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Comment by shawnz | Hacker News Reader

Contrary to popular opinion I haven't found DMT to be that much different than any other psychedelic drug when comparing equivalent doses. Sure it's true that while high on the drug it creates experiences that feel real, but that's true of dreaming too, isn't it? It's not obvious that it wasn't real until it's over. And similarly I have had the same feeling from high doses of "plain old" psychedelics.

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Same. In my experience there is one basic "psychedelic state" accessible via all the well-known compounds, which have different characteristics (especially in terms of duration) but aren't qualitatively different in any meaningful way. I suspect that a lot of the differences in reported effects between the major psychedelic compounds comes down to set and setting (i.e., ayahuasca is associated with traditional cultures whereas LSD is not).

Oh, the differences are very very marked. Sure, psilocybin and 4-HO-MET aren't going to be that different (even tho I swear I can tell them apart if I dosed blindly), but giving some examples:

2C-X family gives me some very weird sensation on the chin before I even feel the main effects. Also the visuals tend to be techno-alien-geometric-engineering-architecture themed if that makes any sense. Also, especially 2C-E in high doses, creates time/perceptual distortions I haven't experienced with anything else; as in, I say something to my buddy, go to a different room, and hear what I said with my own voice coming from the original room.

Psilocybin and analogs create a very dreamy, child-like, earth loving mindset, not always very visual, but when visual everything seems to be covered in native-americanesque patterns.

DMT visually is absolutely alien. As in colorful liquid metal moving in very organic ways. The "curtain" for me is basically a sea of colorful alien robot matter. If ayahuasca feels more like psilocybe mushrooms, earthy and human, in terms of visuals, DMT is a supercharged, sharper, edgier, faster, stronger, out of the galaxy and in your face version of such.

After you have oddballs like DiPT, where the mindset doesn't change much, visually there's nothing, but there are loads of audio hallucinations and distortions. My own voice sounds like Barry White on it; most women sound like talking through Coke cans. Slapping a table sounds like drums, and playing drums sounds like dropping cutlery on the sink. Some music sounds better, some worse. Very strange.

LSD and derivatives, my favorites overall, I find them the most malleable by the set and setting in the feelings it can create and the visuals you will see. On the other hand I feel the experience more "on-rails" and even doing large amounts (800µg my max) I felt nowhere near a bad trip. I wouldn't 8x the average dose on mushrooms because the mushrooms have shown me things I wouldn't be able to handle at bigger doses. LSD for me is very, very forgiving.

Hmm. Interesting. Would love your thoughts on near-death experiences and the many world interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics. When I had my first trip (400~600µg) I was alone in a room and had a couple of near-death experiences. And then a couple of more trips later (150~250µg on average as I'm not mentally prepared to take high doses again) many weird things happened in ways that I could only describe as synchronicity-ish that have clearly saved my life (during and after the trips), and I'm now convinced I have actually committed suicides or died in an accident (during and after those trips) in many horizontal worlds and my consciousness had somehow floated to a world i.e. this one where I have not yet killed myself (like in a quantum suicide experiment).

Would love your thoughts on near-death experiences and "horizontal worlds". For me what's interesting about psychedelics has always been that it is about death and consciousness. Any sort of hallucinations that could be categorised as "visual" or "audio" were just the side-effect as ultimately all senses converge to a single point, or a zero-dimension singularity if you will, an infinity encapsulated in the void, and that is death itself - or at least that is my interpretation of my experiences.

Also could you describe things that mushroom had shown you that you wouldn't be able to handle at bigger doses? I had only taken mushroom once. I'm always under the impression that mushroom is a weaker psychedelics than acid but perhaps that is inaccurate. Would love to learn more.

The difference is rarely do people wake from a dream and feel they ought to change their life in major ways as a result.

Curious what "high" doses of "plain old psychedelics" might be? I've never gone further than 200ug LSD.

Highest I've ever gone was 500ug LSD, and still, it was a more intense experience of the same "quality", not something completely different.

Check out erowid if you want some high dosage lsd stories. In the early 90s I encountered some "mop up" doses that were claimed to be in the 3000 mic range. I tried them twice.. first time during the Rodney king riots in SF (took half a mopup, started out really fun then devolved into a nightmare. Hid in the garden of a high end restaurant, literally inside a bush, watching the mayhem unfold on market Street.. Second time was while backpacking in pt Reyes and that was the best, most transformative drug experience I've ever had. I talked to a mushroom and learned a lot about my self and humanities relationship to nature.. But, at peak, I was completely disassociated. Basically blind/deaf to external reality for about 3-4 hours. I was with 3 other people.. and I think we were just rolling around in a meadow the whole time. Eventually we somehow ended up at the ocean, and the sunset brought us all to tears. In the 90s, the most commonly available doses here on the street were about 150 mics, and cost around 2 to 6 bucks. And the comedown was ugly. I've been told that cheap/old lsd, degrades into strychnine.. which is why the comedown is so harsh. On the high dose ones I did, the comedown was completely different. Nowadays I stick to the occasional couple of shrooms or a hit of molly once or twice a year. I think today I would have too much emotional baggage and ties to my consentual shared hallucination with humanity to do psychs that powerful again.

> The difference is rarely do people wake from a dream and feel they ought to change their life in major ways as a result.

I dunno about a major way, but I've had dreams which took days to properly snap back after, because the experiences felt so real that I felt an emptiness similar to bereavement for the fictional people that I dreamed about. That felt just as real to me as my experiences on DMT. I've also had Ketamine experiences that were similarly profound and have stuck with me since. Once I had a K trip which felt like I was outside of time, watching the cogs of the universe tick past instant by instant for all eternity. That experience snapped me out of a pretty depressive period of my life.

People of course have profound meaningful experiences on DMT, but I don't think its exclusive to it and any strong hallucinogen or dissociative can, in my opinion, have similarly strong impacts for some people.

I've had an experience and ego-death on 500ug. I've done DMT once. That LSD experience produced hallucinations, including 'data' in my field-of-view like I was using an AR app. I was looking into a mirror as it was happening - the 'resolution' of the experience was so high-fidelity it seems impossible to have occurred. I wrote a very detailed report after and even have a video of me describing what I'm seeing only moments after I can back to my 'self' post ego-death. It was every bit as fascinating as DMT. That experience was the most significant of my life.

Five grams of a dried Psilocybe Cubensis strain.

Note: The experience lasts significantly longer than a non-ayahuasca DMT experience.

It's probably important to remember that most people aren't this rigorous about drug use, in general. If one is not precisely monitoring dosages, let alone trying to compare roughly equivalent doses and effects among a variety of drugs, DMT is waaay easier to ingest a high dose of, accidentally or otherwise, compared to most other psychedelics.

Did you get to the "break through" level?

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