Tripsafe, Erowid, psychonaut and r/drugs are among the best ressources the web has been able to produce: thousands of actual trip reports, and empirically tested Risk Reductions procedures withtout stigma or judgement.
Dont do drugs as a illegal thing that give you the thrill of being a bad boy. Take a scientifi approach of risk evaluation, read testimonies and reports and ensure your own safety, as you would do for something like diving and skydiving.
Also never do drugs "because it makes you feel better when you are sad".
Agreed. I wonder about the bad things that didn't happen to me because I read about them on erowid instead, and recall fondly the ones that did happen to me because I read about them on erowid first.
Friendly reminder that they're community/donation supported.
> Also never do drugs "because it makes you feel better when you are sad".
It's not risk free, but I disagree with this as absolute advice, a trip can fill up one's spiritual gas tank to keep on moving forward, they can demonstrate that one's depression is largely illusory.
Mostly that all addicts w/ physical damages i know started using heavily to cope to some pain (heartbreak / mourning / loss of proffessional direction).
Substances can help to realize stuff, but long term (1+year) regular using is never in my layman opinion
Are you basing your judgment only on those who develop addictions, rather than considering all people who use these substances, some of who do not develop addiction issues (developing addiction issues is not terribly common with psychedelics)?
I love this. This was me in 2017 and following the white rabbit led to a most spectacular year. It really is a birth right, and people chosing ‘no’ are really missing out on a fundamental aspect of being alive.
On another note, I always love psych threads on HN. High quality posts all around.
I feel a bit sad hearing this, I'm a pretty anxious person so I'll probably never experiment. While I love reading about people's experiences I often hear warnings that people like me should stay far far away.
I grew some last Spring but have been too chicken since to try them. They're dried, but I don't know if they're dried enough. Does anyone know if there's any additional risk if they've gotten at all rotten?
Bacterial infection in shrooms typically smells like feet. Naturally they smell a bit like farts when you're eating then (but are mostly odorless when dried proper). I'd avoid them if the former and tolerate them if the latter.
They bruise blue (and it's hard to pick them without bruising the stems) which can look nearly black when dried. This can make them look moldy when they aren't. If they're actually moldy I'd toss them.
When I used to grow I settled on letting them sit on a grate with a fan blowing at them for a few days (the air is dry here, ymmv), then I'd store them with desiccant packets. They should be crispy like potato chips, no mushyness.
As for trepidation, that's understandable. I'd start with a super light dose (.5 g) at first just to see what you're dealing with. I'm glad I've had potent trips in the past (I usually find 3.5 g is enough, but it'll vary by batch and by human), but these days I usually dose lightly.
If there is a contamination then the risk is up to what contaminated them, but if they are just dried then the psilocin(1) breaks down eventually leaving you with just the psilocybin.
You would probably know if they were rotten—smell and/or looks would be really off. As for whether they're dry, they're dry enough if they break apart easily—they should crack, not bend.
There's also no such thing as a minimum dose. People have found benefits with very small amounts (1/20g) if you're just curious—it literally cannot hurt.
Keep in mind that “harm reduction” material shouldn’t be interpreted as a guide to avoiding all potential negative consequences.
When it comes to psychedelics, the pendulum of popular opinion has swung from an extreme of “extremely bad for you” to “actually good for you” but neither extreme is good, IMO.
It’s worth reading some of the material about how psychedelic users are weirdly prone to picking up strange beliefs. Not everyone of course, but even a large number of psychedelic researchers who were supposedly doing it the “right way” were still walking away with bizarre and irrational beliefs: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-psyched...
These belief-shifting outcomes aren’t mentioned in harm reduction guides. In many cases, they’re actually celebrated by users with an implicit assumption that all belief changes from psychedelics must be inherently good. I think it’s important to understand that thoughts and feelings imparted by psychedelics aren’t real and may likely be entirely meaningless.
It’s also important to know that the thoughts and feelings and experiences induced by psychedelics aren’t necessarily entirely positive. The negative anecdotes tend to get lost among the hyperbole about psychedelics producing magical experiences, but it’s not hard to find stories about difficult trips or trips that induced long-lasting negative mental states on Internet forums. They tend to be downvote, ignored, or explained away by blaming the victim for doing it wrong. However, it is a very real and not uncommon possibility, which is why harm reduction guides emphasize the need for sitters to monitor the user and why every psychedelic research study had included 10X as much therapy sessions as psychedelic sessions.
> Not everyone of course, but even a large number of psychedelic researchers who were supposedly doing it the “right way” were still walking away with bizarre and irrational beliefs: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-psyched...
That article gives examples of folks who most definitely were not using psychedelics safety. Timothy Leary is famous for his controversial experiments.
Moreover, LSD and mushrooms are often conflated in discussions like this, but it should be noted that the two drugs have widely different outcomes and safe usage parameters.
"The third possibility is the one that really intrigues me. A 2011 study found that a single dose of psilocybin could permanently increase the personality dimension of Openness To Experience. I’m emphasizing that because personality is otherwise pretty stable after adulthood; nothing should be able to do this."
The fact is everything IS able to do this and it's up to the person to choose it. Most people don't.
The idea that personality is a stable feature after adulthood is simply a cultural phenomena. As a person who has accidentally/intentionally constructed different identities with different voices in the head after out the mouth, it's very clear to me people's identities are incredibly malleable and most people are simply unaware/unpracticed in how to do it.
> The idea that personality is a stable feature after adulthood is simply a cultural phenomena
No it's not. Twin studies show that personality is largely genetically determined, ie. twins that were separated at birth and raised separately largely have the same personalities, levels of happiness and life satisfaction, and even similar jobs and spouses. People tend to overestimate environmental influences.
I think there's also an assumption that because there's a genetic component, it's a fixed thing.
Gene expression is controlled via the epigenome, which can be affected by trauma.
Why can't it also be impacted by healing?
Also, since you didn't answer the question I asked, it's not a sufficient answer. I'm not talking about tabula rasa. I'm talking about static vs dynamic personality.
Well, these plants obliterate tons of (anti-depressant) revenues for the pharma industry, which is why they deploy their FUD and disinformation army. Hence the "extremely bad for you" astroturfing.
When reading advice before my last trip, it occurred to me there's a lot of fear-mongering around psychedelics due to judgment.
People judging experiences as positive/negative distracts from what's going on. Simply labeling challenging-to-accept experiences as "bad" and large doses as "heroic" is enough to establish a distracting delusion. It was upon realizing this that I decided I understood how to approach the mushrooms for my last trip:
4g of the mushrooms were measured out by someone. Another unknown and (visibly less seeming) amount was gifted to me by someone else. At first, I was torn on whether to take just the amount measured out or to take more. Upon reading a bit of advice to remind me about how to navigate mushroom journeys, I remembered we can't KNOW anything (like how much mushrooms by weight was in front of me) and also taking the unknown amount was completely in line with my values of courage, embracing uncertainty, and deep analysis.
Most of the harm reduction guidelines seem to be designed for people who are living in a society that's automated judgment of experience and haven't unlearned that, yet.
Fair enough, but I would disagree on the point about taking an unknown amount (unless I misunderstood?). In my view correct dosing is one of the best ways to achieve a safe experience. One of the biggest issues with such substances is that most users will have no idea how strong the dose is, or if it is even what it says it is.
Courage is one thing, but overdosing is not a pleasant experience, even if it is usually not (physically) unsafe. Cannabis edibles are famous for this since most people have no idea how strong their brownies even after they make them. It was one of the main reasons I made an online calculator as a side project (http://www.scientificedibles.com) to help people to estimate dosage, rather than "take one" and end up on the floor.
I agree. It really depends on the substance, of course. 5g+ (for the species I was visiting with) is considered the high end. I was also not necessarily seeking a pleasant experience. I was seeking to uproot violent urge within me that kept rising up from chronically not being heard (and that includes not hearing myself).
A high dose of mushrooms is way way different than a high dose of LSD or cannabis.
> “thoughts and feelings imparted by psychedelics aren’t real...”
I mean, in what possible way are they “less real” than thoughts and feelings imparted by any other cause? This is your body, doing the thing in reaponse to a stimulus. This may be an atypical stimulus generating very different than usual responses, but they’re certainly real
But it’s not a complicated concept to get. Like a person who is drunk might see double, when in fact there is one object. A person who is on a lot of amphetamines might believe they are being purposely followed when in fact there are no people intentionally following them.
Those perceptions are not real, in any commonly understood meaning of the word. It’s easy to understand what the parent comment meant in that context as well.
Ok, thanks. Yes, hallucination causes you to see and hear things that aren’t there. That are not real objects or soundwaves.
Respectfully - there is still a bit of a category error in the GP, and a bit of a goalpost move here on your part.
Here’s the whole paragraph:
> “ These belief-shifting outcomes aren’t mentioned in harm reduction guides. In many cases, they’re actually celebrated by users with an implicit assumption that all belief changes from psychedelics must be inherently good. I think it’s important to understand that thoughts and feelings imparted by psychedelics aren’t real and may likely be entirely meaningless.”
At a minimum, “what the parent comment meant in that context” refers to experiences that themselves alter one’s general perspective, mood, mindset, state of being, etc after the experience. If you prefer, taken word-as-written the GP is saying every thought you have at all under the influence isn’t “real.”
And reading the rest of the post, GP is concerned with permanent, potentially irreversible change to beliefs and brains.
So, shifting the conversation to hallucinations themselves is a bit of a dodge from the original context.
The other reply comment to yours has a salient point: emotions fall into a more durable category of experience than a hallucination. So, in what sense can any shift of perspective, mood, mindset, state of being, etc. in a person be counted as “real” or “not real?”
Responses to your comment are contrary, but my anecdata: Just after I moved away from a particular social scene, a bunch of close friends in it got very into psychedelics. Weekly usage or more frequent, all different kinds of che,ical (‘pure’ lsd, street acid, shrooms, DMT, RCs, etc.)
Many of them did adopt some real wacky beliefs that they have held onto many years past their use. ‘Radicality’ of belief seemed proportional to volume of use. I’m talking Q-anon levels of delusion and beyond. They all felt they were in touch with greater truths and pitied me and my judgement; my self-restriction of perception. They have a lot of flowery language about how I can’t know what I can’t see that you have to be some sort of logician to parse.
In one case, I have watched this ‘enlightenment’ morph over the years from communicationg with beings from beyond the veil to potentially violent political extremism. The guy has been sober for years but low-key views all of his actions and work through a lens of ‘ultimate battle of cosmic good and evil’. Naturally ‘good’ cosmically aligns with whatever his interests at that time are.
If you’re a young person reading this: taking psychedelics a couple times is an interesting experience, perhaps worthwhile. But I’m real damn certain that the ‘enlightenment’ is basically being high. Drunk on a false sense of peace with the universe which exists only as a malfunction in your brain’s wiring. Beware people who tout those effects. They are out of touch with reality.
*I have read there is clinical potential to help PTSD sufferers. I’m not denying this. But 99% of usage is not happening is carefully, scientifically studied and controlled situations. Keeping a trip journal is not scientific, even if you have a chem phd.
> They all felt they were in touch with greater truths and pitied me and my judgement; my self-restriction of perception. They have a lot of flowery language about how I can’t know what I can’t see that you have to be some sort of logician to parse.
This concept has been promoted by philosophers and mystics for centuries and is completely consistent with mainstream neuroscience and psychology. I'm not saying that your friends genuinely transcended this barrier, but that they didn't and thought they did is not a proof that such a realm does not exist.
> They are out of touch with reality.
Surely. But, do you believe that you are accurately in touch with reality?
Saying anything that isn't 100% positive about psychedelics on the internet tends to bring out a lot of psychedelic fans who vehemently disagree. Any time I comment about psychedelics online without a unilaterally glowing endorsement, my comments' score bounces up and down as much as any other controversial topic.
It's fascinating to see even the counter arguments here tap into exactly the sort of mystical beliefs I was talking about: Questioning reality, suggesting that maybe psychedelic induced experiences are revealing an alternate reality and so on. A common theme is a belief that psychedelic users are seeing the real reality through their drug use, which is supposedly unavailable to those of us who aren't inducing these artificial altered states with drugs.
> But I’m real damn certain that the ‘enlightenment’ is basically being high. Drunk on a false sense of peace with the universe which exists only as a malfunction in your brain’s wiring. Beware people who tout those effects. They are out of touch with reality.
Well said. I haven't known anyone to go as deep as your friends, but I have known a few people who started to believe that their drug-induced states were something more than just a drug-induced feeling. It's scary to watch someone lose grip with the difference.
It's also scary to read all of the deadly serious comments here on HN suggesting such clearly false beliefs might be true.
> I have read there is clinical potential to help PTSD sufferers. I’m not denying this. But 99% of usage is not happening is carefully, scientifically studied and controlled situations. Keeping a trip journal is not scientific, even if you have a chem phd.
I've read just about every study on psychedelics and therapy recently. In every* single trial, the psychedelics are part of an extended therapy program involving as many as 20 therapy sessions for every 1 psychedelic session. Anyone taking psychedelics ad-hoc at home and expecting to replicate the study results is not coming close at all.
I did 2g of dried shrooms about a week ago, having almost no prior experience.
It was fun - I was seeing funny things, my friends looked funny, I laughed a lot, was a lot more talkative and social.
My only issue was a tension headache which started about when the first effects came on and was even worse the day after, lashing until about 24 hours after the mushrooms were taken. My friends did not get the headache.
Otherwise, while I found the experience fun, and I'd do it again if it wasn't for the headache, I really can't fathom how people describe it as one of the most profound experiences of their lives.
You fell just short of the “profound experience line”
You need at least 3.5G to have that. While that may seem intimidating it’s not that much more than 2G, but enough to make your inner consciousness turn up to 11
I ate 8g of dried shrooms a few days ago. Once things really got going, I spent the time mostly in the dark at home focusing on whatever came to me. The intentions I set were for ego death of some kind. Much of it was spent grieving childhood trauma and the state of the world, most of which was done while singing, snorting, making other mouth noises, laughing, crying, or some combination of those. Yesterday, I realized I have preverbal trauma and most people probably do, too. Sharing this with the person I'm partnering with, who went on a mushroom journey a few weeks ago to address their own preverbal trauma, seemed to open the door for them to soften toward me. We've been going through rough times, as she slipped into a PTSD episode upon getting pregnant, it's still going on, and how she acts when triggering into her trauma matches patterns of my own trauma, so we've had a difficult time over the past 3.5 years. I haven't been very compassionate/empathetic in how I receive her and often feel confused about what to do or say. Today, that wasn't the case. We both received each other graciously (and let it go quickly when we didn't), freely offered and accepted hugs, and created a lovely little Christmas scene for the child, as well as started collaboratively designing content for santaisdeadlonglivesanta.net.
These are profound and immediate changes in my life. I look forward to what mushrooms have to further teach me.
Oh, I also had the realization that ego death doesn't need to be this cataclysmic, big, scary, break from reality thing done with eyes literally closed and that if I already carry a cosmic identity, dissolving into the cosmos provides insight that can come from reflecting on being the cosmos.
If you've read this far, do yourself a favor, look up CPTSD and preverbal trauma, and check to see if there's something you went through when little that's still alive and getting in your way.
What is your experience with handling trips with CPTSD? I'm on the verge of exploring mushrooms and have pretty serious CPTSD symptoms and burdens. I'm doing therapy and a lot of self-therapy like somatic experiencing, dancing, IFS and just doing whatever my body wants to do. I hope that mushrooms would be a great addition to that 'do whatever I want' therapy by intensifying my child brain, but also I'm fearful that things could get bad in the moment or worse in the long run.
My first mushroom experience was 20 years ago. All I remember is I was in a fog so thick I had to move it with my hands in order to see what was going on around me. My interpretation right now is this was an indicator of lots of cognitive distortions at play in my life and a deep emotional disconnect from the body. The second one was at a party and I don't remember much of any of it.
I have no idea what I took or how much.
All of my other trips have been after adopting a stance of radical acceptance and abandoning most of my preferences. Allowing myself to do what I want I think is really key to living fully and helps dramatically with tripping. If you're nervous about your first time, maybe find a trip sitter. There are also integration coaches out there who can help you prepare and followup with practices for integrating what you learn.
Ultimately, if you setup your environment to have all your needs accounted for (which may include putting "flight instructions" nearby and easily visible, taking a big dose and laying down with an eye mask on in a quiet environment can take you very far. You can always open your eyes and remind yourself you're safe, this is the mushrooms showing you what you need, and it shall pass. Don't Gandalf the Balrog, look at it and ask "What are you doing in my head and what do you have to teach me?"
I know people who have had very scary trips and came out having learned very little and changed very little. They also practice deep denials of reality, so I'd check myself for cognitive distortions and work them out or at least get into the habit of pausing and questioning an experience before flying solo.
Are you making music as part of your therapy? I ask because I've found making music allows me to see how I'm applying my brain to things. I practice playing what Sun Ra calls "pure jazz," music without preconceived notion or simply just being. There's no wrong note or wrong time to play it. However you want to be programming your brain to work, if you approach making music from that mindset, it's a safe environment to practice it.
Christmas brought us our first snow of the season and the beginning of our next big collaboration:
We purchased santaisdeadlonglivesanta.net with the intention of starting a movement in anarchogiving. She's even willing to put a picture of her bearded face on it!
And thank you for your response...I don't see many comments like that on here.
when i first started experimenting with psychedelics on my own, i would set up stations in my room. i had a sketchpad on my desk and an assortment of pens and pencils, next to that i had a journal where i would routinely jot down my fleeting thoughts/feelings. across the room, i had my window open, so that i could look at the stars outside and feel like i wasn't trapped in a shoebox. on my bed, i had my phone and a nice pair of headphones. i also had my computer here, so that i could watch tv. sometimes, when my dog would let me, i would also curl up next to him on the floor. over time, i tried to introduce new stations, like programming and reading, but they never really stuck.
all of these activities kept me busy, but none of them were quite as fulfilling as just closing my eyes and letting my mind do the work (even with music as a guide). eventually, i just started doing the opposite -> the stations remained, but only as tools to help me beat my anxiety and/or boredom. if i ever feel that i am approaching a period of overwhelming feelings, i distract myself with the activities i mentioned.
> I really can't fathom how people describe it as one of the most profound experiences of their lives.
For this to be possible, you need to be alone (= undistracted) and (ideally) be surrounded by beautiful and calm nature, in a completely secure setting.
Then, your inner state must be ready for this.
Also, if your current level of consciousness is not ready for it, it won't happen at this point in time.
Each and every psychedelic experience can be totally different, not directly even related to the amount you take. Set and setting, and your mindset and preparation, the intention that you take while you do it matter a lot.
Eating 2g of dried mushrooms can be a life changing experience, or just a fun evening wondering on about the world. It can even not work at all, or give you just a slight feeling of being in an altered state.
Personally, after experiencing mushrooms and other psychedelics over a 10 year period of time, these days even a small under 1g dose can bring a very strong experience.
Depends a lot also what you have eaten before the experience, how you have prepared for it etc etc .. maybe the headache is something that the mushrooms just brought to the surface in that moment, might not happen on your second time.
It's not a tension headache. Serotonin affects bloodflow in your brain, which is why many migraine drugs target its receptors. The headache is a known effect, although I never in all of my drug fueled years on earth heard of it until I started experiencing it myself after 5g+ shroom trips. Usually it hits us the day after and no amount of water, neti pots, magnesium, etc will help.
Never did any type of psychedelics. You don't read much about "death by misadventure" associated with them though. I'm curious about this.
Alcohol, for example, is pretty famous for clouding judgement, reducing inhibition, and so on. Such that otherwise rational people drive intoxicated, get into fights, fall asleep in inappropriate places, fall off of and into things, etc.
Psychedelics obviously cause you to hallucinate. So why don't I hear about more accidents? Does they seem to leave your common sense, judgement, etc, in place?
The hallucination affected by psychedelics such as mushrooms isn't what you might expect. It's not a fully synthetic kind of "i now see an object that is not actually there". There won't be a floating pink elephant in the middle of the room.
Instead the effect at most normal doses (3.5g) is more that the walls and floors seem to take on a slightly ephemeral breathing characteristic. You may see patterns in things of varying complexity and intensity. The patterns may seem to shift and meld into eachother in a kind of loop... Psychonaut wiki[0] has several approximations of varying quality, a lot of the gifs in particular (the cat lying on the couch and the wolf drinking) resonate with me.
Sensory input can also include audio hallucinations, as well as perceptions that are simply normally filtered out of our experience by our brains--a sense of the organs inside your body, or the teeth in your mouth, or whatever.
A lot of the effects are mental, prompting often amusing and revelatory departures from your normal thought patterns. Everything old is new again. You may find yourself deeply examining the complexity of your hands, or the bizarre fact that we're not always "like this", or in deep awe of the staggering complexity of civilization or the chemical machines that are our bodies. That kind of thing.
The realization that we collectively have no idea what we're doing here, that a whole lot of what we believe to be real and permanent is imaginary and temporary, and that there are no rules to life, no winners, that we should take care of nature and each other, and that you should follow your muse to do what you find interesting and beautiful.
Media portrayal of this varies but some shows do hit it quite on the head, actually Mad Men has an interesting trip episode that understates the visual component and emphasizes the mental[1]. Broad city's was particularly colorful and fun (S4e4, full ep. isn't on youtube).
Some media can give you a bit of a taste of the experience, others grossly exaggerate it or flat out misrepresent it. You know how it goes.
I was disappointed the first time I took mushrooms because I didn't see pink elephants. I thought I hadn't taken a high enough dosage. In its place I took a deep trip that allowed me to reflect on where I was in my life, which was more profound then seeing pink elephants. Oddly it too me a couple of weeks to realize that was the point.
Note that you very much can get "floating pink elephants", but not from psychedelics — you need to get into deliriants for that: Datura plant in small doses, red mushrooms, diphenhydramine or amantadine in large doses, and some other stuff (like these tablets from military first-aid kits: https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Aprofene).
These things were somewhat popular in my language segment of the internet about ten years ago. A lot of people were experimenting with the stuff. Usually one trip was more than enough to never want to repeat that again.
Try reading some trip reports on erowid if you're curious.
Deliriants are fascinating, and the experience sounds absolutely nightmarish. The most interesting thing to me is how the most common feature of every trip of some of the drugs (I think Datura and dph) is repeatedly thinking you're smoking a cigarette, accidentally dropping it then realizing there was no cigarette. And it happens to people who've never smoked.
This sub reddit has a lot of examples of people trying to recreate what they saw while tripping. There are some pretty good examples: https://www.reddit.com/r/replications
Also, I don’t know how true this is, but I’ve heard that some of the hallucinations you see on psychedelics are signals/noise your brain normally filters out, but stops getting filtered during the trip. I believe the context was for so called “sacred geometry”. For example, if you look up the “flower of life”, this is a pattern people regularly see while tripping and it’s one I saw myself the first time I took shrooms.
Yeah! There's evidence for a reduction of the brain's normal input-filtering processes that I alluded to in the parent post. As Huxley says, 'the doors of perception are opened'
These two articles discuss in more detail some of the biological/neurological correlates for the types of patterns seen during psychedelic experiences. Some of the pictures of retinal structure etc are pretty eye opening (hah):
One trick to understanding what psychedelics are doing is to recognize that what's happening in those visual effects is also happening to all your other senses and cognitive processes. Having your sense of depth go into a reflective fractal spiral is a fascinating experience. People often hear sound go into a robotic type modulation. The circuits that trigger when you feel the meaningfulness of things go into overdrive.
Smaller thought loops can take you over the exact same sequence of input/ output over the course of several minutes of nothing jars you or if it.
> It's not a fully synthetic kind of "i now see an object that is not actually there"
This was generally my experience until I combined high dose(5g relatively fresh) mushrooms with pot. I've had a number of experiences on that combination where I experience vivid hallucinations which are indistinguishable from reality. It's rather uncomfortable at times because of that.
On mushrooms alone, up to the 5 or so grams which is my current maximum, I would classify the hallucinations as colorful visuals combined with intense daydreams.
> There won't be a floating pink elephant in the middle of the room.
It is possible to take enough shrooms to hallucinate objects which are not there. It's hard to reach this state without losing full sight of everything tho.
Driving on hallucinogens? Whenever I've taken LSD it was quite clear that I couldn't and shouldn't drive. It's not like alcohol, where you think you can drive. With LSD you very clearly have the presence of mind to know you can't.
Well... the set of things we find self-evident today are not the same as those from the 70s... but once, he did realize that he shouldn't be driving. So he pulled over, and climbed down a 50' cliff down to the beach to walk home. Which, I kinda find incredible: last time I was tripping near a cliff, I noticed that the height appeared to be getting short enough to jump down, so I advised my sitter that we should change locations.
Oh, and it bears mentioning that folks who do drugs recreationally tend to mix hallucinogens with other substances. LSD on its own is comparably clear-headed, but I've known people to mix it with weed, cocaine, mdma, etc... and who knows what's going to sound like a good idea.
I've wrecked a car on mushrooms...not-really-driving like a maniac with a bunch of friends hanging out the windows was arguably the most fun I ever had.
1) They’re not addictive in the classic sense where people are habituated and have to take them every day.
2) As far as I know there’s no straightforward way to test for them and I’d have to assume people who are high on psychedelics that get into an accident aren’t excited to volunteer the information.
Once, I ate 9 grams of dried shrooms, which is something like 3-4x the average dosage and almost double of what's called an heroic dose.
I went into the most intense trip I ever had. During the trip, I called a friend because I was kinda scared, he said that if I hadn't told him about the shrooms, he would've thought I was completely sober.
Now, give me a couple of beers and I'll be slurring in no time.
People with certain conditions should stay away from psychedelics.
Having said that, as others said a normal experience does not include hallucinations of the cliche "see weird crazy things that aren't there" variety. Instead you get more of an experience from patterns, music seems richer, colours deeper, etc.
Our brain dulls reality for us as a evolutionary benefit to allow us to focus our brainpower only on changes/unique things (e.g. the predator sneaking up in our periphery). Shrooms roll that back a bit so suddenly the pattern on a blanket, the branches on a tree, or the backing track in a piece of music, or even the varying white points of lights, comes front and center. In many ways it's like experiencing things with fresh eyes and ears, and that really is the delight of the experience, de-jading our senses.
This can be a disadvantage if you're doing something safety critical and suddenly you're amazed how you never noticed the features of some thing, distracting your attention. No one should ever drive or do dangerous things under the influence. The evolutionary benefit allows us to focus attention in a way that keeps us and those around us safe.
But from a judgment perspective, I am a fairly average chess player (I mean among active players), and under the influence of shrooms I play at the same level as not. I manage time as well, etc. I have programmed some critical code that I later marvel over on shrooms. This is wholly different from under the influence of alcohol, for instance, where my ability drops precipitously.
People drink alcohol and then try to do things like catch a subway train to get home - possibly while still drinking more. Psychedelic users don’t really behave this way. If you’re planning to trip so hard that you can’t actually see reality anymore, people plan for this and do it in a safe space.
People also dose their trips - they know how much they’ll be taking that day. With alcohol, it seems people just keep pouring more down their throats as they get drunker.
Alcohol is a depressant. It reduces your awareness. It even reduces your awareness of how drunk you are. It gives you pleasure and then you feel the need to drink more to stay in that pleasurable state. The idea that your actions might have consequences doesn't much enter your mind because alcohol depresses your thinking. You think less and you observe less when you are drunk. That is dangerous.
I remember trying to imagine what it would be like before ever having taken any. Even the word "hallucinate" is misleading here. It's much more involved than that. It's also specific to the compounds and how they act on your body. They're not all the same, although similar molecules are similar. Specifically from tryptamines (ayahuasca/DMT, psilocybin, LSD, morning glory, etc) you don't hear about crazy accidents because they don't "do that" to you, they're not like that. You'd have to experience them to really understand, but I wouldn't say they leave your judgment in tact in the way you'd expect, but they do leave it in tact in the sense that matters, you're probably not going to find yourself running naked down the street from taking mushrooms or thinking you can fly and jumping off a building.
Bad things do happen but hallucinogens tend to make you just not want to do misadventurous things. Like “I’d like to go walk to the store on the corner and get a sandwich, but that seems like it would be a little too intense right now” is a common sort of thought. Yes driving would be quite dangerous but it’s usually also quite an undesirable experience and your reason just isn’t so inhibited like with alcohol or many other kinds of drugs.
> Psychedelics obviously cause you to hallucinate. So why don't I hear about more accidents? Does they seem to leave your common sense, judgement, etc, in place?
I have a group of friends in the medical field in emergency rooms.
They actually see a lot of people coming through the doors with psychedelic-induced issues, either directly or by injuring themselves.
Higher psychedelic doses tend to be relatively debilitating, though, so it somewhat limits what people can do on them. Sadly this means many of the accidents are more likely to progress to death because the person isn't thinking clearly enough to extract themself from the situation (drowning, house on fire, weather exposure, lost in the woods, etc.)
What you need to know is that it will make you dumb and stupid, and you'll sit there giggling to yourself incapable of any coherent thought, like a drooling idiot. At least that's what it'll look like from the outside. From the inside, you'll feel like you've opened a door to a magical land of true understanding, like the veneer of convention has peeled off the world and you can finally see the underlying superstruture of reality. So not only do you turn into a drooling idiot, you turn into a delusional drooling idiot.
And then it takes over your life because it takes days to really get down from those dizzying heights of sudden chemical revelation, only you don't realise you're still high so you still think you really made all those lofty realisations. Then you go and have some more because you 're still incapable of rational thought and who's going to stop you anyway? It can be years before something breaks you out of this vivious cycle of making yourself stupid and being too stupid to understand how stupid you have become as a consequence.
So don't do it. Life's too short. Go read a book. Go learn a craft. Go get a hobby. Learn woodcutting. Learn to bake. Learn to cook. Have more sex. Maybe get a degree or two. But don't do shit that burns your brain because you only get one brain. And it is very easy to damage irreparably.
Counterpoint: psychedelics helped me overcome a lifelong problem with social anxiety and helped me to overcome fear of dancing in public. Over a decade later I can still say that the changes they made have had a profound and long-lasting positive impact on my life.
An LSD tripped helped with my social anxiety as a second order effect of helping me become more empathetic.
Through a dozen different thought loops + the psychedelic driven introspection of my first trip, I became much more sensitive and appreciative of my fellow humans. I was able to more properly emulate what someone might be thinking/feeling, and that has continued to bear fruit for me personally and professionally. Additionally, I became more tolerant of others and their differences in all dimensions. The idea of homosexuality in the past had left me queasy and suspicious. In the days after my first LSD experience, that difference no longer gave me any negative feelings.
Any more specific than that and we would be getting into neuro-chemistry. I am not well versed and you would have to do your own research. I do recall that LSD boosts some neurotransmitter/modulator sensitivity, and dis-inhibits the Default Mode Network - allowing for a wider range of introspective experiences which may explain my above experience. I like this articles [0] comparison to defragging a hard-drive. I often phrase psychedelics as a chemical way to observe your mind being stuck in some high dimensional local optima of state/opinion. Then you can choose to pull yourself out of those optima and reform your deeply held beliefs.
Another related term of interest might be ego-death/ego-loss.
This comment is just plain wrong.
It has been even studied and proven scientifically that for example psilocin, one of the main components of the psilocybe family of mushrooms promotes neuroplasticity and neuritogenesis (Neuritogenesis is a key process required during development of the mammalian brain). [1]
So, the completely reverse of what you said is true, mushrooms can actually promote repairing the brain and strengthen new, more healthy connections within it.
This is a great resource to anyone interested in psychedelics in general. I've only done psychedelics twice in my lifetime, both with the same friend, and both times NOT in ideal scenarios (because we were both tripping without a sober person trip-sitting us). I would like to warn anyone interested that *tripping is risky if you suffer from high anxiety or OCD*.
My first trip was an incredible experience, I couldn't wait for my next chance to trip. Unfortunately, my second trip went south very fast; I became very anxious and I started having fears that I would unreasonably kill myself or murder my friend. What I didn't know at the time was that I suffered from "Harm OCD" and that the psychedelics were magnifying my OCD tenfold, and thus triggered a horrendous panic attack that wouldn't end until the effects of the drugs wore off.
> Harm OCD is a subset of classic obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). The condition is characterized by having aggressive, intrusive thoughts of doing violence to someone, as well as the responses the person uses to cope with these thoughts... OCD makes the individual feel that they can’t trust their own mind. Wherein someone without OCD could have a violent thought and recognize that it is simply a thought, a person with OCD who has the Harm OCD subset worries that just having the thought is somehow meaningful.
I've tripped dozens of times on lsd, shrooms, dmt and a few RCs. I'm also suffering from such fears during the comeup. after it it's usually smooth sailing. but during my 50 to 100 trips i never actually did anything harmful in any way. so that's that. but it's really annoying.
I've felt it a bunch of times, but I've worked through it with meditation (without drugs)...
I think psychedelics just bring out deeper parts of the mind. I don't do them anymore, but I used to, so I have some experience. I'm not a teetotaler, I still drink alcohol and smoke weed sometimes, but I'm done with psychedelics for the time being.
Yeah, I had been experiencing it for years before I ever tried psychedelics, I just didn't know it was something "real".
Before I knew what it was, if I had an episode of "harm OCD", I would sometimes feel physically ill and excuse myself to the bathroom and repeatedly splash water on my face until the feeling went away. Sometimes I'd keep my hands behind my back on purpose (the idea being that I would harm someone with my hands).
Since learning what it is, I'm more easily able to dispel it when it arises. Simply knowing "oh, this is OCD" is powerful enough for me to get on with my life. For the record, I completely abstain from psychedelics or any recreational drugs now (with the exception of coffee, and light alcohol at social gatherings).
I haven’t tried shrooms but had a similarly horrifying bad trip on weed brownies at my parents’ place a few years ago. My dad had just gotten into baking them and insisted I have two (BIG mistake) and I spent the next 6-or-so hours cycling through panic attacks and hallucinations while absolutely convinced I had murdered my parents earlier that evening.
Gotta say, my ole man knows how to make a potent pot brownie.
I feel like I'm alone in this, but I don't like mushrooms. I usually have unpleasant body effects, and I don't like the trip generally. I'm fairly confident in my ability to have dosed as responsibly as possible with a biological product. Usually, though, I just feel weird and uncomfortable for 10. LSD, by comparison, is positively therapeutic for me.
I think everyone is going to have different experiences. I saw a wide variety experiences
among people taking Ayahuasca, and my own experiences were each different.
LSD wasn’t uncomfortable for me, but I also knew at a deep level that it wasn’t something I needed to explore further. By contrast, there were many times that Ayahuasca had been at times uncomfortable and disturbing for me … but I also knew I needed it.
Exact opposite for me. LSD is nice, but the visuals can be overwhelming. The visuals on mushrooms, for me are more “organic” I guess, and the mental state more natural. I haven’t done either in over a decade, but that’s what I remember. I used to do a heroic dose of mushrooms once a week - the feelings of euphoria once you peek and the subtle visuals were amazing.
It’s also possible to go to sleep on mushrooms once you’re at the end of your trip, as the trip is really a lot shorter. I remember lying awake in my bed on LSD with the room melting around me, wondering if it would ever end, just wishing that I could go to sleep.
Edit: As far as being alone with your experience - I had a lot of friends that preferred LSD over mushrooms. It’s really a personal preference as to which one suits you best.
If you're talking about different mushrooms with different compounds in them (like fly agaric) we are specifically talking about psilocybin mushrooms here.
If you're talking about different species of psilocybin containing mushrooms like wood loving ones and what not, what are your experiences with them? I've only had cubensis mushrooms, but I assumed the primary difference between them would be potency considering they have the same active compounds.
wood-loving generally oxidize fast and have a more psylocin heavy profile on consumption, so there's less come-up, and my anecdotal experience of eating large amounts of wood-eaters (blue footers, found around box elder trees/floodplanes in Bethany, WV area) -- the experience is like immediately intense and psychedelic with no playful buffer since the conversion is shortened -- and if you're not ready you will be properly fucking spun.
other than that, i've had some insanely intense experiences with them, both pleasant and unpleasant. but i have not had much experience with other species.
related to the thread however, my experiences with good L were way more pleasant, manageable, and desirable. but perhaps that's a result a more responsible, less reckless dosing (i had some experience by this time, dosing in clubs and stuff) -- when i was eating mushrooms (spring time, quite a few seasons not really outside of that window) simply eating whatever i am finding on a hike through the woods while having an afternoon coffee, while not really knowing any better, sometimes meant i ingested way more than necessary, shrug. YMMV.
Mostly just describing my experiences with normal psilocybin mushrooms.
The visuals were very noticeable for me, but they would mostly enhance whatever it was that I was looking at. Peoples heads would morph and bend (the best way I can describe that is the music video “Drugs” by Ratatat), trees would breath and the branches would look like giant mushrooms, I’d see slight colors and geometry on flat surfaces, my phone would feel like liquid. The body high was also amazing. All of this for me was on a 7.5g dosage.
In contrast with LSD, it would completely change everything that I could see. I woke up once after going to sleep on alcohol/LSD, and it looked like I was in a cartoon, and I continued to trip for another 8 hours.
My experience is that LSD, when good, is great, but when bad, can be disastrous. Mushrooms, while not as crisp and euphoric as LSD, don't seem to ever leave me scarred, even with large doses. I'll be laughing about a bad trip on mushrooms after I come down, but will be left unable to function in society for 6 months after a bad trip on LSD.
Short-term side effects were acute + severe panic attacks, triggered by flashbacks and feeling as though I was physically back in the same situation/it was starting to happen again.
Even though entirely illogical and not being in the same place it happened, in my mind I felt dead certain that the events that had happened were starting to replay themselves and even physically I was reliving the sensations.
This made me dysfunctional for a period of months, slowly over time the severity + frequency of this tapered off. It took about ~2 years for it to become what I'd call "mostly subsided".
Even now though, if I am under a lot of stress or if I don't sleep well and am slightly sleep deprived, I will start to have flashbacks + panic attacks, but I know how to handle them better now and can force logic through a bit better.
My vision is permanently altered, though it's minor. If you're not familiar with psychedelics, when you take a low dose of them, it makes everything have a sort of "oil-painting" type look to it, and textures are crisper.
The bark on a tree is a good example of something that looks much more intense.
The intensity of this has also subsided a fair amount, but even now I choose not to wear glasses most of the time because if I put on my glasses, everything is too "High definition" and visually intense. I prefer things to just be blurry, to be honest.
I think it's a shame that science does not study rare phenomena like this when they arise, I think there is a lot that could be learned from them.
> and feeling as though I was physically back in the same situation/it was starting to happen again.
> Even though entirely illogical and not being in the same place it happened, in my mind I felt dead certain that the events that had happened were starting to replay themselves and even physically I was reliving the sensations.
I once took some psychedelics and forgot I had taken them (I was also drinking beer), and I had an experience quite similar to this, but at the time had completely forgotten that I was on psychedelics. I always leave myself a note nowadays.
Interesting. When I was 15.5 I took a couple tabs of what I thought were LSD. Given the extended duration, it was probably a research chemical, but it was on blotter(NBOMe? it was 1991) so it was a potent one. My friend took 5 tabs and started throwing up, which we never experienced with LSD. After nearly 24 hours of tripping I was left with years of panic attacks and HPPD. Walls breathing, textures enhanced, increased visual snow, etc. It probably cut my reading speed in half between the difficulty of looking at black text on a white background in addition to the slightly disorganized thinking. It faded away after a decade or two. I think I still notice it if I look for it, but I try not to. I was absolutely convinced someone would try to dose me again without my consent after that. For years I double checked everything I consumed out of the irrational fear that someone injected LSD into the package(friends of mine joked about doing this, which probably started the worry).
I've used psychedelics since then(although much, much later in life). Nothing ever like it since.
FWIW, if I can offer you anything, it's a hint as to what you probably took.
The only thing I've ever taken + know of with even remotely a 24-hour duration is the "DOx" series, like "DOM", and "DOI", etc.
I felt like I had been dragged through hell and back after the time I willingly + knowingly took a single dose of DOI. No idea who thinks 24 hours awake tripping is a good time.
Ah right, yeah I looked it up years ago and figured it was one of the RCs but couldn't remember which one. I think you're right that it was a DOx compound. It was quite the trip. Extreme time dilation, massive trails, auditory effects... my trip partner thought he died and stopped talking to me shortly after it kicked in.
I also had breathing issues around the tail end of the trip(I think you mentioned something similar). I would start to nod out in my attempt to sleep, but I'd come to after a few minutes, gasping for air.
It was tie-dyed blotter that my friend bought from a Dead show in Sacramento. I've never had anything like it since then.
Fully agree. Bad LSD trip changes your life dramatically. Bad shroom trip (example took way too much and end up in a never ending panic of “will this ever end?!”) has no long term negative effects.
I also feel instantly better, smarter, happier, etc for weeks after shrooms. Don’t feel that all on LSD.
This is conjecture/personal experience/anecdotal, just to be clear for others who are evaluating these two substances. It’s worth prefacing with, “My experience was…”
Had a truly terrible LSD trip a while ago, took a couple weeks to shake off and I never really felt "the same" afterwards. I'm not here to spread FUD, but goddamn is it a powerful chemical. Some people (myself included) underestimate the amount of mental rewiring it can do if you're not careful.
I don't like it when folks generalize from a few subjective experiences. Mushrooms and LSD are powerful catalysts and one can never be sure of what one will experience.
Even McKenna had a bad trip on psilocybin that nearly broke him:
"Terence’s pivotal, existential crisis came abruptly, some time in ’88 or ’89. Everything that happened after that event was fallout. I don’t know exactly when it happened, and I don’t know exactly what happened; I am piecing it together from what Kat [his wife at the time] has told me, and she has volunteered few details, and I am reluctant to probe.
It happened when they were living for a time on the big island, and it was a mushroom trip they shared that was absolutely terrifying for Terence. It was terrifying because, for some reason, the mushroom turned on him. The gentle, wise, humorous mushroom spirit that he had come to know and trust as an ally and teacher ripped back the facade to reveal an abyss of utter existential despair. Terence kept saying, so Kat told me, that it was “a lack of all meaning, a lack of all meaning.” And this induced panic in Terence, and probably, I speculate, a feeling he was going mad. He couldn’t deal with it. Kat’s efforts to reassure him were fruitless. After that experience, he never again took mushrooms, and he took other psychedelics, such as DMT and ayahuasca, only on rare occasions and with great reluctance.
Whatever the specific content of the psychedelic experience might have been that triggered the cognitive collapse of Terence’s worldview and precipitated his existential crisis, what was most remarkable was that he did not see it coming. He did not see it coming."
— From Dennis McKenna, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss: My Life with Terence McKenna, now excised
That's about a decade before he was diagnosed with glioblastoma. It wouldn't be surprising if he already had an astrocytoma at that point, but was unaware of the subtle effects which his brain was beginning to compensate for.
That's the bitch about a brain tumor. Your mind is really good at working around it, until it isn't, and then you can't see straight or some other symptom which appears suddenly.
I don't mean to completely diminish your point. Psychedelics can hit you in unpredictable ways, even when you have experience.
Mushrooms are a journey in a car with suspension and comfortable seating. LSD is the same journey in a car with no shocks, metal benches, and no seatbelt. Sometimes the trips are similar but if you hit a bumpy spot the results are quite different.
In practice I have seen several people do a lot of LSD and kind of “not come back all the way.” Don’t recall seeing the same with other psychedelics.
I would caution people against acid, and especially against using a lot of it or repeatedly. I think there’s a reason it has that nickname. It seems to be harsh and unforgiving.
There are positive reports from microdosing the stuff. I have no experience here. This wasn’t a thing when I was in college and I have not been near anything like this for a long time.
For me it is the opposite, LSD is the safe one, shrooms being more difficult - I suspect this is caused by LSD additionaly being a dopamine receptor agonist, which is better for my brain (I also like hippie/candyflips for the same reason I suspect).
Yeah I think for some folks the dopamine kick of LSD is akin to combining meth with mushrooms. It can be very edgy and electric, with more paranoia and a harsher come down. Mushrooms have always just worked for me. Then again I don't mind the body load(i.e. feeling like I need to take a shit for 6 hours, mild stomach unease, fatigue). I've had some good times on LSD, but it leaves me raw after, sometimes for months. I've done high dose shrooms every week or so for extended periods and while I get a little scatterbrained after a while I don't feel like I'm going insane.
Psychadelics famously impact people in vastly different ways. Anyone who hasn't tried them before will probably have the best time doing a standard dose (1 "tab" of lsd or ~1.5g of mushrooms) around friends with nothing else scheduled during the day.
That said, many people have nonlinear responses to these substances. I know folks who hate lower doses of LSD because they just get an anxiety-generating body high, but love the experience above that. Generally, on a per-dose basis, LSD and mushrooms are inexpensive and so experimentation is cheap (even though it's also time consuming because of the ~8hr trip duration). Though, again, if you take lower doses (below the standard I mentioned above) most people will have no trouble doing chores if you must get something done (as long as that chore does *not* involve driving).
I know lots of people will warn you about this stuff but with the caveat that every person is different: I have friends with high anxiety and all these things. We trip together quite pleasantly and enjoyably.
I had a stroke a few months ago, resulting in some long-lasting effects in my visual field. I have read reports that mushrooms can help the brain develop new connections; and I'd like to see if they can help improve my vision. But I have no idea where to get shrooms, how much to dose, etc. Any tips?
Look into growing them from uncle Ben’s rice. Doesn’t get easier. Spores can be legally bought online in most states and no special equipment is necessary.
Just plan on doing a triple batch as without proper lab equipment, the chance of contamination is higher.
As said, grow your own. No need to deal with risky characters, you'll know exactly what you have, requires very little space, low risk as long as you can keep your lips zipped. It's about 6 weeks from inoculation of spores to first harvest, and the total investment to get started can be about $100, most of that for one-time expenses. Spores are legal to buy in most (47) states, and can be ordered from the open internet. If you're in one of the 3 non-legal states, or a non-legal country, there are online spore print exchanges. After buying once, you can propagate from your own spore prints, or from clones.
I would not rely on Reddit for your cultivation advice. Try shroomery.org, an old school web 1.0 forum that's been around since 1997. People who have participated there for years and are recognized as experts are marked with a "Trusted Cultivator" badge. Yes, it is actually possible to grow shrooms on Uncle Ben's precooked microwavable rice packets, but it is not a recommended practice due to high percent of batches lost to mold/bacterial contamination before the spores can germinate. It's just too wet of a substrate and doesn't have adequate airflow for oxygen that the mycelium needs to grow. I have tried it even though I usually use more advanced techniques, and lost 4 of 8 bags to contamination, even though I used above average sterile handling methods.
The PF Tek method is considered a reliable method for beginners that minimizes the equipment you need to buy, and is recommend in the shroomery.org's "getting started" sticky thread: https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/2442017... The thread also has links to spore vendors who have been vetted as reliable.
There is a also a discussion forum on the site for those who choose to use shrooms medicinally, including microdosing, recommended micro/macro dosages and dosing practices, etc.
Sadly, I live in California. For some stupid reason, Cali doesn't allow the sales of spores. And yet shrooms are legal in places like Oakland and Santa Cruz. W. T. F.?? What is wrong with the politicians?
Thank you for the link to Shroomery; I had not heard of this site, but I will explore it in depth. I have a pressure cooker and a garage, all I need are simple to follow directions.
Go figure - but I wouldn't be surprised if that changes sooner rather than later. Attitudes toward natural psychedelics seem to be rapidly changing in both political parties.
The Shroomery has a a spore exchange board, and plenty of people would be happy to send to CA, but you have to be registered for 30 days and make 50 posts to participate. They try to discourage drive-bys in favor of building the community.
I’ve done LSD a few times, maybe a handful, and mild doses of shrooms maybe 3 times.
On higher doses of LSD (> 1 tab), I tend to get a recurring fear and visual manifestation of bugs (spiders, specially). When I’m outside on a walk while tripping I tend to be hyper-conscious of bugs and the noises they’re making. Any thoughts on why and how to deal with this? It tends to have a very negative effect on my trips but it doesn’t always happen. Just stick to lower doses?
I highly recommend taking a look through the Yale Manual for Psilocybin-assisted therapy [1], section 6.9 is particularly relevant to your inquiry. Some excerpts:
> We encourage you to take an attitude of curiosity and acceptance toward everything that happens during your session. Whatever comes up has some kind of meaning or wisdom that you can learn from, even if this meaning is not immediately obvious.
> You may have bizarre sensations and experiences, and you may experience frightening images or thoughts. These may alternate rapidly. This is normal and does not mean anything is wrong.
> We encourage you to “go with” or surrender to difficult experiences rather than fight them. Approach rather than flee; accept rather than reason away, lean into whatever comes up, including any impulse to run away.
> There are methods for grounding and calming yourself, if you would like to use them.
Hmm, I worry about the doses listed. 1.6g of potent caps will get you right fucked. If you haven't done them before and are planning on having a couple drinks and socializing etc I recommend no more than 0.5g (for at least 1.5hrs) then re-access from there.
Different mushroom species have different quantities of active ingredients. Describing the dry weight of a mushroom is really only a secondary measurement of the active ingredients.
Elsewhere on the website they compare 2.4g of mushrooms to about 100ug of LSD. So 1.7g of mushrooms would be equivalent of about 45ug of LSD, and the micro dose range of LSD is 5-25ug. Tripsafe is attempting to describe a light dose, which should include only minor visuals. They are likely using P. Cubensis to describe dosage, which is very common in North America, but only half the potency of the most potent psychedelic mushrooms. “Liberty cabs” or P. Semilanceata are more common in Europe, and are often more potent than P. Cubensis.
There might also be a cultural difference on the expectations for a psychedelic experiences and the activities one should do during it.
Good point about the quantity of active ingredients varying by species.
It’s worth noting that GP may have been referring to the physical distribution of active ingredients within the mushroom body. The “cap” of a mushroom almost always contains significantly more active ingredients.
Thus, 1 gram of stems may yield a significantly different dose than 1 gram of “caps”.
The quantity and relative percentage of psilocybin, psilocin, baeocystin, and other active compounds varies wildly even in a mushroom-to-mushroom comparison from the same grow. This is especially notable in multispore grows, rather than strains isolated on agar over successive generations. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7201054/
Storage is also a big variable. Keeping them in an oxygen free environment seems to help.
IIRC, the amount of psilocybin in a mushroom is sort of fixed at a certain stage of its growth, so picking them when they're larger can just diminish their strength by weight and mess up what you think is the dose. As with most drugs, I find batching them together, say by grinding them all up in the case of mushrooms, and then taking small doses to calibrate the batch strength, is the safest way to go.
I usually recommend taking your mushrooms and blending them up in, say, OJ, then pouring them into ice cube trays and freezing them. They keep quite a long time that way and it's pretty convenient.
It definitely does. 4-5g is our standard dose now. I used to think 1-2g was intense. A big variable is whether or not you're combining them with anything else. I find smoking pot sends things into overdrive and results in hallucinations which are difficult to separate from reality when doing 5g. By itself, 5g is a nice trip(although I can temporarily lose my language functions sometimes, which is kind of interesting).
To add to this, my partner does 5g and it's more or less a fun and intoxicating experience with no visuals at all. 5g for me is intensely visual. YMMV.
Maybe a more useful contribution is to say that mushroom 'highs' are cumulative. I've been a bit of a casual nibbler for 25 yrs or so. You can always eat a little more but you can't uneat them. So that's all. The quantity/duration of consumption ratio is very significant for a good experience :)
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[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 1173 ms ] threadDont do drugs as a illegal thing that give you the thrill of being a bad boy. Take a scientifi approach of risk evaluation, read testimonies and reports and ensure your own safety, as you would do for something like diving and skydiving.
Also never do drugs "because it makes you feel better when you are sad".
Dont hesitate to ask more question
Friendly reminder that they're community/donation supported.
It's not risk free, but I disagree with this as absolute advice, a trip can fill up one's spiritual gas tank to keep on moving forward, they can demonstrate that one's depression is largely illusory.
I was mostly referring to falling into an habit to numb the pain
Is this based on personal experience, clinical studies, something else?
Substances can help to realize stuff, but long term (1+year) regular using is never in my layman opinion
Unless in a proper session/ceremony with professionals/shamans
On another note, I always love psych threads on HN. High quality posts all around.
They bruise blue (and it's hard to pick them without bruising the stems) which can look nearly black when dried. This can make them look moldy when they aren't. If they're actually moldy I'd toss them.
When I used to grow I settled on letting them sit on a grate with a fan blowing at them for a few days (the air is dry here, ymmv), then I'd store them with desiccant packets. They should be crispy like potato chips, no mushyness.
As for trepidation, that's understandable. I'd start with a super light dose (.5 g) at first just to see what you're dealing with. I'm glad I've had potent trips in the past (I usually find 3.5 g is enough, but it'll vary by batch and by human), but these days I usually dose lightly.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocin
There's also no such thing as a minimum dose. People have found benefits with very small amounts (1/20g) if you're just curious—it literally cannot hurt.
When it comes to psychedelics, the pendulum of popular opinion has swung from an extreme of “extremely bad for you” to “actually good for you” but neither extreme is good, IMO.
It’s worth reading some of the material about how psychedelic users are weirdly prone to picking up strange beliefs. Not everyone of course, but even a large number of psychedelic researchers who were supposedly doing it the “right way” were still walking away with bizarre and irrational beliefs: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-psyched...
These belief-shifting outcomes aren’t mentioned in harm reduction guides. In many cases, they’re actually celebrated by users with an implicit assumption that all belief changes from psychedelics must be inherently good. I think it’s important to understand that thoughts and feelings imparted by psychedelics aren’t real and may likely be entirely meaningless.
It’s also important to know that the thoughts and feelings and experiences induced by psychedelics aren’t necessarily entirely positive. The negative anecdotes tend to get lost among the hyperbole about psychedelics producing magical experiences, but it’s not hard to find stories about difficult trips or trips that induced long-lasting negative mental states on Internet forums. They tend to be downvote, ignored, or explained away by blaming the victim for doing it wrong. However, it is a very real and not uncommon possibility, which is why harm reduction guides emphasize the need for sitters to monitor the user and why every psychedelic research study had included 10X as much therapy sessions as psychedelic sessions.
That article gives examples of folks who most definitely were not using psychedelics safety. Timothy Leary is famous for his controversial experiments.
Moreover, LSD and mushrooms are often conflated in discussions like this, but it should be noted that the two drugs have widely different outcomes and safe usage parameters.
"The third possibility is the one that really intrigues me. A 2011 study found that a single dose of psilocybin could permanently increase the personality dimension of Openness To Experience. I’m emphasizing that because personality is otherwise pretty stable after adulthood; nothing should be able to do this."
The fact is everything IS able to do this and it's up to the person to choose it. Most people don't.
The idea that personality is a stable feature after adulthood is simply a cultural phenomena. As a person who has accidentally/intentionally constructed different identities with different voices in the head after out the mouth, it's very clear to me people's identities are incredibly malleable and most people are simply unaware/unpracticed in how to do it.
No it's not. Twin studies show that personality is largely genetically determined, ie. twins that were separated at birth and raised separately largely have the same personalities, levels of happiness and life satisfaction, and even similar jobs and spouses. People tend to overestimate environmental influences.
Gene expression is controlled via the epigenome, which can be affected by trauma.
Why can't it also be impacted by healing?
Also, since you didn't answer the question I asked, it's not a sufficient answer. I'm not talking about tabula rasa. I'm talking about static vs dynamic personality.
People judging experiences as positive/negative distracts from what's going on. Simply labeling challenging-to-accept experiences as "bad" and large doses as "heroic" is enough to establish a distracting delusion. It was upon realizing this that I decided I understood how to approach the mushrooms for my last trip:
4g of the mushrooms were measured out by someone. Another unknown and (visibly less seeming) amount was gifted to me by someone else. At first, I was torn on whether to take just the amount measured out or to take more. Upon reading a bit of advice to remind me about how to navigate mushroom journeys, I remembered we can't KNOW anything (like how much mushrooms by weight was in front of me) and also taking the unknown amount was completely in line with my values of courage, embracing uncertainty, and deep analysis.
Most of the harm reduction guidelines seem to be designed for people who are living in a society that's automated judgment of experience and haven't unlearned that, yet.
Courage is one thing, but overdosing is not a pleasant experience, even if it is usually not (physically) unsafe. Cannabis edibles are famous for this since most people have no idea how strong their brownies even after they make them. It was one of the main reasons I made an online calculator as a side project (http://www.scientificedibles.com) to help people to estimate dosage, rather than "take one" and end up on the floor.
A high dose of mushrooms is way way different than a high dose of LSD or cannabis.
I mean, in what possible way are they “less real” than thoughts and feelings imparted by any other cause? This is your body, doing the thing in reaponse to a stimulus. This may be an atypical stimulus generating very different than usual responses, but they’re certainly real
But it’s not a complicated concept to get. Like a person who is drunk might see double, when in fact there is one object. A person who is on a lot of amphetamines might believe they are being purposely followed when in fact there are no people intentionally following them.
Those perceptions are not real, in any commonly understood meaning of the word. It’s easy to understand what the parent comment meant in that context as well.
Respectfully - there is still a bit of a category error in the GP, and a bit of a goalpost move here on your part.
Here’s the whole paragraph: > “ These belief-shifting outcomes aren’t mentioned in harm reduction guides. In many cases, they’re actually celebrated by users with an implicit assumption that all belief changes from psychedelics must be inherently good. I think it’s important to understand that thoughts and feelings imparted by psychedelics aren’t real and may likely be entirely meaningless.”
At a minimum, “what the parent comment meant in that context” refers to experiences that themselves alter one’s general perspective, mood, mindset, state of being, etc after the experience. If you prefer, taken word-as-written the GP is saying every thought you have at all under the influence isn’t “real.”
And reading the rest of the post, GP is concerned with permanent, potentially irreversible change to beliefs and brains.
So, shifting the conversation to hallucinations themselves is a bit of a dodge from the original context.
The other reply comment to yours has a salient point: emotions fall into a more durable category of experience than a hallucination. So, in what sense can any shift of perspective, mood, mindset, state of being, etc. in a person be counted as “real” or “not real?”
Many of them did adopt some real wacky beliefs that they have held onto many years past their use. ‘Radicality’ of belief seemed proportional to volume of use. I’m talking Q-anon levels of delusion and beyond. They all felt they were in touch with greater truths and pitied me and my judgement; my self-restriction of perception. They have a lot of flowery language about how I can’t know what I can’t see that you have to be some sort of logician to parse.
In one case, I have watched this ‘enlightenment’ morph over the years from communicationg with beings from beyond the veil to potentially violent political extremism. The guy has been sober for years but low-key views all of his actions and work through a lens of ‘ultimate battle of cosmic good and evil’. Naturally ‘good’ cosmically aligns with whatever his interests at that time are.
If you’re a young person reading this: taking psychedelics a couple times is an interesting experience, perhaps worthwhile. But I’m real damn certain that the ‘enlightenment’ is basically being high. Drunk on a false sense of peace with the universe which exists only as a malfunction in your brain’s wiring. Beware people who tout those effects. They are out of touch with reality.
*I have read there is clinical potential to help PTSD sufferers. I’m not denying this. But 99% of usage is not happening is carefully, scientifically studied and controlled situations. Keeping a trip journal is not scientific, even if you have a chem phd.
This concept has been promoted by philosophers and mystics for centuries and is completely consistent with mainstream neuroscience and psychology. I'm not saying that your friends genuinely transcended this barrier, but that they didn't and thought they did is not a proof that such a realm does not exist.
> They are out of touch with reality.
Surely. But, do you believe that you are accurately in touch with reality?
Saying anything that isn't 100% positive about psychedelics on the internet tends to bring out a lot of psychedelic fans who vehemently disagree. Any time I comment about psychedelics online without a unilaterally glowing endorsement, my comments' score bounces up and down as much as any other controversial topic.
It's fascinating to see even the counter arguments here tap into exactly the sort of mystical beliefs I was talking about: Questioning reality, suggesting that maybe psychedelic induced experiences are revealing an alternate reality and so on. A common theme is a belief that psychedelic users are seeing the real reality through their drug use, which is supposedly unavailable to those of us who aren't inducing these artificial altered states with drugs.
> But I’m real damn certain that the ‘enlightenment’ is basically being high. Drunk on a false sense of peace with the universe which exists only as a malfunction in your brain’s wiring. Beware people who tout those effects. They are out of touch with reality.
Well said. I haven't known anyone to go as deep as your friends, but I have known a few people who started to believe that their drug-induced states were something more than just a drug-induced feeling. It's scary to watch someone lose grip with the difference.
It's also scary to read all of the deadly serious comments here on HN suggesting such clearly false beliefs might be true.
> I have read there is clinical potential to help PTSD sufferers. I’m not denying this. But 99% of usage is not happening is carefully, scientifically studied and controlled situations. Keeping a trip journal is not scientific, even if you have a chem phd.
I've read just about every study on psychedelics and therapy recently. In every* single trial, the psychedelics are part of an extended therapy program involving as many as 20 therapy sessions for every 1 psychedelic session. Anyone taking psychedelics ad-hoc at home and expecting to replicate the study results is not coming close at all.
It was fun - I was seeing funny things, my friends looked funny, I laughed a lot, was a lot more talkative and social.
My only issue was a tension headache which started about when the first effects came on and was even worse the day after, lashing until about 24 hours after the mushrooms were taken. My friends did not get the headache.
Otherwise, while I found the experience fun, and I'd do it again if it wasn't for the headache, I really can't fathom how people describe it as one of the most profound experiences of their lives.
You need at least 3.5G to have that. While that may seem intimidating it’s not that much more than 2G, but enough to make your inner consciousness turn up to 11
These are profound and immediate changes in my life. I look forward to what mushrooms have to further teach me.
Oh, I also had the realization that ego death doesn't need to be this cataclysmic, big, scary, break from reality thing done with eyes literally closed and that if I already carry a cosmic identity, dissolving into the cosmos provides insight that can come from reflecting on being the cosmos.
If you've read this far, do yourself a favor, look up CPTSD and preverbal trauma, and check to see if there's something you went through when little that's still alive and getting in your way.
I have no idea what I took or how much.
All of my other trips have been after adopting a stance of radical acceptance and abandoning most of my preferences. Allowing myself to do what I want I think is really key to living fully and helps dramatically with tripping. If you're nervous about your first time, maybe find a trip sitter. There are also integration coaches out there who can help you prepare and followup with practices for integrating what you learn.
Ultimately, if you setup your environment to have all your needs accounted for (which may include putting "flight instructions" nearby and easily visible, taking a big dose and laying down with an eye mask on in a quiet environment can take you very far. You can always open your eyes and remind yourself you're safe, this is the mushrooms showing you what you need, and it shall pass. Don't Gandalf the Balrog, look at it and ask "What are you doing in my head and what do you have to teach me?"
I know people who have had very scary trips and came out having learned very little and changed very little. They also practice deep denials of reality, so I'd check myself for cognitive distortions and work them out or at least get into the habit of pausing and questioning an experience before flying solo.
Are you making music as part of your therapy? I ask because I've found making music allows me to see how I'm applying my brain to things. I practice playing what Sun Ra calls "pure jazz," music without preconceived notion or simply just being. There's no wrong note or wrong time to play it. However you want to be programming your brain to work, if you approach making music from that mindset, it's a safe environment to practice it.
I hope this helps you in your healing journey <3
We purchased santaisdeadlonglivesanta.net with the intention of starting a movement in anarchogiving. She's even willing to put a picture of her bearded face on it!
And thank you for your response...I don't see many comments like that on here.
take magnesium, recommend especially if you're going to take in any psychedelic
Try it with an eye mask and just music next time, and no other distractions, maybe with a trip sitter nearby.
all of these activities kept me busy, but none of them were quite as fulfilling as just closing my eyes and letting my mind do the work (even with music as a guide). eventually, i just started doing the opposite -> the stations remained, but only as tools to help me beat my anxiety and/or boredom. if i ever feel that i am approaching a period of overwhelming feelings, i distract myself with the activities i mentioned.
For this to be possible, you need to be alone (= undistracted) and (ideally) be surrounded by beautiful and calm nature, in a completely secure setting.
Then, your inner state must be ready for this.
Also, if your current level of consciousness is not ready for it, it won't happen at this point in time.
Eating 2g of dried mushrooms can be a life changing experience, or just a fun evening wondering on about the world. It can even not work at all, or give you just a slight feeling of being in an altered state.
Personally, after experiencing mushrooms and other psychedelics over a 10 year period of time, these days even a small under 1g dose can bring a very strong experience.
Depends a lot also what you have eaten before the experience, how you have prepared for it etc etc .. maybe the headache is something that the mushrooms just brought to the surface in that moment, might not happen on your second time.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3345296/
Alcohol, for example, is pretty famous for clouding judgement, reducing inhibition, and so on. Such that otherwise rational people drive intoxicated, get into fights, fall asleep in inappropriate places, fall off of and into things, etc.
Psychedelics obviously cause you to hallucinate. So why don't I hear about more accidents? Does they seem to leave your common sense, judgement, etc, in place?
Instead the effect at most normal doses (3.5g) is more that the walls and floors seem to take on a slightly ephemeral breathing characteristic. You may see patterns in things of varying complexity and intensity. The patterns may seem to shift and meld into eachother in a kind of loop... Psychonaut wiki[0] has several approximations of varying quality, a lot of the gifs in particular (the cat lying on the couch and the wolf drinking) resonate with me.
Sensory input can also include audio hallucinations, as well as perceptions that are simply normally filtered out of our experience by our brains--a sense of the organs inside your body, or the teeth in your mouth, or whatever.
A lot of the effects are mental, prompting often amusing and revelatory departures from your normal thought patterns. Everything old is new again. You may find yourself deeply examining the complexity of your hands, or the bizarre fact that we're not always "like this", or in deep awe of the staggering complexity of civilization or the chemical machines that are our bodies. That kind of thing.
The realization that we collectively have no idea what we're doing here, that a whole lot of what we believe to be real and permanent is imaginary and temporary, and that there are no rules to life, no winners, that we should take care of nature and each other, and that you should follow your muse to do what you find interesting and beautiful.
Media portrayal of this varies but some shows do hit it quite on the head, actually Mad Men has an interesting trip episode that understates the visual component and emphasizes the mental[1]. Broad city's was particularly colorful and fun (S4e4, full ep. isn't on youtube).
Some media can give you a bit of a taste of the experience, others grossly exaggerate it or flat out misrepresent it. You know how it goes.
[0] https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Visual_effects_-_Psychedelic... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpWlKCfSPcU
These things were somewhat popular in my language segment of the internet about ten years ago. A lot of people were experimenting with the stuff. Usually one trip was more than enough to never want to repeat that again.
Try reading some trip reports on erowid if you're curious.
https://www.erowid.org/general/big_chart.shtml
Also, I don’t know how true this is, but I’ve heard that some of the hallucinations you see on psychedelics are signals/noise your brain normally filters out, but stops getting filtered during the trip. I believe the context was for so called “sacred geometry”. For example, if you look up the “flower of life”, this is a pattern people regularly see while tripping and it’s one I saw myself the first time I took shrooms.
These two articles discuss in more detail some of the biological/neurological correlates for the types of patterns seen during psychedelic experiences. Some of the pictures of retinal structure etc are pretty eye opening (hah):
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-theory-for-why-people-...
https://plus.maths.org/content/uncoiling-spiral-maths-and-ha...
Smaller thought loops can take you over the exact same sequence of input/ output over the course of several minutes of nothing jars you or if it.
This was generally my experience until I combined high dose(5g relatively fresh) mushrooms with pot. I've had a number of experiences on that combination where I experience vivid hallucinations which are indistinguishable from reality. It's rather uncomfortable at times because of that.
On mushrooms alone, up to the 5 or so grams which is my current maximum, I would classify the hallucinations as colorful visuals combined with intense daydreams.
It is possible to take enough shrooms to hallucinate objects which are not there. It's hard to reach this state without losing full sight of everything tho.
Of course I'm reminded of Bill Hicks who cautioned, "when on drugs, if you think you can fly, take off from the ground"
I learned from these stories: don't drive on hallucinogens, and don't trip when you've got real-life responsibilities.
Oh, and it bears mentioning that folks who do drugs recreationally tend to mix hallucinogens with other substances. LSD on its own is comparably clear-headed, but I've known people to mix it with weed, cocaine, mdma, etc... and who knows what's going to sound like a good idea.
2) As far as I know there’s no straightforward way to test for them and I’d have to assume people who are high on psychedelics that get into an accident aren’t excited to volunteer the information.
Now, give me a couple of beers and I'll be slurring in no time.
When stories do come out, they tend to be over the top. For instance-
https://globalnews.ca/news/4735129/thomas-chan-guilty-mansla...
People with certain conditions should stay away from psychedelics.
Having said that, as others said a normal experience does not include hallucinations of the cliche "see weird crazy things that aren't there" variety. Instead you get more of an experience from patterns, music seems richer, colours deeper, etc.
Our brain dulls reality for us as a evolutionary benefit to allow us to focus our brainpower only on changes/unique things (e.g. the predator sneaking up in our periphery). Shrooms roll that back a bit so suddenly the pattern on a blanket, the branches on a tree, or the backing track in a piece of music, or even the varying white points of lights, comes front and center. In many ways it's like experiencing things with fresh eyes and ears, and that really is the delight of the experience, de-jading our senses.
This can be a disadvantage if you're doing something safety critical and suddenly you're amazed how you never noticed the features of some thing, distracting your attention. No one should ever drive or do dangerous things under the influence. The evolutionary benefit allows us to focus attention in a way that keeps us and those around us safe.
But from a judgment perspective, I am a fairly average chess player (I mean among active players), and under the influence of shrooms I play at the same level as not. I manage time as well, etc. I have programmed some critical code that I later marvel over on shrooms. This is wholly different from under the influence of alcohol, for instance, where my ability drops precipitously.
People also dose their trips - they know how much they’ll be taking that day. With alcohol, it seems people just keep pouring more down their throats as they get drunker.
I have a group of friends in the medical field in emergency rooms.
They actually see a lot of people coming through the doors with psychedelic-induced issues, either directly or by injuring themselves.
Higher psychedelic doses tend to be relatively debilitating, though, so it somewhat limits what people can do on them. Sadly this means many of the accidents are more likely to progress to death because the person isn't thinking clearly enough to extract themself from the situation (drowning, house on fire, weather exposure, lost in the woods, etc.)
And then it takes over your life because it takes days to really get down from those dizzying heights of sudden chemical revelation, only you don't realise you're still high so you still think you really made all those lofty realisations. Then you go and have some more because you 're still incapable of rational thought and who's going to stop you anyway? It can be years before something breaks you out of this vivious cycle of making yourself stupid and being too stupid to understand how stupid you have become as a consequence.
So don't do it. Life's too short. Go read a book. Go learn a craft. Go get a hobby. Learn woodcutting. Learn to bake. Learn to cook. Have more sex. Maybe get a degree or two. But don't do shit that burns your brain because you only get one brain. And it is very easy to damage irreparably.
An LSD tripped helped with my social anxiety as a second order effect of helping me become more empathetic.
Through a dozen different thought loops + the psychedelic driven introspection of my first trip, I became much more sensitive and appreciative of my fellow humans. I was able to more properly emulate what someone might be thinking/feeling, and that has continued to bear fruit for me personally and professionally. Additionally, I became more tolerant of others and their differences in all dimensions. The idea of homosexuality in the past had left me queasy and suspicious. In the days after my first LSD experience, that difference no longer gave me any negative feelings.
Any more specific than that and we would be getting into neuro-chemistry. I am not well versed and you would have to do your own research. I do recall that LSD boosts some neurotransmitter/modulator sensitivity, and dis-inhibits the Default Mode Network - allowing for a wider range of introspective experiences which may explain my above experience. I like this articles [0] comparison to defragging a hard-drive. I often phrase psychedelics as a chemical way to observe your mind being stuck in some high dimensional local optima of state/opinion. Then you can choose to pull yourself out of those optima and reform your deeply held beliefs.
Another related term of interest might be ego-death/ego-loss.
https://psychedelicstoday.com/2020/02/04/psychedelics-and-th...
Life's too short not to at least try something new and unique and harmless, no? It only costs you an afternoon.
So, the completely reverse of what you said is true, mushrooms can actually promote repairing the brain and strengthen new, more healthy connections within it.
* [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6082376/
Not everywhere though. "Is" is a very tricky word.
I think you are right that particular substances have immediate, serious, irreversible harm to your brain.
Psilocybin is not one of those substances.
My first trip was an incredible experience, I couldn't wait for my next chance to trip. Unfortunately, my second trip went south very fast; I became very anxious and I started having fears that I would unreasonably kill myself or murder my friend. What I didn't know at the time was that I suffered from "Harm OCD" and that the psychedelics were magnifying my OCD tenfold, and thus triggered a horrendous panic attack that wouldn't end until the effects of the drugs wore off.
https://centerforanxietydisorders.com/what-is-harm-ocd/
talking about the fear, natch.
I've felt it a bunch of times, but I've worked through it with meditation (without drugs)...
I think psychedelics just bring out deeper parts of the mind. I don't do them anymore, but I used to, so I have some experience. I'm not a teetotaler, I still drink alcohol and smoke weed sometimes, but I'm done with psychedelics for the time being.
Before I knew what it was, if I had an episode of "harm OCD", I would sometimes feel physically ill and excuse myself to the bathroom and repeatedly splash water on my face until the feeling went away. Sometimes I'd keep my hands behind my back on purpose (the idea being that I would harm someone with my hands).
Since learning what it is, I'm more easily able to dispel it when it arises. Simply knowing "oh, this is OCD" is powerful enough for me to get on with my life. For the record, I completely abstain from psychedelics or any recreational drugs now (with the exception of coffee, and light alcohol at social gatherings).
Gotta say, my ole man knows how to make a potent pot brownie.
LSD wasn’t uncomfortable for me, but I also knew at a deep level that it wasn’t something I needed to explore further. By contrast, there were many times that Ayahuasca had been at times uncomfortable and disturbing for me … but I also knew I needed it.
It’s also possible to go to sleep on mushrooms once you’re at the end of your trip, as the trip is really a lot shorter. I remember lying awake in my bed on LSD with the room melting around me, wondering if it would ever end, just wishing that I could go to sleep.
Edit: As far as being alone with your experience - I had a lot of friends that preferred LSD over mushrooms. It’s really a personal preference as to which one suits you best.
If you're talking about different species of psilocybin containing mushrooms like wood loving ones and what not, what are your experiences with them? I've only had cubensis mushrooms, but I assumed the primary difference between them would be potency considering they have the same active compounds.
other than that, i've had some insanely intense experiences with them, both pleasant and unpleasant. but i have not had much experience with other species.
related to the thread however, my experiences with good L were way more pleasant, manageable, and desirable. but perhaps that's a result a more responsible, less reckless dosing (i had some experience by this time, dosing in clubs and stuff) -- when i was eating mushrooms (spring time, quite a few seasons not really outside of that window) simply eating whatever i am finding on a hike through the woods while having an afternoon coffee, while not really knowing any better, sometimes meant i ingested way more than necessary, shrug. YMMV.
The visuals were very noticeable for me, but they would mostly enhance whatever it was that I was looking at. Peoples heads would morph and bend (the best way I can describe that is the music video “Drugs” by Ratatat), trees would breath and the branches would look like giant mushrooms, I’d see slight colors and geometry on flat surfaces, my phone would feel like liquid. The body high was also amazing. All of this for me was on a 7.5g dosage.
In contrast with LSD, it would completely change everything that I could see. I woke up once after going to sleep on alcohol/LSD, and it looked like I was in a cartoon, and I continued to trip for another 8 hours.
And what happened during the experience?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22991744 (See chain of replies too)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22993060
Short-term side effects were acute + severe panic attacks, triggered by flashbacks and feeling as though I was physically back in the same situation/it was starting to happen again.
Even though entirely illogical and not being in the same place it happened, in my mind I felt dead certain that the events that had happened were starting to replay themselves and even physically I was reliving the sensations.
This made me dysfunctional for a period of months, slowly over time the severity + frequency of this tapered off. It took about ~2 years for it to become what I'd call "mostly subsided".
Even now though, if I am under a lot of stress or if I don't sleep well and am slightly sleep deprived, I will start to have flashbacks + panic attacks, but I know how to handle them better now and can force logic through a bit better.
My vision is permanently altered, though it's minor. If you're not familiar with psychedelics, when you take a low dose of them, it makes everything have a sort of "oil-painting" type look to it, and textures are crisper.
The bark on a tree is a good example of something that looks much more intense.
The intensity of this has also subsided a fair amount, but even now I choose not to wear glasses most of the time because if I put on my glasses, everything is too "High definition" and visually intense. I prefer things to just be blurry, to be honest.
> and feeling as though I was physically back in the same situation/it was starting to happen again.
> Even though entirely illogical and not being in the same place it happened, in my mind I felt dead certain that the events that had happened were starting to replay themselves and even physically I was reliving the sensations.
I once took some psychedelics and forgot I had taken them (I was also drinking beer), and I had an experience quite similar to this, but at the time had completely forgotten that I was on psychedelics. I always leave myself a note nowadays.
I've used psychedelics since then(although much, much later in life). Nothing ever like it since.
The only thing I've ever taken + know of with even remotely a 24-hour duration is the "DOx" series, like "DOM", and "DOI", etc.
I felt like I had been dragged through hell and back after the time I willingly + knowingly took a single dose of DOI. No idea who thinks 24 hours awake tripping is a good time.
https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/DOx
https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/DOM
https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/DOI
NBOMe wasn't discovered until 2003, and not popularized/available until ~2010. I've done my fair share of NBOMe and it lasts only ~5-6 hours.
I also had breathing issues around the tail end of the trip(I think you mentioned something similar). I would start to nod out in my attempt to sleep, but I'd come to after a few minutes, gasping for air.
It was tie-dyed blotter that my friend bought from a Dead show in Sacramento. I've never had anything like it since then.
I also feel instantly better, smarter, happier, etc for weeks after shrooms. Don’t feel that all on LSD.
My impression is that all psychedelics have serious negative effects for the unluckiest users.
Even McKenna had a bad trip on psilocybin that nearly broke him:
"Terence’s pivotal, existential crisis came abruptly, some time in ’88 or ’89. Everything that happened after that event was fallout. I don’t know exactly when it happened, and I don’t know exactly what happened; I am piecing it together from what Kat [his wife at the time] has told me, and she has volunteered few details, and I am reluctant to probe.
It happened when they were living for a time on the big island, and it was a mushroom trip they shared that was absolutely terrifying for Terence. It was terrifying because, for some reason, the mushroom turned on him. The gentle, wise, humorous mushroom spirit that he had come to know and trust as an ally and teacher ripped back the facade to reveal an abyss of utter existential despair. Terence kept saying, so Kat told me, that it was “a lack of all meaning, a lack of all meaning.” And this induced panic in Terence, and probably, I speculate, a feeling he was going mad. He couldn’t deal with it. Kat’s efforts to reassure him were fruitless. After that experience, he never again took mushrooms, and he took other psychedelics, such as DMT and ayahuasca, only on rare occasions and with great reluctance.
Whatever the specific content of the psychedelic experience might have been that triggered the cognitive collapse of Terence’s worldview and precipitated his existential crisis, what was most remarkable was that he did not see it coming. He did not see it coming."
— From Dennis McKenna, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss: My Life with Terence McKenna, now excised
That's the bitch about a brain tumor. Your mind is really good at working around it, until it isn't, and then you can't see straight or some other symptom which appears suddenly.
I don't mean to completely diminish your point. Psychedelics can hit you in unpredictable ways, even when you have experience.
In practice I have seen several people do a lot of LSD and kind of “not come back all the way.” Don’t recall seeing the same with other psychedelics.
I would caution people against acid, and especially against using a lot of it or repeatedly. I think there’s a reason it has that nickname. It seems to be harsh and unforgiving.
There are positive reports from microdosing the stuff. I have no experience here. This wasn’t a thing when I was in college and I have not been near anything like this for a long time.
To each their own.
That said, many people have nonlinear responses to these substances. I know folks who hate lower doses of LSD because they just get an anxiety-generating body high, but love the experience above that. Generally, on a per-dose basis, LSD and mushrooms are inexpensive and so experimentation is cheap (even though it's also time consuming because of the ~8hr trip duration). Though, again, if you take lower doses (below the standard I mentioned above) most people will have no trouble doing chores if you must get something done (as long as that chore does *not* involve driving).
Edit: mushrooms are hard to dose consistently, the dose I listed might be high or low but it will probably not melt your face off or do nothing. More info here: https://erowid.org/plants/mushrooms/mushrooms_basics.shtml
I had a stroke a few months ago, resulting in some long-lasting effects in my visual field. I have read reports that mushrooms can help the brain develop new connections; and I'd like to see if they can help improve my vision. But I have no idea where to get shrooms, how much to dose, etc. Any tips?
Just plan on doing a triple batch as without proper lab equipment, the chance of contamination is higher.
I would not rely on Reddit for your cultivation advice. Try shroomery.org, an old school web 1.0 forum that's been around since 1997. People who have participated there for years and are recognized as experts are marked with a "Trusted Cultivator" badge. Yes, it is actually possible to grow shrooms on Uncle Ben's precooked microwavable rice packets, but it is not a recommended practice due to high percent of batches lost to mold/bacterial contamination before the spores can germinate. It's just too wet of a substrate and doesn't have adequate airflow for oxygen that the mycelium needs to grow. I have tried it even though I usually use more advanced techniques, and lost 4 of 8 bags to contamination, even though I used above average sterile handling methods.
The PF Tek method is considered a reliable method for beginners that minimizes the equipment you need to buy, and is recommend in the shroomery.org's "getting started" sticky thread: https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/2442017... The thread also has links to spore vendors who have been vetted as reliable.
There is a also a discussion forum on the site for those who choose to use shrooms medicinally, including microdosing, recommended micro/macro dosages and dosing practices, etc.
Sadly, I live in California. For some stupid reason, Cali doesn't allow the sales of spores. And yet shrooms are legal in places like Oakland and Santa Cruz. W. T. F.?? What is wrong with the politicians?
Thank you for the link to Shroomery; I had not heard of this site, but I will explore it in depth. I have a pressure cooker and a garage, all I need are simple to follow directions.
The Shroomery has a a spore exchange board, and plenty of people would be happy to send to CA, but you have to be registered for 30 days and make 50 posts to participate. They try to discourage drive-bys in favor of building the community.
On higher doses of LSD (> 1 tab), I tend to get a recurring fear and visual manifestation of bugs (spiders, specially). When I’m outside on a walk while tripping I tend to be hyper-conscious of bugs and the noises they’re making. Any thoughts on why and how to deal with this? It tends to have a very negative effect on my trips but it doesn’t always happen. Just stick to lower doses?
> We encourage you to take an attitude of curiosity and acceptance toward everything that happens during your session. Whatever comes up has some kind of meaning or wisdom that you can learn from, even if this meaning is not immediately obvious.
> You may have bizarre sensations and experiences, and you may experience frightening images or thoughts. These may alternate rapidly. This is normal and does not mean anything is wrong.
> We encourage you to “go with” or surrender to difficult experiences rather than fight them. Approach rather than flee; accept rather than reason away, lean into whatever comes up, including any impulse to run away.
> There are methods for grounding and calming yourself, if you would like to use them.
[1] https://psyarxiv.com/u6v9y/
Another is to put yourself is a goofy/stimulating/amusing situation that distracts the mind from the negative loops it might be manifesting.
But really, the "setting" part of "set and setting" might just mean staying away from bugsy walks and going somewhere cozy and comfortable instead.
https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Set_and_setting
Elsewhere on the website they compare 2.4g of mushrooms to about 100ug of LSD. So 1.7g of mushrooms would be equivalent of about 45ug of LSD, and the micro dose range of LSD is 5-25ug. Tripsafe is attempting to describe a light dose, which should include only minor visuals. They are likely using P. Cubensis to describe dosage, which is very common in North America, but only half the potency of the most potent psychedelic mushrooms. “Liberty cabs” or P. Semilanceata are more common in Europe, and are often more potent than P. Cubensis.
There might also be a cultural difference on the expectations for a psychedelic experiences and the activities one should do during it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Psilocybe_species
It’s worth noting that GP may have been referring to the physical distribution of active ingredients within the mushroom body. The “cap” of a mushroom almost always contains significantly more active ingredients.
Thus, 1 gram of stems may yield a significantly different dose than 1 gram of “caps”.
IIRC, the amount of psilocybin in a mushroom is sort of fixed at a certain stage of its growth, so picking them when they're larger can just diminish their strength by weight and mess up what you think is the dose. As with most drugs, I find batching them together, say by grinding them all up in the case of mushrooms, and then taking small doses to calibrate the batch strength, is the safest way to go.
I usually recommend taking your mushrooms and blending them up in, say, OJ, then pouring them into ice cube trays and freezing them. They keep quite a long time that way and it's pretty convenient.
To add to this, my partner does 5g and it's more or less a fun and intoxicating experience with no visuals at all. 5g for me is intensely visual. YMMV.