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This was an interesting read, but to me felt like a focused/narrowed view on very specific phenomena. If you've ever taken psychedelics, you are familiar with

This was an interesting read, but to me felt like a focused/narrowed view on very specific phenomena. If you've ever taken psychedelics, you are familiar with time dilation. In a dose-dependent manner, (external) time ticks slower and slower. The classic joke is "Two friends are tripping together, one puts on music, and they listen. At the end, one says to the other 'Hey that was great, what album was that?' To which the other replies 'Huh? That was just the first song.'. It's possible to experience time dilation so intense on psychedelics that external progression of time halts completely and you're sort of "suspended" in a moment in time. (I know it sounds ridiculous and completely impossible) So I'd be really interested to see research on how it is that psychedelics impact time perception and what the brain activity looks like.

emptysongglass 6y ago
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.
- gavinray 6y ago
  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.
  - mrow84 6y ago
    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.
  - anon_cow1111 6y ago
    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.
    - asdff 6y ago
      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.
  - LocalH 6y ago
    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
    - Terr_ 6y ago
      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.
- dntrkv 6y ago
  I had a very similar experience. Do you know which episode of Midnight Gospel that was?
  - kgwxd 6y ago
    If you haven't already, I would suggest watching all the episodes from beginning to end.
  - emptysongglass 6y ago
    Existential Trap of the Soul Prison.
- SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
  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.
  - gavinray 6y ago
    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.
    - SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
      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.
      - asdff 6y ago
        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.
        6y ago
- monktastic1 6y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEg70Tf_V5A
  - gavinray 6y ago
    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...
    - monktastic1 6y ago
      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.
- GordonS 6y ago
  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.
- LocalH 6y ago
  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.
- sebmellen 6y ago
  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.

emptysongglass 6y ago

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.

gavinray 6y ago
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.
- mrow84 6y ago
  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.
- anon_cow1111 6y ago
  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.
  - asdff 6y ago
    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.
- LocalH 6y ago
  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
  - Terr_ 6y ago
    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.
dntrkv 6y ago
I had a very similar experience. Do you know which episode of Midnight Gospel that was?
- kgwxd 6y ago
  If you haven't already, I would suggest watching all the episodes from beginning to end.
- emptysongglass 6y ago
  Existential Trap of the Soul Prison.
SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
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.
- gavinray 6y ago
  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.
  - SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
    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.
    - asdff 6y ago
      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.
      - 6y ago
monktastic1 6y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEg70Tf_V5A
- gavinray 6y ago
  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...
  - monktastic1 6y ago
    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.
GordonS 6y ago
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.
LocalH 6y ago
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.
sebmellen 6y ago
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.