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Comment by dvduval | Hacker News Reader

For me, I don't believe I really ever saw anything that was different than reality, but the attention to my senses was heightened. It was a new curiosity about everything I saw or heard. if you wave your hand in front of your face there's a trail behind it. This sort of thing is heightened. I remember going to a racquetball court and it seems like they were many balls in the court when there actually there was only one. I went on top of a mountain and looked down at the trees below and it was almost like the trees were vibrating with life. I remember the sound of super Mario jumping giving me the giggles because the sound was completely different and interesting and it reverberated through the room. So there is a certain curiosity that is derived from the senses. That was my experience

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Are you talking about a full dose? I’ve had the effect of watching a kid throw a ball on a beach and it split into 8 balls and then merged back into one.

But such effects are only present when you take like 100ug, not the few micrograms that would constitute a microdose.

The strongest effect I had was from a liquid dose, and for a minute or two I had what I would characterize as a white out. Everything in my field of vision turned white and I couldn't move very well. My friends were worried about me but it only lasted a short time. I guess it could be said that because I saw multiple balls in the racquetball court that I did see something that was different from reality. But unfortunately when I was taking it we were not so scientific

I accidentally dosed myself in the middle of the night once after turning LSD crystal into ethanol:water:lsd solution and being careless at some point in the process.

Those damn mucous membranes, they really get ya. Must have touched my lips absentmindedly.

Before I realized, I was in bed trying to sleep. Restless, tossing and turning. Eventually started feeling that unmistakable body high around 1am. Anyone who’s done LSD before knows the sensation I’m talking about, you can’t miss it.

Cue a couple hours of having no idea how much I had dosed. I was trying to keep a loose subjective accounting of the time. In my head I’m simulating the different possibilities: either I dosed the equivalent of 1 hit a couple hours ago, 2hits an hour ago, or 4+ hits 30 minutes ago. It wasn’t until I passed peak that those different forked realities collapsed like the wave function and it became clear to me that I’d dosed something like 250 ug.

I didn’t sleep that night, as you can imagine. But the run I went on when the sun finally came up at 6am was incredible.

While waiting for the peak to pass on uncomfortably high doses, I sometimes entertain myself by closing my eyes and realizing I have no sense of how much time is passing until I open them. And if I hadn't the prior experience of closing my eyes while sober (and simply the ability to rationalize about how long things take), I wouldn't actually know if seconds or hours or eons were passing with the eyes shut.

One thing that makes me skeptical of most people talking about LSD on forums is that for you to really lose your shit on LSD (excusing mental illness), you have to take enough to lose your ability to do that sort of thinking and rationalizing. You aren't having a laugh with your friends on a monster dose while listening to Spiritualized. You're more like a newborn animal clutching on to a world you were just born into, the dose regressing you back into a sequence of instincts away from high level human thought.

Hmm, that sounds like your experience. I know a few cosmonauts and everyone’s different.

Some people just laugh at everything.

Would you recommend a full dose 125-175ish by yourself for the first time?

You’ll reduce your risk of freaking out if you have a trip sitter or if you work your way up to that point over time.

This, although some caveats:

(1) Be careful who you choose as a trip sitter. Some people are really bad at it and just end up being super annoying because they're staring at you like you're a zoo animal and keep asking you if you "see colors". Which is a long way of saying, make sure your trip sitter has actually taken psychedelics before, the utility of bringing a sober person along just because they're sober if they don't have psychedelic experience is quite low. (There are some individuals that have never done drugs yet still "get it" so I'm not talking about them to be clear)

(2) Working up doses over time is very good advice, most bad experiences are a result of taking too much in the wrong environment, and/or neglecting the basics. I've found 90% of trip discomfort is solved with water, a blanket, or changing up your physical environment.

But it is worth mentioning that accidentally taking a heavier dose because you think it's a normal dose - can sometimes work out, in the sense that once you've taken, say, 2.5g of shrooms you can't imagine taking 3.5g. I've noticed this particularly with DMT, if you don't get absolutely blasted it's easy to get anchored and be afraid to really commit to a breakthrough experience (as much as I hate the duality / binarity of the whole "breakthrough" concept there's definitely some truth to it)

So: taking a heavy dose as nooby is a terrible idea and thus I never recommend it. But sometimes the terrible idea works out in your favor :)

If it's truly pure LSD, 100ug is plenty. Many hits sold as 100ug really aren't.

That being said, you are more likely to be fine than not on 125ug-175ug, but responses are really variable. I've discovered that I'm very steady on psychedelics and so I can handle physical discomfort (jitteriness etc) and not have a bad time, but there's a certain archetype of individual that has trouble handling the raw barrage of stimulus that tripping represents.

So, you would probably be okay but I would recommend no more than 100ug taken in a natural setting (rather than being stuck inside your house).

Cheers.

Data from a study indicates that starting with 30-40 micrograms is good for most people: https://tripsafe.org/how-to-take-lsd/#3-use-a-safe-dosage-an...

It's extrapolated from psilocybin dosage but it seems about right.

I was in the passenger seat of a car, and my mind wandered while watching the car in front of us - I 100% watched it lose control and drive off the side of the road into the blackness.

It was just my imagination as confirmed by the sober driver and other passengers.

I was aware that my mind was wandering though - at a higher dose I might not have been aware of that.

> I don't believe I really ever saw anything that was different than reality

> I remember going to a racquetball court and it seems like they were many balls in the court when there actually there was only one

There isn't necessarily a contradiction there, e.g. you could just see a single ball at any given moment but feel like it was a different ball than the one you saw a few seconds ago. Ditto for the sounds. So you aren't literally seeing anything that isn't there but you may still form higher-level impressions that are not accurate.

The specific visual they’re describing, at least if it was the effect I’ve experienced while actually tripping, is you see the same ball forked into a number of balls that end up merging back together. That was on like 200ug, probably with some cannabis thrown in for good measure.

More broadly you are right, they’re not “hallucinations”. Huge pet peeve of mine when people call them that.

I was telling a friend who’s never tripped on anything about seeing faces in the cliffs. They looked at me like I was stark raving mad and I realized they thought I meant I was seeing a photo-realistic face implanted on the cliff face instead of the reality which was like when (sober) people are gazing at clouds and “seeing” patterns.

Most of us when we are new to tripping make it all about the “visuals”. But the realization eventually comes that in order to get the really crazy visuals your whole reality needs to be tripping really hard and one way it manifests is the visual field. There’s no way to experience “just visuals”, it’s going to come with the bodily sensations and altered temporal processing etc.

I’ve always found it fascinating how people interpret the melting away of time. Some describe it as lasting “forever”, but that’s just the word they’re using to describe the notion that getCurrentTime() is returning null rather than a fixed number.

>word they’re using to describe the notion that getCurrentTime() is returning null rather than a fixed number.

Can you explain what you mean by this? I've never had the time-dilation effects.

Hard to explain but something with the brain’s ability to subjectively measure time just melts away and as a result while “physical time” is still marching forward, “psychological time” seems to dissolve. Some people really can’t handle the sensation and freak out.

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