11 ms·

I'm quite sure that the research itself is quite interesting but I hate how the "hallucinations" overtake all discussion on psychedelics. I never experienced an

I'm quite sure that the research itself is quite interesting but I hate how the "hallucinations" overtake all discussion on psychedelics. I never experienced any hallucinations, understood as believing that I perceive something which turned out to not be the case, on acid. The only text I know which describes the experience accurately is "The doors of perception" by Huxley and he as well notices how you really don't start seeing things out of nowhere. At best what happens is that you start to notice patters that look like something but you are aware that this is pattern recognition and not real thing. Maybe there are people who experience, and are truly overwhelmed, by the hallucinatory part but I doubt that this is the most important issue with psychedelic.

kerpotgh 4y ago
[dead]
rootsudo 4y ago
I agree, the doors of perception and the book of the dead by timothy leary all give better examples of it it is to be on a "Trip." Most of the common culture, goes on that LSD/Acid, you see invisible things and such - and I, myself, never experienced that - but I can understand how someone that is fully ingrained in a normal life, and having ego death and their psyche is unleashed, can perceive things differently. That' what I feel it is, and I feel very sad that many people online post false stories about this. Places like Erowid, are also quickly eroding as people don't go there anymore, I think, to review or really get into the proper background. But I can also say that dosage is a big factor too, I've witnessed people that had no previous experience wanting to impress friends/new friends and do what is best described as a "hero dose" or such, and while psychedelics aren't immediately harmful, the proper way would be to threshold dose - but good luck explaining what that is. In this experience, I've witnessed this person become unable to talk, communicate and basically fall in and out of consciousness. Mind you, this was not LSD-25, but just mushrooms. They snapped out of it about 90 minutes later, but during that time if you were not an experienced trip-sitter or such, I can see panic kick in and you'd assume the worst - being poisoned, aliens out to get you, men in black or whatever is todays boogey man. From a 3rd party viewing that session, it would just be describable as hallucinations. The person who consumed the mushrooms felt fine and had no real recollection of what transpired, and did want to try again, albeit much smaller dosage now. Which is another thing, peer pressure in some of these groups could be strong - although in this example none was actively pushing it, but just general ignorance of how strong a trip can be for a first time consumer.
esperent 4y ago
I would say I have quite a bit of experience with psychedelics and I mostly agree with you - traditional "hallucinations" are quite rare and dose dependant. Experiences like those described in Huxley's book are by far the most important and interesting aspect of tripping - and I urge anyone curious to read that excellent book. On the other hand, I absolutely have experienced amazing, deep, beautiful, true pop-culture style hallucinations. Usually visual, both geometric patterns but also full on creations of new worlds, entities, landscapes, and more. I've also experienced hallucinations that are multisensory and go far beyond the ability to put into words. I am a very visually focused person with a strong mind's eye, possibly that is related.
siva7 4y ago
I've used quite extensively LSD and i never experienced real hallucinations. Sometimes i wonder if people mistake something they took for LSD.
- hombre_fatal 4y ago
  There is plenty of hallucination going on in my head though, often so crystal clear and undeniable that I all but see it out in the world. I think that’s enough to qualify as hallucination even though it’s not the cartoony meme of seeing aliens walking around or whatever.
  - konfusinomicon 4y ago
    agreed. the pop culture representation of hallucinations is actually more describing delirium. however, closing your eyes and letting your third eye wander is where the real interesting things happen, and it's possible that those experiences are so vivid even with eyes open because you are more acutely aware of what the third eye is seeing. almost as if it unlocks a sixth sense of sorts
- Broken_Hippo 4y ago
  I have, in the way of things melting (for example). I've seen a dream-like image of reality, a short fat man, riding away on a horse with a rainbow tail I have used LSD quite extensively as well - I cannot tell you how many times I've done it. But most of the time, it isn't that obvious. My hands look a little bluish or reddish. My spouse looks shiny. I get little moving lines on a blank sheet of paper: Sometimes I draw the ones that I can get (I often make art while on LSD as well as sober: I have a pretty steady hand). It is all a bit less than I've gotten with, say, mushrooms. Of course, I don't do heroic doses or anything and the more vivid hallucinations came with a stronger dose than I tend to have.
- throwaway173738 4y ago
  I wouldn’t be surprised. A lot of people don’t test what they buy before ingesting it. A lot of other drugs are marketed as something else. For example “MDMA” is often just amphetamine that the dealer sells as MDMA but they produce very different experiences. The physiological effects are similar but the mental effects are not comparable especially what it feels like the next day. Always test everything you get if you want to be sure.
IIAOPSW 4y ago
So I'd agree you generally won't get perceptions constructed seemingly out of whole cloth. They are more like non-optical illusions. Similar to optical illusions in the sense of being a form of erroneous perception which you are aware is erroneous but not really fooled by. Non-optical in the obvious sense that the mechanism isn't the same as a normal sober state optical illusion. Let's call them "distortions" instead and not get stuck on vocabulary. There's a few reliable ways to manifest distortions and to notice the amount of distortion in your present state. 1. After images. Stare at a bright spot such as a lightbulb or a beam of sunlight through a crack for several seconds. Then close your eyes. The normal after image you are used to should now take on a deeply geometric shape rather than smoothly diffusing away. 2. Look at TV static / towel / white noise texture. These patterns are extremely reliable at manifesting crystals and fractals. I have theories why, but lets stay on point. 3. The dead man switch. Set a timer for 20 min. When it goes off, verbally acknowledge and reset. This isn't visual, but the first and most subtle distortion is your sense of time and this will make you acutely aware of it. 4. Thin line on white page. It should reliably start to jiggle around as if it were a wave on a string. As a general rule, things which have very fine grain spatial components will be distorted in some way. If you must know the theory for whats happening (which I can back with scientific citations), the brain is doing something similar to the way jpeg/mp3 compression works. Namely it converts the incoming information into frequencies via a fourier transform (in some weird, highly optimized basis) because information processing is generally easier there. LSD changes the reference clocks so everything is out of phase. Every frequency is being slowly phase shifted from where it should be, which then causes it all to move as if it were following a wave equation.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mandarax8 4y ago
  Any source on that theory or is it your own?
  - IIAOPSW 4y ago
    Arguably both, since I thought of it but later found I've been beaten to it at least twice. Steven Lehar beat me by 20 years and made a phd thesis out of it. http://slehar.com/wwwRel/ http://slehar.com/wwwRel/ Psychedelic Information Theory also echos basically everything I was conjecturing at the time and backs it up in a ton of depth. http://psychedelic-information-theory.com/ http://psychedelic-information-theory.com/ To give a quick summary of what I'm talking about, the brain waves rather than the individual neurons are the representation of everything. Brain waves are a consequence of closed loop neuron paths and propagation delay. The longer the loop, the lower the frequency. One consequence of this is that complex signal processing tricks like fourier transform fall out very easily, far more easily than if you tried to train a regular neural net to do it. Now if you poke at the timings or connections at random, you are more likely to hit a long loop than a short loop. Hence, LSD distorts a very particular band of brain wave frequencies. You can make words just fine but sentences lose their way. A paper that confirms the fourier trick is going on in the optical system: http://www.math.utah.edu/~bresslof/publications/01-3.pdf http://www.math.utah.edu/~bresslof/publications/01-3.pdf Experimental evidence of the shift in frequency partition function due to LSD https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-17546-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-17546-0.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> At best what happens is that you start to notice patters that look like something but you are aware that this is pattern recognition and not real thing. Not everyone is able to identify the difference between real patterns and fake, drug-induced pattern recognition, though. I’ve even seen it happen to a friend who was otherwise a very logical, rational person. After a period of experimenting with psychedelics, he became attached to some physically impossible ideas for a period of a few years. Eventually he started recognizing that the ideas were illogical and triggered by the drug, but for a while he was thoroughly convinced that some things he “learned” during his trip were, in fact, part of a reality that the rest of us simply had seen yet.
- Errancer 4y ago
  I am not denying that for some people hallucinations are possible and dangerous. I think my main point is twofold. First in the general debate hallucinations take too much space in comparison to other psychedelic experiences. Second I think that for medical use hallucinations are not the main obstacle. For example what you describe I wouldn't consider hallucinations. LSD can definitely induce certain ideas and motivations into you and this is the area of experience which I would like people were more aware of.
  - PragmaticPulp 4y ago
    > First in the general debate hallucinations take too much space in comparison to other psychedelic experiences. Second I think that for medical use hallucinations are not the main obstacle. I think you’re downplaying the issue too much. Whatever you want to call them, the illogical thoughts induced by psychedelics can be a significant problem for people who can’t separate them from reality. There is a lot of talk about how psychedelics can change people’s minds and make them open to new ideas, but there has been much less talk about how not all of those drug-induced ideas are actually good or true ideas.
    - Errancer 4y ago
      Okay, maybe my wording was off but I do in fact agree with you. I argue that hallucination is one property and personality-change is another. The article above says that they are working on hallucination-free lsd. Therefore the lsd they produce will still be personality-changing possibly. Therefore we are both worried that there might be something which makes lsd possibly dangerous and therefore unsuitable for wide medical use. I happen to be well suited for psychedelic experience but I do have close one who went thought few months of LSD-induced anxiety and they won't ever take it again because of it. Nevertheless I am in fact in favour of trying out the possibilities of lsd and I think that the policy of harm-reduction with specialised control system can outweigh the possible risks. The two most important takeaways which are repeated endlessly in this context is that one should treat LSD with high degree of respect and use allergic method at the beginning to find the ways in which one is affected by the drug. You start with half dose or even quarter dose. You take a break and observe yourself. Then you can take slightly larger dose. You observe yourself again. Etc. Second there should be someone more experienced who oversees you during the trip and after it so that if there are any troublesome effect which you yourself might omit then there will be someone to catch it and stop your from taking more. Currently both of those points are difficult because of criminalisation and I think that until this is changed we will be floating in myths (both positive and negative ones). And as long as we are floating in myths we won't be able to resolve even the simplest empirical / verifiable questions about the consequences of LSD usage.
helsinkiandrew 4y ago
Surely this is all dose dependent? Micro-dosing results in perhaps more vivid colour/pattern recognition and observation and injesting a couple of 'tabs' resulting in much more vivid illusions that can be confusing and lead you to mistake what the object is. That's my experience anyway.
- Errancer 4y ago
  Partially but as far as other people commented I rather think that each person experiences it differently. I took few heroic doses and the closes experience I had was a running conviction that floor was trying to eat me because I binge-watched attack on titan the week before. Still, it was not a hallucination per say.
PaulHoule 4y ago
A lot of the old literature describes LSD as ‘psychotomimetic’ which is entirely wrong. The hallucinations that LSD users have are entirely different from the hallucinations that schizophrenics have. There is no commonality in the experience at all.
Dfiesl 4y ago
I think this is a dosage thing. The first time I took acid, after about 3 hours whenever I stared at the back of my hands, I could see the skin flying off like particles of sand exposing the muscles underneath with vines growing out from between the muscles. The harder/longer you stared the more detail you'd see.
healthyusa 4y ago
Yes, it’s all kind of pudding. Which is cool. To see real “hallucinations”, head deep into Oaxaca, magic ‘schroom communities. Be prepared to eat a lot of dirt too. You will find what you seek. :-)
MagicMoonlight 4y ago
That’s a hallucination. You didn’t go deep enough to forget what it is but others do. Psychosis is the same. They don’t see a literal government agent in front of them, they smell the numbers and that means the government is listening. They can see the numbers in the walls.
cameronh90 4y ago
Sometimes the lines between visuals and hallucinations can be blurred. On LSD, when I am in an unfamiliar environment or looking at an unfamiliar scene, I can indeed be in a situation where I don't know whether what I'm looking at is real or not. The issue is I don't have any baseline to compare it against, so I can't tell what's a hallucination and what isn't. ...Of course, I still know I'm on drugs and not seeing the world as it is.
rufus_foreman 4y ago
"you really don't start seeing things out of nowhere" If you sit down in a completely dark room on LSD, you really do start seeing things out of nowhere. Or I did at least. Was it pattern recognition? In a completely dark room? What was I recognizing patterns of? Was it a distortion? Of what? Was it real? In the PKD sense of reality, probably not. There seems to be a reluctance to accept the possibility of a hallucination. I would look down at my legs and there would be snakes crawling up my legs. Then I would realize that those weren't my legs, those were my pants. I had come to accept my clothing as part of "me". And that's when things started to go, I realized that the idea of "me" was arbitrary. There's no definite boundary of where "me" starts and where "me" ends, those boundaries start to disappear. Maybe "me" isn't my physical body, it's everything I've experienced, everything I've ever seen or felt. Everything I've ever loved or hated. Everything I've ever created or destroyed. Everything I've ever done or said. Everything I've ever eaten. All that I slight, everyone I fight. All that is now, all that is gone, all that's to come, and everything under the sun is in tune, but the sun is eclipsed by the moon.
torified 4y ago
I was on acid, being driven by a friend in a car at night, and I saw the car ahead of us drive off the side of the road. It didn't happen. It was basically a daydream - I was just thinking to myself, "I hope that car doesn't crash", then zoned out and literally saw it happen with my eyes open. I watched the tail lights drive off the edge. Afterwards I zoned back in and the car ahead of us was back. That is the only time I've ever seen anything that wasn't actually there except patterns and "breathing". I haven't ever taken anything near a heroic dose though.

kerpotgh 4y ago

[dead]

rootsudo 4y ago

I agree, the doors of perception and the book of the dead by timothy leary all give better examples of it it is to be on a "Trip." Most of the common culture, goes on that LSD/Acid, you see invisible things and such - and I, myself, never experienced that - but I can understand how someone that is fully ingrained in a normal life, and having ego death and their psyche is unleashed, can perceive things differently. That' what I feel it is, and I feel very sad that many people online post false stories about this. Places like Erowid, are also quickly eroding as people don't go there anymore, I think, to review or really get into the proper background. But I can also say that dosage is a big factor too, I've witnessed people that had no previous experience wanting to impress friends/new friends and do what is best described as a "hero dose" or such, and while psychedelics aren't immediately harmful, the proper way would be to threshold dose - but good luck explaining what that is. In this experience, I've witnessed this person become unable to talk, communicate and basically fall in and out of consciousness. Mind you, this was not LSD-25, but just mushrooms. They snapped out of it about 90 minutes later, but during that time if you were not an experienced trip-sitter or such, I can see panic kick in and you'd assume the worst - being poisoned, aliens out to get you, men in black or whatever is todays boogey man. From a 3rd party viewing that session, it would just be describable as hallucinations. The person who consumed the mushrooms felt fine and had no real recollection of what transpired, and did want to try again, albeit much smaller dosage now. Which is another thing, peer pressure in some of these groups could be strong - although in this example none was actively pushing it, but just general ignorance of how strong a trip can be for a first time consumer.

esperent 4y ago

I would say I have quite a bit of experience with psychedelics and I mostly agree with you - traditional "hallucinations" are quite rare and dose dependant. Experiences like those described in Huxley's book are by far the most important and interesting aspect of tripping - and I urge anyone curious to read that excellent book. On the other hand, I absolutely have experienced amazing, deep, beautiful, true pop-culture style hallucinations. Usually visual, both geometric patterns but also full on creations of new worlds, entities, landscapes, and more. I've also experienced hallucinations that are multisensory and go far beyond the ability to put into words. I am a very visually focused person with a strong mind's eye, possibly that is related.

siva7 4y ago

I've used quite extensively LSD and i never experienced real hallucinations. Sometimes i wonder if people mistake something they took for LSD.

hombre_fatal 4y ago
There is plenty of hallucination going on in my head though, often so crystal clear and undeniable that I all but see it out in the world. I think that’s enough to qualify as hallucination even though it’s not the cartoony meme of seeing aliens walking around or whatever.
- konfusinomicon 4y ago
  agreed. the pop culture representation of hallucinations is actually more describing delirium. however, closing your eyes and letting your third eye wander is where the real interesting things happen, and it's possible that those experiences are so vivid even with eyes open because you are more acutely aware of what the third eye is seeing. almost as if it unlocks a sixth sense of sorts
Broken_Hippo 4y ago
I have, in the way of things melting (for example). I've seen a dream-like image of reality, a short fat man, riding away on a horse with a rainbow tail I have used LSD quite extensively as well - I cannot tell you how many times I've done it. But most of the time, it isn't that obvious. My hands look a little bluish or reddish. My spouse looks shiny. I get little moving lines on a blank sheet of paper: Sometimes I draw the ones that I can get (I often make art while on LSD as well as sober: I have a pretty steady hand). It is all a bit less than I've gotten with, say, mushrooms. Of course, I don't do heroic doses or anything and the more vivid hallucinations came with a stronger dose than I tend to have.
throwaway173738 4y ago
I wouldn’t be surprised. A lot of people don’t test what they buy before ingesting it. A lot of other drugs are marketed as something else. For example “MDMA” is often just amphetamine that the dealer sells as MDMA but they produce very different experiences. The physiological effects are similar but the mental effects are not comparable especially what it feels like the next day. Always test everything you get if you want to be sure.

IIAOPSW 4y ago

So I'd agree you generally won't get perceptions constructed seemingly out of whole cloth. They are more like non-optical illusions. Similar to optical illusions in the sense of being a form of erroneous perception which you are aware is erroneous but not really fooled by. Non-optical in the obvious sense that the mechanism isn't the same as a normal sober state optical illusion. Let's call them "distortions" instead and not get stuck on vocabulary. There's a few reliable ways to manifest distortions and to notice the amount of distortion in your present state. 1. After images. Stare at a bright spot such as a lightbulb or a beam of sunlight through a crack for several seconds. Then close your eyes. The normal after image you are used to should now take on a deeply geometric shape rather than smoothly diffusing away. 2. Look at TV static / towel / white noise texture. These patterns are extremely reliable at manifesting crystals and fractals. I have theories why, but lets stay on point. 3. The dead man switch. Set a timer for 20 min. When it goes off, verbally acknowledge and reset. This isn't visual, but the first and most subtle distortion is your sense of time and this will make you acutely aware of it. 4. Thin line on white page. It should reliably start to jiggle around as if it were a wave on a string. As a general rule, things which have very fine grain spatial components will be distorted in some way. If you must know the theory for whats happening (which I can back with scientific citations), the brain is doing something similar to the way jpeg/mp3 compression works. Namely it converts the incoming information into frequencies via a fourier transform (in some weird, highly optimized basis) because information processing is generally easier there. LSD changes the reference clocks so everything is out of phase. Every frequency is being slowly phase shifted from where it should be, which then causes it all to move as if it were following a wave equation.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mandarax8 4y ago
Any source on that theory or is it your own?
- IIAOPSW 4y ago
  Arguably both, since I thought of it but later found I've been beaten to it at least twice. Steven Lehar beat me by 20 years and made a phd thesis out of it. http://slehar.com/wwwRel/ http://slehar.com/wwwRel/ Psychedelic Information Theory also echos basically everything I was conjecturing at the time and backs it up in a ton of depth. http://psychedelic-information-theory.com/ http://psychedelic-information-theory.com/ To give a quick summary of what I'm talking about, the brain waves rather than the individual neurons are the representation of everything. Brain waves are a consequence of closed loop neuron paths and propagation delay. The longer the loop, the lower the frequency. One consequence of this is that complex signal processing tricks like fourier transform fall out very easily, far more easily than if you tried to train a regular neural net to do it. Now if you poke at the timings or connections at random, you are more likely to hit a long loop than a short loop. Hence, LSD distorts a very particular band of brain wave frequencies. You can make words just fine but sentences lose their way. A paper that confirms the fourier trick is going on in the optical system: http://www.math.utah.edu/~bresslof/publications/01-3.pdf http://www.math.utah.edu/~bresslof/publications/01-3.pdf Experimental evidence of the shift in frequency partition function due to LSD https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-17546-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-17546-0.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> At best what happens is that you start to notice patters that look like something but you are aware that this is pattern recognition and not real thing. Not everyone is able to identify the difference between real patterns and fake, drug-induced pattern recognition, though. I’ve even seen it happen to a friend who was otherwise a very logical, rational person. After a period of experimenting with psychedelics, he became attached to some physically impossible ideas for a period of a few years. Eventually he started recognizing that the ideas were illogical and triggered by the drug, but for a while he was thoroughly convinced that some things he “learned” during his trip were, in fact, part of a reality that the rest of us simply had seen yet.

Errancer 4y ago
I am not denying that for some people hallucinations are possible and dangerous. I think my main point is twofold. First in the general debate hallucinations take too much space in comparison to other psychedelic experiences. Second I think that for medical use hallucinations are not the main obstacle. For example what you describe I wouldn't consider hallucinations. LSD can definitely induce certain ideas and motivations into you and this is the area of experience which I would like people were more aware of.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > First in the general debate hallucinations take too much space in comparison to other psychedelic experiences. Second I think that for medical use hallucinations are not the main obstacle. I think you’re downplaying the issue too much. Whatever you want to call them, the illogical thoughts induced by psychedelics can be a significant problem for people who can’t separate them from reality. There is a lot of talk about how psychedelics can change people’s minds and make them open to new ideas, but there has been much less talk about how not all of those drug-induced ideas are actually good or true ideas.
  - Errancer 4y ago
    Okay, maybe my wording was off but I do in fact agree with you. I argue that hallucination is one property and personality-change is another. The article above says that they are working on hallucination-free lsd. Therefore the lsd they produce will still be personality-changing possibly. Therefore we are both worried that there might be something which makes lsd possibly dangerous and therefore unsuitable for wide medical use. I happen to be well suited for psychedelic experience but I do have close one who went thought few months of LSD-induced anxiety and they won't ever take it again because of it. Nevertheless I am in fact in favour of trying out the possibilities of lsd and I think that the policy of harm-reduction with specialised control system can outweigh the possible risks. The two most important takeaways which are repeated endlessly in this context is that one should treat LSD with high degree of respect and use allergic method at the beginning to find the ways in which one is affected by the drug. You start with half dose or even quarter dose. You take a break and observe yourself. Then you can take slightly larger dose. You observe yourself again. Etc. Second there should be someone more experienced who oversees you during the trip and after it so that if there are any troublesome effect which you yourself might omit then there will be someone to catch it and stop your from taking more. Currently both of those points are difficult because of criminalisation and I think that until this is changed we will be floating in myths (both positive and negative ones). And as long as we are floating in myths we won't be able to resolve even the simplest empirical / verifiable questions about the consequences of LSD usage.

helsinkiandrew 4y ago

Surely this is all dose dependent? Micro-dosing results in perhaps more vivid colour/pattern recognition and observation and injesting a couple of 'tabs' resulting in much more vivid illusions that can be confusing and lead you to mistake what the object is. That's my experience anyway.

Errancer 4y ago
Partially but as far as other people commented I rather think that each person experiences it differently. I took few heroic doses and the closes experience I had was a running conviction that floor was trying to eat me because I binge-watched attack on titan the week before. Still, it was not a hallucination per say.

PaulHoule 4y ago

A lot of the old literature describes LSD as ‘psychotomimetic’ which is entirely wrong. The hallucinations that LSD users have are entirely different from the hallucinations that schizophrenics have. There is no commonality in the experience at all.

Dfiesl 4y ago

I think this is a dosage thing. The first time I took acid, after about 3 hours whenever I stared at the back of my hands, I could see the skin flying off like particles of sand exposing the muscles underneath with vines growing out from between the muscles. The harder/longer you stared the more detail you'd see.

healthyusa 4y ago

Yes, it’s all kind of pudding. Which is cool. To see real “hallucinations”, head deep into Oaxaca, magic ‘schroom communities. Be prepared to eat a lot of dirt too. You will find what you seek. :-)

MagicMoonlight 4y ago

That’s a hallucination. You didn’t go deep enough to forget what it is but others do. Psychosis is the same. They don’t see a literal government agent in front of them, they smell the numbers and that means the government is listening. They can see the numbers in the walls.

cameronh90 4y ago

Sometimes the lines between visuals and hallucinations can be blurred. On LSD, when I am in an unfamiliar environment or looking at an unfamiliar scene, I can indeed be in a situation where I don't know whether what I'm looking at is real or not. The issue is I don't have any baseline to compare it against, so I can't tell what's a hallucination and what isn't. ...Of course, I still know I'm on drugs and not seeing the world as it is.

rufus_foreman 4y ago

"you really don't start seeing things out of nowhere" If you sit down in a completely dark room on LSD, you really do start seeing things out of nowhere. Or I did at least. Was it pattern recognition? In a completely dark room? What was I recognizing patterns of? Was it a distortion? Of what? Was it real? In the PKD sense of reality, probably not. There seems to be a reluctance to accept the possibility of a hallucination. I would look down at my legs and there would be snakes crawling up my legs. Then I would realize that those weren't my legs, those were my pants. I had come to accept my clothing as part of "me". And that's when things started to go, I realized that the idea of "me" was arbitrary. There's no definite boundary of where "me" starts and where "me" ends, those boundaries start to disappear. Maybe "me" isn't my physical body, it's everything I've experienced, everything I've ever seen or felt. Everything I've ever loved or hated. Everything I've ever created or destroyed. Everything I've ever done or said. Everything I've ever eaten. All that I slight, everyone I fight. All that is now, all that is gone, all that's to come, and everything under the sun is in tune, but the sun is eclipsed by the moon.

torified 4y ago

I was on acid, being driven by a friend in a car at night, and I saw the car ahead of us drive off the side of the road. It didn't happen. It was basically a daydream - I was just thinking to myself, "I hope that car doesn't crash", then zoned out and literally saw it happen with my eyes open. I watched the tail lights drive off the edge. Afterwards I zoned back in and the car ahead of us was back. That is the only time I've ever seen anything that wasn't actually there except patterns and "breathing". I haven't ever taken anything near a heroic dose though.