The only loops i've experienced in my short tripping career were on DMT and N20 (with weed on the comedown of some MDMA)

The DMT loop was on my first time with it, I took perhaps more than i should have as i wanted to breakthrough, which i most certainly did. As i broke though i was pretty damn scared by the intensity and the body buzz.
The visuals consisted of 3 "scenes" that continuously looped into each other and it felt like I (my being/soul/consciousness) was being forced through an infinitely fine mesh. That feeling is what scared me most, it wasnt painful, but very uncomfortable. I now think this was my ego struggling for survival, and it certainly wasnt going down without a fight. At this point i could barely "think with words", if that makes any sense, it was just emotion.
Once i managed to "let go" the visuals and body "feeling" changed immediately and i was in a strange, beautiful, colourful, amorphous landscape for the rest of the trip. I'm definetely keen, though a little nervous, to delve back into dmt space soon.

On nitrous, i get an incremental loop as i call it. Its a thought loop that progresses slightly with each iteration. It feels like each progression steps closer to knowing how the universe (the ENTIRE universe) works, how everything interacts and the encompassing of all knowledge. The only problem is i always seem to come down just before reaching the goal. One interesting thing is that with each balloon i seem to get closer, another step towards enlightenment.
Thats certainly what makes nitrous so addictive for me.

SORRY FOR THE CRAZY BUMP.​

This is exactly what happened to SWIM earlier today. It was a first, and SWIM is very experienced with LSD. However, this night I was taking Methedrone and anhydrous for the first time. I did two giant lines of Methedrone and one small one of Annie. I was feeling really good for a while, until I got home... I took a nitrous hit and that's what started the loop...

Every time I take a nitrous hit (one or two every other day, sometimes with week-long breaks. Just kinda whenever, generally in the shower) I feel like I'm gaining a connection. That is the first word I used to describe it after my first few nitrous hits. This night, I just take one canister and after a few seconds I realize that I understand the connection... That the connection between all the trips is the want to understand what the connection is! Understanding this made me think that I understood... But as you know... It's an infinite loop. Everything you do in your life has been done before or you know is going to happen. I had EXTREME deja-vu and constantly kept going over the same shit, trying to explain how I understood about it all...

I came through some serious personal revelations with this. I started typing what came to my head but could never quite get it to explain right and simplistic. I was overthinking, simply put. I have my logs and my aftermath of explanation, one such as this. I came to a few conclusions and felt a few things:

I felt the need to explain that I understand the loop and how it will keep dragging people back. It's a yearning to understand WHY the loop is infinite.

I could not stop repeating that it was all in an infinite loop. Explaining it in a multitude of ways but also having serious short term memory loss on what was going on but EXCELLENT predictability on what I was going to forget to do next.

Repeated incidents kept happening, like my mouse glitching up and clicking elsewhere on the notepad causing scrambled words when I looked away.

STRONG feeling that it was all an expirement for other parties (anyone near me at that time) to try and figure out HOW we can not piece together the understanding... How we cannot realize that the want to take psychadelics is to get that answer you seem to think you know. I felt monitored like there were supreme beings around.

SWIM wasn't scared at this time, but SWIM KNOWS he was talking crazy. SWIM even said in my head many times that "If people understood that SWIM knew and SWIM tried to explain to them what SWIM understands now they would think I'm crazy. Others CANNOT understand no matter how it is to be explained," and yet SWIM would utter my thoughts out loud.

SWIM has his transcriptions. A full Notepad document, a crazy extract that SWIM doesn't remember copying and pasting into a new document but seems to have mystically created itself with my ultimatum, and a few e-Mails as well.

Everything SWIM explains is a loop, and a lot of things are repeated. However, if you try and follow it things might make a little bit of sense, but highly doubtful.

People experience things differently, and thought patterns are never similar. Like SWIM said some of the things SWIM put in here were just the bad-trip starting to creep out (although I never actually tripped BADLY, just had honest talks with my subconscious {my friend literally talked for 10-15 minutes with me and I SWEAR it was my subconscious...}) and allowing SWIM to transcribe them in attempts to find revelations. When it started wearing off (an hour or two ago) SWIM felt fine and knew that a lot of the things SWIM said about himself were untrue, however deep underlying subconscious thoughts still bubbled.

SWIM will .RAR everything SWIM has transcribed and try and put it in order. I would timestamp but I can only really do estimates so I won't really bother.

I will warn you. You may have thought this post was a long read but my transcriptions are REALLY long and there are a lot of repeats. SWIM will try and keep a touch-up of my aftermath diagnosis.

If you are interested, I recommend you just read the first file. If you are REALLY interested give them ALL a peek. You can see the revelations and conclusions I came up with fairly easily, along with the lack of self-esteem in places.

http://rapidshare.com/files/446521873/Infinite_Loop_Transcriptions.rar

For those who don't want to download, I am also making Pastebin links.

1. Loop - Touched Up
2. Loop - Ultimatum
3. Aftermath Recollection
4. Loop - Original

 

[HeadphonesandLSD]

Good thread, finally got me to register! Hah

I wanted to share a thought loop from my very first experience with any psychedelic.

Myself and five friends acquired a half of ounce of some of the best mushrooms I've ever had the pleasure of taking, I'm pretty sure they were grown by a local guy. At any rate, there were potent enough for us to split evenly and have a good time, and of course, open the mind to this brave new world I was going to be seeing for the first time. I'd done probably two or three years of research on Erowid and other related websites, and had been searching for LSD/mushrooms for nearly as long without any luck (I was a dumb teenagers with no connects for anything but crappy weed at the time).

Anyway, the setting was my friends parent's house. His parents were out of town for the weekend, and the house was located way out in the woods (his drive way was nearly a mile long, and we'd blocked it off with a truck so no one could roll up on us throughout the night xD).

Okay, enough foreplay, here is the first loop I found myself caught in:

For some reason, three or four of us were eating popcorn in the bathroom. Don't ask me why, I can't remember....IIRC I had wondered in there and found them eating a bag of popcorn, I certainly don't remember having any part in making that bag of popcorn.

Anyway, the guy that lived at the house liked to go out on the roof and smoke pot, it was like a past time at his house and I assume he started doing this because his father was a retired state trooper and that's the only way he could get away with it. Anyway, he decides its a good idea to go out on the roof...in the middle of his trip. The rest of us knew this was a bad idea, but he wouldn't listen, so he steps out on the roof, and in my mind it looks like he's stepping off the edge of the world as he walks out into nothingness.

This scared me (understandable), I was in fear of my friends life. So I bolt down the stairs to find my way outside and hopefully talk him down. When I get to the bottom of the stairs I forget why I had gone down. I turn around, get about half way back up, see the bathroom window and remember "Oh shit, my friends on the roof!". Go back down the stairs, forget why I'm down stairs but don't go back up. At some point I remember he's up there and attempt to find my way outside.

Here is the second loop or perhaps an extension of the first. I wasn't _that_ familiar with this house, I'd stayed there a few times as a kid but for some reason I couldn't remember where the front or back door was (even though I was standing right beside one of them). For some reason I decide that the back door must be in the laundry room as I thought I'd past that on the way in hours before.

Well I go in that room, get lost looking for a door that isn't there, forget why I'm in there, go back to the living room, remember my friends on the roof, go back in the laundry room....this process repeats probably 5 or 6 times.

Someone came in the back door and that snapped me out of the loop. I go out the door and find my buddy laying on the roof, hugging on the eve of the house, and when I asked him to come down because "it was tripping me out" his response was "I like it up here".

I finally got him down off the roof after a funny conversation. Another story leads up to this but...about that time another friend wonders around the side of the house holding a rolled blunt in hand. He'd just spent about the last 10 minutes running around the yard because he was "on fire" (he freaked after rolling the blunt because we were poking him, ran out of the house screaming he was on fire and I reckon we all forgot about him for awhile). Anyway, he needed a lighter to light said blunt, my friend on the roof kept telling us there were matches on the porch but we didn't get it. He finally came off the roof to get these matches for us.

A funny end: When he does come down and get those matches, he takes one out to show our friend that we do indeed have fire. My friend takes one look at this unlit match, screams something about begin on fire, and once again runs off to the woods taking the blunt with him. Took us about 30 minutes to track him down and finally get the blunt lit up.

It was a fun night...no one got hurt. But man, I often wonder what would have happened to my buddy if he'd fell off the roof.

 

[Raw Evil]

On nitrous, i get an incremental loop as i call it. Its a thought loop that progresses slightly with each iteration. It feels like each progression steps closer to knowing how the universe (the ENTIRE universe) works, how everything interacts and the encompassing of all knowledge. The only problem is i always seem to come down just before reaching the goal. One interesting thing is that with each balloon i seem to get closer, another step towards enlightenment.
Thats certainly what makes nitrous so addictive for me.

I tried to explain this once. I failed.

Bravo!

 

[Mysterie]

on nitrous one of the memorable thought loops i had once was that I thought my whole life just existed to step one step out of my bed and just repeat that for eternity, and i was just kinda awestruck for like 15 seconds, but for me thats a great experience ^mr white is right

 

[rajh]

High doses definitely cause them I've experienced nearly the exact same thing before a couple times, every time was due to the amount taken, unnecessary amounts when only half or so would have done the job.

 

[Jakeperson]

On nitrous, i get an incremental loop as i call it. Its a thought loop that progresses slightly with each iteration. It feels like each progression steps closer to knowing how the universe (the ENTIRE universe) works, how everything interacts and the encompassing of all knowledge. The only problem is i always seem to come down just before reaching the goal. One interesting thing is that with each balloon i seem to get closer, another step towards enlightenment.
Thats certainly what makes nitrous so addictive for me.

Haha, I get that too. I understood it once but I forgot, was pretttttttyyyyy disappointed.

I havent looked at the universe in that point of view in a while, it does make sense. I've had logarithms mix into the graph of the universe and translate to music.

 

[derejrcar]

i think ive been in a loop on dxm before, while trying to roll a blunt and argue with GF on bbm. what i should have done was put the phone down quickly, and just finish the blunt. but instead i would bbm girl, then remember tht i had to roll the blunt and then i would check my phone again and bbm girl again...haha went on for probably over an hour

 

[derejrcar]

Good thread, finally got me to register! Hah

I wanted to share a thought loop from my very first experience with any psychedelic.

Myself and five friends acquired a half of ounce of some of the best mushrooms I've ever had the pleasure of taking, I'm pretty sure they were grown by a local guy. At any rate, there were potent enough for us to split evenly and have a good time, and of course, open the mind to this brave new world I was going to be seeing for the first time. I'd done probably two or three years of research on Erowid and other related websites, and had been searching for LSD/mushrooms for nearly as long without any luck (I was a dumb teenagers with no connects for anything but crappy weed at the time).

Anyway, the setting was my friends parent's house. His parents were out of town for the weekend, and the house was located way out in the woods (his drive way was nearly a mile long, and we'd blocked it off with a truck so no one could roll up on us throughout the night xD).

Okay, enough foreplay, here is the first loop I found myself caught in:

For some reason, three or four of us were eating popcorn in the bathroom. Don't ask me why, I can't remember....IIRC I had wondered in there and found them eating a bag of popcorn, I certainly don't remember having any part in making that bag of popcorn.

Anyway, the guy that lived at the house liked to go out on the roof and smoke pot, it was like a past time at his house and I assume he started doing this because his father was a retired state trooper and that's the only way he could get away with it. Anyway, he decides its a good idea to go out on the roof...in the middle of his trip. The rest of us knew this was a bad idea, but he wouldn't listen, so he steps out on the roof, and in my mind it looks like he's stepping off the edge of the world as he walks out into nothingness.

This scared me (understandable), I was in fear of my friends life. So I bolt down the stairs to find my way outside and hopefully talk him down. When I get to the bottom of the stairs I forget why I had gone down. I turn around, get about half way back up, see the bathroom window and remember "Oh shit, my friends on the roof!". Go back down the stairs, forget why I'm down stairs but don't go back up. At some point I remember he's up there and attempt to find my way outside.

Here is the second loop or perhaps an extension of the first. I wasn't _that_ familiar with this house, I'd stayed there a few times as a kid but for some reason I couldn't remember where the front or back door was (even though I was standing right beside one of them). For some reason I decide that the back door must be in the laundry room as I thought I'd past that on the way in hours before.

Well I go in that room, get lost looking for a door that isn't there, forget why I'm in there, go back to the living room, remember my friends on the roof, go back in the laundry room....this process repeats probably 5 or 6 times.

Someone came in the back door and that snapped me out of the loop. I go out the door and find my buddy laying on the roof, hugging on the eve of the house, and when I asked him to come down because "it was tripping me out" his response was "I like it up here".

I finally got him down off the roof after a funny conversation. Another story leads up to this but...about that time another friend wonders around the side of the house holding a rolled blunt in hand. He'd just spent about the last 10 minutes running around the yard because he was "on fire" (he freaked after rolling the blunt because we were poking him, ran out of the house screaming he was on fire and I reckon we all forgot about him for awhile). Anyway, he needed a lighter to light said blunt, my friend on the roof kept telling us there were matches on the porch but we didn't get it. He finally came off the roof to get these matches for us.

A funny end: When he does come down and get those matches, he takes one out to show our friend that we do indeed have fire. My friend takes one look at this unlit match, screams something about begin on fire, and once again runs off to the woods taking the blunt with him. Took us about 30 minutes to track him down and finally get the blunt lit up.

It was a fun night...no one got hurt. But man, I often wonder what would have happened to my buddy if he'd fell off the roof.

hahaha after reading this, i realize ive done the same shit like 100 times. i love the last sentence too hahaha

 

[huolesoh]

russian dolls !