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> “I began to suspect that I was either in a dream of my own construction or trapped in some kind of fake reality constructed by someone else,” he wrote in an e

by sersi 2y ago

> “I began to suspect that I was either in a dream of my own construction or trapped in some kind of fake reality constructed by someone else,” he wrote in an essay in 2020. “Could I be in a coma or some afterlife limbo state?” I've had similar thoughts while completely sober, wondering if the world was fake and I was just dreaming it. Usually when sleep deprived, after having just finishing a novel and coming out of the novel's world. Given that I'm susceptible to this kind of thinking, I've decided to steer clear of psychedelics because I can imagine that a bad trip is a real possibility. As a student, I was offered to try Salvia Divinorum and reading reports of bad trips on erowid (one person reported feeling like he was a brick on the wall for an endless amount of time) completely dissuaded me of trying it. Anecdotally, my cousin has taken LSD repeatedly and has had psychosis episodes that she thinks might be triggered by that. She's diagnosed with Schizophrenia though and has a family history of Schizophrenia so psychedelics were probably not a great idea for her.

sweetheart 2y ago
> after having just finishing a novel and coming out of the novel's world. Glad I'm not the only one! It can genuinely be a pretty unnerving feeling for a little bit.
taneq 2y ago
I had a series of dreams like this once. Each dream would start off like any other dream, some probably-objectively-improbable starting scenario extrapolated into a sequence of events, but then at some point I'd 'figure out the trick' and become aware of some glaring flaw in my subjective reality at which point the whole dream would collapse and reset, to be replaced by some new scenario. This repeated a bunch of times during the night (I think something like six but how would you tell?) and when I woke up for real it took quite a while to be certain I was back in 'baseline' reality.
cess11 2y ago
"one person reported feeling like he was a brick on the wall for an endless amount of time" I interpret these kinds of experiences as a form of dissociation as well, to me it seems the perception of time dissolves under certain forms of intoxication. I've had such experiences with cannabis, ketamine, salvia and a range of 5-HT2a-active substances. Mental exercises can bring about similar experiences too, like some forms of meditation and prayer. To me personally they haven't been as unsettling as some people describe. It's an interesting phenomenon, similar to how some episodes of Star Trek manage to communicate how a character has lived a full life in half an hour stuck on some 'subtemporal' planet or so before they're rescued and brought back to the rest of the crew, one can have the experience of being a brick in a wall for eternity or having lived for centuries as a hermit in a desert cave.

by sersi 2y ago

sweetheart 2y ago

> after having just finishing a novel and coming out of the novel's world. Glad I'm not the only one! It can genuinely be a pretty unnerving feeling for a little bit.

taneq 2y ago

I had a series of dreams like this once. Each dream would start off like any other dream, some probably-objectively-improbable starting scenario extrapolated into a sequence of events, but then at some point I'd 'figure out the trick' and become aware of some glaring flaw in my subjective reality at which point the whole dream would collapse and reset, to be replaced by some new scenario. This repeated a bunch of times during the night (I think something like six but how would you tell?) and when I woke up for real it took quite a while to be certain I was back in 'baseline' reality.

cess11 2y ago

"one person reported feeling like he was a brick on the wall for an endless amount of time" I interpret these kinds of experiences as a form of dissociation as well, to me it seems the perception of time dissolves under certain forms of intoxication. I've had such experiences with cannabis, ketamine, salvia and a range of 5-HT2a-active substances. Mental exercises can bring about similar experiences too, like some forms of meditation and prayer. To me personally they haven't been as unsettling as some people describe. It's an interesting phenomenon, similar to how some episodes of Star Trek manage to communicate how a character has lived a full life in half an hour stuck on some 'subtemporal' planet or so before they're rescued and brought back to the rest of the crew, one can have the experience of being a brick in a wall for eternity or having lived for centuries as a hermit in a desert cave.