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

Have no idea what variant of LSD I last consumed, but I remember some deep feelings of profound thoughts and self-reflection quite almost instantly when the stuff &quot;hit&quot; (maybe 30-45 minutes after ingestion), I was still cognizant enough to be able to write it all down. Some of what I wrote was indeed stuff I needed to work on in my own life and it was pretty helpful.<p>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&#x27;t turn it off.<p>LSD is fucking wild.

Used to take quite high doses of LSD, and often had incredible visual hallucinations. Things like watching a large plant sprout flower buds all over it, which slowly expanded to full bloom and then retreated back to small buds; the whole experience went on like that for 20 minutes. Another time I hallucinated that a neighbor&#x27;s house was on fire, until my friend said she was hallucinating the same thing. Fortunately, the fire brigade showed up quickly to quench the very real flames, without us having to ring them.

Auditory hallucinations can be extremely entertaining.<p>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&#x2F;DJ&#x2F;composer.

Just remember: There are a lot of chemicals that produce LSD-like effects. The farther away you are from the chemist, the less likely you know the actual drug that you&#x27;re getting. This is especially the case at concerts &#x2F; festivals, where the &quot;game of telephone&quot; might mean that you don&#x27;t really know what you&#x27;re taking.<p>After reading many trip reports on Erowid for LSD, I suspect that the authors often unknowingly took something else. A classic case is STP&#x2F;DOM, which often comes in paper &#x2F; tabs and is visually indistinguishable from LSD. If you ever hear the familiar, &quot;I took some crazy acid. At first it didn&#x27;t work, so I took another, and then I finally came up after an hour and had an intense trip,&quot; it was probably STP&#x2F;DOM instead of LSD.

When I was in my 20s I tried salvia (<i>Salvia divinorum</i>) several times as tincture and by smoking dried leaves, and I&#x27;d like to share my experiences:<p>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.<p>The second time was also with tincture. Nothing happened. No sensations of any kind.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;t want to &quot;let go&quot; of my hand.<p>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 tried 2C-E a couple times a long time ago. I think it was a relatively low dose. It was really interesting how mentally I felt mostly sober. But the visuals were so intense I got motion sick. It started out with tracers as I waved my hand. The textured paint on the walls looked extra 3D and the walls started to breath. The swirly pattern on the bathroom linoleum looked like chocolate milk. My posters turned into cartoons. And when it was all overwhelming and the motion sickness really kicked in, I closed my eyes and was greeted by fractal machines that built the molecules of the world.<p>I don&#x27;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.

I once took Ketamine, &quot;fell through the bed&quot; and spent half an hour in a different dimension, peacefully floating above and close to incredibly detailed, dull and dark colored patterns while unable to form language-based thoughts until I suddenly snapped out of it. The music I was listening to (HUSBANDS (Run Along, Son, etc.)) helped a lot and was just incredible, though I am still not sure if I could have had the same great experience with different music.<p>It was THE single most amazing and out-of-this-world thing I ever experienced and I highly recommend it to everyone.<p>I don&#x27;t know if it helped me in any way with my depression though. No hangover. No lasting changes.

I&#x27;ve read most of the comments on this post and I can honestly say none of them make me want to try hallucinogenics. It just seems like playing with fire and asking for trouble, especially for those of us with severe anxiety issues.

Interestingly, there is a drug call datura, a beautiful white flower you can find all over suburbia, whose seeds when drank in a tea are an extremely powerful deliriant.<p>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.

The first time I took shrooms I had a very &quot;thing in itself&quot; moment where I realized that, because every time I thought something, all the sudden it became true, my perception must be affected by my cognition and that there were things outside the boundaries of my cognition that I could not necessarily perceive. Worst part was I still had to get up the next morning to teach, I started saying the weirdest shit in my practical anthropology course...

Reminder that one experience with hallucinogenic substances can give you a lifetime of visual or mental abnormalities.<p>Personally I&#x27;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&#x27;m one of the lucky ones - most of the people I&#x27;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.<p>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.

The datura report vault is an old favorite when I am feeling bad about my life choices late at night.

When I did my only two Ayahuasca sessions and closed my eyes I saw some kind jungle scene with the eyes of a big cat looking at me. It was really interesting. With mushrooms I usually see abstract patterns. I never have mach hallucinations with eyes open. I just notice more things that I usually wouldn&#x27;t notice. That&#x27;s why I believe a lot movie directors took some kind of drugs because of all the details they can see.

Oh, by the way...<p>Just mentioning that you used LSD in your past, may be enough to cause problems today[0] (especially in today&#x27;s climate). Myself, I don&#x27;t care. I use my experience to help others, so I&#x27;m fairly open about it.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2007&#x2F;04&#x2F;canadian-psycho&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2007&#x2F;04&#x2F;canadian-psycho&#x2F;</a>

Psilocybin:<p>Form constants, lattices. Colors are indeed vivid, but few hallucinations<p>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.<p>I’ve noticed mushroom trips for me are less visual, more introspective.<p>DMT:<p>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!<p>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.<p>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.

I have never had the full on hallucination of a specific object where one is not. All I have ever had, visually, is -- and here I struggle to find the words to precisely describe my perception -- that kind of dynamic ornamentation which feels like there is some sort of echo and even the equivalent of audio speaker&#x2F;microphone &quot;feedback&quot; in my processing of visual data. Here the infamous Bad Trip involved the feedback being so strong that allowing my visual, auditory, or tangible perception to rest on any one thing for more than about half a second to cause that stimulus to <i>bloom</i> into overwhelming amounts of stacked and subdivided repeats of the original stimulus, such that I dare not rest my eyes on any one thing as I, at the same time, must tune my hearing from one group of sounds to another, my attention scampering about to keep the intensity at a more tolerable level.

&quot;We also looked at different types of psychedelics and didn’t see any systematic differences there.&quot;<p>This was the most fascinating finding to me. I really wouldn&#x27;t have expected Salvia, Acid, Shrooms, etc. to all produce the same hallucinations ... but I guess ultimately they&#x27;re all operating on the same core neurochemicals, so I guess it makes sense.

I never tried psychedelic drugs, but had a NDE like experience before. People who took heroic doses of psychadelics reported similar experiences as people who had an NDE.<p>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 &quot;simulate&quot; the process of dying.<p>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.

10 year old New Yorker article on the couple who runs Erowid<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;2015&#x2F;11&#x2F;23&#x2F;the-trip-planners" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;2015&#x2F;11&#x2F;23&#x2F;the-trip-plann...</a>

all i know is that once you see the eyes looking back at you, and realize that it is the eye of nicholas cage, the universe and reality begins to make a lot more sense and it shows that even the gods reuse assets

Here&#x27;s a novel AI safety thought: Will AI need medicines to remain mentally healthy and sane? Will it enjoy tripping? Will it eventually fix itself to remain in touch with reality in all circumstances?

This is so strange. The entire HN story page claims to be recent but if you look at user profiles this was all posted days ago. I didn&#x27;t realize HN had a repost-with-altered-timestamps feature.

I&#x27;ve never &quot;seen&quot; anything except the lights streaking, but I sure did spend a lot of time looking at the patterns in carpets and marveling at the beauty of trees.

See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Form_constant" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Form_constant</a>

For DMT it&#x27;s immediate. Even closing your eyes you see colors (flashes of light). I was sitting at a wooden table and the grain patterns were moving especially the circular placemat in front of me with concentric rings. And I remember being scared of my own arm like wtf is that. It was brief though minute or two it was over.<p>I have not done LSD or mushrooms as I have a bad childhood&#x2F;repressed memories and I worry of having a bad trip.

My dmt trips never felt like the ones I read about online. They were crazy and impactful every time. (I kept a dmt journal durring covid lol) But visuals were always 2d, geometric, I never saw some of the common things people described. Or seemingly common idk. The way trip reports sound were there were alternate worlds to wander around, 3d beings interacting. I think I used to dab about 20mg, I&#x27;d have to look it up.

I used shrooms for a while to recover from depression, but I never once saw anything. While walking along a trail I felt my vision had grown sharper, but never colors, never patterns or movement. That baffles me because at the time, I thought maybe I had consumed the wrong shrooms. The self-reflection, realization, and separation of thought from emotion was the most profound moment in my life. Yet no hallucination.

I love this quote<p>&gt; And they’ve been great collaborators; I think they once described themselves as “squares among the weirdos, and weirdos among the squares.”

I get how tripping every few years might be a good way to get the cobwebs out and shake things up a bit. However, after 2 times, it just seemed like too much of a hassle. After a couple of hours of kaleidoscope, the novelty and fun starts waning, and it starts to feel like a chore. And then the exhaustion the next day.

Many factors. Quality and type of substance. Liquid, blotter, pill form, mushrooms,cactus,leaves. And very important one&#x27;s belief system. Then how much you ate, did you trip the previous days. How old one is? Do you tell fibs to yourself and others. On and on.

Psychonaut Josie Kins publishes YouTube videos with comparisons and visualizations of various psychedelic experiences: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;@josikinz" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;@josikinz</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plus.maths.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;uncoiling-spiral-maths-and-hallucinations" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plus.maths.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;uncoiling-spiral-maths-and-ha...</a> is a classic!

I usually see the floor when I trip.<p>Sorry about the bad joke, but reading the title I first thought someone is doing experiments having people wear an action cam or something. ;)

when i take lsd i almost seem to gain the ability to see and hear my thoughts. i can imagine stuff with my mind&#x27;s eye normally, but with lsd it&#x27;s like i can see concepts directly. it feels like instead of thinking in words like usual it&#x27;s like i can think with raw energy or something and i have more access to things<p>also it&#x27;s a lot easier for me to recall like trauma and other buried stuff when i&#x27;m on lsd

I had great plans to feed Erowid&#x27;s database through Claude to get a better classification of drug phenomenology. Sadly they have explicitly disallowed the feeding of Erowid reports into LLMs: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;erowid.org&#x2F;experiences&#x2F;email_warning.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;erowid.org&#x2F;experiences&#x2F;email_warning.php</a><p>I appreciate the stand they&#x27;re taking, but the potential for greater understanding and harm reduction seems to outweigh any potential downsides of putting public webpages into an LLM.

Once I took way way too much and disappeared into a swirling mass of organs and gibbering creatures a la Geiger. It should have been terrifying but it just... wasn&#x27;t. I really enjoyed it.<p>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 feel as if taking LSD makes you temporarily schizophrenic&#x2F;schizoaffective.<p>i.e. May be fun to visit, but you wouldn&#x27;t want to live there.<p>Source: Used to take a <i>lot</i> of it. Been a while. A long, long, while. Used up my quota by the time I was 18.

My experiences from psychedelics are as follows:<p>Mushrooms: We must love each other, everything feels so warm and friendly.<p>LSD: It&#x27;s like I&#x27;m traveling through my entire life at 5,000 miles per hour. Completely messes with my perception of time.<p>DMT: Holy shit what the fuck did I just do.<p>As for visuals, obviously DMT is the craziest. I saw the universe as a black hole warping space time. Tons of crazy geometric patterns.<p>LSD visuals include moving shapes, seeing animals in everything, and lots and lots of fractals. Just don&#x27;t look at yourself in the mirror on LSD, it&#x27;ll freak you out.<p>Mushroom visuals for me were less intense, with lots of nice moving patterns.

I&#x27;ve tried almost every class of hallucinogen there is. Psychedelics, dissociatives, cannabinoids. Never did get my hands on salvia, but these days I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;m very interested in trying it either. I have the most experience with psychedelics and cannabinoids in terms of having tried many different members of the class. And I&#x27;ve messed around with some strange ones that don&#x27;t quite fit into any of the classes, like zopiclone(the sleeping med). I&#x27;ve also experienced stimulant&#x2F;sleep deprivation psychosis<p>Psychedelics for me usually involve complex geometric patterns, colours, and objects &quot;breathing&quot; and morphing. More distortions and extreme pareidolia than actual hallucination(defined as perception in the absence of stimuli). They also involve what feels like &quot;enhanced&quot; hearing, where you&#x27;re able to focus on everything you&#x27;re hearing with exactly equal attention(I honestly don&#x27;t know if that description makes any sense), which makes music sound very different, especially music that&#x27;s tailored for listening while on psychedelics, like Shpongle.<p>The cognitive effects are also hard to describe, but there&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;m doing it once every 4 weeks, since I&#x27;m trying to cure my addiction to hash by teaching myself moderation, and it&#x27;s been working fine. Although part of me misses just the simple feeling of being stoned, giggling at children&#x27;s cartoons and eating peanut butter with a spoon. I suppose I might never get that back.<p>Synthetic cannabinoids are horrible drugs I wouldn&#x27;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&#x27;re also quite hard on the body. Stay away.<p>Zopiclone is a strange one. It&#x27;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&#x27;s the only drug that&#x27;s given me tactile hallucinations, which is a strange sensation. If I had to classify it, I&#x27;d put it in the deliriant class, but it has some dissociative properties too. It&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s since been learned that they&#x27;re exactly like benzos, addiction and all, just with more side effects. Boggles the mind that they&#x27;re still prescribed at all.

Reading this thread, Jesus. TIL: HN has a significant following of drug users. No judgment, y’all do y’all, but it was surprising.

Hah, this now prompted me to ask ChatGPT to tell me about Erowid and the most remarkable things it read there, and we&#x27;re chatting along over bad trips and it telling me how apparently heroin can&#x27;t fix a bad trip, and it comes up with quotes from which I have to assume that they are just hallucinations, but &quot;funny&quot; ones if one thinks about them just having gotten made up by an AI:<p>&gt; Every bad sensation was magnified a thousandfold because there was nothing to filter or rationalize it. Pain didn&#x27;t feel like something I was experiencing—it felt like everything I was.<p>&gt; I was convinced I had broken something inside my mind permanently, that I&#x27;d never be normal again. The terror of that idea became its own reality.<p>but also the nice things are interesting to chat about<p><pre><code> Users frequently say things like: “There was no past or future, only this moment.” “Who I was didn&#x27;t matter anymore; I just existed.” </code></pre> or &quot;That&#x27;s one of the most interesting paradoxes people report: thinking continues, but the thinker disappears.&quot;<p>generally a fun thing to chat about with it.