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How have psychedelic trips changed your overall perception of time?

S

Sapphires

Greenlighter
Joined
Apr 30, 2011
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Location
Baltimore, USA
I believe one of the first lessons taught by many drugs is that time does not technically exist and it's easy to both underestimate and overestimate exactly how much time has passed while under the influence of a majority of drugs. This thread is not intended to discuss which drugs give the most time distortion during the experience but rather which drugs have a long lasting or dare I say permanent effect on how people view time.

I've been dwelling on this question personally as it seems that ever since a difficult 2c-i trip my perception of the speed of time has drastically slowed down.

Think of it like this. When you are 9 years old, you have experienced 9 years of life. For the whole year you are 9 years old, your life can be seen as 1/9th of the total.

On the flipside, when you turn 10 years old, that year would then be 1/10th of the total life. This means [ (1 / 9) - (1 / 10) = 0.01 ] a 10 year olds life seems 1% faster.

Up until the point when I took 2c-i, this logic seemed to apply to my life. I always thought to myself how the years seem to fly by and think "it was just yesterday." It's been almost a year since the experience and I can honestly say that each month now feels like a year. Nothing new has really occurred and there's no stress or major changes from previous years. It seems as though my mental clock was simply reset in the process and now I'm starting back over at one and have to see life much slower. This has it's advantages however I really find it more of a nuisance than a positive thing but maybe if I was older I would appreciate it more.

So, who else has experienced this? What drugs caused it and how bad is the perceived difference? What do you think causes this?

Hopefully we'll get some interesting responses!
 
Interesting question. While experiencing time dilation on acid it sometimes really hits home to me how long life is. However, I haven't had strong lasting effects like you describe.

The thing is tho that life is really long on a day by day basis. Its just that our brains don't remember the vast majority of things that happen so looking back it feels like 'time flies'
 
I think people often forget that memory can and probably does distort our perception of how we actually percepted time at any one point in time. Like when your younger, you have less memories stored in the bank so it may actually seem like time has gone by quicker where as later in life you have more memories to fill in the more of the blanks, so life perceptually seems to last longer with each passing year. I always felt like time moved slowly though, I just figured it was how I lived. For me personally, like you time being an invention of man was one of my beginning lessons. Before that time seemed to be important and something that was hinged upon/worried about. Now its simply a unit of measurement nothing more, nothing less. Its relevance in realistic terms has plummeted for me. I don't really worry about time anymore besides something like being at your job and needing to finish something in a certain amount of time. For some reason thinking on it, I rarely seem to notice to much time dilation or distortion anymore, unless i'm getting antsy or super far down the tunnel. Its really been to long since i've gazed at the clock and would have sworn/bet my life that at least 45 minutes had to have passed if not more like an hour or more when only a minute or so has crawled forth. 2c-e/LSD/mescaline/certain 4-subs would distort time really strongly to almost ridiculous points. Often times on 2c-e it would be one of those times I would swear a very large amount of time had passed, I had begun and finished so many thought patterns/etc only to see that little to no time had passed at all(it was always a very strong feeling, I don't think it was ever knowledge). DMT/.DPT/5-MeO-DMT distort time as well but in a different manner since their short lasting(theres a million others but none stand out in my mind as causing extreme dilation)I've never noticed any long lasting effects. For some reason i'd say i've become better at estimating time/changes in it over the years while sober but who knows the reasoning behind that. I've also never thought of an age being some proportion of your life as to me this illogical and not true, at age 9, for all know you might be at 9/10's of your life span because you'll be hit by a car at age 10. I have no idea what causes it, maybe its a delay in reaction or simple change in how your brain actually perceives the passage of time(like your brain literally is confused and believes that 45 minutes passed instead of one). Or maybe your brain is simply bleeding, thats how visuals occur...oh wait that was rod and cone confusion or something along those lines, getting my myths and facts mixed again!8o;)
 
I took 2c-e a couple times this year after almost a decade away from psychedelics. January took ages to end. I think this is good, you only live so long might as well draw it out.

I don't know why that happened, perhaps it is just that I am examining the present more intensely in my day to day life. Also, I've noticed a bit of the old HPPD is back, which I don't mind so much.
 
Shit man, after some serious business went down, since then time is just the current number value in the big pattern haha.
 
Time does technically exist, its scientifically proven however everyone's perception of time is different.
 
Out of all psychedelics DPT has most thoroughly shuffled my perception of time. I wrote a report for Erowid called Taking Back the Second Seconds that details the effects. I've used DPT at high doses a few times since then, and the same experience inevitably recurs, like my mind recognizes the drug and uses it to remind me of the puzzle -- presumably I haven't recognized the full import of the message. DPT at high doses has ostensibly been changed forever for me.
 
If anything psychedelics have helped me understand that my time here is minuscule in the grand scheme of things. For me, as I get older, time seems to move faster and faster. I know this is true for a lot of people regardless of psychedelics.
 
I'm not a good planner to begin with, but if I have done a good bit of ketamine for a while it becomes very hard for me to use an agenda and calendar and get a clear picture in my head of what will be happening when.
My ideas rather just float around in my head still doing that "meta" thing.
 
Times going slow huh? Well pick up a daily pot habit and im sure it will speed up again, in the long run im speaking. I don't even realize that i am 21 now, i know i am 21.. but it doesn't feel like it. The years just went by, i am kind of just here now trying to get by.
 
F1n1shed said:
Times going slow huh? Well pick up a daily pot habit and im sure it will speed up again, in the long run im speaking. I don't even realize that i am 21 now, i know i am 21.. but it doesn't feel like it. The years just went by, i am kind of just here now trying to get by.
Click to expand...

I think a lot of people feel like that regardless of drug use.
 
I thinking there's a theory about time: time appears to to fasten when you don't experience new things...
That's why the life of older people seems to pass faster, when your young, you just experience cool and excithing new things.
 
I have realised with psychs, that time is weird, in the sense that if there's something you're really looking forward to you build it up in your head and you imagine yourself there, and then when you're there it can never match how excited you were.

Once I had this, I just sort of came to the conclusion that time keeps pushing onwards and so when I don't want to be somewhere, I can sort of reassure myself by remembering that it's not forever and has a definite time period, and I can just focus my mental energy on a time I'm actually looking forward to.

That probably made very little sense :P
 
Psychedelics have helped me appreciate the now. When you can live more in the moment, your perception of time does indeed change. This is something that begins in the psychedelic state, but can carry over in to the 'baseline' state after repeated exposure, especially with a conscious effort to cultivate those aspects in to daily life. You are less concerned with what you think is going to happen or should happen next week or next month, and instead are exploring the sensations of what is happening right now. This gives a feeling of time dilation.

This is one of the reasons why music sounds so good on psychedelics, because it brings your mind back to the sonic vibrations happening now, rather than focusing on your anticipation of what you think the next notes are going to be (including any pre-made emotional associations). Songs can seem to take 2 or 3 times as long to go from start to finish as they normally do, because you are so involved in every moment of it.

OrneTTe said:
If anything psychedelics have helped me understand that my time here is minuscule in the grand scheme of things. For me, as I get older, time seems to move faster and faster. I know this is true for a lot of people regardless of psychedelics.
Click to expand...

Actually I feel the opposite. I've come to realize that every moment is forever, and the entire potential of the universe is contained within it. Time is just a perceptual way of seeing the changing of events in the sphere of our existence. It doesn't ever go anywhere or disappear, because we are always here. It just changes with the way we perceive the morphing between events.
 
You live in the now.
I was unable to sustain a past or present. Only for fractional periods, but possible.
I'm tired. It's time for bed.


Drug addicts need to figure out how to turn back the time to get sleep they lost while learning. I'm all for it. *yawn*
 
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