I urge everyone who's contemplating trying this substance, which is arguably by far the most powerful psychedelic on the planet, to thoroughly educate themselves on it first.
I registered an account just to comment on this. With all of the new interest in psychedelics over the past few years, so many people are jumping it without preparation and without an idea of what they're risking.
As far as drugs go psychedelics are generally very safe. They can have amazing therapeutic properties for some people. But don't do them without first doing as much research and preparation as possible, and without some idea of what you're getting into. Psychedelics break down walls in your brain, but some walls are there for a good reason.
I had an intensely terrifying "bad trip" (on something much less potent than DMT) some time ago that I'm still trying to come to terms with. I had no idea that the human mind could suffer like that. The suffering, terror, and panic was really beyond anything I've ever experienced.
Some people argue that there is no such thing as a "bad trip" -- only difficult ones that unearth negative thought processes and past trauma, and that you can utilize them to become a happier and better person. For a lot of people this is definitely true, but there are cases of psychedelics triggering long term anxiety, PTSD, DP/DR, etc.
If you want to get into psychedelics -- and especially stuff like DMT -- do your homework. Ask yourself why you actually want to do it. If you decide to go through with it, respect the drug, start with low dosages, and follow harm reduction practices.
Yeah. 15+ years after a bad trip for me, I am still dealing with the effect it had on my life.
It honestly had an entirely different effect than articles like this portray - it turned me from an easy going worry free 20 year old into a panic-attack riddled alcoholic (the only way I could get to sleep for many years.)
I guess the good side of it was that all that anxiety made me quit smoking, quit drinking caffeine, and come to terms with the fact that I am indeed mortal. So in a certain way it has really focused my life into actually living it and not just going through the motions.
I'm 95% better at this point, but yeah, not a good time in my case.
I really wish that both good and bad trip reports would be much more thorough in their reporting.
Useful things to know to make sense of and draw useful conclusions from trip reports:
0 - whether there was any preparation (things like fasting, meditation, therapy, prayer, "clearing the space", etc)
1 - exactly what was taken and its purity, how the users knew they got the substance they were told they had, and whether they mixed drugs
2 - the dosage
3 - where they had the experience (whether it was done at a club, at a party, at a concert, in a city street, over dinner with one's parents, in nature, in therapy, at a friend's house, in a church, or in a shamanic ceremony will make a huge difference)
4 - who was with them (and whether these people were trained or at least experienced in guiding psychedelic trips)
5 - whether they had set any concrete, constructive intentions beforehand, or whether it was done on a whim, to "party" or to "get fucked up"
6 - what was their mindset and life circumstances beforehand (tired? depressed? anxious? struggling with a breakup, a divorce, or a death of a loved one? a history of abuse or trauma in their past?)
7 - how much they themselves had researched about what they were getting themselves in to, and in to mystical, psychedelic, shamanic, and non-ordinary states of consciousness in general and how different cultures and peoples have dealt with and made sense of them
8 - whether they used any strategies before or during the session to prevent or handle adverse effects (things such as ritual, dance or movement, chanting, singing, playing musical instruments, prayer or calling for help from their guides, friends, god(s), or their own inner source of strength or wisdom)
9 - whether and what kind of music was played during the experience (a well designed musical accompaniment can make a huge difference, and this is one of the critical means by which the MAPS psilocybin and MDMA studies maximized the chances of having a constructive experience)
10 - how or if they tried to integrate the experience afterwards
11 - whether they consulted therapists specializing in psychedelic integration afterwards
12 - whether they themselves or anyone in their family had a history of mental illness
13 - how much prior experience with psychedelics they had, and which psychedelics they had used
14 - whether they were on any psychoactive medications
15 - what their state of physical health was
This is a lot to ask for, but without such details it's really hard to draw conclusions.
That said, yes, it's possible to have really harrowing experiences, and some people come out scarred from them, having gotten nothing positive from the experience at all.
But it is possible to prepare for psychedelic experiences in such a way as to minimize the risk of negative experiences, and if such experiences do happen to deal in constructive ways with them both during and after.
Unfortunately, many people don't know how to do that, or choose not to.
Something else to think about: Some people think they're "happy" or "normal", but they're really not, and just haven't been able to face their own dark sides, repressed past traumas, or the difficulties they have relating with others, and these things can come up during the trip or influence it.
Then a common reaction is to fight these realizations or run away from them, to hold on tight and not let go, which all but guarantees a difficult experience. In contrast, the MAPS guidelines advise to squarely face the difficulties (including physical difficulties like pain or discomfort, and even annoyance at the music), to explore them, to not fight them, and to surrender and let go. That tends to lead to a freeing, blissful, constructive experience.
One final thing: In an interview I once heard with a veteran psychedelic therapist, who'd overseen hundreds of psychedelics sessions, he said the people who had the toughest times with these substances were die hard theists or atheists with something to prove, because they both went in to the experience with an attitude of "I know what's going on!" They weren't able to just go with whatever was revealed to them.
I want to reinforce what is said in this post. I did not not have respect for DMT and it floored me. I misused it several times to my own detriment and I really wish I hadn’t. It is not to be played with. This drug holds profound opportunities for personal growth and development. If you misuse it you are taking a huge risk.
Thanks for this idea, I Googled Rick Doblin, which led me to MAPS, and now I've discovered there are two therapists in my home town that specialize in psychedelic integration. I'm going to contact them, I'm hoping that's exactly what I need to help me recover from my experience.
Just a heads up: 5-meo is not DMT. There are quite a few chemicals with DMT in their name like 4-aco (4-AcO-DMT), which is also not DMT.
Also, when it comes to 5-meo you don't really "trip" per se, not in the traditional sense. You just kind of half pass out for about a minute. The potential for the risks you mention on 5-meo is nearly impossible, due to it not being a traditional kind of trip.
Likewise, DMT you don't really trip in a traditional way either. For about 5 to 15 minutes, you're off in la la land. You can barely think straight let alone enough to explore your inner mind like you would do during a normal trip. For similar reasons, the risks you describe are most likely non existent for DMT. Though, DMT isn't exactly enjoyable for most, so there is that.
I've seen a few studies and so far it seems to be that cannabis is most likely to cause the risks you're describing, including psychosis. While those risks are possible on LSD, magic mushrooms, and other drugs you trip on, the risk is far lower than in cannabis.
It's so rare it isn't studied, so I can't say if 5-Meo can cause it.
HPPD in theory is caused by a strong intense memory, and when something familiar to that memory occurs it brings that person back to that mental place. If this is what is going on, then you're going to have a hard time forming a strong memory to something when you're passed out or so out of it you're not paying attention to the setting around you. So, I imagine HPPD is not a thing in 5-Meo, but as I said there are not studies on it. HPPD is rare.
It must be a terrible experience to have minutes to hours of thinking you're dieing and the suffering that comes from fighting that. My heart goes out to you.
There is this movie called Revolver written by psychologists who try to show the audience their ego is not them. Some people took to the movie well and others... When Roger Ebert reviewed the movie he wrote, "Some of the acting is better than the film deserves. Make that all of the acting. Actually, the film stock itself is better than the film deserves. You know when sometimes a film catches fire inside a projector? If it happened with this one, I suspect the audience might cheer."
Tripping reduces the ego. If you go too far, the ego disappears for a couple of seconds. But for those who mistakenly think their ego is them, when their ego starts to disappear, they think it is them that is dying. A good sitter will tell them they're not dying, and they'll relax and have a good trip, but sadly not everyone gets that treatment.
The ego processes language and concepts. It understands words and it speaks words. It is tied to the inner dialog. When the processing of concepts, like the word 'self' and the concept of identity temporarily goes away, sometimes people mistake that for them.
I don’t mean “I thought I was dying”. I mean that I actually was dying and the regular world turned off and another world turned on. At first it was dark and silent; no perception of any kind, absolutely nothing. I could talk but there was no echo, and then I slowly realized that I didn’t have to breathe, and then I began to panic and scream because I realized what was happening although I didn’t know why. Then transported to dream state, long vision quest kind of stuff that I’m still trying to process (10 years). Then back into nothing world, but this time it’s tearing and burning deep throughout my body, a seemingly impossible level of physical pain; mental anguish or fear of death not even registering anymore. Then I came back to consciousness in and out for a while during the rescue and eventually back to (mostly) normal.
The mind’s potential for suffering is immense. The scale doesn’t go nearly as far in the other direction. I cannot imagine any possible pleasure within many orders of magnitude. I can see how this would stop addictions by eliminating the sense of all pleasure or minor discomfort. Its possible that this was part of ego dissolution and I just didn’t come completely to the point of acceptance of the pain, but I think about it a lot, and fully expect an eternity of that when I die.
>The mind’s potential for suffering is immense. The scale doesn’t go nearly as far in the other direction. I cannot imagine any possible pleasure within many orders of magnitude.
I've meditated a lot, which brain scans show the brain lights up in a near identical way to magic mushrooms, except when meditating you get to control how deep the state is, so if you bump into something you can't handle you can come out of the state or reduce the state as little or as much as you want. This gives the ability to "trip" without the risk of a bad trip.
I know it's a bit apples and oranges, but from meditation I've passed out from pleasure before, so I can say it gets very extreme. Neurologists and psychologists have been finding for a while that the average person's suffering is 3x that of equivalent pleasure for an equal event. They recorded day traders making a profitable traid and a losing trade and recorded their responses to get this rough baseline.
Facts, while valuable, never the less, can seem cold hearted in the face of painful emotions. I hope I'm not coming off that way. Understanding and knowledge gives power over what you know, and with the power of knowledge it is possible to conquer suffering.
Those who struggle with death have a baseline suffering that has been happening for so long they often don't even notice it. Identity is one of the three big causes for suffering. By understanding how the ego works, and what really happened there, one of the causes of many pain points throughout your life goes away. From that benefit it is imho worth knowing about.
Tripping is a bit of a trial by fire. Those who shed their ego comfortably gain the option to learn how it works, and from that they gain power over it, including suffering. This is why an ego death is touted as the single best thing that has happened to some while simultaneously touted as a horrible experience for others. The problem, imho, with the tripping community is it's easy to bump into an ego death, where in meditation circles it's walked up to and only experienced once one has removed (or at least reduced) all of the kinds of suffering before it guaranteeing a pleasant experience.
This is why I recommend people interested in altered states of consciousness try out meditation instead of psychedelics. It's so much safer, and with enough practice, can be just as profound.
Wow, that's such a terrifying experience. Do you feel comfortable sharing any details on the what actually happened?
A very common experience with psychedelics is that you feel like you're dying, or that you have died. In that sense I can totally see how the real experience of dying could feel extremely similar. (Although yours seems to be an order of magnitude worse, partially because coming back into consciousness brought with it immense physical pain.)
> and fully expect an eternity of that when I die
This is exactly what has given me the most amount of anxiety post traumatic trip. The fear that consciousness exists in a constant and eternal state of suffering post death (since that's what I thought was happening in my trip). It's given me sort of the opposite fear of most people -- rather than a fear of non existence after death, I'm scared of the POSSIBILITY of life after death, because I'm afraid that's what it'll be. I would much rather have my consciousness just cease to exist after death. I've learned this is an actual phobia with a name: apeirophobia.
While this fear is still kind of in the back of my mind, here are some of the things that have helped me:
* The experience of suffering is something that exists physically within our bodies and brains. If consciousness does persist after death, it would be without a body or brain, and thus not capable of the same type of suffering we experience on psychedelics or in a near death experience. During those experiences we can feel like we're in infinity or that we don't have a body, but we have to remember those are still just things happening in the brain.
* We have literally 0 evidence for consciousness existing after death. Why stress out about one unlikely possibility? From a probability standpoint, it's not really different from worrying that we're going die and be punished by Zeus or Odin or Ra. Can't prove it won't happen, but it seems unlikely.
* Other people have experiences like this that are positive, affirming, and full of love and peace. Why give more credence to the idea of eternal suffering rather than eternal joy / bliss / happiness?
I haven't totally moved on from that fear, but this train of thought helps. I want to believe (and I think it's more rational to believe) that those experiences really are just a combination of the brain's normal processing being severely altered combined with the body's survival mechanisms being kicked into an insane overdrive. That there's not really anything more to it than that.
I have no idea if any of that helps (or if it's actually something that bothers you on a day to day basis), but it's the thing that has helped me the most with coping.
This is nothing to be fooled around with and I am not sure if mainstream articles such as these are helpful.
Bufo (Toad/5Meo-DMT) is extremely strong. You smoke it and you are in. Then you typically just drop out of the experience again. For some people it is blissful - like described in the article - the most common experience people have told me about is more like ego death. This can be a great experience, it can feel like hell; but whatever you feel: Integration is key! If you don’t know how to do that or have somebody experienced around: don’t. Maybe you’ll get lucky (many people do) but you might also feel more lost after than ever before.
Personally I find smoking DMT a little hard on the system. It is very different to ingesting it orally and - at least for me - harder to integrate than drinking e.g. Ayahuasca (NN-DMT and/or 5MeO-DMT admixtures). This is coming from someone with a lot of experience.
Psilocybin in small doses with assistance seem way more appropriate to me for people with depressions or similar.
That being said, if you are experienced, feel ready and feel the call: by all means. As the article says, it can be a life changing experience. You should however be ready for that change. Be safe.
True. Ego death can probably occur with any psychedelic compound.
With most substances however it is a matter of dosage. Eating 8 grams of Cubensis might get you there. The dosages that e.g. the MAPS program works with will not (yes people have different responses, but that is why you start low and they have professionals attending).
Going for a true Bufo experience automatically puts you in the realm of possible ego death. I have never heard of anyone trying to micro dose it. There are so many other substances that are easier to low dose that are more readily available too.
While psilocybin is a potent and valuable medicine, it's effects in terms of ego death are truly dwarfed by 5-MeO-DMT. Within 2 minutes of smoking bufo it's as if every fragment of your being has been evenly distributed across the entire universe, time is infinite you have zero awareness, you are simply one with all. And then the re-assembly begins.
They work very differently. Each has its own vibration / frequency. The increased dosage might increase amplitude (or intensity) of the experience, but not that vibration / frequency. I don't know how else to describe it. We need more bards like Terence McKenna.
The compound in question was legal in the US until 2011. Bulk chemicals from Chinese suppliers are dirt cheap. I'd guess that both enthusiasts and entrepreneurs built up huge stockpiles before the ban went into effect.
As for authenticity, my impression is that a huge proportion, if not most, of the exotic drug trade is mis-identified and/or mis-dosed. As others have pointed out precautions exist for the careful and meticulous. But let's be realistic, this does not describe 90% of recreational drug users.
Illicit substance distribution is a massive, fault tolerant, self correcting and self routing network of individuals, you just have to know some people near the edge nodes. This is also why the war on drugs is such an abject failure.
As for this substance I've only had what was described as a "child dose" and enjoyed the absolute tranquility, some friends have had bad trips on much higher doses but as someone that isn't a fan of psychedelics and didn't want any hallucinations I loved that small dose.
>How do people magically get their hands on these various substances
Some people sell psychedelics in person. In my country they're incredibly rare and I've never seen anyone sell anything except mushrooms or LSD. So the fallback is the darknet.
>and know that they’re authentic?
If you're buying from the darknet, user reviews. Other people make good guinnea pigs. Otherwise, there are reagents you can use to test to make sure you've got DMT. But generally people just smoke it and see what happens. DMT is very unique, if the substance you have is something else it will be noticeable very quickly.
My own experience, which is documented there on Erowid, about 10 years ago at some ridiculous dosage ingested oral ROA, was much more akin to Psilocybin than DMT. i.e. not the most powerful psychedelic on the planet, but very formidable.
> As with DMT, 5-MeO-DMT has been demonstrated to be active orally when taken with an MAOI, but according to numerous reports this combination tends to be extremely unpleasant, producing a strong body load in addition to the risk of hypertensive symptoms and serotonin syndrome, and is therefore strongly advised against.
To anyone who might be curious to try these substances:
Both iboga and datura can be deadly!
Beware!
Both iboga and datura have been used in traditional shamanic contexts, and ibogaine (derived from iboga) has shown some promise in treating addiction, but usually this is done with a medical team trained to handle possible dangers.
I know of no remotely safe way to do datura at psychedelic dosages.
Most of the datura trip reports I've read have had a nightmarish character to them, with true hallucinations (ie. ones where the user does not realize that they're experiencing something that is not there), often involve the users putting themselves and/or others in physical danger, and often result in amnesia.
More can be read about iboga and datura on Erowid:
This might be too ‘woo’ for the HN audience, but I found the plant spirit of Datura(Jimson Weed) to be fierce and feral. I had the most intense dreams and frightening ones. For a while before I started farming, I had a garden that I allowed to go wild with invasives and weeds. From wild lettuce(soporific..as Beatrix Potter taught us) to the borderline wicked crone spirit of black nightshades to Mandrake and Mugwort and Wormwood, each plant had its own ‘spirit’, as it were..
Except Datura. Which was very scary. I never ingested or smoked them but I also never wore gloves and was very touchy feely with masses of them. Having said that, I read a lot and my impressions were probably coloured with some fancy ..but it was something I wanted and welcomed. It was a very scripted imaginary ‘trip’, I guess ..on a mental plane as a well researched enacted experience...as I am very risk averse and protective about my physical health.
There is a guy walking around the town of Iquitos (upper Amazon of Peru) who took a dieta with datura and tattoed his entire face green. Another guy was found naked in the street he didn't know who he was. It took months for expats to identity where he was from and find his family.
It's one of those things I'm perfectly satisfied to read about. I have a bit of a guilty pleasure of reading trip reports of ridiculous stuff like Datura on Erowid, that alone would convince all but the hardiest souls to give it the same wide birth as the Elephant's Foot at Chernobyl.
As someone that likely has more experience as a psychonaut than anyone that reads this thread, I would never ever recommend someone dip their toe into the waters of psychotropics and to be honest I wish I'd never have dabbled with them for the several years that I did. Being introduced to them in high school and continue that on into my early 20's is something I absolutely wish I could undo.
People like to go "I microdosed and had a great day of work!" or "man I did some acid/shrooms/dmt and felt connected to everything, my depression is gone!"
Not so much the bad experiences though. In 'another life' I did lots of things... LSD, DMT, MDMA, some synthetic tryptamines that not a lot of people have used, mushrooms, salvinorian a extracts...
Was I Santa once on a heroic dose of LSD? Sure and it was awesome, I was also a dragon on some alien planet in that trip, I was gouging bedrock with my talons and it felt so real and satisfying. Cool, right?
Did I have some alien head with octopus tentacles for a beard fondle my face and make me laugh and feel loved while on DMT? Sure.
Did I feel music on a subatomic level and taste electric happiness while on mushrooms, you bet.
Did I have tons of good times just hanging out with friends while we were on this or that while camping/floating down a creek or river, listening to music, hiking, hanging out at the mall, sure.
I also had some really, really, really terrible experiences back then.
Did I see my putrid, bloated, corpse that had massive bruising around it's neck staring back at me in the mirror on a DMT trip and manage to get up and stumble to the toilet and force myself to vomit because "I had to get death out of me" to the point of managing to throw up a baseball sized lump of bile trying to get death out of me because I wanted to still be alive. You bed.
Did I get stuck in a glitching 8-bit video game loop for what felt like the better part of a year while on a salvia trip one time, pleading to God that if he made it stop I'd never do anything harder than caffeine again as long as I lived only to come out of the trip and be told by my friend it had been less than 10 minutes. Oh yeah.
Did I have multiple experiences on DMT where I was a corpse in a morgue drawer, in a crematorium oven, with the feeling that I'd totally screwed up and it was my fault I was dead. Yes.
Did I have multiple experiences coming up on DMT hit hard out of proper glass where I 100% believed that I'd screwed up, that by inhaling I'd done something so incredibly wrong and I now had to suffer the consequences. That something knew I'd broken some rule and that I now had to live in 'reality' and that my prior existence had been a complete lie and I ruined it and it would never come back and everything and everyone i knew was gone and I was now fully awake in some horrible existence where malevolent entities reigned supreme and were quite unhappy with me. Oh hell yeah.
Did I watch a Star Wars film on 'penis envy' mushrooms once, watching an entire planet being destroyed, and know 100% that I was on that planet and was witnessing my own death and feel such pain and sadness like nothing I've ever felt in my entire life before or since. Yup.
Did I do DMT and salvinorin a on various occasions and have 'machine elves' tell me to kill myself so I could stay. Demand that I kill myself so they might share with me while my brain screamed "they're lying, they're lying, get out of here, snap out of it, they're lying to you, get out of the trip". Yyyyup.
Did I forget how to talk, lose the ability to even form words in my head/have an internal dialogue, for 10~ minutes on a very mild DMT dose once while showing someone how to hit the glass for their first experience, becoming quite scared at one point that it wasn't going to ware off and I'd seriously screwed up and caused brain damage? Yes, not something I'd ever want to happen again.
There's a reason I long since stopped doing these sorts of things. They can do far more harm than they can good.
Will they someday have valid medical applications that are effective and pleasant more oft than not? Maybe. Should we absolutely research them in very controlled clinical settings, sure!
Should people be randomly conducting self-experimentation in non-clinical settings without the ability to be sedated if stuff goes sideways and without trained individuals that can calm and control the situation and even restrain them if need be? No. Not at all. Not even microdosing because we have no idea what mid to long term consequences are.
Wow, what a fascinating (and terrifying) list of experiences. People like to say that bad trips are uncommon, but I see so, so many reports of them online. Maybe that's because the only real numbers we have are in controlled clinical settings, where the bad trips are going to be obviously be less frequent, due to the precautions and guard rails in place.
And even if they are uncommon, somebody else in this thread made the good point that the mind's capacity for suffering appears to be so much greater than its capacity for happiness or pleasure. I don't know if this is actually scientifically true, but it sure feels that way. Out of curiosity, would you say your most positive, beautiful experience was anywhere near as powerful as your most negative, terrifying experience?
Out of curiosity, you said you stopped a long time ago -- do you happen to suffer any long term negative side effects? Anxiety, PTSD, DP/DR, etc? I'm about a month past the trip that blew my mind to pieces and I'm still suffering with some residual fear and anxiety, and hoping it'll continue to pass with time. (Before anybody says it, yes, I'm considering therapy. And also yes, I realize everybody's experiences are going to be completely different, some people would get over a terrible trip in a week, and some people may never be able to completely recover.)
>Out of curiosity, you said you stopped a long time ago -- do you happen to suffer any long term negative side effects?
No not really, aside from the memories of some of the bad experiences. Sometimes I'll be looking in the mirror shaving my neck, washing my hands, whatever and I'll remember seeing this bloated, mottled skin version of myself with deep bruising around my neck and remember being at the toilet on my knees forcing myself to 'throw death up' but it's not traumatic or anything.
Sometimes when I lie down in bed my brain will go to one of those DMT trips where I was in a morgue drawer type deal. A lot of DMT experiences were while in bed so even when I wasn't in a crematorium oven/morgue drawer I'd often experience myself going into some sort of compartment not unlike those or even like an MRI head first and then I'd go to what people usually describe as the 'waiting room' where there would be weird alienish faces/entities so that'll probably always be a thing occasionally when i get in bed. It doesn't scare me or disturb me or anything though, just reminds me of it.
Mostly I'll just remember effects or events from random trips while going about my life, nothing like a 'flashback' just kinda like how you'll smell something and it'll trigger a childhood memory or you'll see something and start thinking about an ex or something. I'll see a spider and maybe one out of twenty times I'll 'remeber' the 'time I was a giant spider in the corner of the room' because as I was coming up on a trip I was getting some water from the sink and there was an orb weaver outside of the kitchen window making its web so then when I was peaking I thought I was a huge spider hanging out in the corner of the ceiling for a while.
Sometimes I'll miss the visuals and I'll go watch some HD mandelbrot zoom.
>? I'm about a month past the trip that blew my mind to pieces and I'm still suffering with some residual fear and anxiety,
So when I mentioned the 8-bit video game loop salvia trip, that did stay with me for the better part of a year. I didn't want to do any other drugs, I didn't want to drink, I didn't want to watch anything animated or computer generated including playing video games, but it eventually just worked itself out.
Time will likely help considerably but talking about it will help. I did suffer PTSD when I experienced hypokalemia so severe I woke up effectively paralyzed [1] and required hospitalization. Once I was released I couldn't sleep, I couldn't even sit for more than a few minutes before I'd start getting panicky and have to get up and move. I was drinking close to a fifth most nights to try and relax enough to get to sleep because as soon as I'd start to relax my brain would panic and think "it's happening again!" and flood my system with adrenaline, cortisol, etc. Eventually I dealt with that by modulating the cortisol with 'large' doses of inositol and phosphatidylserine and by talking about it to myself. I'd have to tell myself it's fine, you can move, just relax while sitting. Then in bed I'd have to joke about it to myself leading up into bed, try and find humor in the few hours I was awake and couldn't move like the dog coming in and sniffing me as I shouted for help and then walking away like "I don't care about him!" until I could just make being still not immediately make me panic. That took the better part of 2 years to get my panic episodes down to less than once every few months. I had sleep paralysis last year and it only panicked me for a few seconds after I could move again so I'd say I was successful at fixing that. Seeing a professional probably would have been a lot faster though but I'm not one to ask for, or willingly receive, help.
If it's really bothering you, I'd talk to someone because I think it would probably help. Either a friend or a professional. Fear is something that's easier to deal with if you talk about it in my experience.
Thank you so much for sharing! It does help to hear about other people's experiences, and where they are now (even though I know it's different for everybody).
> If it's really bothering you, I'd talk to someone because I think it would probably help. Either a friend or a professional. Fear is something that's easier to deal with if you talk about it in my experience.
For sure, this is great advice! I've been working on finding a therapist. For the most part, I'm okay. I don't think I'm suffering from PTSD, but my base anxiety levels have risen a lot, I've had one panic attack (a couple days after the bad trip), and sometimes I catch myself ruminating on some really dark shit. (Like the idea that the natural state of consciousness is eternal suffering, which is what I 100% believed was the truth during the trip.)
Before my experience I would read stuff like your 8-bit Salvia experience and think "okay, yeah, that sounds scary, but also super interesting, and something I would maybe want to experience". I kind of thought people would exaggerate how scary things were for dramatic effect. Now I know better. The human brain has an amazing capacity for self torture.
I'll probably lose track of this thread now but you can find me with on reddit as /u/ryanmercer too if you have any other questions.
>"okay, yeah, that sounds scary, but also super interesting, and something I would maybe want to experience".
It was definitely the strangest experience I've ever had. I felt like I was going up a roller coaster ramp but everything was like when an NES cartridge would glitch and kept looping... I would get the impression that time would go forward 3-4 seconds then would just pop back 2-3 seconds. So I was slowly working my way up this thing that felt like a roller coaster.
The angle of the climb of 'roller coaster' (it was just like a million kaleidoscopes threw up with vague notions of movement) months later made me think it was the exit ramp to get to my friend's apartment. We were driving up the exit ramp and I closed my eyes because the sun was just blasting them and I was like wait, this feels like that horrible trip.
Upon review of most of my trips, I can link them to real memories/objects I'd recently seen. Like the spider, the dragon I'm pretty sure was a mix of books in the Pern series, I was Santa because it was the day before Christmas Eve, the morgue/crematorium were always when I was in bed in the dark and wearing a sleep mask to block out light, the octopus tentacle face guy reminded me of the guy in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, a few times I felt a consciousness and tried to reach out to it only to have a buzzing and painful clap happen in my ears that would snap me completely out of the trip... per Biblical lore man can't hear the voice of God so that's probably where that came from.
The only time I had positive experiences from psychotropics was when I was in relaxed social settings with friends. We used to take acid at the mall in high school and we'd rove around together so we all had good experiences. Various things at outdoor concerts, floating down a river or creek on innertubes, hiking or camping. Even then though you'd eventually get tired of it long before the effects wore off but it wasn't so bad because you could just talk and keep busy, alone I'd often also get bored relatively quick on mushrooms/mdma/lsd and there's nothing you can do but just continue on with disjointed thoughts and a tight jaw (it took me forever to figure out to chew gum) and that's when you'd get antsy or paranoid or dark thoughts would start to creep in. Once you get antsy/paranoid/dark the trip is soured and almost certainly will stay there or get worse.
It was an interesting part of my life but it's nowhere near as glamorous as the internet, or even movies, make it out to be. DMT specifically can just be a generally unpleasant experience and appears to be pretty universal in that, while some people have good experiences pretty much everyone has some bad ones once they've done it a handful of times.
Erowid[1] is a good place to start.
[1] - https://www.erowid.org/chemicals/5meo_dmt/5meo_dmt.shtml