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Don't Fear the Reaper - Perspective on Bad Trips

artic

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Jan 29, 2009
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I've been recalling some of my "difficult experiences" lately and thinking about how they shaped my life and my perception of what is real, how I connect and interact with people, etc. I've come to the conclusion that a bad trip is usually the result of repressed emotion, or denial of a truth that is difficult to face. I've had several difficult trips on mushrooms. The first one I described for some time as "bad", but looking back on it some years later, I feel like if I had been open to the message that I was being sent I would have saved myself a lot of heart break in the long run. Mostly I understood that the relationship I was in was doomed to failure and that I should let it end, but that I knew I wouldn't, and in a space of a few hours I knew all the pain I would experience over the next year. I completely fell apart. Vomiting, crying, the whole nine yards. After that I was scared away from fungi for a while. It wasn't until everything was said and done and I understood what had happened to me that I accepted my bad trip as something necessary.

It was a couple years later, over a year ago now, that I had my second difficult trip. This one was filled with apocalyptic visions, some of which we all experienced. I was on a pebble beach on the pacific ocean, and it was beautiful at first. Things got strange when the sky started flashing red (only I saw this) and a strange red light shot across the horizon at unnatural speeds (we all saw this). My friends and I sat on the rocks and watched the tide come in. On the way back the hallucinations became more chaotic. Walking along the beach I looked down at my feet, and instead of pebbles and rocks I saw thousands of mangled corpses. I looked at my friend E, and he was like "holy crap, you see that shit?!" pointing at the ground. Later he confirmed that he was seeing the same thing as me. We cut back through a golf course and as we walked I kept on feeling spider webs and bugs crawling on me. I freaked out and took off running, straight through a hedge. Luckily I didn't lose my friends and got home safe. Later, looking back on it, I handled everything a lot better than I handled my first difficult trip, in spite of it being considerably more disturbing.

I think that sometimes we need the bad trips as much, or more, than the good trips. They can be a shock, and difficult to get through. I wouldn't trade my bad trips for good trips, though. I think that they probably have more to teach us. I kinda feel the same way about all experiences in life. The good ones are pleasant, but the bad ones are worth more. I hope this makes sense, wasn't too long, and was somewhat thought provoking.
 
When I think of my "bad" trips, usually the bad moments are only a fraction of the entire trip. I've never spent 10 hours on LSD feeling bad all the time, but I definitely know that being on a psychedelic and not feeling right can be one of the worst feelings in the world and you are scared that you might never feel better again.

I ate two hits of acid around 6:30pm one night with plans to go to a rave around 10:00. I spent 45 minutes at the rave with 3 other trippers and we were having such a bad trip at that point that we called a friend to pick us up. The next day, I realized that out of the entire night, the only part that sucked was the 45 minutes at the rave but the rest of the night was fun!
 
yeah i guess once you see an apocalyptic sky and thousands of mangled corpses you appreciate a cup of tea and a piece of bread alot more...

sounds quite amazing

and i remember getting scared playing zelda with those zombies as a kid! although thinking about it now maybe that game was very psychedelic drug influenced... it was quite surreal

reminds me of the genocide of the nazis and hitler...

keep in mind these kind of events have realistically happened, where there would be lots of mangled corpses; e.g. war and shit, so as terrible as it may seem perhaps it was a kind of life lesson?
 
Bad trips can be terrifyingly enlightening. I haven't really had a bad shroom trip, but my lsd trips have started to feel pretty damn strange. The last one was unbearable. Having a bad trip mentally is one thing, and that can be shattering. But this trip was a bad trip physically. The electric waves going through the body. Ripples going through my achilles tendon. I was completely jittery. At points uncontrollably. I thought i was going to have a seizure, and I thought I was going to have epilepsy after the experience. So yeah it was a bad trip mentally and physically. It really sucks because I can barely remember any of the insane epiphany's i was having, but I literally needed to spit out all of the shit that was on my mind to my girlfriend while I was shaking hardcore. Also the first 4 or so hours of the trip were pure joy, a mixture of laughing and crying at the same time. Just amazing. But after we smoke a few bowls of weed, I think that just made me a little too fucked up and changed the vibe into a bad one. But yeah having that bad trip was intense, but looking back on it, it was a pretty good thing. I've mainly learned that lsd is not my psychedelic of choice.

good vibes yall
 
I've come to the conclusion that a bad trip is usually the result of repressed emotion, or denial of a truth that is difficult to face.

I agree with that 90%

Sometimes though a bad trip is just a bad trip and you can't really pin it to the person but the substance and setting. Like a funky batch of mushies or a quirky research chemical reaction.

I have found it impossible for me to have a bad LSD trip. Just something about the way the substance effects me the more I take, the more positive and comforting of an experience to be honest.

Now I will say the opposite is true with shrooms. Massive doses can lead to a darker more sinister vibe during a trip, which I find extremely fun and enjoyable similar to the way watching a horror movie is enjoyable (they are never that dark though) but yeah high dose shrooms can simply get weird beyond comprehension. Like spending hours convinced you are a dinosaur at a music festival with lots of other dinosaurs that evolved out of the forrest LOL

LSD shoves some kind of beautiful life force and knowledge of the universe into my brain...
Shrooms well I really don't even know what they do. Low doses are as beautiful as LSD though

What's crazy is I always had thought LSD was more powerful than shrooms.

Boy was I wrong once I tried megadosing. 8o

Could just be my particular brain / personality / spirit or whatever though :)
 
^^I agree with you on LSD. I'm much more likely to have a difficult trip on mushrooms. I've never taken more than 4 hits at once, but I've heard that once you eat more than about 10 you don't really trip much harder, just longer. I've never taken "heroic" doses of either, but I'd be more inclined to try it with LSD. I find mushrooms to be very chaotic and unpredictable, but that's kinda what I like about them. I typically take what would be considered by most to be a low dose, but I've had some crazy experiences on low dose mushrooms. The time I saw the sky flash and all the mangled bodies and shit was just a single cap. I kinda like the risk in mushrooms - having no idea where a trip is going to take me.
 
Bad trips can be terrifyingly enlightening.

Indeed.

I've never had a "bad" trip.. I've had a terrifying trip that completely changed my world view though. I certainly don't regret it.

I think "bad" trips are more people who just trip to laugh and see colors and shit and don't get what they expected.
 
I've had trips that were dark and difficult at times but looking back they were enjoyable at parts, a learning experience, and just what I needed at the time.
 
I 'overdosed' on shrooms and that lead to a very bad trip. I was drinking the tea, started feeling not so good, but kept drinking it anyways. Kind of like if you're sipping whiskey and you start to feel you should stop... but I kept going. I'm not going into too many details, but I thought I was caught in a Dresden-esque firebombing raid and I could see everything around me engulfed in flames, and I saw my legs melting into the pavement. I also felt a gunshot wound in my chest, I could put my fingers inside the hole and see the blood. Among other things, I thought my genitals were mutilated, I thought that I had killed my friend I was with, and I also thought I killed my neighbour's cat. I saw the blood on my hands for fucks sake.

Some people ended me taking me to the hospital, and even though they were people I trusted, I saw their facial expressions warning me not to cooperate with the doctors. I thought they were taking me to the hospital to be euthanized. Once they had me in the hospital bed, covered me with blankets and hooked me up to the IV, I realized that it was too late and I was going to die and I was powerless to change anything. At that moment, I accepted that my death was inevitable and felt at peace. When I began to come down, I realized how silly and ridiculous the situation was and felt quite embarrassed. I couldn't help but laugh at it and tell the nurse what a farcical situation it was.

Needless to say, it was quite the emotional experience. It used to bother me to think about it, but now it's been so long it doesn't bother me.
 
Yeah, rough mushroom trips can be VERY vivid. During the first experience I mentioned in the initial post I remember at one point moving my tongue along my gum-line and feeling my teeth fall out one by one. I also remember my hands being covered in blood. Very real at the time.
 
The only times (6 or 7 times) I have had a "bad trip" -not my favorite term more so learned about myself was on shrooms.
And everytime I do them it opens up my eyes onto the the fact that what i do affects everyone around me and thats what shaped me into who I am today. I try and make everyone around me as happy as possible, sometimes to the point where I help other people more than myself.
 
I had a really terrible awful trip from 3 hits of LSD, 25 mgs or so of 2C-D, and a shitload of ketamine.

It really scared the living shit out of me.

But after it was over I had a totally new respect for the psychedelic experience. I haven't tripped much since then compared to what my tripping habits were like up until that point. Either way, that trip was fucking nuts, and I hated going through it, but in retrospect, I'm glad to have it under my belt.
 
The only times (6 or 7 times) I have had a "bad trip" -not my favorite term more so learned about myself was on shrooms.
And everytime I do them it opens up my eyes onto the the fact that what i do affects everyone around me and thats what shaped me into who I am today. I try and make everyone around me as happy as possible, sometimes to the point where I help other people more than myself.

I can relate. Sometimes I have a hard time keeping my mouth shut on acid, and I've said some things to people that I regretted. Of course, immediately after saying or doing something awkward I realize that its fucked up and then I feel REALLY bad about it for a while. I never really got stuck in a mental loop over it or anything, but it definitely made me think more about my actions toward others more once I came down.
 
ive had a very bad trip once and ended up looping for awhile. it drove me nuts. im pretty sure it gave me mild PTSD. however it taught me that doing everything over again in life is insane and pointless, if i wanna go anywhere and progress i need to make some changes in my life. it made me realize im stuck in a rut, and so are a lot of people
 
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