The Blur

[Flickering]

I'd like to describe an unusual phenomenon I've encountered on psychedelics to see if anyone else has experienced it. It usually lasts for a minute or two, and I've had it mildly on LSD at random points early in the trip, fairly strongly on cannabis, and overwhelmingly strong the only time I ever did mushrooms.

The Blur, as I call it, begins with your proprioception starting to get very confused. You start to interpret your body in quite odd, unpleasant, and hard-to-describe ways. Its boundaries become obsolete and you feel you're expanding out of your control beyond your own skin. There is a dissociative sensation of still being loosely connected to the body, but it's hard to keep track of exactly where your limbs are or what they're doing. Leaning forwards, your chest might feel like it's folding inwards forever. Stretching your arms, you feel like your ribcage is expanding outwards exponentially.

Then your thoughts get equally disoriented. Random words pop into your head without meaning, and the other thoughts also lose meaning. This rather dizzying experience gets even more confusing when you find yourself in a sort of dissociated headspace where the lines between your inner world (thoughts, imagined images or sounds) and the outer world merge.

Ultimately, there is no difference between your thoughts, emotions, proprioception and even your vision. It all fuses into a totally incomprehensible Blur!

On acid, I just ride out this effect for the minute or so that it lasts. Its intensity depends on the dose. As for mushrooms, well the first time I took them was my first true psychedelic experience (had three DXM trips before, but that's a dissociative). The Blur hit me very hard and very suddenly, and in the midst of it, I forgot my name, forgot everything about reality, and came back to my senses an unknown amount of time later to find I'd pissed myself. (Yuck.) I spent the next four hours in a state of total confusion and delirium, the worst trip I've ever had. I can't say whether this is just how shrooms affect me, because I've only tried them that once... but shroom season is coming up.

This isn't a "Help-what-do-I-do" thread, I'm really just curious to see if I'm the only one who experiences this thing. Sorry I haven't done the best job of describing it, but it really is hard to convey and I'd probably do better if I wrote about it immediately after experiencing it.

 

[stormcharger]

I got this on dxm once! for like 2 hours I dunno what the fuck happened, I dont even know if my eyes were open or closed or what I did I just know that I was tripping balls

 

[Venrak]

Sounds like the beginnings of ego death.

 

[Flickering]

Ego death came after. I remember looking around the room and having absolutely no idea what the fuck... anything... was. It was the weirdest feeling. The door, the heater, the carpet. I saw them as I always did, and I was at least oriented in three-dimensional space and capable of understanding that I could move through it. But that was it. Nothing else made any sense at all.

I then set about trying to figure it out. Each theory I had on what my bedroom was, was more insane than the last. Eventually I gave up and told myself I'd remember soon. I spent the remaining four hour of the trip reconstructing reality in a gradually less delirious framework until I finally, mercifully, fell asleep.

Interesting you got it on DXM, Stormcharger. How much did you take? I've taken DXM to the third plateau and I also had the experience of not being able to tell if my eyes were open. But that was more like, I couldn't distinguish the fantasy worlds in my head from the real world I was seeing - they both seemed equally false.

 

[Albion]

Sounds like the standard beginning sensations I get on dissociatives like MXE. Pretty sure it is dissociation, which will ultimately lead to ego-death and more, as Venrak said.

 

[Tryptamino]

I get that a lot when i smoke pot, more often than when i take psychedelics, for some reason.

 

[Thorns Have Roses]

it's hard to keep track of exactly where your limbs are or what they're doing

To a really extreme extent? Not like robowalking or drunk messed up coordination, but you have to be extremely deliberate in your actions since controlling limbs is no longer natural/intuitive, and you're liable to forget what you are doing/be overwhelmed and swept into a different thought process while in the midst of a relatively simple action (like picking up a glass or standing up)?

 

[TheAppleCore]

This sounds exactly like high dose DPT / 4-AcO-DPT.

I would describe it as a physical ego-loss:

Basically, before you take the drug, your sober mind is conditioned to make the (erroneous, but useful) assumption that what you *perceive* of the outside world, *is* the outside world. Instead of being aware of the fact that your senses and nervous system are the mediating agent between you and the world, your eyes, ears, nose, tongue, etc. are like perfectly transparent windows into the world. When psychedelics come, and start disrupting the signal flow of sensory perception, it's like dirtying those windows -- suddenly, instead of simply looking *through* them, you can look *at* them. You become aware that, what you previously assumed was your environment, is actually just a bunch of signals in your brain. And hence, what you previously thought was separate from you, IS you -- physical ego-loss.

This physical ego-loss is opposed to the intellectual ego-loss I get on something like DMT or 4-AcO-DMT. There, the boundary dissolution doesn't really come from a blurring of the senses, but more of a conceptual idea of myself as boundless and infinite.

 

[Flickering]

To a really extreme extent? Not like robowalking or drunk messed up coordination, but you have to be extremely deliberate in your actions since controlling limbs is no longer natural/intuitive, and you're liable to forget what you are doing/be overwhelmed and swept into a different thought process while in the midst of a relatively simple action (like picking up a glass or standing up)?

That's putting it lightly. I've robo-walked in the third plateau, that was weird enough. This is more like, the entire concept of 'body' is a swirl of incomprehensible sensations in the back of your mind. As with many psychedelic experiences, it's almost impossible to describe, or in this case even remember very well. I find it isn't so unbearable when I'm sitting down. Then there's only the scrambling of thoughts and senses to deal with. When standing and trying to walk around, your awareness of your physical self becomes absolutely bizarre and, in a way, terrifying.

AppleCore - it's something like that, only, that sounds a lot more ordered and sensical than the experience of it. In the experience, you don't know which way is up. You literally have no idea what "up" is.

Aww, there goes my 666 post count.

 

[Lazyscience]

i take psychedelics just so i can experience "the blur"