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This is my first hand experience. My life was a codependent mess, I was depressed and having suicidal thoughts. I took a "heroic dose" of psilocybin, and durin

This is my first hand experience. My life was a codependent mess, I was depressed and having suicidal thoughts. I took a "heroic dose" of psilocybin, and during the ~4 hour trip I fell asleep and I was convinced I had died. I re-experienced my forgotten birth and felt the pain of my circumcision. I experienced a bunch of unexplainable things, fractal patterns and music, and explored a Interstellar(2014)-like tesseract where I could choose any place in time to return to. I decided to return to myself in the present time, rather than pass on to whatever comes after my life. I awoke in a puddle of urine and vomit. My body felt like it had been hard-reset and I felt little pains here and there which I had completely forgotten about and my brain had just become used to and ignored. I immediately felt better about my mess of a life, and happy that it's what I get to work with and make better. I used that positive momentum to get pumped about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, where I did a lot of good work on myself. For therapeutic effect of psychedelics, I think the uncomfortable mind-body separation experience is necessary.

mulderc 6y ago
My experience suggests you don’t need to go that far to get good results. I was at the lowest point in my life, very depressed and just generally lost. I was likely clinically depressed but didn’t have enough money to get a proper diagnosis. I everything short of prescription drugs to deal with it and nothing worked. Then I took some LSD and had a mild trip with a friend and literally the next morning I felt happy and energetic. From that point on I have not been anywhere near the depression I had before. Now I just have the normal ups and down of life abs feel perfectly capable of dealing with the world.
- __blockcipher__ 6y ago
  Some people just need a little acute upregulation of neuroplasticity to break out of their funk. For others it's a much deeper and more entangled and multi-dimensional problem. But just to agree with you, not everybody needs a heroic dose, and as the name implies, it's a dose where there is the possibility of stuff going very wrong - but one of the morals of psychedelics, (and indeed life itself because reality is "the strongest tab I never took"), is that you have to get to that place of completely surrendering and offering yourself up in order for you to be really transformed. And the funny thing is so many of us go into our trips with the idea that we're taking it to improve our lives, and then when you're actually deep in the peak of the trip and you've got a whole universe inside of you suddenly you realize not just how unprepared you really were but more accurately, how fundamentally incapable of being prepared for the experience we really are)
  - Syzygies 6y ago
    > Some people just need a little acute upregulation of neuroplasticity to break out of their funk. That's the best sentence I've read all year on HN.
- subsubsub 6y ago
  If we're sharing unverifiable anecdotes about LSD, then I have one... A friends mother took LSD in the 80s and still gets nightmare flashbacks. Stay safe kids.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    Maybe if you have a particularly bad trip but everyone seems to have these horror stories and yet no one is one e.g. it's like the teacher saying about how the kid who leant too far back on his chair fell over and cracked his head open
    - jordan_curve 6y ago
      Huh? Obviously if you dismiss all of the bad anecdotes and none of the good ones, you’re only going to have good anecdotes My mom’s brother went into psychosis during an acid trip and eventually schizophrenia. He killed himself when he was 24. I think hallucinagens are fun recreationally and clearly have the potential for positive therapeutic use, but let’s not pretend that it’s always positive, especially in uncontrolled settings.
      - eurasiantiger 6y ago
        These anecdotes are always sad, but you have no way of confirming whether they took a normal sized dose of actual LSD, or whether they took a shitload of some unknown research chemical. Also, as you wrote, set and setting are important and those are not described.
      - Talanes 6y ago
        Even in the realm of unverifiable anecdotes, there is still a difference between a first party anecdote and a third-party anecdote. In the first party anecdote I only have to put my trust in one person, where in a third party anecdote I have to trust 2-to-infinity people. For whatever reason, negative anecdotes seem to be overwhelmingly third person, at the very least all the ones in this thread have been.
__blockcipher__ 6y ago
Thanks for sharing. I've never taken more than 3.5g of mushrooms, so not heroic, but even as little as 3g was enough for really profound life changes. 2g was just a fun experience and not much more. I've only done shrooms a handful of times but I think they're the best for actual transformative insight, whereas LSD (which I've done probably 30 times not counting microdosing) for me is much more just about the visual/aesthetic/kinesthetic/energetic experience. I've done breakthrough doses of DMT many times however. Fun fact, go look at DMT and psilocybin molecules side-by-side, they are nearly identical (https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/N_N-Dimethyltryptamine https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/N_N-Dimethyltrypta... versus https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/psilocybine https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/psilocybine). The key difference being that DMT can be inhaled whereas psilocybin can't, so you can get blasted into hyperspace and be back to normal in 20 minutes. I've gotten the more basic fractals and symbols written in the sand and faces in the clouds type effects on LSD/shrooms, but a proper dose of DMT brought me to this level you describe (and probably a little past): > unexplainable things, fractal patterns and music, and explored a Interstellar(2014)-like tesseract where I could choose any place in time to return to (minus the choose any place in time to return, although the general concept was similar since I was experiencing hyperdimensional objects and just as you can conceive of a cube as an infinite amount of 2d sheets of paper, so too can, say, a 5D space be viewed as an infinite amount of 4dimensional manifolds stuck together) > I re-experienced my forgotten birth and felt the pain of my circumcision Very interested in this experience. I won't go down the rabbithole too much but I'm in the (long) process of foreskin restoration, and definitely think that strapping a newborn to a table and (mostly) irreversibly damaging their most important organ is going to send out shockwaves of suffering that last not just your own lifetime but of course like all pain continues propagating forward through our children, etc. Anyway, all that aside, I'm wondering how much reading you'd done into circumcision and its effects before taking that trip. What I'm getting at is in psychology it's considered pretty well accepted that we can falsely re-experience memories, and so just curious what your "priors" were going into the experience. In other words, had you never thought about your circumcision (except superficially), and then had this forgotten birth / re-experienced trauma of circumcision experience, or do you think your subconscious was already "loaded up" with negative attitudes towards it, and this was just a sort of visceral expression/manifestation of that? (To be clear, even if the memory itself was a false memory, the trauma itself, whether it's just the more basic "pain sensitizes you to further pain" effect that's well studied or rather the more complicated self-propagating effects of the actual feeling of complete terror and helplessness that we must have felt as a baby and carried through spacetime, is clearly not false)

mulderc 6y ago

My experience suggests you don’t need to go that far to get good results. I was at the lowest point in my life, very depressed and just generally lost. I was likely clinically depressed but didn’t have enough money to get a proper diagnosis. I everything short of prescription drugs to deal with it and nothing worked. Then I took some LSD and had a mild trip with a friend and literally the next morning I felt happy and energetic. From that point on I have not been anywhere near the depression I had before. Now I just have the normal ups and down of life abs feel perfectly capable of dealing with the world.

__blockcipher__ 6y ago
Some people just need a little acute upregulation of neuroplasticity to break out of their funk. For others it's a much deeper and more entangled and multi-dimensional problem. But just to agree with you, not everybody needs a heroic dose, and as the name implies, it's a dose where there is the possibility of stuff going very wrong - but one of the morals of psychedelics, (and indeed life itself because reality is "the strongest tab I never took"), is that you have to get to that place of completely surrendering and offering yourself up in order for you to be really transformed. And the funny thing is so many of us go into our trips with the idea that we're taking it to improve our lives, and then when you're actually deep in the peak of the trip and you've got a whole universe inside of you suddenly you realize not just how unprepared you really were but more accurately, how fundamentally incapable of being prepared for the experience we really are)
- Syzygies 6y ago
  > Some people just need a little acute upregulation of neuroplasticity to break out of their funk. That's the best sentence I've read all year on HN.
subsubsub 6y ago
If we're sharing unverifiable anecdotes about LSD, then I have one... A friends mother took LSD in the 80s and still gets nightmare flashbacks. Stay safe kids.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Maybe if you have a particularly bad trip but everyone seems to have these horror stories and yet no one is one e.g. it's like the teacher saying about how the kid who leant too far back on his chair fell over and cracked his head open
  - jordan_curve 6y ago
    Huh? Obviously if you dismiss all of the bad anecdotes and none of the good ones, you’re only going to have good anecdotes My mom’s brother went into psychosis during an acid trip and eventually schizophrenia. He killed himself when he was 24. I think hallucinagens are fun recreationally and clearly have the potential for positive therapeutic use, but let’s not pretend that it’s always positive, especially in uncontrolled settings.
    - eurasiantiger 6y ago
      These anecdotes are always sad, but you have no way of confirming whether they took a normal sized dose of actual LSD, or whether they took a shitload of some unknown research chemical. Also, as you wrote, set and setting are important and those are not described.
    - Talanes 6y ago
      Even in the realm of unverifiable anecdotes, there is still a difference between a first party anecdote and a third-party anecdote. In the first party anecdote I only have to put my trust in one person, where in a third party anecdote I have to trust 2-to-infinity people. For whatever reason, negative anecdotes seem to be overwhelmingly third person, at the very least all the ones in this thread have been.

__blockcipher__ 6y ago

Thanks for sharing. I've never taken more than 3.5g of mushrooms, so not heroic, but even as little as 3g was enough for really profound life changes. 2g was just a fun experience and not much more. I've only done shrooms a handful of times but I think they're the best for actual transformative insight, whereas LSD (which I've done probably 30 times not counting microdosing) for me is much more just about the visual/aesthetic/kinesthetic/energetic experience. I've done breakthrough doses of DMT many times however. Fun fact, go look at DMT and psilocybin molecules side-by-side, they are nearly identical (https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/N_N-Dimethyltryptamine https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/N_N-Dimethyltrypta... versus https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/psilocybine https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/psilocybine). The key difference being that DMT can be inhaled whereas psilocybin can't, so you can get blasted into hyperspace and be back to normal in 20 minutes. I've gotten the more basic fractals and symbols written in the sand and faces in the clouds type effects on LSD/shrooms, but a proper dose of DMT brought me to this level you describe (and probably a little past): > unexplainable things, fractal patterns and music, and explored a Interstellar(2014)-like tesseract where I could choose any place in time to return to (minus the choose any place in time to return, although the general concept was similar since I was experiencing hyperdimensional objects and just as you can conceive of a cube as an infinite amount of 2d sheets of paper, so too can, say, a 5D space be viewed as an infinite amount of 4dimensional manifolds stuck together) > I re-experienced my forgotten birth and felt the pain of my circumcision Very interested in this experience. I won't go down the rabbithole too much but I'm in the (long) process of foreskin restoration, and definitely think that strapping a newborn to a table and (mostly) irreversibly damaging their most important organ is going to send out shockwaves of suffering that last not just your own lifetime but of course like all pain continues propagating forward through our children, etc. Anyway, all that aside, I'm wondering how much reading you'd done into circumcision and its effects before taking that trip. What I'm getting at is in psychology it's considered pretty well accepted that we can falsely re-experience memories, and so just curious what your "priors" were going into the experience. In other words, had you never thought about your circumcision (except superficially), and then had this forgotten birth / re-experienced trauma of circumcision experience, or do you think your subconscious was already "loaded up" with negative attitudes towards it, and this was just a sort of visceral expression/manifestation of that? (To be clear, even if the memory itself was a false memory, the trauma itself, whether it's just the more basic "pain sensitizes you to further pain" effect that's well studied or rather the more complicated self-propagating effects of the actual feeling of complete terror and helplessness that we must have felt as a baby and carried through spacetime, is clearly not false)