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Comment by emptysongglass | Hacker News Reader

I once had an experience of "time-looping" on acid where I returned to the beginning of the same scene over and over. After four or so rewinds I would say the words of whoever's turn it was to talk before they said it. I'm a pretty rational guy but that experience shook me to the core. There's a Midnight Gospel episode I saw recently that portrayed it in animation dead-on. So I can't be the only one.

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Certainly not the only one. I once took too much (only obvious in retrospect) with friends, and the scene replayed what felt like thousands of times. Each time was subtly different than the last, but cumulatively it felt like a whole different world. Eventually I ran into the very difficult dilemma of having to "reconstruct" my original timeline so that I could return safely to it, rather than to the bizarre new timeline we all seemed to occupy. It felt like a Herculean (or maybe Sisyphean) effort to rebuild all of reality to the place where we had left it, but juuust as we managed to do it (seemingly eons later), the trip coincidentally ended. Haven't touched LSD / AL-LAD since.

If I were a materialist, I'd find this hard (but not impossible) to explain. The only permissible explanation would be that the whole thing was an illusion of some sort (insert lots of handwaving), brought on by chemicals in a very real brain. But I'm (roughly) an idealist, and this isn't even the strangest experience I've had on psychedelics, so there's a much broader set of possibilities here -- some of which actually inform my sober life in practical and beneficial ways.

Tangentially related, I found this to be a fun trip report: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEg70Tf_V5A

FWIW, I also had the experience/sensation of being "removed" from the standard reality we experience daily, and put into a slightly-altered one that had been "created" or brought on by what was happening. And it felt very clearly like "the rules do not apply here".

This sort of sensation only happened in those particular experiences, all the other ones just felt "normal" (ironic term here).

Look at how absurd all of this sounds when you say it publicly. Psychedelics are something else...

Yes, I've also had very powerful demonstrations of the rules no longer applying. And the more my mind tried to fight it, the more explicit and painstaking the demonstrations became, until I was forced to submit to a shocking realization (roughly: that I do not, and cannot, know what reality "really" is, and shame on me for having the hubris to so confidently insist otherwise).

It would have been very easy for me to ascribe this to something like advanced alien technology, or the simulation hypothesis, or other extraordinarily strange possibilities. From the Buddhist perspective, it is the very nature of mind to demonstrate and teach -- in whatever ways the sentient being requires -- the infinite flexibility and unlimited potential of experience. If one is receptive to it, it can be integrated in a healthy way (much unlike the alien or simulation explanations, IMHO). In my experience, that is why psychedelics are not necessarily appropriate for all people at all times.

Would love to hear more about your story, if you feel like sharing.

> The more my mind tried to fight it, the more explicit and painstaking the demonstrations became, until I was forced to submit to a shocking realization

Exact same experience as well. It was like a Gordian Knot -- the worse I struggled, the tighter it squeezed. It's kind of eerie how similar all the variants of this experience I've read online are.

> Would love to hear more about your story, if you feel like sharing.

Sure. I think it's useful to share things like this so other people don't think they've gone insane/are the only one.

Had a long discussion and went into detail on it before here:

Initial comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22991744

Background story:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22993060

> Sure. I think it's useful to share things like this so other people don't think they've gone insane/are the only one.

The weird/crazy/interesting and scary thing about it, is that many of these things can happen to people without taking any psychedelics.

Some people do think they've gone crazy.

Related research about persistent non-symbolic experience: https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...

Well now we need to know, if you're willing to share: what was the strangest experience you've had?

One problem is that the further out the experiences get, the less easy they are to put into words (or even into memories). The other problem is that this can sound like bragging or attention-seeking. Nonetheless, as another commenter pointed out, it might be healthy to normalize some of these experiences (insofar as such a thing is possible). In each case, I'm not the only one who has had the experience.

On DMT, I've had the experience of retracting all of reality into a singularity, where I remained for eternity in infinite bliss, until I ("I") was ready to Big Bang the whole thing out again, which I of course dutifully did. As you can imagine, this is a very condensed version of the story.

I've had experiences of discovering how reality is "actually" a dream, and becoming privy to all of the precise, minute details of how everything is projected from the psyche of the Godhead that we all ultimately are.

I've had the experience of living countless lives, from the perspectives of both victims and their perpetrators, until I've seen very precisely why unerring compassion is the only sensible response to anything, ever, period. Why all evil is illusion, and can only be driven out by light (the primordial love that manifests as all of reality). Why humanity suffers so much: because we project the darkness within us outside of ourselves, so that we can avoid taking responsibility. How we wear these projections as a badge of honor: look, we are the good guys, fighting the bad guys!

I have also had more "conventionally strange" trips (if that makes sense) in which physical laws are broken in arbitrarily strange ways. Think of the old Tibetan Buddhist story of a master who was able to fit a large animal (a yak maybe?) into his shoe, without the Yak getting smaller or his shoe getting bigger. Some of these experiences offered me the chance to use all of my normal tools to confirm them as thoroughly as I would be able in sober reality, until I was thoroughly satisfied that no combination of neurotransmitters or standard physics could suffice as an explanation. I would love to share more details, but I'm not sure I can.

I would not blame someone reading this and concluding that I'm batshit crazy. From my perspective, the crazy part is us being so certain we've got reality figured out in the slightest bit. This belief in a fundamentally lifeless reality is the root of so much suffering (for example, the whole climate crisis), and yet we're doubling down on it. It breaks my heart.

My rational mind has even constructed radically skeptical arguments demonstrating why we should not (see my profile, e.g.). Your mileage may vary, of course.

Edit: wow, a lot in common with gavinray's response.

> the old Tibetan Buddhist story of a master who was able to fit a large animal (a yak maybe?) into his shoe, without the Yak getting smaller or his shoe getting bigger

This reminds me of something I once experienced on truffles (the kinds sold in Amsterdam smartshops), but I experienced only mentally. I had this vivid fractal "dream", if you will, of all of reality condensing into a point not dissimilar to the Mandelbrot fractal. When I looked at it, I realized the edges were the limits of human knowledge (or something like that).

But I could go further down or further up, and I realized that I was actually holding this entire fractal in my head, so I could explore any part of it, which meant I had access to all knowledge already.

I realized afterwards that Plato must have experienced the same, promoting his quote that "all learning is remembering".

I also had an experience on 5-MeO-MiPT, when I was tripping and went to get acupuncture. I went to the bathroom before the session started, and somehow I managed to fit into the bathroom despite being so large I could barely get in the door. Very similar to Alice in Wonderland.

I wonder how this size distortion happens, because when I experienced it, it felt so absolutely real.

This is the Buddhist take on it, FWIW: http://www.lionsroar.com/visualizing-a-pure-and-perfect-worl...

When I had ego death, I (if you can use that word) was sort of trapped/floating in space in the universe for an eternity, felt like billions of years. But there was no planets or stars, just a massive void, and my tiny speck of consciousness.

Finally, the void "burst"/exploded and the energy from it caused me to feel "pain" the likes of which I can't even describe. It was like being hit with a laser beam that tore every atom in your being apart.

When I did, I realized it was the birth/creation of the universe, the "Big Bang" (except it's not one bang, it's a never-ending cycle) and I woke up in my bed.

I once experienced existing in multiple points in history as multiple people (no clue who they were) of all ages/ethnicities/gender simultaneously.

The other ones are things that felt related to various religions, except I wasn't aware of what they were until afterwards. But I have never been exposed to religion, and don't have any beliefs.

There are two that stand out to me.

1. I had an experience where my partner at the time, it felt like we were the same being. Two sides of the same coin. This experience wasn't going so well, and I was trapped in bed (not physically restrained, just that I couldn't get myself to move).

And the gist of it was that, I was trapped in time and forced into a choice, and it was to either let myself die and stay there eternally, or create the universe.

The theme was essentially this two-sided entity that wanted to create and then experience the universe to entertain itself, but in doing so would also unleash all the pain that would ever exist.

Later on I wound up running across the concept of the "Demiurge" in Gnosticism, and that aligned pretty nearly with my experience.

2. Nearing ego-death and in my head having the phrase "I am Who I am" repeating endlessly. It had several meanings. "I am", "I am who?" "Who am I?" "I am who I am." At some point I woke up and was speaking some very foreign sounding language that I couldn't stop and I had never heard in my life. I want to write it off as gibberish but the way the sentences flowed grammatically and my voice inflection was not something I could off-my-head improvise in a made up language and sound that natural.

Later found out that phrase has some religious meaning.

Alright, there's most of the batshit crazy stuff you won't believe haha.

> Later found out that phrase has some religious meaning.

Yeah just the Hebrew name of God is all

I think it's easier to explain (as a materialist, which I am) if you posit that what has been disrupted is not the real-time sensory and self-awareness functions of the mind,

but those of encoding memory of those experiences,

memory being the necessary stack layer through which this all transpires.

Metaphorically, remember how skipping CDs sound?

Generating and recording the same stream of sound is possible but as you say, "hard," but if the same outcome can through a relatively trivial disruption of a different part of the system...

(I have intentionally made glitch music of various kinds... the fast path is always to force failure modes in the tools, not to try to replicate them through intentional construction :))

To add my own observation of the alternate experience of time on psychedelics: one reason I have loved the 2C family is the recurring perception that the entropic arrow hides from us that all states (T - N, T, and probably T + N) exist eternally all the time; the "we" of any given moment T merely experience it as illusory flow.

As more and more friends die, and other things are lost, it is deeply reassuring to imagine that this might be so–that those people and things are still "there" in a literal real sense, even, nearby in some sense...

...just not one we are privy to given the limits of our embodiment.

Not something I suspect is falsifiable,

but if I'm going to have faith in something, as an aetheist,

this is as deep a well of peace as I have found.

Nope, same here, twice. I made it worse by opening my phone's stopwatch and starting a timer. The time was in the format 00:00.00, and I could see the milliseconds creeping by, slowing more and more, until the numbers stopped moving entirely and that's the point when I was like "Welp, I made a big mistake here tonight."

Got pretty traumatized from that. You assume linear progression of time to be a given truth of the universe, and when you loop in time or it stops, it's as if gravity had been reversed and you can float now. Cracks the fundamental assumptions you had about everything and you are left trying to put the pieces back together afterwards.

If drugs always wear off in a finite amount of time -- but the drug has subjectively halted YOUR movement of time, you can now logically be in this state for an eternity/infinity. And that's when you get chills down your spine and start to panic haha.

I also experienced this on mushrooms, and found it quite traumatising as well, though I was already (I think) in a bit of a dark place when that part of the trip began, so that probably influenced my perception of it.

Did you notice any more obviously physical effects of time dilation then, or just the phone timer? As in, throwing a ball and counting the rotations while it moves through the air, or fan blades spinning, etc?

Just wondering if there's a way to study this as a real measure of reaction-time improvement, versus just a hallucinated one.

I think there are some stimulant properties with psychedelics that I wouldn't be surprised if reaction times were improved. One thing I noticed from my experiences with LSD was that I could run seemingly indefinitely without tiring, and drink quite a lot of beer as if it were water and not feel drunk, when that same dosage while otherwise sober would make me struggle to walk. I think it would be too tough to stay focused on an empirical task to truly measure this, however. My mind might be running quite fast, but is easily distracted in this state.

Historically, Dock Ellis threw a no hitter while tripping on LSD. He could scarcely see the home plate through all the visualizations, but he did it.

The strangest thing about my DMT time loops was that even though my perception of external time was dragged back and forth, I still have the memory of an internal chronology that was largely present throughout the experience, with gaps here and there

Humans don't remember things so much as we re-create an imaginary scenario based on clues to keep us on track.

So it's entirely possible that your memory--the replay simulation being done right now by your mind without drugs--is what provides the internal chronology, because that's simply how the re-simulation process works.

That’s very possible. Like I said, there are gaps so it’s not an entirely intact chronology.

In the first two or three minutes of the trip (which felt like much longer), I had this perception of “understanding everything” about reality and consciousness. During this time, I was lookin around the room and enjoying the vivid colors that were overlaying everything. Then a very intense and pleasant vibration occurred. After this, I attempted to play Guitar Hero. This only lasted for exactly one note before I started being pulled through the time period of the trip - I felt my perception forced backwards along the exact path that my eyes had initially taken through the room. In this manner, I was pulled forwards and backwards in a sort of loop. I tried to stand up at one point and knocked over a Coke bottle, and I perceived that bottle falling over multiple times. Same for my friend and tripsitter breaking up a post-trip bowl of cannabis. At one point my perception had come to what seemed like the “now” moment and just kinda stopped or got extremely slow. My thoughts went to the idea of whether I was dead and the looping was the experience of death, so I asked “am I dead?” My sitter told me that “you’re more alive than you’ve ever been”. After that, my trajectory through time continued until I felt a similar vibration to the earlier one, except it felt more dreadful. After that subsided, normal “reality” started to fade back in, with me becoming able to tug back against whatever was pulling me through time. It was very surreal. Even once the afterglow faded, my mind was clear for the first time in 20 years. I could think about nothing if I wanted to. Anyone with ADHD will understand how difficult that normally is.

> but the drug has subjectively halted YOUR movement of time, you can now logically be in this state for an eternity/infinity

Someone told me the story of a guy that smoked DMT, was out for 15min and when he woke up he said he was never doing it again. He experienced living as a different person for 60 years, having a job, getting married, a whole life.

It reminds me both of the end of the movie Contact and of the game in Blips and Chitz (Rick and Morty).

I can just imagine dying, only to have my alien friends ask me how the trip was.

Here’s a story from someone who was knocked unconscious and lived an entire life in that time.

It’s the top comment, not the deleted post itself:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/oc7rc/comment/c3...

I had the same thing on mushrooms once, many years ago. I kept finding myself in the corner of the same room, staring at a troll (an hallucination). It seemed like it had happened a hundred times, and was pretty frightening.

The whole night went horribly, and I never touched shrooms or acid since.

I had a very similar experience. Do you know which episode of Midnight Gospel that was?

If you haven't already, I would suggest watching all the episodes from beginning to end.

Existential Trap of the Soul Prison.

I've had a very similar experience when I was alone, where I sat across from myself on four seats at my kitchen table. I played a game of cards with myself for what felt like an hour, repeating each play from the vantage point of my other selves.

I have absolutely no rational explanation for how I could have imagined this or what phenomena made it take place. The only explanation I can really believe is that I somehow was able to see between the cosmic fabric that separates the multiverses.

I'm confused - are you saying the looping was in perception, or did you believe you actually were? Given you were actively imbibing mind and perception altering chemicals, isn't the easier assumption that your ability to form memories was impaired to the point where the order got jumbled? Your perception is imperfect at the best of time, which we all know, and so what you're experiencing is an at best imperfect representation of what has, is, or will occur.

I am someone who doesn't believe in anything but science and logic.

Let's use Occam's Razor here. Is it more probable that:

A) Time was actually looping or frozen

B) You were on drugs and just confused

I would really, really love to tell you that the answer was "B". But the leap of faith I ask the readers to make is that it was not B, and that it was very real.

I cannot give you a single shred of evidence to support this, nor does it even sound like something other than non-sober delusions and misinterpretation.

The unsatisfying answer is "try it for yourself and tell me what happens."

I wouldn't have believed it either to be honest.

As long as we're clear that it's unbelievable. Invoking Occam's razor really helps decide it - is it more likely that you are experiencing altered perception while consuming chemicals that are use explicitly to alter perception, or that time itself doesn't follow the rules that are observed and understood and reproducible by some other quality of the perception altering drugs.

Could a third option be that our sober perception of time isn't particularly accurate, and is a construct of our own consciousness? We see a day as a day, but for a fruit fly a day is 1/14 of a lifetime.

Regardless of the rate of time (which we can all experience with doing an enjoyable or boring task), there's no reason to believe the fruit fly experiences time in reverse or as a loop.

I think it’s more that our sober human perception of time and space is a filter we all share and reason about. All clocks tick at more or less the same rate, but a second is meaningless without the “human standard” filter.

But they are describing time as looping. I take no issue with time being variable - I've experienced slow and fast days, but looping is the issue.

This seems like a variation on fractals.

We’ve established that the experience of time can fully stop. When stopped, infinite fractals can play of the same moment.

I had intense and forceful time loops on DMT. Not just merely perceiving things repeating but literally perceiving being dragged backwards and forwards through time.

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