The classic statement about LSD trips is that they are governed by “set” and “setting”. “Set” as in mindset – your own internal attitude or emotional state. “Setting” as your physical surroundings and the people you are with. If either set or setting are overly negative, you are more likely to have a “bad trip.” Of course, this is kind of a truism and could be said about any experience – LSD influenced or not.
I never experienced visual hallucinations of some of the sort described here. I don’t recall ever seeing anything that just was not really there. Distortions, warping, trails – sure. But visualizing totally non-existant stuff, never happened to me. Based on my reading, hallucinations of this sort are rare to non-existant on LSD, so these could have been caused by other substances.
I had a couple of bad trips, mainly as a result of my set. Looking back, I was probably in the midst of a session of clinical depression. The LSD served to intensify these emotions and run my thoughts at a much quicker level. It was very very intense, very very emotionally painful and very very useful.
I would say that LSD is much like a firearm. You can have fun with both of them, but neither is a toy.
I tend to believe that our brain is immensely more powerful than we can imagine, so much so that it has to have a governor on it - something to hold down the rpms lest we overload and blow a fuse (to mix a metaphor). LSD shuts off the governor. Accordingly, everything is AMPLIFIED and UNFILTERED. Knowing (believing?) that, I’ve never taken “the Power A” (as we called it in my little circle of friends) when I’ve been in an anxious, depressed, or scared frame of mind. I know enough about how I react to head that particularly nastiness off at the pass. On more than one ocassion I’ve had to assist someone who was not having a good, rewarding, satisfying time - the best way is to talk them through it. Like Wavy Gravy says about his tenure in the Freak Out Ward at Woodstock, "Some guy comes in with his toes in his nose and you just tell him, “Hey, you’re going to be OK. You’ve taken a heavy drug, and you’re not having a very good time right now, but you know what? It is going to wear off. You’re fine. What’s your name? Bob? Hey, Bob. Tell me your name again. Say, “My name is Bob.” See, you’re fine. You’re grounded. Now, I’m going to be right here with you, even though you may not really recognize me or notice me. But I’m here. And you’re going to be OK.”
As was pointed out above, sometimes the sensations weren’t pleasant, but they were always powerful and I tried to keep focused on the whole experience and see what connections I could make between what happened. I can also recall saying, “OK, I’m ready for this to be over now. I’m beat.”
My wife, who is a psychotherapist, has an text book from the 1960s on the therapeutic use of LSD. An interesting read.
Sure. I’ll scare it up (if she hasn’t gotten rid of it - I didn’t see it when we last moved). LSD was made illegal in 1967 (1966?), so I know it was written before that - it has a whole protocol on what type of setting to use, what to expect, etc. Cary Grant went through LSD therapy, BTW.
She has two volumes, both of which I suspect are out of print (she told me she got them at a library sale at Eastern Virginia Medical School, where she studied for her graduate degrees):
LSD In Psychotherapy (which is the proceedings of a symposium), printed in 1960.
and
LSD Pscyhotherapy: An Exploration of Psychedelic and Psychelitic Therapies, by W. V. Caldwell (1968).
The orange juice thing is a myth. There is nothing in orange juice that will intensify or prolong the trip, unless someone put more LSD in it.
And a three day bad trip is a lie as well. One dose, whether large or small, lasts roughly the same time. The significant effects generally last 8-12 hours, and possibly some mild aftereffects persist for 24 hours, but that’s it. Either she was lying, or you are.
Well, this is debatable if you ask me. The after effects of a bad trip could last you a life time if it fucks your head enough but the effects of the LSD may have worn off long ago. I felt wrecked and paranoid for nearly a week after I wound up in hospital and had visual disturbances for about three days but the ‘peak’ lasted about 12 hours. I think after a extremley powerful drug experience you could still describe the trip as ‘bad’ until you feel alright even if the LSD has worn off.
Thanks, plnnr. Finding these books may be a challenge but they sound quite interesting.
As for the OJ thing, I’ve heard that before too. I was told that vitamin C helps your trip. Since I’ve only dropped once, I don’t have a control to either confirm or deny it. Still, sounded like BS to me then just as it does now.
Never had wild hallucinations like Willass either. I just thought I was a little alien inside the head of a giant robot and I could control it via levers (ie. Men In Black). I couldn’t hear myself talk, but could hear other people talk. I kept asking people if I was talking because I seriously didn’t know. I peaked for about 4 hours and tripped probably for about 14 hours straight. It did feel like I had spider webs on face all night. I dropped acid about 20 times before this, but never once again since. You never know whats in the drops/sugarcubes/paperhits.
Does it mention the effects of megadosages? I have taken quite a lot of hallucinogenic drugs and would agree that LSD rarely produces these effects but I have seen enough people suffer complete mental meltdown to the point where they are no longer perceiving the real world to know that, although rare, it is not unheard of. I am also experienced enough to tell the difference between LSD and other drugs to make the judgement that it was simply a huge dose of LSD and not some other substance.
Well, to be fair what I labeled as “critters” ( and often have described as “lizards” ) weren’t visually perceived as specific, describable entities - they were more mentally interpreted that way by me. In truth I never had a handle on anything other than fast-moving little squiggles on the edges of my vision ( one of the reasons they were so frustrating ). I don’t know if that technically qualifies as a full-blown hallucination or not, but they sure seem to fit the lay definition, anyway.
And I stand by my experience :).
Now, a more full-blown visual hallucination I remember was not drug-induced at all. When I was running an extremely high fever as a child, courtesy of Scarlet Fever. Then I hallucinated giant, head-sized animated wasps in my room, stinging me ( I was in real pain at the time, so it corresponded well enough ).
Actually, thinking about it, it was a stucco wall and stucco critters/squiggles. I remember distinctly thinking afterwards they were little stucco lizards, like geckos. But I never did see one full on.
js_africanus, I’ve never had a hallucination in the sense of seeing an object that wasn’t there, but plenty in the sense of interpreting existing shapes into something awesome or terrifying. “Flesh and blood” characters from shadows, for example. This is not to say that I wouldn’t describe one experience as “seeing a dragon in the sky.” There was a cloud shaped like a dragon one time, and it kept that shape for what felt like a remarkably long time. We began to pretend it was a dragon, at which point our extreme suggestibility took over and we actually panicked. So, in a sense most LSD users would recognize, I saw a dragon in the sky and got scared. This is a different impression than someone who had never taken LSD might get. It is hard to describe the experience of hallucinating very well. What is a non-user supposed to understand it in terms of, if their senses have always been relatively normal?
As a startling example, a friend and I used to take “snapshots.” We’d go somewhere completely dark so nothing could be seen with a flash camera and take a picture (no film, just the flash). The brightness would be enormous, it would fade to black again, and then an image of the room would appear and stay there for quite some time. A perfectly still room. Particularly disconcerting would be a snapshot of your arm out, which you would hold until the picture appeared, and then you would move your arm but see nothing but the still frame. Or we’d take a picture of a closed closet, open the door while the sight was black, and when the picture appeared we’d reach out to touch the towels inside.
As your own quote suggests, afterimages carry over (most commonly seen as trails), things warp, and the mind is extremely suggestible. Add all three up and you could probably understand most “tall tales.” No one who has done LSD has doubted most LSD stories (excepting that one dude that is permanently insane and thinks he’s an orange; he doubts everything :p), but that is because they understand what they’re picturing. An entire trip, not a lone, raw visual hallucination.
So did John Lennon. He was dead long before I was born, but I did a biography on him this year, so now I know like everything to know about John Lennon. From a readers point of view. Sadley it will never come in handy
Take the worst you have ever felt and multiply it by a hundred.
Imagine having your humanity sucked out of you by an existential void and replaced with a plastic headache.
Throw in a couple dashes of schizophrenia and a splash of dementia.
Your flesh has become reptilian.
Agonized faces silently scream at you from every surface.
Nature is too alien and man-made stuff is too artificial.
People are pathetic animals living in boxes.
For a time you watch it like a movie.
Wishing it would end, it won’t. You try to sleep and can’t.
You cry as the meaninglessness of your life and life itself becomes more and more apparent.
Whatever you do, don’t look in the mirror.
All this fun for just $2 a hit.
I have seen the dragons. I could have counted the scales or teeth were it not for the incredibly evil slit eyes and the flaming maw as he swallowed me whole. Then the walls of the throat re-form as another dragon’s maw and it happens over and over again. And that’s just one tiny little example.
I’ve seen richly detailed imagery from foreign cultures (especally Aztec for some reason. Very common) and seen the faces of long-dead gurus. But the kicker came when I was tripping to ELP and “Jerusalem” came on. I startes seeing animated stained-glass windows, then the gleaming ancient city descended onto a plain (sorta like Close Encounters). I entered the city and quickly found myself before Christ on the Cross. For a moment I felt as though I should be up there, but then Jesus looked up, so I looked up and saw a bright, white tunnel of light. Cynical, science-orined sckeptic though I may be, I felt as if I’d been “born again”.
Add to that what AlHunter3 said in his first post.
Hmm, allow me to field this one, I’m something of an expert.
A bad trip, to me, usually involves psychadelics of some kinds like LSD, mushrooms, peyote, or ketamine. My personal favorite was LSD and ketamine together, the experience goes well beyond my ability to describe without robbing it of its luster. Out of an estimated 30 “trips” to la-la land I’ve had two bad ones.
A bad trip for me was mostly about paranoia. Forget the ideas of being paranoid you may have if you’ve never done LSD, its a unique and very powerful experience. For me, LSD could have the effect of allowing me to form images and complex patterns of thought (a thought tree) in the most incredible detail. I could start thinking of a situation like (at the time) my crappy car. Instantly I could see all the horrible things that were wrong with it, how it might affect me later, basically my imagination working triple overtime working out all the possible bad senarios. This same attitude can quickly spread to other areas of your life, suddenly it all looks bad. What am I doing here? Why am I doing this to myself? What was that sound? Is that flashing light the cops? How will I explain myself…it goes on and on, sometimes spiraling out of control and for some people ending badly. The key is your enviornment. Keep it upbeat, quiet, and happy. Its pretty easy to fall into a paranoia rut while you are tripping and if others around you are tripping as well they need to watch out for each other. It dosen’t take much to set off a domino effect to a room full of already over-paranoid people.
Do not ignore this advice. Whatever you do, don’t look in the mirror. If you catch a glimpse of yourself in a mirror, move on. Do not, under any circumstances, stare at yourself in the mirror for a prolonged period of time.
And this is very important if you don’t want to find out the answer to the question posed in the OP: If, while under the influence of a large dose of LSD-25, you have the uncontrollable urge to deficate and find a bathroom which, while conveniently close, happens to have a full-length mirror on the shower door positioned in such a way so that the occupant of the toilet gets a full, unobstructed view of themselves while sitting on said toilet, do not use that toilet. And if, for some reason beyond your control, you do use said toilet, do not, I repeat, DO NOT stare at your horribly disfigured and unexpectedly hairy and apelike body as it twists and contorts in unexpected, non-Euclidian ways in the throes of waste elimination.
