What do people see when they're tripping? Analyzing Erowid's trip reports
70 comments
·February 25, 2025NickC25
BobbyTables2
I think watching golf on TV would make time seem pretty meaningless for a lot of people too!
westmeal
Sometimes it just hits in such a way that you have no idea wtf is happening. One time I couldn't read because letters just didn't have meaning any more. It looked like alien unicode characters or some shit.
guardian5x
Isn't that kinda scary? I mean when some parts of your brains don't work or not work properly?
fullstick
It's only scary if you try to hard to hold on. Relax and float down stream... In the moment, it does not feel like your brain is not working properly. I tend to feel more clearheaded (even when confused) than I am on alcohol.
Traubenfuchs
Depends on your attitude.
I consider life and reality incredibly, painfully boring.
That's why I LOVE alternate states of mind, even if they are scary.
Nothing excites me more than the prospect of feeling thing and seeing things I have not experienced before.
Traubenfuchs
> It looked like alien unicode characters or some shit.
That's how my iPhone keyboard looked when I took a moderate amount of shrooms. It was weird, I could still think and talk coherently, but the keyboard was an incrophensible, vibrating, round, green-energy-sparks-decorated mess.
raducu
> deep feelings of profound thoughts.
I remember dreaming about profound answers and equations about everything and being extatic in my dreams in uni.
Then I woke up and wrote down what I dreamt and realize it was just garbage :).
The same this one time I was traveling with friends and bought some very dubious hashish and smoked it and I got incredible visuals where I could see, open-eye a matrix of videos starting from a common theme and all evolving differently. I could see visual kernels of ideas and how they all worked together.
But at that time I was very interested in variational autoencoders, so after the effects wore off, I realized the experience was just like the deep realization of the dreams -- utterly meningless and just a hallucination that felt profound in the moment.
devmor
I had similar experiences the first time I tried a recreational drug - it was with my father and we watched Nova on PBS. We spent hours convinced we had novel theories on spacetime and wrote them down, believing we had stumbled upon revolutionary scientific insight.
When we reviewed them in the morning they were absolute nonsense!
nthingtohide
Artists put themselves through various experiences (sometimes extreme) to portray the ineffable through abstract art. Works at both personal and societal level
ctrlp
That sounds pretty amazing. What a metaphor that is. Hope you fully recovered but kept some valuable mental souvenirs from your trip. I do think people underestimate the dangers of LSD. It's amazing but I've known people who permanently injured their cognitive capacities using it.
null
tac19
Used to take quite high doses of LSD, and often had incredible visual hallucinations. Things like watching a large plant sprout flower buds all over it, which slowly expanded to full bloom and then retreated back to small buds; the whole experience went on like that for 20 minutes. Another time I hallucinated that a neighbor's house was on fire, until my friend said she was hallucinating the same thing. Fortunately, the fire brigade showed up quickly to quench the very real flames, without us having to ring them.
LoganDark
> Fortunately, the fire brigade showed up quickly to quench the very real flames, without us having to ring them.
imagine calling them like "my friend and i are both on lsd and we are both seeing that house on fire so could you check it out please in case it's real"
a trick i use sometimes is to check my phone camera to see if it also sees the same thing
dylan604
until you hit the generative AI camera mode because, well, you're tripping, and it hears your description of the fire and adds flames to your image. In the words of Neo, "whoa!"
PartiallyTyped
There's something about digital pictures that escapes the visuals.
Workaccount2
Interestingly, there is a drug call datura, a beautiful white flower you can find all over suburbia, whose seeds when drank in a tea are an extremely powerful deliriant.
If you read the trip reports of it (which are pretty fascinating tbh) you notice a common trend of people hallucinating that they are smoking a cigarette, and then they drop it, only to search around and be unable to find it. This is usually one of the first tip-offs they have that something is happening before they totally get lost in the void. Really fascinating how many people on there had this same common experience while taking datura specifically.
buildsjets
Absolutely no one should even be entertaining the thought of experimenting with datura without first performing in-depth research, and having come to an understanding and acceptance that the result may likely be a multi-week violent psychotic/deleric episode culminating in involuntary hospitalization or incarceration. I have NEVER heard of anyone having an enjoyable experience with this substance, and I've been around for a while.
Workaccount2
I meant to add that at the end. Like you said, basically no one ever has a good time on this drug. The trip reports seem to be almost entirely kids looking for a free high, and virtually no one who knows what they are doing purposely taking it.
LoganDark
i think it's probably bad that this made me more curious
i think someone in my head wants to try it even if it's universally unpleasant
edit: jk i read literally anything about what the experience is actually like and i don't know if i feel like boiling the body with dehydration that bad, and apparently the other way you know it's working is that your mouth and throat get so dry that it becomes impossible to swallow food without choking
wave-function
When the Soviet Union fell, lots of military first-aid kits escaped in the wild. Some of them (small plastic ones colored in bright orange IIRC) contained this thing:
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Апрофен
(sorry, you'll have to rely on Google Translate, there's very little info on it in English)
It's a powerful anticholinergic agent used to treat poisoning by organophosphorus compounds (like Sarin).
Like many other anticholinergics (including Datura), if taken without first actually experiencing the poisoning, it results in a deep delirium with complete loss of control over one's actions. There are lots of interesting/disturbing stories out there on the internet, most of them written in late 1990s to early 2000s before all the stockpiles had been found and used up.
neom
Salvia turns people into zippers and books, sometimes door knobs.
NoThisIsMe
It's a deliriant, not a disassociative. Worth mentioning the trip is said to be deeply unpleasant, and also the plant is poisonous.
But yeah I too find it interesting how a drug can seemingly yield the same specific hallucination in different people. See also spiders and DPH (another deliriant).
wave-function
Spiders are also a recurring theme among amantadine users:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amantadine
It was very easy to buy in Russia and neighboring countries up until 2012 or so. I've never used it (chickened out of trying out something like that), but there are tons of stories from more adventurous people.
Workaccount2
Ah yes, thanks, my mistake
gosub100
A friend-of-a-friend took it and did the same thing. He was pinching his fingers in the blades of grass and putting them to his lips in a smoking motion. Then he ran straight into a wooden fence and took down the entire panel. Nothing about datura is good, nobody has ever had a good trip with it. Stay away.
Molitor5901
I used shrooms for a while to recover from depression, but I never once saw anything. While walking along a trail I felt my vision had grown sharper, but never colors, never patterns or movement. That baffles me because at the time, I thought maybe I had consumed the wrong shrooms. The self-reflection, realization, and separation of thought from emotion was the most profound moment in my life. Yet no hallucination.
LoganDark
for me psychedelics tend to cause things to "pop out" at me more but they don't cause things to appear on top of reality
gwbas1c
Just remember: There are a lot of chemicals that produce LSD-like effects. The farther away you are from the chemist, the less likely you know the actual drug that you're getting. This is especially the case at concerts / festivals, where the "game of telephone" might mean that you don't really know what you're taking.
After reading many trip reports on Erowid for LSD, I suspect that the authors often unknowingly took something else. A classic case is STP/DOM, which often comes in paper / tabs and is visually indistinguishable from LSD. If you ever hear the familiar, "I took some crazy acid. At first it didn't work, so I took another, and then I finally came up after an hour and had an intense trip," it was probably STP/DOM instead of LSD.
FuriouslyAdrift
At Bonnaroo, one of our party got STP instead of acid and we had to babysit all frickin weekend. Of course, I had already taken my mescaline so it was not fun at all.
LoganDark
even LSD doesn't usually work immediately. it usually takes something like 30 minutes to an hour to start having effects.
i think one of my records is something like 12 hours after dosage to start feeling the effects. which i think happened because i also ate a bunch of food before taking
i use LSD recreationally every 1-2 weeks or so
Traubenfuchs
Same thing for ecstasy: Can be anything from filler scam, to an MDMA dosage that will probably send you to hospital, to drugs that work very similar to MDMA and can also be called ecstasy to weird ass hard drugs that are something completely different.
In Vienna we have an organization that checks pills or powder from the batch you bought and tells you what exactly it is.
ge96
For DMT it's immediate. Even closing your eyes you see colors (flashes of light). I was sitting at a wooden table and the grain patterns were moving especially the circular placemat in front of me with concentric rings. And I remember being scared of my own arm like wtf is that. It was brief though minute or two it was over.
I have not done LSD or mushrooms as I have a bad childhood/repressed memories and I worry of having a bad trip.
btwitch
> I have not done LSD or mushrooms as I have a bad childhood/repressed memories and I worry of having a bad trip.
That's a reasonable stance. I've found "bad" trips on both to be incredibly healing, nevertheless. I'm sure the outcome depends largely on your state of mind at the onset. Combining with MDMA could take the edge off bad memories that come up and grant space for processing them directly.
ge96
What do you think about doing it with a sober friend to control you? I guess you could be alone in a room and they monitor you if you need help.
Also micro-dose. It's funny the movie Jobs 2013 it shows him doing acid and he's in the field, I'm like "Oh if I do acid I can be like Steve Jobs" not serious but was wondering maybe... unlocks your brain somehow.
jampekka
A sober, or an experienced trustworthy, tripsitter is almost a must. A small amount of MDMA (especially if you're not familiar with it) before taking a psychedelic can be helpful as mentioned. Having some sedatives just handy just in case may itself lessen the probability of unpleasant effects.
Micro-dosing is mostly placebo. But a good idea is to start with small doses (check e.g. the "threshold limits" at Psychonaut Wiki), and maybe faster shorter acting substances like 2C-B or mushrooms rather than longer acting like LSD.
Also good to acknowledge that psychedelics just aren't very enjoyable experiences for many, and even for most they are rarely unambiguously good.
jampekka
DMT hallucinations are very different, and a lot more vivid, than those from LSD or mushrooms. With the latter, at least with eyes open and in reasonable doses, the effect is not so much as seeing "new things", but seeing the same thing somehow differently. There may be some slight morphing-type movement, but it's still obvious that you see the "same things". I don't think the visual effects are really significant part of LSD/Mushroom trips. They are just easiest to verbalize (unlike e.g. some weird brainfucks like forgetting what a door does), so they are talked about more.
With DMT it can be as if someone suddenly put VR glasses on you.
ge96
I'm just afraid of being trapped in a bad trip for hours ha may seem like eternity, maybe it's not so bad/try micro dose.
Edit: tangent: it's interesting, I jumped out of a plane before (tandem) and when I landed I didn't change as a person.
machine_ghost
"We also looked at different types of psychedelics and didn’t see any systematic differences there."
This was the most fascinating finding to me. I really wouldn't have expected Salvia, Acid, Shrooms, etc. to all produce the same hallucinations ... but I guess ultimately they're all operating on the same core neurochemicals, so I guess it makes sense.
LoganDark
the recent research on psilocybin therapy is very interesting and so long overdue, i am so glad it's finally happening
FuriouslyAdrift
Once I took way way too much and disappeared into a swirling mass of organs and gibbering creatures a la Geiger. It should have been terrifying but it just... wasn't. I really enjoyed it.
Meanwhile, back in the fully conscious world, my roommates had conversations with me that I do not remember at all. I took a very long break from any experimenting after that.
throwaway49F301
I get how tripping every few years might be a good way to get the cobwebs out and shake things up a bit. However, after 2 times, it just seemed like too much of a hassle. After a couple of hours of kaleidoscope, the novelty and fun starts waning, and it starts to feel like a chore. And then the exhaustion the next day.
superb-owl
I had great plans to feed Erowid's database through Claude to get a better classification of drug phenomenology. Sadly they have explicitly disallowed the feeding of Erowid reports into LLMs: https://erowid.org/experiences/email_warning.php
I appreciate the stand they're taking, but the potential for greater understanding and harm reduction seems to outweigh any potential downsides of putting public webpages into an LLM.
poincaredisk
Commendable stance from you. It's sad that big tech won't care and will index their content anyway. I wish terms of use like this were enforcable.
ziddoap
Might be worth reaching out to them, assuming you meet their criteria of "researcher".
>The Erowids state on their website that researchers cannot “mine” data from their site but that they’re open to discussing projects with researchers, provided they’re properly credited and cited.
null
Have no idea what variant of LSD I last consumed, but I remember some deep feelings of profound thoughts and self-reflection quite almost instantly when the stuff "hit" (maybe 30-45 minutes after ingestion), I was still cognizant enough to be able to write it all down. Some of what I wrote was indeed stuff I needed to work on in my own life and it was pretty helpful.
I then spent the next like 12 hours on my couch realizing that the entire concept of time is a manmade construct that is absolutely meaningless and irrelevant in the grand scheme of the universe. All this while watching golf on TV (which followed a golfer who posted the lowest final round score ever at a major). I have no idea how the TV turned on, and why I didn't turn it off.
LSD is fucking wild.