@Buzz Lightbeer, I'm so sorry I missed your messages the other night, I'm having phone troubles right now and didn't have the battery to open them. I didn't see them until later when I turned my phone on to try to get some last minute info out of it and it ended up dying permanently at that point. I tried to get the messages from my laptop client but they didn't transfer over there. You can message me on there again now if you want but I'm still in between phones so I may not get it right away.
I've seen and known a lot of people who have experienced psychosis from psychedelics, and other things. It happened around me so frequently when I was new to tripping that for a long time I just assumed that it was happening to most people most of the time except for self-proclaimed hardheads. It took me a while to realize that most people weren't seeing things as crazy as I was when just hanging out with their friends on psychedelics.
I've seen multiple distinct types of reactions but some recurring themes across a large enough sample size of people tripping on various drugs. The description
@Buzz Lightbeer gives of his psychedelic-induced psychotic experiences reminds me the most of what I often would call the 'word salad' type. Primarily characterized by the completely obvious inability of the psychotic person to strings words together properly and everyone else around them respond with "Uhhhhhh, what?" People in this state often seem to be kind of half delirious and half grounded and they'll respond to things that actually happen and seem to really want to communicate with you but any actual attempts will be fruitless. I had a long-time tripping partner friend who started reacting like this to psychedelics not that long into his tripping career and once it started, it became the norm for his psychedelic experiences. He ended up becoming a big fan of smoking DMT, since it's short-lived and immobilizing, and made him trip very hard. He went through a phase of extracting it for all of his friends and used a lot of it to my knowledge without issue, although I don't know how far he actually ultimately pushed it.
The 'word salad' type seems to be the most purely disorganized from my perspective, and like mentioned seems to be often associated with thought loops and maybe also other complains like temperature dysregulation. The people I've known who experience it tend to lessen their psychedelic use as a result, with possibly good reason. These kinds of trips sometimes threaten to become unexpectedly public as the tripper becomes too focused to remember common social boundaries and/or feels that they need to seek help, which can mean practically anything at the time. One friend I knew once spent a night in a public park thrashing around in a rose bush screaming about demons coming to get him which were actually his other also tripping friends trying to calm him down, and luckily the worst thing that happened to him is he got completely torn up by all the thorns (I saw him the next morning to get this story, it was bad).
In the aforementioned story, another friend of mine was there playing trip sitter, although also tripping himself. There were four people in total: himself, the friend who was eventually screaming about demons, another friend who has shattered into multiple dissociated copies of himself who were all having a conversation with each other, and a final friend who was also confused in some way though I forget how. The "trip sitting" friend said that in his own trip, he perceived himself as playing a game centered around managing the trips of the other three as efficiently as possible, figuring out how to quickly bounce back and forth between them in patterned ways and use only the specific words needed to try to curb each trip back to a better place each revolution. This is an idea that stands out in my own psychotic experiences, the idea that everything around me is part of a game I'm playing, and also that there are signs everywhere that hint at the purposeful and formulaic structure of it.
My suspicion is that psychosis is associated with the mental network for conceiving of and performing a task, that plays out in a way apparently similar to the relation to such functions seen in dreaming. Many of the different types of more psychotic reactions to psychedelics that I've noted appear relatable to it: the 'word salad' type is comparable obviously with respect to the garbled way we speak and rationalize things in dreams, although the fear and hallucinogenic themes seems more alike sleep paralysis although I would also suggest that that counts; the dissociative type mentioned above where people become several different interacting entities can be related to the idea of a single brain producing many interacting dream selves; and playing games is one of the earliest most prominent forms of training the brain in the cognitive realm of conceiving of and performing tasks, with playful behavior in early life being common throughout the animal kingdom, and simulating those situations in your mind during that kind of cognitive operation can also be superficially compared to dreaming. Another aspect common to many different varieties of psychosis which I would relate to dreaming is what I would call an increased propensity for jumping to conclusions, which is accompanied by something I earlier conceived of as something like, switching my behavior from being based on things I feel sure are real to being based on things I feel not sure are not real; it's something that feels to me sort of like an increased willingness to trust my own ideas, but at the same time, what feels like a legitimate fear of what the consequences would be of not acting on those ideas just in case they are real even if I'm less sure that they are than I would typically budget for, which can seemingly lead to me just running with stories in my head, although it feels more emotional and intense while awake than while in a regular dream.
Everyone's own brand of psychosis will probably mix and match multiple qualities from these different types as psychosis is very complex and everyone's brain is different. My own psychotic experiences are highly manic and dissociative but I generally retain the ability to speak coherently which I think frustrates the people around me during my episodes because it's hard to tell that I'm crazy enough to be able to do something about it even when I'm really, really crazy. For me there are specific stories that develop with voices conveying them to me and they are about things like how the entire universe is a game I'm playing with another cosmic entity and there are many themes like witchcraft like with
@Cosmic Charlie's sister. I've had mental health issues for a long time though and I don't need to take psychedelics for this to happen, and I still often do enjoy my psychedelic trips when I do take them, with it only sometimes seemingly triggering my symptoms back out afterwards, but lasting for weeks to months when it does. My biggest episode was definitely psychedelic-related but it came at the end of a period where I was smoking DMT and 5-MeO-DMT analogues in increasingly higher dosages several times a week for two months straight, so it wasn't exactly that surprising.
So I guess the difference is, perhaps, the ability to retain the ability to doubt what you're experiencing? And to be able to control your external behavior enough to not act out disruptively?
Doubt is the solution to psychosis but it's harder to apply than normal. It's like a runaway train of connecting dots.
Hope everyone is doing well.
