Edit: Whoops, post got a bit bigger than I intended, sorry guys.
Blush said:
I don't know if I even labeled it correctly as hope...but I get tempted every time any of my friends sheds light about their amazing psychedelic experiences. I've tripped on several occasions and I find that my feelings, anxieties, and overall way of being becomes tainted even more. I tripped about 5x and starting out I didn't really do too much, in fact I barely felt anything and felt slightly nervous about my situation (not that I was on drugs, but family situations that were happening during that time). I have to say that my last two trips were more terrible than badly manageable... I just feel like doing psychedelics is just a lost cause for me to enjoy any insightful experiences. Does any feel different about this? Have you ever felt like that and magically enjoyed a spiritual journey?
If I were less cynical and more spiritual/metaphysical, I might say something cheesy like "When you have a trip you don't take the trip you want. You get the trip you need. Or deserve. And some of us have some outstanding smacks upside the he head queued up for delivery."
I might also say something like "Don't go again until you understand the last one and are ready for the next test." But for me, trips have been more work than play. Much more like finals week than spring break.
I could probably say some more interesting things like what I thought during my first experience but I'm afraid of anyone who reads it recalling it and having it trigger a bad trip.
Link_S said:
^Thats alot harder to do than to say
If you've only ever experienced bad trips or difficult experiences then when you start coming up on whatever psychedelic these feelings are going to be amplified because your not sure how to keep your mindset any different, whereas if you've had some good experiences you'd know how to steer the trip in this direction.
I'd suggest candyflipping (MDMA+LSD) to get you used to the positive side of tripping, the chance of a bad trip is greatly reduced with this combo
I might just be talking out of my arse though, i was put off psychedelics in my early use of them by a bad lsd trip, and am too 'scared' or worried about a bad trip to try them again
This is true, but candyflipping worked for me. I did get into a point where I was reminded of my previous horrible experience but the MDMA comeup knocked me out of it before I got stuck. So I would recommend it for anyone experiencing difficulty. Note that since MDMA tends to have a shorter duration than many hallucinogens you may want to only take them once you start noticing the onset of the other drug.
However, even though I know it should not need to be repeated again, I will because in this case it's even more important than usual:
test your goddamn pills in advance! If you don't have
known good pills, hold off until you do! Otherwise your little safety net may turn out to be dental floss, or worse, barbed wire! I cannot emphasize this enough, because in this case it's not just the physical harm you risk with untested pills, but the potential psychological trauma. We have good science and medicine and doctors can usually help if you just have a physical issue like you poisoned yourself. But our understanding of the mind is far more limited, and damage there will be much much harder to treat!
Danashae said:
Then I was convinced that I was stuck in a time loop of about 5 minutes. I was convinced that every time I looked at the clock, the time was further back or exactly the same as the time I had looked at it before, no matter how many times I looked. I kept thinking that I could break myself out of it, and I would keep getting up and going to the bathroom, then I would get back in bed. Then my fiance would walk in, I'd walk past him... wash, rinse, repeat. Somehow in the middle of all this, I wet myself. I got changed, managed to calm down a bit, and was able to stay in bed without feeling stuck in time. You will never understand the terror of feeling that you were going to live the scariest five minutes of your life over and over again, with no way to break out of it. After being able to relax, I was then convinced that I could control the world around me.
With this knowledge, I started to believe there was no reality. I thought I was trapped in a Matrix styled world, where everything was subject to my wants. Since a lot of strange coincidences have happened in my life where I should have been dead, but wasn't, and that somehow I always get what I want, I was convinced that none of my friends were real and neither was my fiance. I would imagine him doing things in my head, and the scary part was that he would go and do them. He would say the things I wanted him to say in my head, and would do the actions I wanted him to. I was trapped in this world for about 4 hours. 4 hours of pure tortured hell.
It may not sound intense, and it may not have been the most visual trip ever... but I would take seeing something I could rationalize wasn't real after wards to something that was familiar being warped around me.
Been there over 16 hours once, which was my first time trying any hallucinogen. It's not a fun place. It's even less fun when each iteration of the loop is slightly altered and all you want to do is get back to how things used to be, or consists of slightly less time. 5 minutes is bad, until you notice it's 4, then 3, then 2, then 1, then you start considering what happens when there's not enough time for you to even realize there's time. The recovery took almost 2 years to the point where the fear didn't sneak up and pounce on me at random anymore.
Dalfir said:
Thought/Time loops are the worst...And crazy psychedelic deja vu.
I agree. Now toss in some understanding of quantum physics, astrophysics, cosmology, chaos theory, information theory and turn the processing power up to 11 so you can run multiple loops in parallel while cross-analyzing them faster than real-time.
If you've had dreams (without drug influences) that are both full-sensory (color vision, sound, smell, taste, tactile/pain) and lucid you're probably a candidate for this kind of thing. If you've had ones that have featured consistent higher order simulation (physics, economics, social dynamics, etc) as well, you almost definitely are.
A bit farther back in the thread someone mentioned finding the night sky relaxing and I said it was the trigger for bad experience. Let me explain that one:
We all have a fear of death, it's programmed into us at the deepest level since it's the point of life to try and survive. Anyone who didn't have this would have died off easily. However, since we are sentient we are capable of contemplating the future and hence our own mortality. For most people this is a rather scary and/or depressing place and most choose to seek comfort in the thought of an afterlife to sooth themselves. I will not belittle that choice, and I cannot prove things are otherwise.
However, most of us don't go around fearing our death every moment, to do so would be pretty horrible. So for much of the time we (especially when we're young) assume we're immortal, that we'll just live forever. Either we'll wind up somewhere else after or somehow something will work out and we'll beat this whole aging/dying thing with cloning or nanotech or uploading or whatever.
Now, this is where the night sky becomes a problem. If you look at the night sky you see stars. For me, at the point in the trip where I was, the stars seemed to zoom closer and split into rainbows of light. For most people, this is just a "woah cool!" effect. But for me, who has read things about the Big Crunch vs the Heat Death of the Universe, it was extremely alarming. Because if the stars were visibly moving closer it would mean the universe was collapsing at a rate which would indicate there were only seconds to minutes left. The rainbow effect would support this by showing evidence of doppler shift, and the speed it was happening at was provided by the feeling of time distortion the drugs caused.
Thus, comes the thought that "even if they conquer death, and we live forever, the universe will not. What then?" And then things went for a ball of shit. Obviously the universe did not end but my memory kinda shorted out and I kept getting deja-vu, which led to the bad time loop place. The time loops started to become a game along the lines of "find the one quantum probability in the exhaustive expression of the Many Worlds Theorem model where you don't die a horrible death this instant. P.S. You can search as fast as you want but your thought speed is finite and this haystack is infinite. You have until the continually accelerating cycles you're in reach a state where time ceases to exist, at which point so will everything else, including you."
Note: Being slapped at this point by someone else who's frightened by your screams can be helpful, since the physical pain is a new element that does not reset on each iteration and thus can be used as proof that an outside world still exists and that the stupid theory is a crock of shit.
