What is a LSD Loop?

[derejrcar]

i read people talking about getting into 'loops' and causing a bad trip, what is this loop exactly? how can i avoid getting into a loop while im tripping alone? thanks!

 

[moke]

There different for everybody, but with my experience it is like entering a state of mind where everything loops into an endless state. I've tripped myself into thinking i was insane on lsd and pretty much the way i was comprehending reality all the conversations that were going on connected together to the point i couldn't depict reality, so i was stuck in this loop of never ending incomprehension almost, but at the same time i was genius. It was like having a million piece puzzle and i kept taking one piece of the puzzle after the other and they kept connecting one by one, to the point it drove me crazy cause i didn't understand how i was doing it. Its something you wont understand until you experience. Also acid trips sometimes fade in out like a loop. You'll be in the trip and then back to reality and then the trip will slip back on. Pretty much mindfuck.

 

[MrGrunge]

'Thought Loops' are simply when certain thoughts or emotions seem to repeat on an endless loop. Some people take it as a sign of going insane, which will in turn cause their trip to sour. It is a common feature of psychedelic/dissociative trips, and why people advise others to be psychologically healthy and well-grounded before they undertake a psychedelic experience. They can be avoided or remedied simply by changing your scenery, as, IME, such thought loops are triggered by unconscious environmental stimuli.

 

[Folley]

Thinking the exact same things, for the exact same reasons, over and over again.

I saw the post that made you start this thread, dont worry about it man youll be fine, as long as you can do what you want to do youll have a blast

 

[Black]

i'm thirsty. so i guess i'll drink some water, some nice refreshing and clear water, as clear as the glass of the window i'm looking out of at the moment. this windows seperates us trippers from the strange non-tripping people outside. i wonder how they feel at the moment. what does it feel like to be sober anyway? certainly not how i'm feeling now! but how exactly am i feeling now? i'm thirsty. so i guess i'll drink some water, some nice refreshing and clear water, as clear as the glass of the window i'm looking out of at the moment. this windows seperates us trippers from the strange non-tripping people outside. i wonder how they feel at the moment. what does it feel like to be sober anyway? certainly not how i'm feeling now! but how exactly am i feeling now? i'm thirsty. so i guess i'll drink some water, some nice refreshing and clear water, as clear as the glass of the window i'm looking out of at the moment. this windows seperates us trippers from the strange non-tripping people outside. i wonder how they feel at the moment. what does it feel like to be sober anyway? certainly not how i'm feeling now! but how exactly am i feeling now? ....

that's a pretty harmless (and short) example, but ultimately this results in you never picking up the water bottle until you get out of the loop. for example by some outside stimulus (someone talking, music changing, walking by something interesing) or if you get really thirsty . sometimes these loops also tend to spiral somewhere and you reach a conclusion at some point...

 

[Folley]

^ Good example!

But I find that often things happen in between the different "sections" of the loop

once on 5 hits of acid I was having thought loops that made up one giant thought loop... fuckin crazy man


its almost like waking up, and its yesterday, and your the only one who knows...

 

[jaurk]

So when you're in a loop, do you have a part of your mind where you can think to yourself
"Shit, I've been thinking this a lot, I must be in a loop, craaaap" or something like that.

Or do you not realize it?

How can you get scared if you have a thought loop and it feels normal?
Or do they not feel normal?
When you're in a thought loop do you have to try hard to get outside, change the environment, whatever works.. to get out of it?

 

[Folley]

You dont really notice that it happens till its happened IME

 

[TheAppleCore]

Hmm, there are some very interesting anecdotes in this thread. I've never had a thought loop. I guess I'll consider myself lucky.

 

[sekio]

Thought Loops thread here on BL.

 

[Rawley4491]

Ok finally someone to talk to about this, I'm 23 and I've had a loop experience at least five times now. And the drinking water experience specifically has happened a few times. What's int though is that now when it happens I remember all of the times that it's happ before so the whole thing connects to one trip again and I am able to accept it pretty quickly without freaking out. Also the last time it happened there was a "keyword" that if I kept saying and thinking it and only it I was very happy. It was beard last time lol. Ironic though because thinking and saying only one word is kind of the definition of a loop thought cycle but I guess the point is go with it instead of fearing it and it will get better

 

[tripnnface]

" so i need to get up ; go outside and walk to my car..... so i need to get up; walk outside and go to my car.... ok.. get up.. go outside... walk to my car.. " square 1 on infinite loop
only happened a few times to me super highhh; weed makes it worse for me too
also i have heard single words echo in my head so loud it took me awhile to figure out what was going on lol .

 

[AA357]

Used to get them the first few times I took acid. Now I don't tend to get them nearly as much... I think it's because I'm just so used to the psychedelic mindset.

 

[Cream Gravy?]

I used to hear endless repeats of the weird endings of certain Animal Collective or Beatles songs (like at the end of "A Day in the Life") and that was funky... It would freak me out. Gotta keep distracted. I'd also sometimes experience my thoughts constantly connecting and leading to one another and then becoming the same thoughts over and over again... It's a scary, mystical thing, as others have mentioned.

 

[Goddess Mode]

Thoughts loops are neither inherently bad nor scary, if you are in a comfortable environment and properly prepared for them. They are a part of the trip that should be celebrated, not avoided. Honestly, I think that having a thought loop experience gives one insight into the workings of the human mind in a way that no one who hasn't had such an experience could ever possibly grasp, similarly to seeing psychedelic visuals or having an out-of-body experience for the first time. Coming out of a thought loop, especially the first one ever, is often a mind-blowing experience that you will remember for a very long time. What you really want to do is just not trip somewhere where you can't be completely and utterly open and uninhibited; if you are in a place where you can totally be yourself with no responsibilities or anxieties, your chances of having a bad time on LSD are slim to none, unless you've just got tons of demons repressed inside of you. Always keep that in mind when planning your trips and you should be fine.

One thing I should say though, is be careful about giving yourself access to potentially dangerous drugs if you're also tripping! As in, overdosing from continuously redosing when you don't really need it while looping would not be a good thing. o.o A friend of mine actually on his first ever loop, on LSD, was shifting between going to the bathroom, smoking half a cigarette, and then putting out two lines of coke and railing just one of them. He didn't actually realize that he was looping at all until he came out of the bathroom to find like five or six half cigarettes in the ashtray and five or six lines of coke just out on the table, and by then he was having the speediest and a little later on most paranoid trip of his life. And thankfully it was something as short-acting as coke, so some of it was probably wearing off even by the time he got out of the loop; imagine if it had been meth! So, it is important to note that looping can present a genuine danger if you have access to something which you can use to cause yourself harm if you do it repeatedly without noticing, and so such things should be completely removed from the environment before you dose. However, this kind of precaution should be taken before any trip, and for more reasons than just looping!

For a positive loop example, I'll tell you about one time I (somewhat recklessly) took six hits of LSD along with someone who was taking two hits for their first time with it. I was fairly experienced with it by then, and looping does definitely get less frequent or intense with experience at least with low to moderate doses, but since I was also on a fairly high dose, those psychological effects could still get pretty strong. We started out tripping at a friend's apartment, but he started feeling a little overwhelmed, so we stepped outside for a minute and then decided to head back to his dorm room to chill instead. However, we hadn't actually told the guys we were hanging out with that we were leaving, and I was lucid enough to realize that we had probably left very awkwardly as overwhelmed tripping people often do, so we decided to go back and tell them first. However, by the time we got back to the apartment, we had entirely forgotten this goal and thought we were just walking around to chill out. So, we then decided to go back and hang out in his dorm room instead, but on the walk there, we realized that we had never actually told the guys that we were hanging out with that we were leaving, so we went back to tell them. However, by the time we got there we had forgotten this goal again, and decided that we should probably just go back to his dorm room and chill instead rather than hanging out at this apartment. As we were on the way, for literally no more than half a second, I saw a look of confusion in his eyes. Suddenly I stopped walking, looked back at the path we had walked, and said "Waaaaaait a minute...."

I, having experience with these things already, was instantly freed from the delirium at that moment, but my poor friend, who had never experienced anything even remotely like a loop before, could barely comprehend anything I was saying to him as I tried to explain what was going on. Though, this probably wasn't helped by the fact that my explanations would grow increasingly convoluted as time went by, because I was tripping so hard that I could literally see my explanation in the form of a leaf-shaped fractal sprouting off into a hopelessly large number of irrelevant tangents before my eyes.... But, after a multitude of failed attempts to get him to understand, I did finally get him to solidify in his mind the memory of me saying "I'll explain when you're sober." Which is a good thing, because he still kept asking what was happening anyway sometimes, and my natural response is to start answering... until I started getting all tongue-tied again, and he would say "Oh yeah, when I'm sober!!" However, there did actually come a point during the experience when we were still both tripping pretty hard but he had become lucid enough, and been through the cycle enough, to start to understand the mechanics of a loop, and that's when it got really fun! He was appropriately mind-blown by the whole thing, as was I, because I had NEVER heard of two people looping together. Even when we were both aware of what was going on, we still kept cycling into the same conversations over again, and we got so good at catching it at different points that we felt like we were riding this shared psychological wave together and we were manipulating how developed it would get before finally breaking and dissolving again. It was honestly one of the coolest things I've ever experienced while tripping, and I feel pretty lucky for having been through it. We spent a lot of that experience actually talking about how incredible it would be to ride that wave with a massive crowd of psychonauts....

So yeah, loops are not a bad thing, it all comes down to what you make of them. Just remember what I said about being in a safe and comfortable place and I think you'll find that there is actually quite a bit of good to be found in experiences like loops!

 

[One Thousand Words]

It's something like this.....

 

[Cream Gravy?]

It's something like this.....

I see what you did there, hahahahah

 

[max_freakout]

thought-looping is analagous to the way the Earth looks flat when you are standing right on it, then when you blast-off away from the Earth in a rocket, it starts to look circular. The higher perspective that a rocket gives you enables you to see the earth as round instead of flat.

Taking LSD is like getting into a rocket and blasting off, except that instead of getting a higher perspective on the earth, you get a higher perspective on *time*. When you are sober, time looks like a flat, linear dimension, then when you get the higher perspective that LSD gives you, time begins to look like a circle, and so thinking go round in circles.

 

[DaLambsbread]

mine was like blacks. i had the urge to go get some water so I went to the kitchen and started to walk around aimlessly/sidetracked by the window looking outside and how fucking shiny the cooking pans and water faucet were.. pretty much forgetting what I wanted to do. Realized 5 min later that I wanted water so I got the cup and put it down on the counter once again sidetracked because the colors were changing probably from the clouds and the sun. That led into this and then it led into that which then led into me remembering the water again!! Now I filled the cup up with ice and then my cat homie cruised in the room so i said wassup to the homie and got sidetracked again. You get the picture. took about 40-45 minutes.

 

[LucasLewin]

So when you're in a loop, do you have a part of your mind where you can think to yourself
"Shit, I've been thinking this a lot, I must be in a loop, craaaap" or something like that.

Or do you not realize it?

How can you get scared if you have a thought loop and it feels normal?
Or do they not feel normal?
When you're in a thought loop do you have to try hard to get outside, change the environment, whatever works.. to get out of it?

it happened to me a few days ago and the worst thing was that i had a music video playing on repeat on my tv so at that point a sort of fell into a subconcious state almost like sleep paralysis and the only thing going through my head was this music video and my thoughts that kept repeating everytime. after a couple hours i was in a lot of pain and i remember getting up and walking upstairs and my friend asked me where i was going and i said home for some reason but i wasnt really thinking straight i was tripping nuts. so this whole time i still had the thoughts of being on that fucking couch with that god damn music video. it was almost like sleepwalking except i wasnt sleeping i was stuck in a loop. my friend “woke” me up and i eventually just sat down and started shaking and twitching till i fell asleep. it wasnt so much a bad trip but i just had a ridiculously high dose and i also had nothing else to do or look at so that was probably a factor. but to answer ur question yes and no, when ur as far gone as i was u really cant do anything, but when ur not tripping as hard it can happen and u can easily get out of the loop because its not as strong of a loop i guess idk what else to call it