☮ Social ☮ Is it bad that I never had a bad trip?

[PriestTheyCalledHim]

Is it bad that I never experienced a bad trip on LSD or mushrooms? My trips were more about learning, fun, and breaking down barriers/expectations like this:

 

[Cheshire_Kat]

You are a remarkably lucky fellow. Not that any trip I had was insurmountable, but some were definitely difficult and some downright unpleasant.
Is it bad, LOL I dunno.

I don't try to "measure" things that way. Just the way I'm wired.

 

[PriestTheyCalledHim]

You are a remarkably lucky fellow. Not that any trip I had was insurmountable, but some were definitely difficult and some downright unpleasant.
Is it bad, LOL I dunno.

I don't try to "measure" things that way. Just the way I'm wired.

I should clarify: I have had periods during LSD and mushroom trips that were difficult, such as not being able to hear/speak, or I guess having rather not so fun thoughts; but it was not a classic 'bad trip', psychologically/spiritually universe/Earth-shattering, that made me want to hurt myself, I did not get PTSD, or the type of experiences that friends of mine had during bad trips where they swore off all psychedelics completely, or just started taking them in micro-doses only maybe once or twice a year before watching a film or something, thought they were going insane, etc.

I did have a period of time where I was taking LSD daily, and I would still see minor visuals such as trails, visual static, colored flashes of light, the walls/tiles breathing/moving, etc. and I was sort of mildly tripping for half a year, but none of this really disrupted my life, and I was able to go to classes, work, etc. and after I stopped smoking pot the effects went away for the most part. If I am really tired, or stressed from lack of sleep I can bring the minor visuals back but I don't consider this to be HPPD.

 

[TripSitterNZ]

Usually most bad trips come down to combing to large of a dose of LSD with cannabis. I never had a bad trip on LSD alone but really dark and hardcore trips with cannabis. But looking back i no longer say they are bad i just refused to accept the dark parts of myself and the way my life was going til i literally got scared straight. So in the end they were positive life changing events for me well at the time really shattering and broke me down and one psychotic event for a short period of time due to my twisted beliefs of reality at that point and my other drug use. Just never mix 500 ug of LSD with cannabis. That is literally fucking insanity i think i was just tripping super hard that i lost contact with all of earth but my sitter managed to break me back inside from the street. And i do understand why i was screaming. At that point i still was a idiot and thought satan was acutally real but now i realize all is one. I hated the world and the trip reflected all that back at me. I could not bare to witness watching my life relive every second for millions of times over realizing that it was not the world which was fucked but my own relation to it. I still held lots of very dark thoughts in my head after that it was the road to recovery for years as i integrated more and more that dark ocean of the unconsciousness shadow.

I have been integrating back into society but honestly i prefer been a bit fried in the psychedlia world on the constant. This is the longest break i had in a long time

 

[Bare_head]

i think that it is important to have an uncomfortable experience when fully going through a "trip"

i think my best trips were where i went through a while bunch of emotions . i felt the most "enlightened" so to speak after these experiences.

I have seen people have bad trips, but usually they were mixing substances or very inexperienced/ in a bad setting which i think is different from a difficult experience so to speak.

i found that weed just made the experience more intense in my experience which i wouldnt advise to a first time psychedelic user.

God i miss that feeling it gave me after my first truffle experience stay safe,

bare_head

 

[Ismene2]

Never had a bad trip either - I've taken too much so it was physically and mentally uncomfortable for an hour or two but none of this bullshit about "dying" or pissing your drawers in fear. I've just never been able to see anything scary about it - it wears off in a few hours anyway so what's the problem? - are you a man or a mouse? There's no need to call the police for "help"

 

[PriestTheyCalledHim]

i think that it is important to have an uncomfortable experience when fully going through a "trip"

i think my best trips were where i went through a while bunch of emotions . i felt the most "enlightened" so to speak after these experiences.

I have seen people have bad trips, but usually they were mixing substances or very inexperienced/ in a bad setting which i think is different from a difficult experience so to speak.

i found that weed just made the experience more intense in my experience which i wouldnt advise to a first time psychedelic user.

God i miss that feeling it gave me after my first truffle experience stay safe,

bare_head

I used to LOVE smoking pot on high doses of LSD. But this was decades ago when the Colombian mid-grade pot I smoked was better than the Mexican pot. This was before the explosion of high quality high THC strains.

On shrooms pot just made things sort of funny such as seeing the letters in a street sign pop-out in lavender neon letters, and re-arrange themselves into an anagram. The small amount of food grade nitrous I inhaled made things confusing, but it was just temporary.

 

[Buzz Lightbeer]

Once, on what turned out to be three 25i-NBOMe blotters (thought it was DOI so didn't think too much of the bitterness) things went really south for like an hour. Irrational thoughts start and it's hard/impossible to stop because you're already in so deep. And then once psychosis but I don't necessarily classify that as a bad trip per se.

Never had a bad trip either - I've taken too much so it was physically and mentally uncomfortable for an hour or two but none of this bullshit about "dying" or pissing your drawers in fear. I've just never been able to see anything scary about it - it wears off in a few hours anyway so what's the problem? - are you a man or a mouse? There's no need to call the police for "help"

Yeah but it's not as straight forward, when all logical reasoning and previous trip knowledge disappears panic and help can sometimes seem like a perfectly sound option. I'd never call the police or ambulance though, that works on an instinct level.

I think most trippers have never had a trip go really bad (as in insurmountable panic)

 

[TripSitterNZ]

Most people will never even take a large enough dose to have a bad trip then proclaim to know everything about tripping when in reality there psychedelics were trash tier and they never made it out of the tutorial.

 

[Buzz Lightbeer]

I don't subscribe to the trash tier synths argument, but I agree with the sentiment. I rarely push to doses where I may suspect beforehand that I might lose my shit. If I push a dose quite far, it's because I wanna see if I'm missing out by dosing too low, or because I am curious if somehow the nature of the experience changes. My confidence is high enough but I'm not gonna randomly dose 1000ug LSD or 200mg DPT, going psychotic was quite humbling in that sense. Dosed high enough, I believe anyone can lose the thread, it doesn't require that much of an incentive mid trip

 

[TripSitterNZ]

i just mean like people taking lsd which was never 50 ug + a tab. So they never had the full 250 ug experince.

 

[Kl519]

I haven't had a bad trip per se, but some trips floor you enough to worry a bit, which I wouldn't call a bad trip a really strong trip. A bad one is if you lose the plot or something like that lol, which I've seen but not experienced myself. Patience is a virtue, or don't take any drug if you think you might freak out, took in peer pressure, etc. If you know what you're doing and know what to expect, you shouldn't have a bad trip.

 

[couldbesojs]

The first time I took acid 1 and a half tabs (which I now believe was an nbome) I had a great trip for the first few hours. Then when it started to get dark I noticed how numb my tongue was and started to think it wasn't there at all. I became certain I had swallowed my tongue and therefore lost the ability to talk. For a few hours I lost my shit completely but was too scared to tell my friends I wasn't having a good time and just nodded at them when they asked if I was alright.

A few hours later when we were coming down I felt a lot better but it gave me some lasting anxiety where I would wake up in the middle of the night and think I was swallowing my tongue. When I would chew I would bite my tongue frequently because I couldn't tell where it was sitting in my mouth, specifically the back corner of it. After a few months this went away but I still have anxiety about lifting my tongue and have poor control of it.

I was scared off of tripping for almost 10 years outside of the odd mushroom trip. A friend reintroduced me to acid one night and I absolutely loved it and have been on the psychedelic drug train ever since.

 

[PriestTheyCalledHim]

i just mean like people taking lsd which was never 50 ug + a tab. So they never had the full 250 ug experince.

OK I have taken high doses and super high doses of LSD. It was not in the best environment as I was in school, and then a few hours later at home with my parents, and the peak was super intense and life changing; but I am pretty sure my mother knew I was on drugs, and thankfully she did not flip out or rush me to a hospital the way other friends' parents did when they found their teens on super high doses of LSD. The dose was so high and so life changing that I thought that all LSD was this strong, and I had a lot to process so I did not take it again until I was an adult two or three years later and after I had high dose mushroom experiences. I suppose looking back it was good that I did not go crazy with LSD or other drugs as a teen. I have a friend that went crazy with LSD and MDMA as a teen, taking them daily or as much as possible and he has short term memory loss, had multiple psychological breakdowns, became addicted to cocaine and then opiates/heroin, and is a former shell of himself.

 

[Ismene2]

What does taking a big dose mean tho? Is it taking 1000mics for your first trip? If you've been tripping every week for 3 or 4 years you can take 1000mics or more and it won't hit you like a massive dose. I still find it physically uncomfortable at that dose tho - an overdose has never given me a bad trip it just isn't as much fun.

 

[TripSitterNZ]

ismene2 sounds like a fucking cop.

 

[Ismene2]

Where did you learn about enlightenment trips? Did your master teach you "anyone who disagrees with your opinion you go after them my child, be as pissy and humourless as possible...btw my rates are going up to 30 quid a lesson but you keep at it trips you are my finest student..enlightenment is just round the next corner. . Not long now my child..."

 

[sin_is_synthetic]

I've been in all kinds of crazy situations while tripping...fixing flat tires of a friends car while peaking when I knew no one else knew how, getting a message that my father passed away, being around religious anti drug folks, carrying an injured friend out of a riverbed at midnite etc. But in all of these trips I felt in the end showed me sides of my self i didn't know and helped me understand myself more. We tend to associate "difficult" with "bad" but growth comes from uncomfortability. In my experience, these difficult trips werent bad but were more rewarding than the "all sunshine and rainbows" trips I've experienced. I also fully understood even in those states that I hasn't obeyed the adage of "set and setting" and had put myself in situations I knew carried risk. So, in many ways, I can't think of a bad trip either in my life.

 

[SKL]

I never had the kind of "bad trip" that people describe either, that raw existential terror and feeling or complete loss of control. And I did a lot of acid and other psychedelics, combined with all sorts of other shit, sometimes in shady situations. The worst experiences I've had have been a couple hours of paranoia or a few fractions of an hour of the fear of losing control and having a bad trip. That and occasional maudlin reflection on life or society but I can get that off booze or even sober lol.

@TripSitterNZ is right IME anyway that most of my bad experiences involved cannabis. It tends to make me anxious in an introspective way (introspective in an anxious way?) to begin with and I always had an ambivalent relationship with it. When on psychedelics it intensifies things and often brings out the worst in a trip for me. I usually only smoked it while tripping because I'd be in a group that was doing it and get passed a bowl.

However, a big factor for me is that I almost always tripped with some benzos on hand and often while taking opiates as well (sometimes in the context of taking one or both daily.) I would always have some Valium or Xanax ready to take in case I started feeling that loss of control. And I would take them if I did get those feelings pretty readily. Just the fact of knowing I had them probably reduced my anxiety about needing them, too, if that makes sense.

I used to keep vials of injectable Thorazine and Ativan and needles suitable for IM use on hand while tripping especially when tripping with others. I never had to give it to anyone but it was always there, not in the least because I didn't want anyone getting too loud in my apartment and attracting attention if they were gonna be on that type shit. But also just in case someone needed to be brought home from a bad time. More often though and something I actually did use I have some type of fast acting benzo pill on hand at all times as I mentioned.

I don't buy into this stuff about needing to experience the bad parts of a trip to "grow" or whatever. It's a recreational drug and people need to get over themselves. Psychedelics do give that feeling of enlightenment or whatever, it's part of what they do and not to be mistaken for anything real. It is true that peaking after an anxious come-up and losing that anxiety while feeling overwhelmed with oneness and all that is a great feeling but it's no less great a feeling if you pop a Xanax to cut the anxiety a bit. People act like this is some great sin against the psychedelic experience. Bullshit. It's taking drugs to optimize your neurochemical situation to feel good. That's what the whole Bluelight/soi-disant "psychonautic" lifestyle is about.

Most really bad trips are down to entirely avoidable "set and setting" factors. It's not a right of passage, it's not the luck of the draw, it's a failure in keeping your situation and attitude positive. Don't do it if you're afraid to be discovered doing it, don't do it around people you don't trust, don't do it if you haven't gotten over a recent breakup or death or whatever. Simple stuff. It's meant to be enjoyed in a positive, supportive context. I mostly took psychedelics among close friends or at events that were designed for psychedelic-taking.

Worst experience I've ever had while tripping on LSD was getting robbed at knife-point for my drugs and money in the dark woods right off the beaten path at a festival. I was super naïve and didn't think of people having bad intentions so I went off with a guy there supposedly to do some business. The experience of getting relieved of my goodies was not a good one but not as scary as you might think. It just went really slow. If anything the acid kept me from doing anything stupid. Everything felt rather abstract and I just went ahead and complied. I caught intense visuals off the knife, too, lol.

After it all went down I went into my tent and ruminated about bad vibes. But then I shot some dope, went to hang out with my friends and do some balloons, and my trip came around from being bad. Shit happens. It's about how you deal with it. And having supportive friends and a good environment. We eventually were laughing about it. Heartfelt acid laughter at that.

People in the psychedelic scene have talked about S&S for over fifty years now. It's amazing people still disregard it. They do so at their own peril and that's how you get horror trips and freakouts. People who are liable to lose their shit have no business doing these drugs in the first place. If you have a "trainwreck and trip disaster" as Earth and Fire put it a long time ago, you have nobody to blame but yourself

ismene2 sounds like a fucking cop.

@Ismene2 is a fucking lunatic (I say it affectionately) but is an old school bluelighter (formerly @Ismene, note the 2005 join date. Lost password I presume.) everyone who was around back then can vouch for both of those things. Most definitely not a cop though

 

[sin_is_synthetic]

Damn I do have to agree with what people say about cannabis. Quite possibly the darkest moments in my head were more from edibles than any of the supposedly stronger psychedelics.