☠ WARNING ☠ Head trauma whilst tripping

[Zana_banana]

Hello all, I had a unique trip recently which I wanted to share. A small group of friends and I like to go wild camping and often we'll take some hallucinogens. This occasion we had a tab of LSD each, ~300ug so fairly moderate. We had a few THC gummies too (in hindsight this was an error!)

The mood was jovial and all was going well. We went for a walk and happily the skies were clear so we stargazed for a while, which led to some visuals. I stepped back to steady myself, but the next thing I knew my head had impacted the ground hard. According to my friend I'd fallen straight back like a plank of wood. A jolt went through my whole body and my first thought was I'd fallen out of my hammock. Then my brain caught up and realized I'd fallen over.

I got right up and felt sober again, my entire nervous system was on fire with jolts of pain regularly searing through my head, neck, back and legs. The strength in my legs quickly returned and my vision cleared, and I didn't feel sick or weak, so I was confident it was a fall and I'd not fainted. It's just that my brain was operating too slowly to react and steady the body or break the fall. However, by behaviour changed: I started becoming very blunt, rude and irritable. I could observe this but was unable to change it. My innermost feelings were unable to be checked by social courtesy or reasoning. When I'd try to think deeply, it was not possible. I felt a physical block in my brain to some cognitive functions. Like the synapse was firing but there was no receiver available. The door was there, I could see it. But it was locked: inaccesable.

These are all signs of concussion and of course brain functionality is affected whilst tripping. I'm a well-experienced psychonaut so I understood this even in the moment. But I couldn't shake the notion that I couldn't assess what could be expected signs, and what could be signs of greater brain injury. This anxiety coloured the rest of the trip. I was quickly exhausted so returned to camp and tucked myself into the hammock. Hammock users will understand that you always end up in the middle of the hammock, so I started worrying that my head would be too low and blood might pool in my head. Then I'd start drifting off and would spring back to consciousness for fear that I might not wake up. So I stayed up for hours, performing cognitive functioning tests, trying to calm myself down and observing the local woodland.

Over the next few days I recovered from the concussion and whole-body pain, but this experience was far from pleasant and I think it'll stay with me for a while. It was an interesting insight into how the brain functions when concussed with a hallucinogenic compound active within. It was a battle between confused observations of behaviour I couldn't control against rationality and presence of mind. This is not abnormal whilst tripping but was a great deal more profound on this occassion. Anyway just wanted to share this experience.

I do not recommend it.

Look after your heads, folks!

 

[Chickens]

My friend took a fall off a 2 story deck head first on LSD and broke a lot of important things. He was in a wheelchair for years.

 

[Esperighanto]

Once on a monstrous amount of pharmahuasca (including redoses, over the span of 6 hours about half a gram of harmaline, a quarter gram of THH, and ~450mg of N,N-DMT) I was repeatedly slipping in my own vomit, landing head first on a tile kitchen floor, getting knocked out from the hit, then waking up and doing it all again. I was yelling for my former friend who was about ten feet away to help me somehow but he just sat there and watched. I figured it out myself, I was asphyxiating on vomit and had to make it to an inhaler or nebulizer fast, and I did, but the concussion was pretty fucking gnarly to say the least. I'm somewhere between 10-15 total concussions so far, so it didn't help.