Lysergamides Hallucinating insects and demonic faces on LSD

[Kaleida]

If it was not clear, he would get very angry when my housemates and I would ask him questions about things he said or claimed happened when in psychosis, or when in delusional disassociative states, or when he was into lying and manipulating to himself and others. He would start and stop his medications or take them for a day or two or week and then completely suddenly stop them. When he was on the antipsychotic meds he was not angry, friendly, and relatively normal, not super angry or argumentative, and not psychotic.

Ah, well I can kind of understand that. I don't have that much of an anger issue but I do sometimes get irritable and defensive about my mental shit and it can be embarrassing to talk about psychotic stuff, or sometimes I'm just still experiencing some degree of it and dealing with reality is kind of frustrating or aggravating like when tripping around people you'd rather not be tripping around. Luckily I've only rarely been more extremely delusional to what was happening in the world around me and had limited contact when I did, though I still managed to do some damage to some of my relationships; most of my stuff personally is internal or about self identity and highly dissociative in nature, though certainly still quite intense at times.

I can relate to not wanting to take antipsychotic medication, even if it might be a better idea to. I have a prescription for olanzapine but I've only used it once for a week so far to bring myself down from a psychotic episode that was really starting to get going. I've been told that I seem happier on them, but I would rather not take them at any time I can effectively avoid it (but that's a very critical factor). If possible I prefer to face my internal stuff headfirst and work through it like a trip, but, that's kind of standard for dissociative identity disorder, which is generally treated with therapy; I just also happen to have some issues with psychosis and mania.

The shit I/we go through is actually really weird and I don't think I've actually met someone else who's described something quite like it, though I can relate pieces of it to pieces of what others have described. It kind of feels like what a lot of it centers around is that the way we experience sexual stimulation is readily strong enough that it causes salvia-like effects - though, that theoretically I actually can relate to common ideas about the mechanisms of psychosis and dissociation, considering that dopamine is involved in sexual stimulation and salvinorin A activates the endogenous receptor for dynorphin. It's actually been that way for as long as I can remember but took most of my life until now for me to really start being able to recognize and appreciate it, mostly because it kind of finally sensitized to the point that those dissociative effects have kind of reached another level, and it's harder to just ignore. I have a suspicion that I might have an unusually dissociative expression of bipolar disorder or something, though I haven't been diagnosed with it at this point (though also no one's really tried, I just started getting that olanzapine a couple months ago with mania and psychosis as a reason though).

 

[PriestTheyCalledHim]

Ah, well I can kind of understand that. I don't have that much of an anger issue but I do sometimes get irritable and defensive about my mental shit and it can be embarrassing to talk about psychotic stuff, or sometimes I'm just still experiencing some degree of it and dealing with reality is kind of frustrating or aggravating like when tripping around people you'd rather not be tripping around. Luckily I've only rarely been more extremely delusional to what was happening in the world around me and had limited contact when I did, though I still managed to do some damage to some of my relationships; most of my stuff personally is internal or about self identity and highly dissociative in nature, though certainly still quite intense at times.

I can relate to not wanting to take antipsychotic medication, even if it might be a better idea to. I have a prescription for olanzapine but I've only used it once for a week so far to bring myself down from a psychotic episode that was really starting to get going. I've been told that I seem happier on them, but I would rather not take them at any time I can effectively avoid it (but that's a very critical factor). If possible I prefer to face my internal stuff headfirst and work through it like a trip, but, that's kind of standard for dissociative identity disorder, which is generally treated with therapy; I just also happen to have some issues with psychosis and mania.

The shit I/we go through is actually really weird and I don't think I've actually met someone else who's described something quite like it, though I can relate pieces of it to pieces of what others have described. It kind of feels like what a lot of it centers around is that the way we experience sexual stimulation is readily strong enough that it causes salvia-like effects - though, that theoretically I actually can relate to common ideas about the mechanisms of psychosis and dissociation, considering that dopamine is involved in sexual stimulation and salvinorin A activates the endogenous receptor for dynorphin. It's actually been that way for as long as I can remember but took most of my life until now for me to really start being able to recognize and appreciate it, mostly because it kind of finally sensitized to the point that those dissociative effects have kind of reached another level, and it's harder to just ignore. I have a suspicion that I might have an unusually dissociative expression of bipolar disorder or something, though I haven't been diagnosed with it at this point (though also no one's really tried, I just started getting that olanzapine a couple months ago with mania and psychosis as a reason though).

Sounds interesting. Do you ever disassociate during sex or masturbation?

 

[Kaleida]

Sounds interesting. Do you ever disassociate during sex or masturbation?

Most of the time, but the reason it took me so long to realize it is because the degree of dissociation is related to the degree of letting go into the sexual stimulation, but it also paradoxically makes that more difficult to do, so for a long time I was managing to get some of the right physical reactions to let myself think I was getting there but in retrospect really was barely letting go in any way and was basically just pushing my mind and body until it had no choice but to react in some way even if I was totally detached from it. Nowadays I can let go into my sexual stimulation really easy which is great, but at the same time it makes it so that I dissociate really, really easily, and the dissociation acts as a feedback loop where I start to get internal hallucinations that increase my sexual stimulation and then dissociation further, and I also most often feel kind of wired and hypersexual too (unless I'm feeling depressed) so it all kind of rolls together into me floating around in this state of mind fairly often anymore. It also makes a difference with things like if I or another alter is experiencing the sexual stimulation, and what exactly is causing it.

In addition to my sexual dissociative headspace spilling over more into my normal headspace and getting stronger, I've also been noticing lately that there's this odd phenomenon where sometimes, it's like my orgasmic response, like not the build up to it but the actual release, is really, really slow, almost like my stereotyped instincts are happening in slow motion, and it's associated with a huge amount of tension, but also some of the strongest of the dissociative hallucinations, and often peaks with some sort of internal identity shift, again because it's a particularly salvia-like dissociation in my experience, and sometimes there will be several shifts in a loop taking me back to the beginning, as well as some consistently recurring types of synesthetic visions that seem to help me keep track of some of the changes. I've realized over time that these identity-shifting loops are accessible to me at other times too and play out more slowly and based on my psychological contexts, and they really can be very significant shifts, including between things like inner body image, personality expression, gender, sexual orientation, and much more rarely the imagery gets into areas like animals, plants, weather patterns, or more mystical-type things like is more common on drugs, but I would say there's a very high focus on the more specifically human identities for me.

I've done some research in this area and one thing I find very interesting is the idea of "alternating gender incongruity" which is a term some in the scientific community use to refer to what is more socially called bigenderism, which if you're not aware is most commonly a blending of or shifting between, and this term's case particularly the latter, the two binary genders, male and female, and there's a non-binary bigender crowd too, but the couple scientific papers I've seen focus on the male and female so far. Fascinatingly, one of the papers states in the abstract:

Finally, our survey found decreased lateralization of handedness in the bigender community. These observations suggest a biologic basis of bigenderism and lead us to propose a novel gender condition, "alternating gender incongruity" (AGI). We hypothesize that AGI may be related to an unusual degree or depth of hemispheric switching and corresponding callosal suppression of sex appropriate body maps in parietal cortex- possibly the superior parietal lobule- and its reciprocal connections with the insula and hypothalamus. This is based on two lines of reasoning. First, bigender individuals in our survey sample reported an elevated rate of bipolar disorder, which has been linked to slowed hemispheric switching.

As you can see, it mentions "an unusual degree or depth of hemispheric switching" and further clarifies by comparison specifically to bipolar disorder that they also specifically mean "slowed hemispheric switching." I obviously can only hypothesize at what might actually be going on with me, but this description honestly seems relatable to me with the kind of internal experiences I've been having, and I can certainly relate to both the bipolar disorder-like issues and the bigender aspects as well, though I think the dissociation I experience in this way may also take things a but further than would be described by the average bigender person. There is quite a lot of gender alternation to the point that it feels like a significant part of it, but I feel like there's more dissociation than that too where I have multiple distinct states for each gender as well as more abstract states that occur in between; it actually reminds me quite a lot of things like old religious beliefs of the afterlife and reincarnation in some ways, which I think is where the more explicitly bipolar disorder-like part starts to show itself. I can also often experience the same sorts of states in different ways depending on what other roles other alters are in at the same time, so... it's kind of complex, but it definitely at least seems to me like it could be similar to what's going on with what is described above.

 

[PriestTheyCalledHim]

Most of the time, but the reason it took me so long to realize it is because the degree of dissociation is related to the degree of letting go into the sexual stimulation, but it also paradoxically makes that more difficult to do, so for a long time I was managing to get some of the right physical reactions to let myself think I was getting there but in retrospect really was barely letting go in any way and was basically just pushing my mind and body until it had no choice but to react in some way even if I was totally detached from it. Nowadays I can let go into my sexual stimulation really easy which is great, but at the same time it makes it so that I dissociate really, really easily, and the dissociation acts as a feedback loop where I start to get internal hallucinations that increase my sexual stimulation and then dissociation further, and I also most often feel kind of wired and hypersexual too (unless I'm feeling depressed) so it all kind of rolls together into me floating around in this state of mind fairly often anymore. It also makes a difference with things like if I or another alter is experiencing the sexual stimulation, and what exactly is causing it.

In addition to my sexual dissociative headspace spilling over more into my normal headspace and getting stronger, I've also been noticing lately that there's this odd phenomenon where sometimes, it's like my orgasmic response, like not the build up to it but the actual release, is really, really slow, almost like my stereotyped instincts are happening in slow motion, and it's associated with a huge amount of tension, but also some of the strongest of the dissociative hallucinations, and often peaks with some sort of internal identity shift, again because it's a particularly salvia-like dissociation in my experience, and sometimes there will be several shifts in a loop taking me back to the beginning, as well as some consistently recurring types of synesthetic visions that seem to help me keep track of some of the changes. I've realized over time that these identity-shifting loops are accessible to me at other times too and play out more slowly and based on my psychological contexts, and they really can be very significant shifts, including between things like inner body image, personality expression, gender, sexual orientation, and much more rarely the imagery gets into areas like animals, plants, weather patterns, or more mystical-type things like is more common on drugs, but I would say there's a very high focus on the more specifically human identities for me.

I've done some research in this area and one thing I find very interesting is the idea of "alternating gender incongruity" which is a term some in the scientific community use to refer to what is more socially called bigenderism, which if you're not aware is most commonly a blending of or shifting between, and this term's case particularly the latter, the two binary genders, male and female, and there's a non-binary bigender crowd too, but the couple scientific papers I've seen focus on the male and female so far. Fascinatingly, one of the papers states in the abstract:



As you can see, it mentions "an unusual degree or depth of hemispheric switching" and further clarifies by comparison specifically to bipolar disorder that they also specifically mean "slowed hemispheric switching." I obviously can only hypothesize at what might actually be going on with me, but this description honestly seems relatable to me with the kind of internal experiences I've been having, and I can certainly relate to both the bipolar disorder-like issues and the bigender aspects as well, though I think the dissociation I experience in this way may also take things a but further than would be described by the average bigender person. There is quite a lot of gender alternation to the point that it feels like a significant part of it, but I feel like there's more dissociation than that too where I have multiple distinct states for each gender as well as more abstract states that occur in between; it actually reminds me quite a lot of things like old religious beliefs of the afterlife and reincarnation in some ways, which I think is where the more explicitly bipolar disorder-like part starts to show itself. I can also often experience the same sorts of states in different ways depending on what other roles other alters are in at the same time, so... it's kind of complex, but it definitely at least seems to me like it could be similar to what's going on with what is described above.

Have you ever described all of these experiences to a therapist, psychologist, or psychiatrist? If so, what did they say?

 

[Kaleida]

Have you ever described all of these experiences to a therapist, psychologist, or psychiatrist? If so, what did they say?

I've talked about it to a therapist that I've been seeing for many years, as recently as a couple days ago. Part of her professional focus is on gender, sexual orientation, and identity in general and she has also seen multiple dissociative identity disorder patients, and seems to find my condition fairly interesting. We're on good terms and I've talked to her very openly about many things before including extreme psychedelic trips that she at times let me go like half an hour past the end of my session just to finish telling the story of, so she's a fan of this kind of stuff too, and opened up to me about her own psychedelic experiences in youth after I first spent some time talking about them. Last time I went in there talking about my theories about the bigenderism stuff and how it relates to different functions of the two brain hemispheres and drew some of my visions and some diagrams for her trying to explain my ideas and observations. She thinks I'm trying to solve psychosis, and she's right.

She mostly just encourages me to continue working through for it as long as it seems that I can do so healthily and checks up on my general life momentum and whether or not I've had any experiences that make me feel like I should start taking my antipsychotic again and stuff like that. I think she pretty much knows that in the end I'm going to do whatever the hell I personally think is the right thing to do. She does try to give me some guidance like career suggestions based on the kinds of ideas I'm sharing with her and stuff like that too. It helps me a lot just to be able to go to her and talk out loud about all this stuff uninterrupted for a while because otherwise it continues to build up in my mind and drive me more crazy. Usually she hasn't seemed overly concerned with my ability to handle things after getting to know me, though once I started experiencing more complete delusional states of course she began to worry, but she agrees so far that they still seem like a less common problem for me.

Here's an example of part of the conception I've been developing about all this and was talking to her about and drawing out for her.

Spoiler: Kaleida's Wheel of Madness

This appears to me to be the core structure of the internal map containing the interconnected tracks that I take through all the identity shifts as I go through my dissociative loops. The writing is only somewhat clear so to further clarify, there are four circles that each count as a different layer of the map, and each part of the map which is divided up holds a different type of identity that I shift through or interact with somehow internally while in a different identity state, except for the third inner layer on the right which contains at least three different totally separate possible identities for me, and not just different states for the same identity type, that I've experienced - don't ask me why there's so much going on in that part, there just is - and the identities in each layer are as follows:

1. Top and center is "Mother Nature" while "The Horned God" is on the left side and "The Divine Twins" are on the right side.

2. The left side is Feminine Heterosexual Female while the right side is Masculine Bisexual Male.

3. The left side is Feminine Homosexual Male while the right side is Masculine Bisexual Female, Feminine Heterosexual Male, and Feminine Homosexual Female.

4. The top-left quadrant is Father, the bottom-left quadrant is Mother, the top-right quadrant is Daughter, and the bottom-right quadrant is Son. (EDIT: I actually just realized that the Father and Son should be switched though, but the rest is right to what I've observed so far.)

In my experience so far, it seems possible to move between any of the layers in one way or another, and also jump from the inside layer to the outside layer, so it's all pretty smoothly connected. I told my therapist literally all of this and more the other day and she seemed into it, which is part of why I like her, she actually supports this kind of stuff as long as it seems like you're still thinking rationally while exploring it. I definitely do still worry about my mental state personally though, but I'm currently at least feeling like I'm starting to piece all of this stuff together.

 

[PriestTheyCalledHim]

I've talked about it to a therapist that I've been seeing for many years, as recently as a couple days ago. Part of her professional focus is on gender, sexual orientation, and identity in general and she has also seen multiple dissociative identity disorder patients, and seems to find my condition fairly interesting. We're on good terms and I've talked to her very openly about many things before including extreme psychedelic trips that she at times let me go like half an hour past the end of my session just to finish telling the story of, so she's a fan of this kind of stuff too, and opened up to me about her own psychedelic experiences in youth after I first spent some time talking about them. Last time I went in there talking about my theories about the bigenderism stuff and how it relates to different functions of the two brain hemispheres and drew some of my visions and some diagrams for her trying to explain my ideas and observations. She thinks I'm trying to solve psychosis, and she's right.

She mostly just encourages me to continue working through for it as long as it seems that I can do so healthily and checks up on my general life momentum and whether or not I've had any experiences that make me feel like I should start taking my antipsychotic again and stuff like that. I think she pretty much knows that in the end I'm going to do whatever the hell I personally think is the right thing to do. She does try to give me some guidance like career suggestions based on the kinds of ideas I'm sharing with her and stuff like that too. It helps me a lot just to be able to go to her and talk out loud about all this stuff uninterrupted for a while because otherwise it continues to build up in my mind and drive me more crazy. Usually she hasn't seemed overly concerned with my ability to handle things after getting to know me, though once I started experiencing more complete delusional states of course she began to worry, but she agrees so far that they still seem like a less common problem for me.

Here's an example of part of the conception I've been developing about all this and was talking to her about and drawing out for her.

Spoiler: Kaleida's Wheel of Madness

This appears to me to be the core structure of the internal map containing the interconnected tracks that I take through all the identity shifts as I go through my dissociative loops. The writing is only somewhat clear so to further clarify, there are four circles that each count as a different layer of the map, and each part of the map which is divided up holds a different type of identity that I shift through or interact with somehow internally while in a different identity state, except for the third inner layer on the right which contains at least three different totally separate possible identities for me, and not just different states for the same identity type, that I've experienced - don't ask me why there's so much going on in that part, there just is - and the identities in each layer are as follows:

1. Top and center is "Mother Nature" while "The Horned God" is on the left side and "The Divine Twins" are on the right side.

2. The left side is Feminine Heterosexual Female while the right side is Masculine Bisexual Male.

3. The left side is Feminine Homosexual Male while the right side is Masculine Bisexual Female, Feminine Heterosexual Male, and Feminine Homosexual Female.

4. The top-left quadrant is Father, the bottom-left quadrant is Mother, the top-right quadrant is Daughter, and the bottom-right quadrant is Son.

In my experience so far, it seems possible to move between any of the layers in one way or another, and also jump from the inside layer to the outside layer, so it's all pretty smoothly connected. I told my therapist literally all of this and more the other day and she seemed into it, which is part of why I like her, she actually supports this kind of stuff as long as it seems like you're still thinking rationally while exploring it. I definitely do still worry about my mental state personally though, but I'm currently at least feeling like I'm starting to piece all of this stuff together.

Which psychedelic drugs did she use in her youth? I had a therapist tell me about how he used to take lower doses of LSD, and smoked lots of pot, and how he once smoked opium which I suspect was actually black tar heroin.

 

[Kaleida]

Which psychedelic drugs did she use in her youth? I had a therapist tell me about how he used to take lower doses of LSD, and smoked lots of pot, and how he once smoked opium which I suspect was actually black tar heroin.

It's been a number of years now but I mainly remember her talking about her experiences using peyote with a Native American group. It still makes me jealous because I haven't used any form of mescaline yet. I think it's great when a therapist is open to talking about that kind of stuff as long as it's not going to have a negative effect on the patient, I know I'm paying them to listen to me talk about my problems unconditionally but nonetheless I'm still not going to be able to open up fully if I don't feel comfortable around them because I'm not sure if they can relate to my life on a level that seems important to me to understand my perspective or are at least willing to try.

 

[PriestTheyCalledHim]

It's been a number of years now but I mainly remember her talking about her experiences using peyote with a Native American group. It still makes me jealous because I haven't used any form of mescaline yet. I think it's great when a therapist is open to talking about that kind of stuff as long as it's not going to have a negative effect on the patient, I know I'm paying them to listen to me talk about my problems unconditionally but nonetheless I'm still not going to be able to open up fully if I don't feel comfortable around them because I'm not sure if they can relate to my life on a level that seems important to me to understand my perspective or are at least willing to try.

Why not take San Pedro cactus sludge, or dried powder cactus? There are Native Americans in the Southwestern USA that do mescaline/peyote ceremonies, and there is some church in Arizona on a Native reservation that also has ceremonies open to the public or church 'members' in that if you join their church they will give you mescaline/peyote. I never did this or even went to a sweat lodge but a friend took peyote/mescaline with the church when he became a member of it.

 

[Kaleida]

Why not take San Pedro cactus sludge, or dried powder cactus? There are Native Americans in the Southwestern USA that do mescaline/peyote ceremonies, and there is some church in Arizona on a Native reservation that also has ceremonies open to the public or church 'members' in that if you join their church they will give you mescaline/peyote. I never did this or even went to a sweat lodge but a friend took peyote/mescaline with the church when he became a member of it.

I just never really got around to learning what to actually do with that stuff, was never hanging out with anyone else who wanted to do it and never got myself out to the stores or anything. As the years went by I mostly just started using research chemicals and stopped thinking about it. A ceremony would be awesome, though I'd be a little apprehensive to do anything public right now in my current state of mind. I'm not really too concerned with tripping much in general right now for that reason, but when I do get around to it, I think mescaline does sound like something I could really like having an option. I, perhaps obviously, at the very least feel like I probably don't need anything that's got a lot of dissociative or manic effect or going to dissolve my ego so much at the moment, but I could definitely go for the more kind of laid back, highly connected to and appreciative of the outside world kind of experience again, it's been a good while since I got to a have really euphoric and refreshing day like that.

 

[Kaleidoscopic2]

I actually support this theory in concept, though I don't necessarily agree with every situational example people might try to give, and I extend it further than just schizophrenia and more into things like psychosis, dissociation, and mania just in general. I also think the way people try to imagine the way the brain used to work might be a little simple and reductionist, but I understand what they're trying to get at nonetheless. Unfortunately, I knew about this theory before I had that psychotic experience, so it's kind of tainted as an example.

I have dissociative identity disorder, which I think actually provides far more insight into how the brain might have used to work, and there's a hell of a lot more going on with it than one listener and one commander. I've actually come to believe that the human brain is basically like as massive storehouse of individual conscious minds of far greater than number than one can imagine that are each assigned to different behavioral trajectories either from birth or when they first come into use, and that the only reason most people don't realize this is because the human brain has evolved in such a way that makes these processes subconscious and makes it impossible to differentiate which of your behaviors are connected to which identity state, creating the illusion that it's all just one sense of self with a highly complex behavioral repertoire. I expect that in ancient times, the way it worked was something like each alter identity was specifically created as a way of storing information learned for the most part from other living beings, such as watching another member of your species perform a complex action you don't know and then having your brain create an alter of that other member of your species that reverse engineers the physics of that thing you saw them do based on what you saw from what angle and such to translate it into your own body's behavior and allow you to learn that action by watching, so back then it would just be that you switch to the alter that knows how to do whatever you need to do at any given time, whereas humans now again just assume it's all just them because they're unaware of the switches or the individual alters.

The truly disturbing thing about DID is how orderly it all is; when you watch it play out firsthand, it's impossible to deny that the brain is actually doing something purposeful and complex, as opposed to just generating chaotic inner hallucinations. I've frankly mostly stopped thinking about drugs (though I still use lots of cannabis, which certainly intensifies some stuff for me) since I had to start dealing with it and my other psychotic and manic issues more severely not because I should be stopping for the sake of my mental health, but because none of them are as trippy as what I deal with already anyway. These days I spend most of my time being an adrenaline junkie and documenting the results and findings of doing so in a dissociative inner world we tend to refer to as "the hellscape" which is as bad as it sounds, though incredibly fascinating. I'm hoping one day I can organize everything I know and understand about it into something I can publish in a meaningful way to help people understand this state of mind more clearly, or maybe at least make a movie for the MCU.

I really like your train of thought. I have had DP/DR for the past seven years, it never goes away, I have hated it for so long. Your post has been very thought provoking, the brain most certainly is doing something purposeful and complex, and thinking of it in that way makes me feel… a bit comforted about the whole thing. To think of it as fascinating, instead of horrible and terrifying like I usually do, could become a very helpful and necessary part of my personal experience. So thanks!

 

[Kaleida]

I really like your train of thought. I have had DP/DR for the past seven years, it never goes away, I have hated it for so long. Your post has been very thought provoking, the brain most certainly is doing something purposeful and complex, and thinking of it in that way makes me feel… a bit comforted about the whole thing. To think of it as fascinating, instead of horrible and terrifying like I usually do, could become a very helpful and necessary part of my personal experience. So thanks!

I'm happy to have given you a shift in perspective, and you're quite welcome. If there's one thing I know for sure, it's that you've got to make the most of what you've got. Also, no matter what your personal situation is, the trajectory of human evolution still explains how you got to where you are just as well as it does for anyone else. Something I like to remember is that in experimental models for PTSD that they create for lab animal tests, one of the most common ways to induce PTSD-like behaviors is to simply expose them to a predator - something that will happen to nearly every wild animal in existence at some point in their natural life anyway. The only reason humans think traumatic states and dissociation are unusual is because we became too collectively good at avoiding them most of the time, but they're just a normal part of life on Earth. When we treat them like they're nothing but something to be suppressed we totally miss out on gaining a greater understanding of how the states actually fit into the model of our consciousness and how they can be worked with in a way that might allow those who experience them to regain a greater amount of structure in their lives.

I wish you the best of luck with your struggles.