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The Big & Dandy HPPD Thread

DOHP said:
^ I get blue electric looking pixel / circles that move around in random directions with trails when it is bright outside. Similar?
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I've gotten exactly what you're describing before, but only for like 5 seconds.



I think i have a persistent, but very very faint visual artifact where light on walls or whatever will "pulse" but it's not noticiable unless i'm looking for it.



EDIT: this is what i'm talking about, but for ease of viewing the "dots" have been enlarged significantly


 
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I sometimes have CEVs, but it doesn't happen really often. I have to be really calm for so. I can see and have a partial control on twisting patterns in my field of vision with eyes closed. Also, I sometimes see an eye with my eyes closed. Really special and pleasant to me.


Drug background, around 5-10 LSD trips, 3 shrooms trips, multiple (20+) ketamine trips, over 100 e pills and mdma caps, some 750mg DXM trips, some experiences with salvia, coke, speed, ghb, canabis. Also, various combinaisons of what is listed above. No drug in the past year.
 
psychicpsycho said:
haha. about the whole floaters thing. Ive noticed I have one since I was very young. Long before drugs were ever used by me. It appears one or two semi transparent black dots that I can nearly focus on that follow my vision. Ive always thought of them as like a targeting sight in my eye. Although it doesnt target anything and likes to move all over ;). Anyways im sure some people have more of these naturally but just never notice it until later. I might have more who knows.

A lot of this is due to the nature of psychedelics themselves. Our mind is set up so that our senses are refined to a point where all the uneven or unwanted information is filtered out and everything is refined into a streamlined smooth broadcast. Psychedelics inhibit these filters making those removed features more prominent and noticeable. I see it only natural that once our brain has its filters inhibited enough that it naturally tunes itself to include this new previously unrecognized stream of information into our existing refined broadcast. Making for what we are calling HPPD. I think that a lot of this is a natural process and that the reason it goes away is because our brain is programmed to try and revert itself back to a more filtered state. Hence the reason many people who get this eventually return to normal.
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willow11 said:
Everyone gets it (normal visual static); psychedelic users just pay more attention to it. imo
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quoted for truth.

I do think that HPPD is real but I've had floaters/flashers and other things like visual static and I'd see grid like patterns and have the walls breathe but I know that some of this was caused by stress/lack of sleep, sometimes overuse of stimulants like caffeine, and I agree with the writing that I quoted.

The mind can be trained to see lots of things:
http://www.erowid.org/psychoactives/visuals/visuals.shtml
 
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I used to have problems with this, but 2 years since my last trip (I think, excluding dissociatives) that's not too surprising.

I have occasional flashbacks where things, usually tiles, will jump up and change places. I first saw that on my first shrooms trip, and it happens sometimes when I'm anxious still (not that I was anxious then, actually I was taking a shit)

I had the typical HPPD symptoms that weren't too intrusive after using a lot of 4-ho-dipt, N20, DXM, shrooms, DMT, Cebil and... arg there was another RC I forget.
 
^ Occasional visual disturbances are NOT flashbacks.

Also, if visual disturbances are not intrusive (ie disruptive to your normal life), then it is not (by definition of a disorder) HPPD.

RC-cola? I like Dr. Pepper more!
 
frasierdog said:
I've gotten exactly what you're describing before, but only for like 5 seconds.

I think i have a persistent, but very very faint visual artifact where light on walls or whatever will "pulse" but it's not noticiable unless i'm looking for it.

EDIT: this is what i'm talking about, but for ease of viewing the "dots" have been enlarged significantly
Click to expand...

this may not necessarily be hppd, rather these artifacts are associated with glaucoma, excessive interocular pressure, and they stem from a physical cause rather than a psychological cause. pressure on the photoreceptors causes them to generate signals. if you see dots and streaks along with difficulty with straight lines it is a very good idea to get checked for glaucoma.
pulsations are also indicative of glaucoma, especially if the pulsations are at the same frequency as the heart beat.

I totally agree with willow here. Even these who have never taken hallucinogens have preceptive artifacts, though most people do not notice them.
For example debris in the eye, floaters are extremely common, in fact almost everyone has them, though it may be that those that have taken hallucinogens are more in tune to noticing these. if a non user is subjected to visual sensory deprivation using white light and table tennis balls over the eves, they too see floaters phosphenes and other visual artifacts, fairly rapidly they will also see 'visuals' patterns in the uniform whiteness etc.

the other thing that a lot of people who claim to have HPPD, is the view moving and warping when concentrating on say a dot on the ceiling. however this again is perfectly normal. If a normal individual totally concentrates on a small dot about 1.5-2 metres away on a white background then the dot will appear to disappear and re appear along with the white background appearing to move. this has to do with inhibitory fields in the eye, which essentially make the dot disappear, then any movement of the eye makes it reappear. leading to all sorts of weird effects. the visual system is simply not designed to concentrate intensely on something, it is designed to rapidly scan and pick out useful information from the clutter.

the definition of HPPD leaves much to be desired, as it relies on subjective reporting and people tend not to be able to remember what exactly their perception was before hallucinogen exposure. the more recent EEG studies are much more interesting, as they might provide objective indicators.
HPPD, as far as I can make out is a catch all applied to various visual disturbances which may or may not be beyond the outer limits of normal perception in 'normal' individuals. I guess the important metric is whether the effects disrupt the normal life of the sufferer,
true HPPD is a lot rarer.

as a side note;
those diagnosed as schizophrenics report a lot of visual phenomena that are very close to those reported by HPPD sufferers.
as it is difficult to verbally communicate the visual, the art by sufferers is very revealing. The most famous one is Louis Wain's cat series.

gato3.jpg


http://www.cerebromente.org.br/gallery/gall_leonardo/fig1-a.htm

the really interesting thing is that the peak ages for the emergence of schizophrenia happens to also be the peak time for experimentation with hallucinogens. and given the prevalence of schizophrenia (about one in 200) in any population is about the same whether or not hallucinogens are used.
 
^^ I love those series of cat paintings... chilling and beautiful. Actually the way they develop reminds me of a somewhat sinister version of DMT visuals. Actually, the painting above reminds me greatly of the viosuals I got on DOC during my most immersive trip with it.

I would like to also post a reminder that visual disturbances that linger are NOT HPPD. HPPD is defined as symptoms that interfere with your daily life in a serious way. Those with true HPPD have, IMO, suffered post-traumatic stress disorder. They are seriously disturbed and feel disconnected from reality and completely overwhelmed on a day-to-day basis. Visuals may or may not have anything to do with it. I have a range of persisting visual distortions, particularly in the darkness (I find it hard to tell whether something is there or not because colors start to overwhelm my vision). But I do not consider myself to have HPPD because at worst they're just a slight annoyance.
 
Just as a data point, I have tripped at least 300 times on LSD, LSA, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, most 2C's, and the odd other RC and I do not have HPPD. At most, I might have a little more visual static for a day or two after a trip.

I am always careful to space out my trips (never more than once a week and rarely that often); I have noticed that most of the people who report HPPD have used psychedelics heavily over a short period of time. I have no real proof that the two are related, but better safe than sorry.
 
Hppd?

it all started two summers ago. through out a three month pierod i ingested roughly 400 pills of ecstacy. since then i had noticed littel things that i had not noticed befor such as funny shapes on blank walls along with very faint yet noticable color variances. i'am aware that this in its self is not considered hppd.

i have since then recently found a steady source of acid. i have done it around 15-18 times. i took 7 hits that time around. it was a good trip not to mind blowing but mind blowing enough. ever since that night the very faint colors have become more defined. the shapes are still present but also now i see faces they are not faint or rough out lines of faces they are plain as day in the clouds, in wood grains, on walls. any thing with a pattern in it if looked at for longer than a second starts to move and wave. also as my hand is sitting on a table if i look at it it seems things move ever so slightly under my skin.

none of these things bother me. i was just wondering if it hppd or just residual effect of the acid some how. any insight would be helpfull.
 
It's not HPPD if it's not disruptive to your everyday life.
 
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Merged an HPPD question in here, with a response. Here is a friendly reminder to all to make sure to at LEAST look at the front page to see if there is a topic already in existence before you post a new thread. And better yet, use the seaech engine and/or the Best of PD page. I try to keep the Best of PD page well-updated and complete, so please use it! :X =D ;)
 
^ There's nothing on HPPD though on the essential reading page, perhaps add a link to this thread? It seems long enough too to be big & dandified maybe =D
 
its not because its still in you (chemically).. its because you abused psychedelics.
people have different thresholds to drugs and some people can just keep taking stuff and it won't matter to them

HPPD is only when it effects you so much you cannot live your day to day life. If you are working, or doing something, does this still happen? Can you read a book properly?

Im not going to say HPPD doesn't exist, i think you've just developed a link to your subconscious, maybe you're trying to find something out. I went through 6 months of intense +2 visual/mental state daily after abusing psychedelics, mainly 2c-i. It took a year or so to totally stop.

Maybe its a thought pattern, thats not coming out as a language you understand, because I don't really get much visuals at all anymore, even after tripping, more like just a racing mind and anxiety that took it over.


I reckon stop the drugs, even pot if you smoke that, and if it persists and annoys you. See if something like alcohol or a benzo makes it stop? I found anti psychotics helped when it got too much (Zyprexa), but I rarely used it. But when I did it would stop and I'd be this one-track minded zombie, and then have a really long nap off just 5mg. So apparently that means i wasnt schizophrenic or psychotic :p Because I slept and it didnt just make me more normal/less deluded.

Are you tired when it happens more? When I drift off to sleep or even sleepy I get the most intense sounds and sometimes visuals its not funny, like a full blown dream/trip coming out when im still pretty conscious. It was happening just before and was getting annoying for 2 hours. Hearing voices, yelling, screaming, music that didnt exist etc...

Are you getting enough sleep? Too much sleep? You need a good balance of REM and sleep to have it together.

I think this will slowly pass you. You know what stopped it mostly for me, reading a passage about an inactive drug in Pihkal or Tihkal, about Shulgin's wife tripping hard for a week off this inactive drug, and they called it a spiritual emergency, or something like that. After she heard that a friend had it more much longer, it went away pretty much the next day. After reading that part of the book, and waking up the next day, I wasn't cured, but I thought a lot about it and it started slowly going away, but the next day was a big step..... from seeing 2C-I and Acid like visuals for a good 6 months daily to seeing them much less...
 
its not only when i 'am tired but when i'am tired it seems to increase. i can barly read any more the words become all fuzzy and distorted. for me smoking bud helps some times then other times it increases it. but like i said it doesnt really bother me. however there are times (only once or twice so far) where crazy shit happens and it like what the fuck was that! i have tried finding his books unfourtuanly these stuid book stores wont order it for some reason.
 
^^Those are HPPD-associated symptoms, but the important question is, does it bother you? If it does, my only advice is to stay away from drugs for 6 months to a year. There's no guarantee that it will go away completely, but if you continue taking acid there's a chance the symptoms could further intensify. If it doesn't bother you at all, then no sense in worrying about it, but just don't count on it getting better right in the short term if you're going to keep taking psychedelics.
 
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i noticed some weird visual activity when i first started using E and Mushrooms and LSD when i was 16. just some floaters, nothing serious.
they were probably always there, i just started noticing them more.

im 20 now and i can safely say i dont have HPPD. (thank god)
 
Okay, my theory is youve just trained your brain to go into trances easier. If you do more eye movement and make your self less detachedf from the world do tjhe visuals still consume you ?
 
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