Actually I think you might be in the minority on this one, unless this is perhaps a semantic issue. While they weren’t “true” hallucinations in the sense of seeing fully-formed objects or people that weren’t there, visual distortions were very much an element of the acid trips I (and everyone else I knew) took. This included trails swooping behind moving objects (e.g., your own hand waving in front of you), rapidly shifting colors, and the squirmy pattern effect you describe, among other things. Some people are probably expecting to find themselves in a room with three-dimensional dragons or giant lollipops or whatever, which (at least in my experience) acid doesn’t really provide.
The “trail” effect (aka tracers) was something I’d see mainly during the peak, rather than during the entire trip. (For a fairly good facsimile of the effect, get in front of a webcam with a low frame rate and wave your arms around quickly.)
Hippie child of the 60s, I have hit LSD, mescaline and hash. Tried pot but it just makes me tired. I didn’t try glue because I heard if you tried it, you would stick with it.
I don’t doubt that people were calling it mescaline but mescaline, synthetic or not, requires a certain amount for an effective dose. Of course I don’t know just how small you’re talking but a dose the size of a tiny cylinder of pencil lead isn’t going to be nearly enough to do anything at all. Here’s the link I posted earlier. A dose of mescaline that’s on the small side of normal would have to be about the size of the largest pill in that picture and that’s before any pill binders are added. After the binders it would be even bigger than that or be inside a gelcap.
If you weren’t interested in getting the surprise drug du jour, you did well to turn it down.
It was the size of the microdot, just a redish purplish color. It may have actually been a slice of a colored pencil lead that someone was scamming with, it could have been homemade acid they were calling synthetic mescaline … I just didn’t want to get a drug pig in a poke
I stopped doing weed mainly because I could get the same effect from alcohol, and it was legal for me to buy and drink alcohol, and I needed to get and maintain security clearances for work purposes. Why should I needlessly worry about losing a job just to get wasted when I can get wasted on alcohol legally? Not to mention in general alcohol was cheaper than weed.
Cocaine was interesting for me. I wouldn’t say cocaine made me “feel good” in the sense of happiness or euphoria or peacefulness. I did feel an overwhelming sense of reward.
In psychology you hear talk of “reward” in the abstract, and we’re told that it ties into the dopamine system, but when I tried cocaine, I got it. I mean I. Got. It. Not happiness or joy… on the contrast I felt jittery and paranoid and a little scared, even. The bitter taste and stinging nose was no fun either. But the rush of the reward sensation… it’s sinking the 3-point shot at the buzzer, pumping your fist in the end zone after scoring a touchdown, being handed a big fat bag of cash, unhooking her bra with one hand, just winning, winning, winning, endlessly. And the thing about winning is that it can never stop, must never stop… and as long as you have coke, it never has to stop. Cocaine is money and money is cocaine.
I only tried it once, 12 years ago. It’s a miracle I didn’t get hooked on it. At that time I was ready to cash in every single asset I had to convert it to an endless supply of cocaine. Even to this day all my senses go on alert when I see people doing it in movies, when somebody plays “White Lines”, when I see any conical pile of white powder. I actually start salivating. Sometimes I have dreams about snorting a giant, infinite mountain of the purest blow. I am just awed by the power of my psychological reward circuitry. I wonder if it got this way by playing Atari for tens of thousands of hours as a tween.
That is interesting, and it puts in words what I have felt about it.
I always just remember the greed bit.
I have always said that if you want to understand true greed, then try it… but you should do it at night in a small town, as you REALLY shouldn’t have access to cash in large amounts.
But yours does in fact explain Charlie Sheen, as well as a few other things.
I definitely had visual hallucinations when I took lsd- crabs and underwater sea creatures mixed with monsters you would see on Monster’s Inc. Bears lol (my friends got a kick out of this because my mother’s house is FULL of them). The best part though, and the reason I recommend acid, is the stars and galaxies I saw looking at the sky. Definitely accompanied by the feeling of who you are in the vast world. I too, didn’t feel tired at all the next few days.
I forgot about taking salvia four times. The most unusual, and the one that stopped those outings, was when I took some blue and went schizo. A larger me was chasing the real me, a smaller me. And everything was covered in old Jaguar graphics that were moving constantly. When I came down, I had destroyed everything in my friend’s room. Felt pretty shitty about that. Too creepy for me. But did have an interesting winter wonderland experience and I was on a pirate ship once. Don’t know what’s up with me and hallucinating ocean things, but I turned into a fish the first time I took it.
I’ve never been a big fan of pot, but have plenty of friends who are regular smokers (and have been for decades). I’ve not noticed any of them being unusually paranoid, so I’m wondering why you say that. Everyone eventually? Really?
