What do people see when they're tripping? Analyzing Erowid's trip reports

I then spent the next like 12 hours on my couch realizing that the entire concept of time is a manmade construct that is absolutely meaningless and irrelevant in the grand scheme of the universe. All this while watching golf on TV (which followed a golfer who posted the lowest final round score ever at a major). I have no idea how the TV turned on, and why I didn't turn it off.

LSD is fucking wild.

I ate a few magic mushrooms I found while walking in the UK. On returning home I went to bed to relax. Someone was playing some music downstairs, I could only faintly hear it, the general ambient sound was louder. My brain elaborated the faint auditory signal to create the most fantastic music I had ever heard, and it filled my head like it was super hi fi. Curiously I was able control the sound effects and elaborate instrumentation at will in real time, like I was some omnipotent engineer/DJ/composer.

After reading many trip reports on Erowid for LSD, I suspect that the authors often unknowingly took something else. A classic case is STP/DOM, which often comes in paper / tabs and is visually indistinguishable from LSD. If you ever hear the familiar, "I took some crazy acid. At first it didn't work, so I took another, and then I finally came up after an hour and had an intense trip," it was probably STP/DOM instead of LSD.

The first time was with tincture. My entire left body half became intoxicated in the exact same way as when drunk on alcohol. The left half of my body had difficulties with balance, coordination and motor functions. The vision on my left eye was impaired by the eye refusing to stay on target. Most interestingly, the left half of my brain was also influenced, giving me problems with speaking fluently and thinking straight. My right body half was completely unaffected, instilling me with a sense that humans were composed of two distinct halves rather than one body.

The second time was also with tincture. Nothing happened. No sensations of any kind.

The third time was with tincture and by smoking. It was a profound experience. I dozed off and dreamt that I was a nut on the branch of a tree. The wind swept me away and threw me onto a meadow where I sprouted and began to grow. I experienced life as a sapling, growing for years and years until I was an old tree, and I had vivid and fresh memories of seeing countless springs, summers, autumns and winters coming and going. When I came out of it I had an exhausted feeling in my chest reminiscent of waking up from long and deep sleep, and in my mind I had the memory and feeling of having lived for a hundred years, and a strong sense of an incredible amount of time having gone by since I smoked the salvia.

The last time I used it was by smoking. I experienced merging with things I touched. I sat on the floor and leaned back against a sofa, and felt my back sinking into the sofa and becoming part of it. I laid down on the floor, and felt my back fusing with the floor. I drank water from a glass and felt as if the glass didn't want to "let go" of my hand.

Smoking salvia hit almost instantly. With tincture, which was to be kept in the mouth for 10+ minutes but not swallowed, it took close to 20 minutes before the sensations begun. All of the trips lasted no more than 15-20 minutes and I never had any kind of hangover or lingering effects other than the (positive) emotional and psychological phases of reflecting on the experiences.

I don't recall any really profound thoughts, introspection, or feelings of intoxication. Which was a strange difference to me compared to things like 4-ACO-DMT and LSD, but I liked it.

It was THE single most amazing and out-of-this-world thing I ever experienced and I highly recommend it to everyone.

I don't know if it helped me in any way with my depression though. No hangover. No lasting changes.

If you read the trip reports of it (which are pretty fascinating tbh) you notice a common trend of people hallucinating that they are smoking a cigarette, and then they drop it, only to search around and be unable to find it. This is usually one of the first tip-offs they have that something is happening before they totally get lost in the void. Really fascinating how many people on there had this same common experience while taking datura specifically.

Personally I've had visual snow for over a decade from a 5 minute Salvia trip. This means that instead of looking at the color white or black and seeing a clean color, I see a static cloud all over it. I'm one of the lucky ones - most of the people I've known over the years who messed with these substances ended up dead, with persistent mental illness, or brain fog that took years to clear up.

You roll the dice on your mental and physical well being every time you ingest a hallucinogen. The characterization of these substances as ones which induce visual hallucinations without mentioning the lifetime of mental health issues they leave people with is dangerous.

Just mentioning that you used LSD in your past, may be enough to cause problems today[0] (especially in today's climate). Myself, I don't care. I use my experience to help others, so I'm fairly open about it.

[0] https://www.wired.com/2007/04/canadian-psycho/

Form constants, lattices. Colors are indeed vivid, but few hallucinations

Some things almost take on a new form, for example stars tend to dance and moss on a tree can swirl its texture like a moving river, and appear mesmerizing.

I’ve noticed mushroom trips for me are less visual, more introspective.

DMT:

I’ve never taken enough to truly break through, but in lower or medium quantities, things tend to move around and form clear patterns and sometimes a new appearance altogether!

Some objects can even take on a new form as an entity; I recall a very dynamic tree that put on a show for me my first trip.

The last time I used it, I closed my eyes for the duration. The visuals appeared much stronger, and I was even pulled me out of my own head and into a brief “slideshow” I felt the gods put on for me. I recall some beautiful, ancient looking visuals which reminded me of old Egypt or Sumer. Very surreal, and minutes later I was back in true reality like nothing happened.

This was the most fascinating finding to me. I really wouldn't have expected Salvia, Acid, Shrooms, etc. to all produce the same hallucinations ... but I guess ultimately they're all operating on the same core neurochemicals, so I guess it makes sense.

What is interesting is that brain activity is severly reduced in these states. So it could be that taking large doses of these drugs could in a way "simulate" the process of dying.

I had an out of body experience, floating just below ceiling and seeing myself in bed. Being lighter than a feather. Window was slightly opened and i could feel the outside breeze trying to pull me out, at that point i got scared and put all my strength into falling back in my body. Years later I was diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea. Maybe my oxygen levels dropped significantly and i almost left for good.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/the-trip-plann...

I have not done LSD or mushrooms as I have a bad childhood/repressed memories and I worry of having a bad trip.

> And they’ve been great collaborators; I think they once described themselves as “squares among the weirdos, and weirdos among the squares.”

Sorry about the bad joke, but reading the title I first thought someone is doing experiments having people wear an action cam or something. ;)

also it's a lot easier for me to recall like trauma and other buried stuff when i'm on lsd

I appreciate the stand they're taking, but the potential for greater understanding and harm reduction seems to outweigh any potential downsides of putting public webpages into an LLM.

Meanwhile, back in the fully conscious world, my roommates had conversations with me that I do not remember at all. I took a very long break from any experimenting after that.

i.e. May be fun to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.

Source: Used to take a lot of it. Been a while. A long, long, while. Used up my quota by the time I was 18.

Mushrooms: We must love each other, everything feels so warm and friendly.

LSD: It's like I'm traveling through my entire life at 5,000 miles per hour. Completely messes with my perception of time.

DMT: Holy shit what the fuck did I just do.

As for visuals, obviously DMT is the craziest. I saw the universe as a black hole warping space time. Tons of crazy geometric patterns.

LSD visuals include moving shapes, seeing animals in everything, and lots and lots of fractals. Just don't look at yourself in the mirror on LSD, it'll freak you out.

Mushroom visuals for me were less intense, with lots of nice moving patterns.

Psychedelics for me usually involve complex geometric patterns, colours, and objects "breathing" and morphing. More distortions and extreme pareidolia than actual hallucination(defined as perception in the absence of stimuli). They also involve what feels like "enhanced" hearing, where you're able to focus on everything you're hearing with exactly equal attention(I honestly don't know if that description makes any sense), which makes music sound very different, especially music that's tailored for listening while on psychedelics, like Shpongle.

The cognitive effects are also hard to describe, but there's a a tendency towards tangential thinking while retaining the ability to navigate the complex tree of tangents, a feeling of profoundness attached to even the simplest deduction, and a perceived ease of handling highly abstract ideas. There's also a sort of tearing down of deeply ingrained biases and rationalisations which in my view is how psychedelics are potentially very powerful accelerants of psychotherapy and personal change.

I never liked dissociatives very much. Their effects on memory make it hard for me to even remember the experiences, and mostly what I remember from doing ketamine and MXE is that everything looks strange. Angles are weird. Headspace is more confused than profound and certainly less productive. I might just have an atypical reaction to dissociatives, idk.

Cannabinoids are very unique drugs in that they provoke some combination of stimulant, sedative, psychedelic, dissociative and deliriant effects. Many people report that after combining cannabis with psychedelics multiple times, their experience with cannabis becomes more psychedelic. This certainly happened to me. I used to frequently combine 2C-B with hash several years ago. Ever since then if I smoke some hash with no tolerance essentially have a psychedelic trip for 3 hours. I quite like it. I get to take a short trip into a psychedelic mindspace without the usual hassle, longer duration, bodily side effects and sleep disturbances of taking a conventional psychedelics. Right now I'm doing it once every 4 weeks, since I'm trying to cure my addiction to hash by teaching myself moderation, and it's been working fine. Although part of me misses just the simple feeling of being stoned, giggling at children's cartoons and eating peanut butter with a spoon. I suppose I might never get that back.

Synthetic cannabinoids are horrible drugs I wouldn't recommend to anyone. Their sheer potency leads to a domination of dissociative and deliriant effects. Psychosis is a likely outcome. Complete dissociation like forgetting who you are, anterograde amnesia, severe anxiety and paranoia. They're also quite hard on the body. Stay away.

Zopiclone is a strange one. It's primary mode of action is the same as benzos, but it also has some interesting interactions with nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, which I suspect is what causes the hallucination. It's the only drug that's given me tactile hallucinations, which is a strange sensation. If I had to classify it, I'd put it in the deliriant class, but it has some dissociative properties too. It's strongly synergises with cannabinoids but also with psychedelics. For me, the recommended dose of 7.5mg usually caused some very mild hallucination, but 15 was the dose I usually took. I don't recommend zopiclone though, as it can cause strange episodes of anterograde amnesia the day after. Even when used as a hypnotic. The Z-drugs were originally touted as being like benzos without the addiction potential. It's since been learned that they're exactly like benzos, addiction and all, just with more side effects. Boggles the mind that they're still prescribed at all.

> Every bad sensation was magnified a thousandfold because there was nothing to filter or rationalize it. Pain didn't feel like something I was experiencing—it felt like everything I was.

> I was convinced I had broken something inside my mind permanently, that I'd never be normal again. The terror of that idea became its own reality.

but also the nice things are interesting to chat about

  Users frequently say things like:
  “There was no past or future, only this moment.”
  “Who I was didn't matter anymore; I just existed.”

generally a fun thing to chat about with it.