Hi all. Am I a hippy? Good question, I cut my hair in the physical sense many years ago, but it's never really been cut in the metaphorical sense. I'm posting here for a reason and hope some people will reply. I have a very simple question to ask everyone: I anyone here still tripping, many years after taking an hallucinogen? I'm interested because you are a community whole have obvioulsy, like me, been involved with, or are still involved with, hallucinogenic drugs. The Stonehenge festival of 1984 did it for me. Some really nice pink speed, followed by enormous quantities of hash and alcohol, were in retrospect not the best precursor to the acid I took. I don't remember much about the trip, but I do remember ending up in hospital the next day, I'd been pumped full of something to knock me out. I continued to take drugs until I realised that I was actually still tripping 24 hour a day, every day. Smoking weed made it 1000 times worse so I simply had to stop using drugs. Bugger! 21 years later I still have continuous, albeit relatively mild, hallucinations (tracers and afterimages plus an electric blue dot that appears now and again). I also suffer badly from feelings of unreality on a daily basis. Technically I have what's called HPPD (hallucinogen percistent perception disorder) and DR (de-realisation). If you still feel the effects of hallucinogens years after you stopped taking them, or if you have been taking hallucinogens for many years and don't believe that there has been any long term damage done by them, I would be very interested to hear from you. Peace.
Well I have only used these substances for three years, but nothing like that has happened to me, but that isn't to say it won't happen to others.
Done my fair share. Did large doses of the pure liquid for awhile in the late 70's. Stopped completely in 1985. I think tripping changed my way of thinking permanently, but I don't get any visual effects that I think aren't normal. This is interesting. All of the sudden you came to the conclusion that you were tripping all the time?! So you are (were) in a permanent state of heightened awareness?
I came to the conclusion that I'd never completely come down from an immensely bad trip, and I still haven't to this day even though I quit drugs 20 years ago. It freaked me out completely at first and I sank to the bottom of a bottle and almost never resurfaced, but eventually it got less severe and I learned to live with it.
Wow is all I can say. I've only had one bad trip. It affected me for a long time, probably years, but it's in the past now. I was stricken with depression, paranoia, and feelings of melancholy and impending doom. I would have unpleasurable flashbacks. But I think it was my personal demons, and not the acid that was the root cause. The acid was a catalyst.
Yeah, I can relate to that. I've often felt that the acid was a catalyst that caused some unwanted doors to open, deep down in my subconsience, and I've never been able to completely close them again.
From what you have said, I assume you've talked to doctors and done some research on the subject. What explanations does modern science give?
Yeah, I 've seen doctors and had all sorts of tests and scans. The outcome was that it's all in my head so I was referred to a psychologist who did nothing to help me. That was a long time ago now, there's been more recent research into it since then and it's now a recognised disorder (see http://www.hppdonline.com), but at the moment the only treatment seems to be benzos which I'm not that keen on. I have a general tendency to get hooked on things so I don't want to complicate things by developing a benzo addiction.
Read most of that website. I feel very lucky indeed. Have you ever read any Carlos Castaneda? Don Juan talks about how drugs (peyote, jimson weed, mushrooms) cause a shift of the assemblage point.
Yes, I read his books many years ago. I always fancied trying peyote but it was almost impossible to get hold of over here. I have read some shamanic explanations of HPPD which explain that the persons aura has been damaged allowing entities from other dimensions to enter and fuck about with you. I'm always very open minded about things like this, but this partiular explanation sounded a bit scary to me. I have only vague recollections of the bad trip, but I do recall believing at one point that I'd been transported to a higher dimension and no longer existed within a physical body.
I wasn't thinking damage, but that your assemblage point, which determines your reality, had moved permanently. I know this stuff sounds crazy, but reason and logic can't explain everything.
I have the blue and white dots aswell, for me its for abuse of magic mushrooms this summer. I took them 6 times in 2 months; guess I regret it. When i'm tired everything goes moving. Well I'm not doing anything about it, since its managable now, to anyone else who has this: goodluck with it, it scared the shit out of me at first.
It doesn't sound crazy to me, as I said earlier I always keep an open mind about these things. I read a book recently about quantum science and the theory that the universe we live in has many dimensions, not just the 3 that we can determine with our own physical senses. It gave very good explanations of why we are simply unable to comprehend 4 (or even 10) dimensional objects due to the limitations of our physical senses. It gave an example of imaginary 2 dimension beings called flatlanders who live in a 2 dimensional universe. If a 3 dimensional object like a cube landed on this 2 dimensional flatland all the flatlanders would see would be a 2 dimensional square. They would have to raise up beyond their own dimension in order to comprehend the cube as a 3D object like we can. It made me think about the possibility of us expanding our own awareness in order to comprehend more than our physical senses allow us to. I've never been fully convinced that hallucinogens can actually do this, I think they may just screw with our own physical senses to such an extent that we believe we have attained a higher level of conciousness, although I do still believe it may be a possibility. However, I do most definitely believe we can expand our conciousness through other means such as meditation and lucid dreaming.
DSL - I have never heard of this, but I did read the web site you posted with interest. What a bummer that you have this problem! Do you think it may have been some really bad acid? Looking at this from a medical point of view, do you think there could have been some chemicals in the acid to cause a malfunction in a part of your brain?
It's a possbility, although there were 2 other people with me at the time I had the bad trip who both dropped the same type of acid and they had no ill effects from it. I suppose mine could have been from a different batch. One theory in the medical world is that some people are genetically more likely to develop the disorder which would explain why only a handful of hallucinogen users get it. Apparently there's a type of brain scan (I think it's called a QEEG) which can actually detect abnormal activity in the brains of people with HPPD.
