Seeing bugs when tripping

[huttdjm]

My friend (someone who has decent experience with a range of substances and has basically never had a bad time on anything) has said that when she tripped acid a couple of weeks ago, after smoking a couple of joints she started to have a really bad time and was seeing bugs everywhere - crawling over her, emerging from patterns in furniture, etc. and then decided to abort her trip with some Xanax.

Since this experience, she has used ketamine a few times. Each time she has, she has seen bugs again - sometimes not even in such a scary way, often more like 'for fuck's sake, here they are again'. She and I were wondering how she might go about remedying this for the future as she is now quite anxious about tripping again.

Thanks!

 

[Clocktower]

Take a break, and don't smoke weed while tripping.

 

[Solipsis]

Hi welcome to the forum

Maaybe by aborting the trip with xanax, it got sort of paused with the bugs - meaning it is an unresolved fixation.

And with psychedelics and dissociatives, subconscious material surfaces like your fixations. I agree with cutting out the weed with tripping until you got a handle on things and know what you're doing... maybe lower the dose and work through the experience instead of trying to escape and go around it. Treat it like a phobia I guess: confront and fight your fear, the bugs themselves but also it's just your mind conjuring experience to begin with.

Of course at a high enough dose this is easier said than done, for anyone.

 

[mindseye888]

I've only seen bugs while high on datura and a-pvp.
From reading bluelight threads, diphenhydramine (I think that's how its spelled) is a common chemical for seeing not only bugs but specifically spiders, only know this from other bluelighters but, not personal experience.

 

[Kaleida]

Yeah, spiders are incredibly common on diphenhydramine. Also scorpions and crabs for me.

They're not standard for me on psychedelics though unless I expect them to be there, like if I'm walking around in nature at night or if I suddenly feel like there's a bug crawling on me for some reason. For that reason, I would agree with what Solipsis said about fixation. If I truly expected to see bugs everywhere whenever I tripped I probably really would.

A break might help, also just acknowledging that there's nothing to fear and not giving it power. Just don't look for the bugs at all, focus on something else until it becomes natural again.

Hope it all gets worked out somehow either way.

 

[Solipsis]

I think seeing spiders like on deliriants may very well be akin to the ones I predict you will see on sleep deprivation eventually or stim psychosis. That still doesn't explain anything, but I think it is a different mental mode of 'filling in' missing information to create a stream of consciousness. With serotonergics, the higher brain is mostly affected as in: reflecting, sensorically, how you feel or things about things. There is agonism though, not antagonism which would dull the shit out of how you reflect on everything (antipsychotics etc).
With dissociatives and deliriants a trip is produced in different ways, I think there are more fundamental functions distorted which by antagonism, messing with the more cognitive "facts" you are drawing from, taking them away. Both glutamate and choline are involved in cognitive function.

Maybe the explanation for seeing bugs is that there is an evolutionary advantage to seeing spiders and bugs that freak you out, when for some reason you are getting gaps in your mind. Which are filled in by the brain with the bugs. If you at least are made vigilant about the gaps that might be better for your survival than when they would be filled in with comforting things or just bland evened out blurs. Until of course the point where your freakouts get you in trouble and draw attention to predators - maybe you'd be as good as dead at that point anyway in prehistoric yesteryore.

Anyway, spiders are not that common with dissociative trips but I guess there is some common ground between dissociatives and deliriants, what they do essentially.