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Bad trip probability

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PsychedelicLove

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Jun 11, 2011
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I understand that having a "good trip" depends largely on set and setting, and I am not asking you to magically predict whether I will have a good trip. I just am curious as to what percentage of trips are bad (preferrably on psilocybin mushrooms). Does anyone have any info on this?
 
That's a hard question to answer. It really depends on, well, set and setting. I know some people who have never had bad trips after eating mushrooms dozens of times, and other people who have done mushrooms twice and had one bad trip, which is technically a "50%".

I don't really like the idea of assigning a number or percentage to it, to be honest. :\
 
I think that once you've had one or two horrific psychedelic experiences you learn to handle them a lot better and they just become "difficult". Once you've gone through hell, nothing really scares you anymore.
 
PsychedelicLove said:
I understand that having a "good trip" depends largely on set and setting, and I am not asking you to magically predict whether I will have a good trip. I just am curious as to what percentage of trips are bad (preferrably on psilocybin mushrooms). Does anyone have any info on this?
Click to expand...

It depends 100% on set and setting. There is no predictable rate at which you can have a bad trip. Psychedelics are really all about you, it will depend on where you are at, physically, emotionally, mentally, and if you're one of those...spiritually.
 
From my experience with friends.

I have over 10 friends who have tried shrooms or 4-aco-dmt (which I'm going to count for this purpose as they are very similar). We probably have more than 40 trips on those substances between us. Of those trips 3 were difficult in some way and 1 was bad in the sense that it was intensely dysphoric and incredibly scary.
 
Nobody should give a percentage in this thread. Because it depends more on the person and situation than the compound. Can you give a percentage of how many situations are bad and how many are good? I won't even begin to discuss states of being in different people.

Please check the Psychedelic Index for threads about 'bad trips', there is a lot of info on them. But do not become focused on them please! Keeping that in your mind will greatly increase the chance of getting one, while many trippers really try to evaluate the definition of it. A bad trip is not just something that washes over you without control. Think of it more like a negative spiral that you yourself allow to exist. If you become deeply pessimistic in a trip then it becomes an infinite negative feedback loop until either enough time passes for the drug to become inactive or another thing snaps you out of it and reversing the effect.

So you see, worrying about bad trips is one of the worst things you can do because it destabilizes you and steers you right into a pit. And you might think of yourself as being a victim of being sucked into one but really the one holding you down is yourself. Realize that and set yourself free.
 
It depends on the person. I've taken mushrooms about 10 times, only two of those have been what I would describe as good. Whereas the person I tripped with has never had a bad mushroom trip and tripped with me every time I did. If she were to take LSD it would promise a bad evening for her and a great one for me.

Every person is different.
 
^haha.

As you said OP, set and setting... there are so many variables that those words encompass it would be impossible to calculate.

The gyst of it is this: If you are in a good frame of mind, in a comfortable place, the probability is lower than if you were in a chaotic environment and had troubles on your mind. But even if you can happily say 'check' to both the former things there's no telling what your own subconscious mind will throw at you. But if anyone on BL or any trip reports on the internet has said that an uncomfortable experience hasn't done them some good, I haven't seen it (I'm not reffering to absolute train wreck trips here). Some will say you haven't tripped properly if you haven't faced some nasty feelings once or twice.

There's always another variable which is also unpredictable... situations that may emerge no matter how well prepared you are, for example encounters with authority (whoever that may be) or a friend falling over and fucking up their ankle in an isolated spot etc etc.

Turning your phone off is one way of minimizing outside interference, but everything I've said you'll find around here anyway, multiple times :)
 
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^ Yup. Just get up and change your surroundings. You can come out of any difficult feelings just by starting to walk out of the room, or wherever it is you are at.
 
Maybe that's the reason some people who are tripping very hard can start thinking they are prophets. ;)
 
You can't put a percentage on how good or bad someone's trip is going to be. The trip is based entirely on 3 very important concepts:

Dose
Set and Setting
Experience

All three of these are super important in determining how the trip will go. Dose is important because it is the absolute base for the level of the experience we want. There are basically 4 levels. Shulgin developed them. Set and setting is your mindset at the current time and experience is self explanatory. Anyway I'll copy it in.

PLUS / MINUS (+/-)
The level of effectiveness of a drug that indicates a threshold action. If a higher dosage produces a greater response, then the plus/minus (+/-) was valid. If a higher dosage produces nothing, then this was a false positive.

PLUS ONE (+)
The drug is quite certainly active. The chronology can be determined with some accuracy, but the nature of the drug's effects are not yet apparent.

PLUS TWO (++)
Both the chronology and the nature of the action of a drug are unmistakably apparent. But you still have some choice as to whether you will accept the adventure, or rather just continue with your ordinary day's plans (if you are an experienced researcher, that is). The effects can be allowed a predominant role, or they may be repressed and made secondary to other chosen activities.

PLUS THREE (+++)
Not only are the chronology and the nature of a drug's action quite clear, but ignoring its action is no longer an option. The subject is totally engaged in the experience, for better or worse.

PLUS FOUR (++++)
A rare and precious transcendental state, which has been called a 'peak experience', a 'religious experience,' 'divine transformation,' a 'state of Samadhi' and many other names in other cultures. It is not connected to the +1, +2, and +3 of the measuring of a drug's intensity. It is a state of bliss, a participation mystique, a connectedness with both the interior and exterior universes, which has come about after the ingestion of a psychedelic drug, but which is not necessarily repeatable with a subsequent ingestion of that same drug. If a drug (or technique or process) were ever to be discovered which would consistently produce a plus four experience in all human beings, it is conceivable that it would signal the ultimate evolution, and perhaps the end of, the human experiment.
 
the more you worry about it, the higher the chance is of you having a bad trip.

seriously just relax, eat them, and prepare to have the best time of your life. you're not going to have a bad trip honestly, you may think that while you're sober, but when you start seeing the walls breathing and faces twisting, you'll wonder why you ever thought it could turn out bad.


now of course if you were on mushrooms and all of the sudden your friend had a seizure and slipped on the kitchen table straight into a boiling pot of hot water and then proceeded to smash his face with an axe until he died because of how much he was tripping, THAT would give you a bad trip. Yeah.
 
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