Experiencing multiple selves at once on hallucinogens

[Dancing Chick]

This subject has been a long time fascination of mine.... Over years of reading trip reports and lucid dream journals I've come across a number of mentions of someone having the experience of being in more than one body at once, more than one world, more than one life. I have yet to experience anything like that myself, but I always wonder what it must be like. The brain enthusiast in me is also just very curious in finding out more about how these states work, and under which conditions they appear most commonly....

If I had to guess, I would say that this seems more like a dissociative effect... but I really only can guess because the times I hear about it are so few and far between, but I'm fairly certain I recall hearing about it at least with caapi, salvia, and maybe methoxetamine and DXM? In any case, I would like to know a lot more about it.... If you have had this kind of experience, I would love to hear about it! Can anything be said about what it was like? How it felt, physically, psychologically, emotionally? Like, can you fully feel each body? Is there a separation of consciousness between them? I realize that these experiences will be highly subjective of course, but I'm just wondering about individual cases. And then of course basic questions like what did you take to reach that state?

I would be highly appreciative of anyone who could help me out here!

 

[Xorkoth]

I had an experience on LSD and 2C-B combined once where when I laid down and listened to music with my eyes closed, my consciousness seemed to "split", with the center of my "being circle" being my head, and wedges cut equivalently by rays emanating from that center. Each wedge that was formed I was experiencing as a different person or being. It was a very bizarre and interesting state. I wrote a TR about it:

http://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=55565

 

[Dancing Chick]

I can't even begin to describe how happy it makes me that that happened to you on a combination involving LSD lol. That is a crazy boost for just adding some 2C-B! That's a great report, and it sounds freaking awesome.... I would *love* to have an experience like that!! It's interesting because I can sort of relate to that visual style with LSD.... A few years back I took a couple of hits after a night of like five MDMA tabs and my vision was split into wedges like that. I wasn't tripping hard enough for that kind of thing to happen though, it was mostly just the way the patterns were pulsating for a while, but I really felt like my vision had been shattered or something. It left a little bit of an HPPD imprint for a while too. Hmmmm, that's more interesting to think about now....

This very much makes me want to mix LSD with some phenethylamines.

 

[Xorkoth]

It's a good combo, as is combining a tryptamine with a phenethylamine. As long as you have experience with both individually and you dose responsibly.

 

[Dancing Chick]

I am looking forward to that as well! I have mixed both LSD and 4-AcO-DMT with a phenethylamine, but that phenethylamine was 2C-I. In the future I hope to work with ones that I feel may synergize better, like 2C-E or 2C-P. I will need to try those alone first though.

 

[Xorkoth]

Definitely try 2C-E alone first, as it is a very strong psychedelic. I'd imagine a 2C-E + tryptamine (such as 4-AcO-DMT) trip could be amazing, but it would be screamingly intense also.

 

[Dancing Chick]

Oh yeah, I would want to experience 2C-E just for what it is first anyway.... I'm very much looking forward to it. And I would love a screamingly intense trip, that sounds exactly like what I need right now.

 

[zn13bt]

I've experienced feeling like a different person on dissociatives many times. It starts out with the random thoughts in my head getting slightly more loopy than usual, then as I get deeper into the dissociative hole my thoughts keep going off on more and more tangents until finally I end up convincing myself that I'm a billionaire banana farmer in the Panamanian jungle, or something. Other times it seems like my sense of conscious awareness shrinks down to a tiny point, and it's floating around through a cavern illuminating various cubby holes and crevices which are somehow at the same time entire other personalities and timelines which are being played back for my consideration.

 

[Dancing Chick]

That sounds very fun as well. Just becoming someone else at all is something I've never experienced on any hallucinogen either, though I've wanted to for a long time. Though what I was trying to get at specifically here is being multiple people at the same time... having multiple bodies... carrying on multiple lives at once... that kind of thing. Like what Xorkoth said.

That cubby holes thing sounds very neat.... Is that banana farmer example from a real trip? XD

 

[darkstar51474]

Crazy, I experienced this to an extreme degree on 17mg of 4-aco-met. All at once, my thoughts would diverge into 3 different sides of myself. One was positive, one was negative, and one was the rational neutral. Frankly, the negative side was grotesque and it scared me. But the positive side and rational neutral would calm myself down. This repeated over and over again for a good hour and a half. Definately a crazy psychedelic, not one I would repeat. Ill stick to 4-aco-dmt and 4-ho-mipt

 

[Dancing Chick]

That sounds like a wonderful reason to use that drug again hahaha. That experience sounds incredible! I was already interested in 4-AcO-MET and I'm much more so now.... I've actually heard of people having to deal with multiple thought processes before on mushrooms, though I think they were more like a bunch of random thoughts than constructed before. You've definitely got me intrigued. :D Though I don't think you were trying to lol.

I'm looking forward to exploring 4-AcO-DMT more and 4-HO-MiPT as well. Though I get where you're coming from because those definitely do sound easy on the mind for the most part from what I've heard.

 

[zn13bt]

That sounds very fun as well. Just becoming someone else at all is something I've never experienced on any hallucinogen either, though I've wanted to for a long time. Though what I was trying to get at specifically here is being multiple people at the same time... having multiple bodies... carrying on multiple lives at once... that kind of thing. Like what Xorkoth said.

That cubby holes thing sounds very neat.... Is that banana farmer example from a real trip? XD

Usually I get them happening sequentially, but I have vague memories of high-dose DXM trips where my awareness seemed to be split into several parts each running concurrently, and this somehow corresponded to different parts of the visual field...but it was really abstract and it's hard to remember exactly what was happening. Panamanian bananas was just something I made up (I was coming down from MXE ) but I did get it into my head one time on 3-MeO-PCP that I needed to move to Cairo so that I could investigate the recent Marian apparitions that had happened there. 8(

 

[Xorkoth]

Yeah what you described it what I experienced on the LSD + 2C-B combo, my visual field and my whole essence split into equivalent parts (I had closed eyes but it's still my visual field, just internal visual field), and each was operating independently and simultaneously. It felt very geometrical. Interesting when different peoples' experiences match with psychedelics.

 

[pupnik]

when you get to the point that time stands still or goes backwards, then it does not matter what you think
each thought and feeling persists.
you can easily have contradictory notions
and since they are persisting you may slide into one and then back into the other.
and if they are reactions to each other you will be alternatively both characters - this
can become a conversation.
some of the ideas may seem to come from a chair on the other side of the room or from a painting.
it is freaky if the mouth is moving.
Often it happens from television, you become certain they are talking about you.
In salvia it is called level 5- immaterial, just a bit higher dosage gives amnesia.
you could go in and out of amnesia with a high but just below overdose amount.
that is when the weirdest stuff will keep happening.
as weird as your weirdest dreams

 

[psood0nym]

I have posted a lot about this topic over the years. From a psychological perspective it is perhaps the single most intriguing category of psychedelic effects because, among other things, it suggests that the ego pattern is far more malleable than it seems to us intuitively.

There are numerous ways that psychedelics can enhance or create a sense of alternative or simultaneously existing identities:

The way that is most familiar to our everyday experience involves enhancing the sense that different aspects of ourselves are in dialogue with each other, with one aspect “taking the podium” of our primary awareness at a time. Anybody who's had a debate with themselves while attempting to discern what they believed about a novel topic and used “you” to address the other aspect of themselves that's adopting a counter-perspective is familiar with this. Closely related to this phenomenon, I've had sleep mentations involving such monologues dueling in debate in my mind's ear that were clearly audible, and though they were using my voice my perspective from within the dream was as a passive listener.

Another form of dissociative identity involves the projection of the body outside or beyond itself, presumably a distortion of proprioceptive faculties, which you've experienced if a trip has had you feeling like your nervous system has extended and enervated an external object's shape, or you possess multiple limbs, like Ganesha.

A stronger version of this involves the simultaneous sense of the entire self being in two locations at once. I had a highly disorienting experience after smoking a combination of salvia and 5-MeO-DMT on top of ayahuasca where I saw a concentrated mass of swirling visuals in the corner of the room that I felt animated within, and that I also recognized personally as myself.

Another form involves forgetting one's sober identity and experiencing a new one. I've experienced this in dreams and during drug experiences. It's not really that this alternative identity exists in a full fledged sense, since it has only existed during the time it's being dreamed about or envisioned psychedelically, but it is nevertheless unrecognizable as oneself. I speculate that it involves a shift in the constellation of sense and memory associations that are within a range typically affiliated with our recognized sense of self that is so radical that an alternative identity is rationalized on the fly. I consider a dream where one perceives themselves acting in ways they can't imagine they'd ever actually act under the circumstances a weaker form of this type of ego dissociation.

The strongest sense of alternative identity I've experienced is the simultaneous experience of oneself and a separate alien identity. After smoking salvia I clearly perceived myself getting up from the couch, climbing the stairs and walking through my house. But in doing this I was acting out a narrative from the perspective of a rainbow-banded set of three bird-like beings composed of light connected at their wing tips who were pursing a pool of similarly composed light in the distance that represented a collective they sought to rejoin. This strongest type of dissociative identity contains the other aforementioned types nested within it.