I'd be interested to hear your story. I've never used psychedelic drugs, but I find their effects fascinating.
Well, that night went bad. Really, really, life-alteringly bad. For the first time, I had a bad trip. And not like, some mildly uncomfortable thoughts. I got a bad feeling in my stomach from the moment I dosed, and I knew something was going to be different this time.
As I started to come up, the bad feeling and a dark presence grew, and I pulled out my phone. I started a timer, and I watched as the time slowed to a point where it completely stopped. I started looping, I would get up off the couch, walk a few feet, and be teleported back. Over and over.
I realized that I had gotten so high, that time was no longer moving. And if time was not moving, I could maybe never come down. I was stuck here forever. And then the hellish nightmare started.
I felt like I was losing control of myself, like something else was trying to take over, and whoever won the battle, that is the consciousness that would exist. The more I fought, the more painful things got. Pain the likes of which I no one can physically imagine.
Went upstairs and laid down in my bed, began going out of body. I started dying over and over in unimaginable ways in my head, trapped in loops. Pain beyond anything I've ever felt in reality, there was no limit. It was tied to my breath, I realized that it had been so long since I had breathed, I kept forgetting who I was and what was going on, and then I would catch a slight glimpse and remember and fight so hard to take another breath. And there was so much pain in fighting to "survive" and hold on to who I was.
Eventually, the pain/struggle became too much, and I "gave in" and said "okay, I give up, you win, I can't take it anymore, I'd rather die." And that's when it's stopped. There appeared this giant shape of light/energy that was every color at once, and colors we don't have words for, and it "touched me" (could have been me moving towards it, or it towards me, there wasn't really a concept of this).
When it "touched" me, what it "showed" me was something I later learned is called an "Ouroboros", the snake eating it's tail. It showed me what "infinity" really meant, and that was too much to handle and shattered my psyche.
In that moment my body/mind/soul felt like it was obliterated to pieces by some energy beam in the most excruciating, searing pain, and I woke up in my bed having just pissed myself.
It took a long time to piece myself back together after that one.
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There are a lot of details I've omitted for brevity's sake, but this captures the gist of it.
The majority of my trauma has to do with anything related to loops: think Nietzsche's Eternal Return, general time-loops, fear of time-stopping, etc.
When I have panic attacks I have to stop myself from starting a stopwatch on my phone to make sure time is still moving because it'll cause a feedback loop and ratchet-up the panic, causing the time-dilation to increase in a vicious cycle.
not having a reliable way to know exactly what you took can amplify the anxiety, when your brain starts filling up with seratonin and whites everything out just like people on their deathbeds report, are you supposed to let go? when your sense of self has been obliterated and the next moment you are in the body of another mammal lost and confused in the forest for an entire lifetime before being transported back into your body and only a minute has gone by - but your trip is to last another 9 hours, should you fight it? Distinct neural networks in your mind that never communicate are now connected, vestigial components of the mind are now being expressed, are you being replaced in a firmware dump and flash?
a lot of people have a friend with them to guide them through an acid trip because trips can be steered with sounds and words, simple chimes, melodies.
would it have helped? very hard to say. but as the author wrote, the bad day and uncomfortable setting did not help. It is similar to a dream state (just radically more intense), where the things on your mind and also happening around you can affect the direction of your dreams.
> when your sense of self has been obliterated and the next moment you are in the body of another mammal lost and confused in the forest for an entire lifetime before being transported back into your body and only a minute has gone by - but your trip is to last another 9 hours, should you fight it?
There was a lot of this, during that out-of-body-period. I existed in multiple places/points in time at once as different people of various ages/genders/nationalities and then occasionally as animals, and lived entire simultaneous lifetimes. At one "time", in places + times A, B, C, D as different living things. Really does a number on your sense of self for a bit, heh.
Sorry for the questions, we can talk about it somewhere else, just add an email or protonmail account to your hackernews account I'll mail you there