Time distortion

[MattMVS7]

When people have psychedelic trips or near death experiences, they sometimes claim that their experience seemed to last hours, days, months, years, or even forever. There is a difference between this being a literal amount of subjective time that has passed as opposed to it just seeming that way. For example, if I was very bored and I said that standing in line felt like hours when it was really only a few minutes, then there is a big difference between me just feeling like it lasted for hours as opposed it actually lasting for hours from my subjective point of view.

Standing there for hours and experiencing this passage of time would be very different than standing there for a few minutes and feeling that hours have passed. So I am wondering when it comes to trips and ndes, if the elongated periods of time that people who have these experiences describe are simply being attributed to the latter time description, or if it literally was like hours, months, days, years, or forever.

Edit: What I just simply wish to ask is do I have any reason to worry about the time dilation period I would experience during a trip or nde regardless of how long the amount of time is? Would the amount of time become unbearable to me, drive me insane, etc. just like how it would here in my normal waking reality if it were many centuries or millenniums? Especially if all, most, or a significant fraction of that time is spent undergoing torment and misery during a horrible trip or nde. Or is the amount of time, regardless of how long, not a contributing factor at all in a person's boredom, misery, torment, insanity, etc. during a trip/nde?

 

[pupnik]

The sense of time passing depends on support from all of your senses and mental processes.

everything has to be operating is good form for the timng circuits in the cerebellum, and all the clear sensory evidence of time passing to mesh into an experience of ordinary time.

however when stoned or emotional the sense of time passing is disrupted. depending on the intensity of stoned-ness or emotional enhancement, moments of experience last longer than usual - for instance a frame of vision will fade in about 1/15th of a second normally but will last longer while stoned. (note that film is 24 frames per second and seems seemless, and television is between 15 and 60 fields per second depending on implementation.)

anyway when that 1/15th of a second stretches out to 2 and 3/15ths of a second we get a lot of visual enhancement, and when it is stretched to 7 or 8 15ths of a second we see trails when we wave our hand before our eyes.

but get this, not only vision is affected, all the senses and mental events are affected and the sense of time passing gets wonky.

moments that have not faded stack up, and all are occurring equally in the mind - this enables deja vu, and the perception that time has stopped or is going backwards.

when the overlap is as much as 3 seconds, we begin to have the perception of more than one self in our self, i.e complete personality or attitude formations can spawn of and seem to operate semi-independently.

 

[MattMVS7]

Alright, you have explained the mechanisms describing how time can become faster or slower to us, but my question is to what extent? If a person who had a trip or nde claimed that the experience lasted days, months, or years to him/her, then would that be an unrealistic amount of time? Would the person just simply be tricked into feeling that it lasted that long? Or would it literally last that long to him/her?

A few hours I could definitely agree would be a realistic amount of time for a person to claim to have experienced during a trip or nde. But I am not so sure about days, months, or years.

 

[pupnik]

with increased dosage, the time dilation extends - but there is a limit that can be intelligible which is followed by blackout.
between blackout and extreme time effects (which are about time seeming to stop, go backwards, or go slow or fast or loop)
there is an amazing thing called delirium.

in delirium (what you experience may have nothing to do with the external real world because fully encompassing hallucination is happening.) you may experience a day or a week or a year during the episode (which may be a few minutes or hours).

Also, since hallucination or delirium is made of dream material - the rules of dreaming may apply. and this includes radical jump cuts and still frames for which it takes almost no time to generate a large series of scenes - this way you can pack a year or a lifetime into a very short parcel of time like an hour or maybe 30 seconds.

so yes, you may have a realistic seeming experience that has extreme duration

 

[MattMVS7]

I am very worried about a horrible nde. I don't plan on taking any drugs, but just worry about having a hellish or horrible nde. If there is extreme time dilation during the nde and it seems to be like a series of horrible experiences that last for years, many lifetimes, or even forever, then something like this is simply inconceivable to be fine with, cope with, and be alright with regardless of what therapeutic methods I implement.


It would be like an eternal hell. Unless others here have had this same experience during their trips and yet they somehow managed to live through it all just fine. Otherwise, I don't see how it is even possible for anyone here to be fine taking psychedelics since these drugs always pose the risk of having such a horrible trip that would seem to last years, centuries, or even forever. In my opinion, you would have to be completely out of your mind to be fine taking such a risk.

 

[morphine-dreams]

Time distortion isn't necessarily as scary as it sounds and can happen while perfectly sober Ever heard the phrase, "time flies when you're having fun"? That's because it's all relative. I have experienced pretty intense degrees of time warping while tripping and only during one bad and VERY intense mushroom trip did it bother me (every minute felt like 30+, though at one point time simply ceased to exist). The crazy thing is, once you come back to, it's hard to imagine what time dilation felt like, even though you've just experienced it. That's why people tell you to just "let go", don't worry about time and just enjoy the ride. When you have a good trip, it can simultaneously feel like you've experienced an entire lifetime and like the whole thing lasted for five minutes. Think of dreams-they feel like they can go on for days or even longer, but most actually last several seconds, up to a few minutes. Once you wake up, the time warping no longer matters, because you're experiencing time as you normally would. You would have to take an insanely strong dose of an already insanely strong psychedelic to really feel trapped in eternity, although this did happen during my first psychedelic experience lol! I got through it ok though High dose LSD let me chronologically re-live portions of my life in what was actually just 8-10 hours. A standard dose of a typical psychedelic, say 1 tab of acid, wouldn't cause that kind of experience.

Otherwise, I don't see how it is even possible for anyone here to be fine taking psychedelics since these drugs always pose the risk of having such a horrible trip that would seem to last years, centuries, or even forever. In my opinion, you would have to be completely out of your mind to be fine taking such a risk.

Medically, I may not qualify as insane, but it takes a special kind of person to chase intense experiences like that. It's not for everyone, psychedelics are neither purely recreational nor purely therapeutic drugs, and going into them with that mindset is asking for trouble imo. A trip is just that, a trip. You have to just let go and let it take you and then the magic becomes apparent

 

[MattMVS7]

I got a response from another poster who said:

When you're doing psychedelics it's not like time just feels stretched out or condensed TIME no longer makes sense and no longer works the same way. It's impossible to explain and wrap your head around even if you've gone through it first hand. "Time" is completely different in these states so I guess to simply say it's "distorted" would a major understatement because really nothing about time is the same to how it usually is in that moment. For example 12 hours of tripping on LSD without any time distortion might feel ten times more strenuous and exhausting than a 3 hour trip on mushrooms that feels like a few weeks. You just can't explain it, it's like an eternity goes by but you have no problem with it.
Like I can experience multiple eternities on mushrooms in one single night and be completely content about it both while it's happening and after it's happened but god forbid if an LSD trip (with no time distortion) lasts 1 or 2 hours too long I feel completely drained and out of it and am essentially begging for it to end because my sanity feels tired. It's something you really can't explain, you experience major dilations of time but it is not accompanied by the same attitudes and feelings you would have if you had actually gone through those lengths of time (eternities, years, etc.)

You said it sounds very very risky and seem puzzled as to why someone would put themselves in that situation but really I don't see it as a real risk. I've never heard of someone feeling like they had a hellish or bad trip that felt like an eternity. Sure I've heard of bad trips that were pretty long in length but never heard of something like what you're describing.
I know soooo many people in real life who trip and who have tripped and no one I have ever talked to has experienced such a thing so I don't see it as being very likely if even possible however almost anything is possible. I don't see it as a real risk and can't even picture how I would get myself into that.
With psychedelics it's not like just a roll of the dice, you don't just have a bad trip for no reason there's always a reason. All of my "bad trips" were for the better and to be honest I don't really even believe in "bad trips" because even though they may feel bad at the time it's not like they're actually bad for you. They're good for you and I always learned the most from my "bad trips", those are the true introspective and healing ones and most bad trips aren't at all "hellish" they're just very psychologically difficult, they're not scary or anything typically.

I don't know man when you have these periods of time where time has stopped or ceased to exist or you're just "existing" in eternity good and bad don't really exist anymore at that point. When you're having moments of eternity you're not really having a good or bad trip you're actually just peaking your ass off and it's unlikely you even know what's going on around you or in your mind. You're basically in a trancelike state or in a hypnosis so yea...it isn't all so organized it's not like;
"Oh you're having a trip in Hell right now? Well how about I give you some TIME DISTORTION so you feel like you're in Hell for YEARS!!! MUHAHAHAHA!"

No it's not like that^

So I wonder if the time dilation that is experienced during trips or ndes where people claim that it seemed to last years or longer, I wonder if they don't literally mean that and that they instead meant it how this quoted poster described it. So who is telling the truth here? What does science say? Does the poster's views apply to everyone who takes a drug or has an nde? Or does my literal view of time dilation actually apply to some people who take drugs and have ndes?

 

[morphine-dreams]

Science says that time is relative. You won't literally be trapped in the void for centuries because that would require messing with space-time and breaking the laws of physics as we know them. But it can *feel* like you are, if you take the right substance and dose, because time is relative, in other words, it's all in your head. You can feel like you've experienced years during a trip without physically having done so. Time goes on as always, but stops for you. Why that's possible, I have no idea and I'm not sure if anyone has any solid, scientific explanation for it.

The fact that we don't really know shit about why psychedelics do what they do or the psychedelic realm is just part of the magic.

 

[MattMVS7]

Science says that time is relative. You won't literally be trapped in the void for centuries because that would require messing with space-time and breaking the laws of physics as we know them. But it can *feel* like you are, if you take the right substance and dose, because time is relative, in other words, it's all in your head. You can feel like you've experienced years during a trip without physically having done so. Time goes on as always, but stops for you. Why that's possible, I have no idea and I'm not sure if anyone has any solid, scientific explanation for it.

The fact that we don't really know shit about why psychedelics do what they do or the psychedelic realm is just part of the magic.

But again, I wish to know if that time dilation you described is as how that quoted poster described it, or if it is literally like years or longer have passed. If it is like how that quoted poster described it, then it wouldn't exactly be like years or many lifetimes have literally passed. It would be like that in a way according to that quoted poster, but that time would pass easily and wouldn't be anything at all like literally experiencing the passage of many years or many lifetimes here in this reality.

What I am asking is, would a vast amount of time that is experienced during a bad trip or nde not be unbearable? Would it easily pass and not even be considered to be anything worried about? If you were to experience that amount of time here in this normal waking reality, then that amount of time would be quite unbearable if it was a life of immense suffering and misery. But I am wondering if that amount of time would be nothing to get worried about during a bad trip or nde regardless of how horrible and tormenting the experiences are during that trip or nde.

 

[phuckingnutz]

Standing there for hours and experiencing this passage of time would be very different than standing there for a few minutes and feeling that hours have passed. So I am wondering when it comes to trips and ndes, if the elongated periods of time that people who have these experiences describe are simply being attributed to the latter time description, or if it literally was like hours, months, days, years, or forever.

Well, it seems that if it felt like forever and you aren't sure if it felt that way or was that way would be easy to figure out.
If it felt that way then all your family and loved ones would still be kicking, but it it actually was that way everyone you knew would be dead...that was easy.

 

[pupnik]

one thing about forever when you are very stoned:
any moment may be accompanied with the idea of eternity,
but the eternity is based upon errors (philosophical and experiential);
the overall result is that you will only be thoroughly impressed by the eternal experience, for a short time thereafter.

memory intensification happens with repetition over time.
the eternity experienced while stoned is repeated over a short time so it remains quixotic afterwards. puzzling and ephemeral.

don't fear experiences of eternity, you can learn a lot about yourself by stopping time if you are open to it and curious about mind.

 

[psy997]

You must overcome your fear Matt

 

[dariozee]

To me, time dilation is probably most fascinating thing about psychedelics. It's so amazing to perceive everything as if in slow motion - movements, sounds, thoughts. It's literally as if someone is slowing down a movie - I can watch my own hand move and realise I've been looking at this movement 'forever'. It's very subjective, and I can't say it feels like hours literally, because time simply doesn't exist. It's like another physical thing that I can perceive - stretching, speeding, slowing, like a blob of invisible 'something'. Yet it's 'visible' somehow. Hard to explain! Well, impossible. And then there's 'eternal moments' during the peak when everything just feezes, there's just sequence of images frozen in time. Yet 'time' still passes. My God, it's hard to write about psychedelic effects! :D I feel time dilation most strongly on LSD, but DMT is also very similar.

 

[iksaxophone]

The sense of time passing depends on support from all of your senses and mental processes.

everything has to be operating is good form for the timng circuits in the cerebellum, and all the clear sensory evidence of time passing to mesh into an experience of ordinary time.

however when stoned or emotional the sense of time passing is disrupted. depending on the intensity of stoned-ness or emotional enhancement, moments of experience last longer than usual - for instance a frame of vision will fade in about 1/15th of a second normally but will last longer while stoned. (note that film is 24 frames per second and seems seemless, and television is between 15 and 60 fields per second depending on implementation.)

anyway when that 1/15th of a second stretches out to 2 and 3/15ths of a second we get a lot of visual enhancement, and when it is stretched to 7 or 8 15ths of a second we see trails when we wave our hand before our eyes.

but get this, not only vision is affected, all the senses and mental events are affected and the sense of time passing gets wonky.

moments that have not faded stack up, and all are occurring equally in the mind - this enables deja vu, and the perception that time has stopped or is going backwards.

when the overlap is as much as 3 seconds, we begin to have the perception of more than one self in our self, i.e complete personality or attitude formations can spawn of and seem to operate semi-independently.

This is a really interesting model, I like it. I didn't know that vision comes in 'frames' though.

 

[pupnik]

vision actually comes in fragments.

However over 100 years ago it was discovered that we can watch a film at 24 frames per second and would perceive that the motion was smooth and natural.

This means that any fragments sensed were followed within 1/24th of a second in new positions as smoothly as in the real world. The perceptual hand-off therefore is just over 1/24th of a second. My personal testing suggests 1/15th of a second is the normal fade for a sensory pulse train.

note that frames advancing at 1/24th of a second but lasting 1/15th of a second have an overlap or drag of 1/60th of a second this tiny drag means that some fragments noticed from one frame will be fixed in the next frame which encourages a sense of continuity or smooth flow.

increasing the pulse train duration (eg with psychedelic) introduces the perception of trails of motion - fragments that are noticed persist over top of new fragments that are noticed for multiple intervals.

 

[MattMVS7]

So just to be clear one last time, the time dilation that is experienced during trips or ndes whether it be many lifetimes or millenniums, you are saying it is absolutely nothing like how we would experience that passage of time here in our normal waking reality in which it would be an unbearable amount of time that would drive us bored, tormented, or insane? That there is just simply no way to explain it and that the only way for me to know is to experience it for myself through a drug trip or nde?

 

[psy997]

Of course it is not like that.

 

[MattMVS7]

Of course it is not like that.

Are you saying it is not like how I described it in my post and that it really is like experiencing the passage of many centuries or millenniums here in our normal waking reality? Or are you actually agreeing with my post and saying that it really is not like experiencing that amount of time in our normal waking reality?

 

[Kl519]

Yeah, it is NOT the same as the passage of time in sober reality. It does give you the sensation that time has been extended greatly, but I think this is most evident during the peak, and I guess the first half of the plateau, depending on the substance (DOxs are different ime). 10 minutes can feel like an hour though, and depending on the person's mindset, they could theoretically FEEL (paradox) like the trip is lasting an eternity, but all of this varies substantially from person to person, as well as the trips themselves. Ime time dilation was time slowing down, basically, but the mind wasn't "slowed" at all.

just my 2 cents.

Edit: So the regular passage of time is a lot more firm and like clockwork, but on psychedelics our sense of time is distorted. But then it doesn't always happen, and sometimes not consistently either...

 

[pupnik]

So just to be clear one last time, the time dilation that is experienced during trips or ndes whether it be many lifetimes or millenniums, you are saying it is absolutely nothing like how we would experience that passage of time here in our normal waking reality in which it would be an unbearable amount of time that would drive us bored, tormented, or insane? That there is just simply no way to explain it and that the only way for me to know is to experience it for myself through a drug trip or nde?

right it is not the same but the same.
but if it is a time of suffering then you actually do not actually get as much suffering, but moment to moment the perception that you have suffered immensely would be had, and if you went through years you would experience an assessment of years of suffering.

every minute of suffering is terrible, but you can the next minute have a non-suffering experience. then it is up to you to review and assess the glass half full or half empty.
and if you think you had 10 years of empty glasses it's the same if it's a hallucination or real time.