Why do we see spiders on Diphenhydramine?

[DubNaut]

back in high-school it wasn't so much spiders, but lightning, and visioning myself doing something then snapping back to me staring at a wall

^ this with salvia, and a car accident concussion, i just dont know man i dont know.

 

[OTGee]

I think it is probably because it is such a wide spread rumour that it is just stuck in peoples heads. I know when I think of DPH I think of spiders just cuse erowid reports and such come to mind. Lots of people are scared of spiders nd spiders are in fact pretty horrible looking things. I think its a combination of the spider rumour and spiders being something that your mind could easily imagine going through your house as there probably is and most people are prone to negativety so they'll think, holy shit im gunna see a spider.

 

[whoseanb]

The best trip stories to be told are without adoubt DPH I(belladonna, Datura) trips.
Hands down these are the most interesting trips and the craziest part about this drug... You can buy it pretty much anywhere.

If it wasn't for the horrible stories about seeing spiders and having ultra desert mouth, I'd love to give it a try. But I'm pretty sure the seeing spiders part is engraved in my brain and that will 100% be the main part of my trip if I took it. And I'm fucking terrified of spiders so theres no way I would take that chance. I'd proably jump off a fucking bridge or something just to snap out of the trip.

But geez the real life hallucinations sound so fucking fasinating man. They really do. It's what I hoped to get off 2c-e and mxe but nope. Felt pretty much nomral just with some visual distortion. DPH pretty much puts you in a lucid dream and boy I want to experience that. (just no all those nasty side effects.)

I pretty much read every DPH story on errowid. And the ones that pop up every blue moon here are even more interesting because you can actually respond and get a response back.
I really wish some smart ass ghetto chemist would stop with the kiddie rcs like all those weak ass 2c-x and other bs drugs and come up with a more tame version of DPH without the evil side effects and I'd probably have my dream drug.

Guess I have to stick to my dreams until then...

 

[<SpaceHead>]

I haven't tripped on diphenhydramine but I have dome dramamine a number of times years ago. The viduals I got at pre-delerium doses were faint red/pink geometric paisley patterns only on skin and white surfaces. Then I would see little bumps moving around under any fabric like there were mice running around under them. I also saw insects and spiders. I don't know what the pink/ red pattern stuff is about but I imagine the mice/ insects phenomena may be due to the fact that people have probably had to ward off insects and other small animals for thousands of years of human evolution. So maybe its one of the more basic visual recognition systems/ models kindof like face recognition. Why it it common to see faces in clouds or other abstract visual things?

It may be of note to look at the bizzare and extremely specific and peculiar effects of the chemical warfare deleriant drug BZ:
http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/bz/bz_effects.shtml

 

[CoReCoNTAX]

Yeah iv seen the spiders too, Fucknows why!?>

 

[CyanideHeart]

For my first time DPH I had no clue what I was in for, I weigh about 120lbs and I took maybe 15-18 50mg I believe. On my bus ride home about 1 /12 - 2 hours after I had taken them I was starting at the floor and it looked like beavis and butthead were dancing around on the floor. The weird part about this was that they were just outlines of what seemed to be red ink on the floor. By the time I had gotten home I was starting to feel something crawling on me, I just wiped it off thinking it was a fly. About 10 minutes later I'm laying in bed and I see the hair on my arm slightly twitch. So I looked closer to find what looked like a crystal daddy long legs crawling on my arm. When I went to go pick it up it laid down flat against my skin. After many attempts to pick it up I finally managed to do so, only to have it slip out from between my fingers and land back on my arm. Freaked out I tried to ignore it, that's when the rest of them came, casually crawling out from under my boxers and shirt like it was any other day for them. My brilliant idea was to rush post my mother and her guest to the bathroom and take a boiling hot shower thinking that it would kill them. Unfortunately no luck there other than a nice relaxing/scalding shower. Fir the rest of my trip I did my best to fall asleep and win in the end.

The weirdest part of my experience ever is the fact that I still feel those spiders crawling over my skin from time to time.

 

[Psyentologist]

Maybe one of these days I will see the point/fun in delirium....as of now it only seemed like a bad practical joke played on the sober mind of one confused subject asking himself what he got into.

Why can't we just stick to the drugz that make sense like THC, LSD, DMT, Shrooms, K, Cocaine, Opiates, and N20 (irony intended)...

 

[webbykevin]

what I find hard to understand is when people who have never ever seen any aztec art or motifs such as eskimos take DMT they get the full aztec visuals. wonder if the spiders thing would happen to someone who had never seen one in real life.

 

[Psyentologist]

what I find hard to understand is when people who have never ever seen any aztec art or motifs such as eskimos take DMT they get the full aztec visuals. wonder if the spiders thing would happen to someone who had never seen one in real life.

I would be amazed if I ever met someone who has not seen a spider IRL.....that would blow my mind more than any drug could...

Its like where in the WORLD could you grow up and NOT see a spider......unless you were raised in the ANTARCTIC, seriously.

Or maybe I just misunderstood your post

 

[alpinegen]

I had quite a nice trip all told, no spiders or creepiness, had a conversation with a pigeon like it was normal, had a run through different people I knew standing at the foot of my bed, right up until I went to talk to them and I had a flash of sobriety and realised they weren't real. No spiders, the sore throat was the worst bit for me, oh and trying to plug my laptop in, only to realise my laptop wasn't there, that got annoying.

 

[red22]

I never had a full on deliriant trip yet but i always wondered how people could see real OEVs because, as far as i know, we don't have an exact photographic memory, do we ? Or maybe anticholinergics (among loads of drugs) exploit more of the brain's potential, in comparison with the limited sober state of consciousness.

Dude, from what i read you need like 700 mgs of DPH to induce the delirium (drugs.com, erowid). You managed to hallucinate on 200-300 mgs? A few days ago i did (first timer) 300 mgs DPH + ganja only to induce sedative effects... then i tried redosing it to 500 mgs but it wasn't enough and it made me fall asleep....

Saaaame here, this has me confused. But what's really weird is that although I've experienced very mild delerium on DPH in the past, all my latest doses have simply felt like a mild, short lasting version of amphetamine (the primary effect being becoming horny and getting penis shrinkage). That's very weird considering in the past I've gotten deleriant and drowsy effects.

In any case, here's some literature that supports the amphetamine effect:

The tropane alkaloids, especially hyoscine (scopolamine) (18), have been used to treat PD since they increase DA activity by antagonizing cholinergic activity at the muscarinic receptors in the striatum. The naturally occurring alkaloids, found in various genera of the Solanaceae, are not used much for this purpose but synthetic analogues e.g. benzatropine (19) are used since they also inhibit DA reuptake, and the resultant increase in DA compensates for the deficiency of DA associated with [Parkinson's Disease].

Selected Topics in the Chemistry of Natural Products (Raphael Ikan, 2008), p. 406

Note: amphetamine is a dopamine releaser.


FYI, diphenhydramine has a connection with Solanaceous chemicals:

Following the description of the structure and activity of scoplamine by Ladenburg, the search for synthetic analogues of and methods for total synthesis of scoplamine and/or atropine in the 1930s and 1940s resulted in the discovery of diphenhydramine, an early antihistamine and the prototype of its chemical subclass of these drugs, and pethidine, the first fully synthetic opioid analgesic, known as Dolatin and Demerol amongst many other trade names.

Pharmacology for Anesthetists 5, John D. Current, M.D., p. 195


I also want to add that the amphetamine effect I experienced included a feeling of being burnt out on the come down, just like amphetamine does. And a worsening of this crash when dosing more to try to feel better (including feeling like I had a fever). Furthermore, something scary happened to me: I fell while walking and experiencing the rebound effects and when I hit the ground I quickly became extremely dizzy, so much so that I thought I was going to wind up in the back of an ambulence, breathing in and out, hanging onto my life. Luckily I immediately went back to normal though....

I also messed with low-moderate doses of datura seeds many times recently and never got the same level of amphetamine effect that DPH produced, although it was there to an extent. On the positive side, datura never made me crash the way DPH did. Datura always produced a delerium-type effect, which was suspiciously absent from some of my DPH trials. And note that I've never experienced the full blow delerium that these substances are notorious for.

I would describe this 'delerium effect' as downright stupid. Memory impairment is also an effect, so you won't even remember much. Using datura in combination with like 4 mg of Klonopin on one occasion resulted in a complete black out. I found myself sitting on the steps of a building with no memory of how I got there. Even later I found that I had lost my sneakers and I have no memory of how that happened, although I remember that I was putting my shoes back on before being asked to leave the steps of the building, so I was obviously taking my shoes off.

I had quite a nice trip all told, no spiders or creepiness, had a conversation with a pigeon like it was normal, had a run through different people I knew standing at the foot of my bed, right up until I went to talk to them and I had a flash of sobriety and realised they weren't real. No spiders, the sore throat was the worst bit for me, oh and trying to plug my laptop in, only to realise my laptop wasn't there, that got annoying.

Yeah, I've had a small taste of what you're describing. I've never seen something as dramatic as a person standing at the foot of my bed, but here's an example of what I've experienced: I was sitting at the counter in my kitchen and my mom was sweeping. When not looking at her, I slipped into a state where she wasn't my mom but rather the cleaning lady and I asked her, 'is my mom coming back soon?' She said, 'I am your mother' and I looked up and snapped out of it and it was like 'whoa, you're really fucked up.' I had already told her that I was experimenting with it for antidepressant reasons. She ended up calling the police on me when it became apparent how fucked up I was and I had to spend hours in the hospital until it wore off. But one thing I wanna emphasize is that one does not just see things like people who aren't there, rather one slips into a dream-like state in which such things can occur, right?

 

[The Shadow Self]

I had the strangest experience on DPH one time;

I had been sneezing a lot, and took a dose, and man, don't you know...my sneezing subsided altogether? The thought crossed my mind that I might never sneeze again, which was both terrifying and exhilarating! No spiders, just a long nap afterwards...

JK I hate that shit, at least for recreational purposes. Between that and DXM, I'd rather not trip at all than endure the sheer discomfort of taking insane amounts of that shit. Throw in some dust-off and a couple of hits of

 

[The Shadow Self]

...salvia for a really nightmarish experience. (Editing would not work, so I added it...)

 

[Brian242]

Wow nice 5yr old thread bump lol! Blast from the past

 

[Sir Ron Pib]

Like smoking phantom cigs I think it's stuck as a meme though spiders obviously hold a lot of symbolism. I friend said why do eye always come up tripping - mostly they don't but I said we relate to eyes so strongly in a primary way it might be why they would come up more often than blocks of cheese for example.

 

[d1nach]

I think it has to do with dry itchy skin. It almost feels like ur being stung your skins so sensitive.