Why do bad trips have the best visuals?

[ShiaFuckingLaBeouf]

Classic psychedelics such as LSD and mushrooms usually only result in visual distortions such as flowing, warping, geometrics and kaleidoscope effects, colour enhancement, pattern recognition, and lyllyptan hallucinations (idk if I spelt that right) etc. They tend to take a visual feed of reality, and then alter it in some way that is seemingly purely distortion. However, during bad trips it's a different story. I have seen hallucinations that were totally different to the regular distortions, as during bad trips for some reason your psychology seems to greatly affect the visuals to look more like complete redesigns of reality as opposed to distortions. I'm not talking about seeing unicorns or demons or shit (although I've heard that can happen). What I mean is that people (for me it tends to be just people rather than inanimate objects) take on a form that isn't just a geometric misrepresentation of reality, it seems like an entirely new reality altogether. For example, I've had bad trips where people start looking quite cartoony in shocking ways . Specific examples: a friend's head morphing into a rats head. A girl I don't know started looking like Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad. Another friend turning into an elf. Another friend looking like the Joker, this time. Sometimes they turn into completely different characters or creatures, sometimes they just appear as a mythical alter ego of themselves. For some reason, thjs doesn't always apply to everyone around me. E.g. During a bad trip at a festival once, some of my friends looked like people regularly do on psychedelics, just messed up faces and warping mouths and eyes etc. While other friends had no visual distortions, as in their faces and bodies were totally clear, they just looked different. It looks very very real but at the same time cartoony as hell. It always looks very cool, honestly I'm blown away, even in the depths of nightmarish misery and paranoia of the bad trip , I still have to stop and think to myself "holy shit this is cool". Does anyone else get this kind of hallucinations on a bad trip? Is there any way I can get it to happen in a good trip?

My own theory is that the reason this kind of hallucination occurs during a bad trip is because your mind is in such a state of anxiety that it starts to interfere with the visuals in your chemically potentiated brain. Therefore it requires extreme states of psychological stimulation to achieve it. So my guess is that the only way to achieve such mind blowing visuals without having a bad bad trip, is to have a trip that instead of being extremely terrifying, is extremely euphoric. Like the happiest trip ever. Dont know how to achieve that though lol

 

[Burnt Offerings]

I haven't found that to be the case personally. IME some of the trips with the hardest, most reality-destroying OEVs were also some of the ego death-type trips, where you come out of it just feeling so refreshed!

 

[woodyfence]

I once saw a Komouri Dragon from Yugioh in the ceiling at a friend's place during my first ego death (I took 15 tabs). I had a 4 hour ego death which I also attribute to copious amounts of weed. Great visuals though they are just so difficult to remember.

 

[Solipsis]

It's probably because of the dissociation and delusion or in some cases delirium even (like on high dose 2C-T-7) - the craziest hallucinations come from serious breaks from reality, in delusions like that your consciousness apparently does not try to make what you experience sensible and 'normalized'.
This is also consistent with dissociative drugs being among the strongest potentiators of psychedelics: the rules of sensibility can be bent or broken in the dissociation..

Could psychedelia be thought of as fire?: you need the psychedelic as like fuel / a substrate, but also some dissociation as enabler, like oxygen... a sobering setting can prevent a heavy trip because its so plain and predictable, normality is locked down... but in a new setting that makes you uncertain about a lot of things you are experiencing, there is much more freedom for the mindbending. Dissociation rips you away from whatever setting you are in, and enables the same freedom.

imhe

 

[Muzda Jonxx]

Could it be that it's usually the proper high doses that cause bad trips because it all gets too intense? My one proper bad trip happened years ago. I was growing heap big piles of shrooms at the time. As such, I collected all the tiny 'aborts' that grow, until I had about 60 of them. I was always told 'don't eat the aborts' but it seemed such a waste. So, one evening I ate the lot. 20 minutes later I got an idea of the crazy amount of psylocybin I had ingested. It was just me on my own for the duration, and it was intense to the point of sheer terror. The hallucinations were so real, and there was no way to escape them. It's exhausting just to remember it.

So yeah - for me at least I simply took far too much, and my brain couldn't cope with the jangling disconnect from reality and hyper real imaginings.

Edit - I discovered later on that the way shrooms grow, most of the psylocybin is added to the shroom at the point where it is tiny. Therefore I probably ate the equivalent of 50+ full size cubensis in one go. Worth baring in mind if you're a grower.

 

[Solipsis]

Yes, high doses do seriously increase chances of bad trips but it is not the cause I think... although far too much too fast, that can promote the delusional dissociation - even if that is wrong I feel like a proper explanation mentions the mechanism, not a correlation even if it is a strong one.