IANAD. I might be misreading some of this, because it doesn't match the tone of the rest of your post, but I worry you might be putting too much emphasis on an all-or-nothing response. Treatments...
IANAD.
I think I fear losing the spiderweb-thin strand of hope this experiment has spun for me. If the next experience doesn't improve on the first, I will worry the hope will break, leaving me at a dead end.
I might be misreading some of this, because it doesn't match the tone of the rest of your post, but I worry you might be putting too much emphasis on an all-or-nothing response.
Treatments and therapies for depression and a handful of other psychologically-sourced issues aren't ready-made solutions. I see them more as… a box of weapons to help you fight a war. They don't fight the war for you, but they can help (and depending what's in the box, they can be incredibly powerful and turn the tides, or they can just give you a little push. Also sometimes the box is empty.)
When I went through my own years of depression, there wasn't one thing that helped. There were lots of small things. It wasn't always easy to tell what was truly helping versus what was providing "relief", but at the end of the day, finding the positive sides of everything I was doing to fight (rather than focusing on whether it was directly helping me achieve an abstract goal of "getting me out of the mud") made everything a lot more bearable.
That is to say, I would focus on whether this experience was positive as a whole, and remove it from the context of your underlying reasons for trying it.
Or for an parallel that'll be all too familiar to some, if you focus on what makes "going to the gym" a fun activity for you, rather than whether it's really helping you lose weight, then you'll just go rather than put it off. Or maybe you will decide that it's not fun, and then change strategy.
Also every time you take shrooms you'll have a slightly, or wildly, different experience. If one day with one dose does nothing that doesn't mean shrooms will never do anything good for you. That...
Also every time you take shrooms you'll have a slightly, or wildly, different experience. If one day with one dose does nothing that doesn't mean shrooms will never do anything good for you. That doesn't mean you should just endlessly try to trip on shrooms until something happens, but it also means you should not write them off based on limited experience. The mindset you go into a trip with sets your direction. I've also never experienced any large epiphanies on doses below 2 grams. Low doses are still fun and productive, but probably won't have the power necessary to do heavy lifting.
OP - are you measuring your shrooms' weight dry or wet? The standard doses assume dry shrooms.
I haven't experienced that myself, but I have had a pretty strong post-trip after glow in the immediate hours afterwards. It feels like I'd been standing up my whole life and just sat down for the...
Neither of us had the next-day "after glow" that is often talked about
I haven't experienced that myself, but I have had a pretty strong post-trip after glow in the immediate hours afterwards. It feels like I'd been standing up my whole life and just sat down for the first time.
I’ve never had any success screening things with psychedelics. This includes tv, cinema, video games, and even “trippy” visualizations. Live shows can be good though. I tend to use music and...
I’ve never had any success screening things with psychedelics. This includes tv, cinema, video games, and even “trippy” visualizations.
Live shows can be good though.
I tend to use music and mandalas/art if I feel attracted to stimulus. Bit usually experiencing the interplay of within and without is where I am.
Fwiw, I very rarely take a large dose (> 2 g) these days. I have good results with mood effects if i take about .8 every week or so. That dose for me is juuusst above the perceptual
Threshold.
I wouldn't give up hope on it just yet. There are several compounds out there that tap into this part of our brains and we don't know a lot about it all yet thanks to research on this topic being...
I wouldn't give up hope on it just yet. There are several compounds out there that tap into this part of our brains and we don't know a lot about it all yet thanks to research on this topic being banned by most governments or rejected for funding until relatively recently. One session, or even one drug, is not the whole picture by a long shot.
I'm still learning how to use this stuff myself. I related my experiences here a while back. I have an update for that, though. That second time I didn't take 4 grams. I had 1/4 ounce, or ~7.3 grams. The friend I got the mushies from thought I wanted 1/4 oz when I asked for 4 grams... damn metric/imperial mistakes are messing with my high. I didn't find out until I mentioned it in conversation weeks later. :P
I got the mushies version of the hero's journey without the pressure of knowing I was about to take it - and I still barely hallucinated. My ego/id were unfazed, I just regressed to being mentally twelve years old for six hours - which is a wonderful way to spend an afternoon once in a while. I need to try LSD sometime and see if it hits the same brick wall my aphantasia throws up for mushies. I am really curious about this. Apparently DMT/Ayahuasca can break through it for some people, perhaps even reverse/cure it. Haven't tried those yet either, and I get the feeling that those are best saved for last, after I'm more practiced and comfortable with this stuff.
I'm still interested in microdosing. For me at least, mushies beat back depression. It didn't stay gone, but it was in retreat for a couple weeks both times. If I can take small doses on the daily or slightly larger ones on the weekly to get that effect, I'd do it. Beats the pants off of prozac or depakote for me.
Perhaps this should start a new topic, but I hesitate at the thought of spreading mushrooms all over Tildes. On the verge of embarking on a trial I read some disturbing content that is frightening...
Perhaps this should start a new topic, but I hesitate at the thought of spreading mushrooms all over Tildes.
On the verge of embarking on a trial I read some disturbing content that is frightening me away from psychedelics. The fear is of "Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder," which apparently can permanently alter a user's vision, leaving an aftertaste of visual snow, outlines, patterns, what-have-you, overlaid on the world. Like a visual tinnitus, it sometimes never improves. I looked at medical papers and an online forum to try to get a feel for its prevalence. One of the possible answers for a mushroom forum poll asking how many people have this was, "No, but I wish I did!" This is in no way a representative sample, but many respondents reported dealing with this side effect (most embracing it positively).
I just... I need to feel relatively secure going in that a low dose won't do this to me, for goodness sake.
I am suspicious that what a lot of people consider HPPD is just paranoia and just noticing things they were already perceiving but not necessarily noticing. I myself have mild visual snow (more...
I am suspicious that what a lot of people consider HPPD is just paranoia and just noticing things they were already perceiving but not necessarily noticing.
I myself have mild visual snow (more prevalent in the dark) and floor patterns and carpets and whatnot seem to "breathe" when I stare at them despite me never having taken psychedelics. I do smoke weed on occasion but I noticed these things before I had ever smoked my first joint.
There are almost certainly people with real HPPD but a lot of it just sounds like plain old freaking out over nothing imo.
I'd never heard of this until it was mentioned in this thread. I looked it up and wikipedia has a nice visual for it. I thought that was normal vision until about five minutes ago. I've had that...
I thought that was normal vision until about five minutes ago. I've had that sort of static as long as I can remember, just like aphantasia and tinnitus. All of that was present in grade school. The image in the article is pretty close, but mine's more transparent (about a quarter as loud as that image) and mine are every color, like pixels morphing through the rainbow, not so much violet and red and blue. The dominant colors for me are white/yellow/blue, red is way down the list.
Mine is also nowhere near that hyperactive - if it was I'd go mental. :P It's much lazier, like drifting snow, and it tends to bracket objects slightly, even the letters on the screen as I type this post, kinda like a halo that likes to hang out between the lines. Just like the tinnitus, I don't really notice it unless I'm thinking about it, or in the dark where it's the only thing I can see. It's not hard to ignore something when you have no alternative to compare it to. I've never seen 'nothing' and I've never heard 'silence' either.
I get more annoyed at floaters due to my age than I ever did from that visual static. I didn't notice any change in it at all while I was on the mushies, or afterwards - though I did get the 'breathing' effect while I was high (and it went away after). This is pretty wild. Seems like my visual/auditory cortex is more than a little non-standard.
Edit: Looks like migraine and tinnitus are common comorbidities with this condition, so that checks out. I'm one of the lucky ones who can keep the migraines away with a single cup of coffee in the morning, but I do have them.
My hot take on HPPD is that it really isn't a big deal. I had it for a couple years, to where looking at any noisy or patterned surface would lead to it idly drifting and morphing, tracers...
My hot take on HPPD is that it really isn't a big deal. I had it for a couple years, to where looking at any noisy or patterned surface would lead to it idly drifting and morphing, tracers followed most movement, and visual snow was ever-present. That didn't come from just taking a gram or two of mushrooms occasionally. I never had a problem discerning the real shape of patterns or details, it didn't interfere with life, and cannabis was always more tied to it than true psychedelics. Since then it's basically shifted to an ability to turn it on and off at will.
While only a single datapoint, I had HPPD for a couple of years and it wasn't anything life-destroying. Basically whenever I saw static/noise (this was back in analog TV/video days so a lot more...
While only a single datapoint, I had HPPD for a couple of years and it wasn't anything life-destroying. Basically whenever I saw static/noise (this was back in analog TV/video days so a lot more common then) or patterns similar to static/noise, or closed my eyes while wide awake, I would see animated fractal-type patterns. Friends used to say they were jealous and wish they had that, but rather than being fascinating/fun like during a trip it was just annoying as it didn't go away. That was it though, just the recurring fractal patterns for a few years then one day it just disappeared. I was so used to it by that point that I didn't really notice it stopping, I just realised one day that it was gone.
Thanks for the insight. I think it's a question of temperament, but even benign little reruns would disturb me. The threat of having the show play for years without stop really pushes me away from...
Thanks for the insight. I think it's a question of temperament, but even benign little reruns would disturb me. The threat of having the show play for years without stop really pushes me away from trying.
IANAD.
I might be misreading some of this, because it doesn't match the tone of the rest of your post, but I worry you might be putting too much emphasis on an all-or-nothing response.
Treatments and therapies for depression and a handful of other psychologically-sourced issues aren't ready-made solutions. I see them more as… a box of weapons to help you fight a war. They don't fight the war for you, but they can help (and depending what's in the box, they can be incredibly powerful and turn the tides, or they can just give you a little push. Also sometimes the box is empty.)
When I went through my own years of depression, there wasn't one thing that helped. There were lots of small things. It wasn't always easy to tell what was truly helping versus what was providing "relief", but at the end of the day, finding the positive sides of everything I was doing to fight (rather than focusing on whether it was directly helping me achieve an abstract goal of "getting me out of the mud") made everything a lot more bearable.
That is to say, I would focus on whether this experience was positive as a whole, and remove it from the context of your underlying reasons for trying it.
Or for an parallel that'll be all too familiar to some, if you focus on what makes "going to the gym" a fun activity for you, rather than whether it's really helping you lose weight, then you'll just go rather than put it off. Or maybe you will decide that it's not fun, and then change strategy.
Also every time you take shrooms you'll have a slightly, or wildly, different experience. If one day with one dose does nothing that doesn't mean shrooms will never do anything good for you. That doesn't mean you should just endlessly try to trip on shrooms until something happens, but it also means you should not write them off based on limited experience. The mindset you go into a trip with sets your direction. I've also never experienced any large epiphanies on doses below 2 grams. Low doses are still fun and productive, but probably won't have the power necessary to do heavy lifting.
OP - are you measuring your shrooms' weight dry or wet? The standard doses assume dry shrooms.
I haven't experienced that myself, but I have had a pretty strong post-trip after glow in the immediate hours afterwards. It feels like I'd been standing up my whole life and just sat down for the first time.
I’ve never had any success screening things with psychedelics. This includes tv, cinema, video games, and even “trippy” visualizations.
Live shows can be good though.
I tend to use music and mandalas/art if I feel attracted to stimulus. Bit usually experiencing the interplay of within and without is where I am.
Fwiw, I very rarely take a large dose (> 2 g) these days. I have good results with mood effects if i take about .8 every week or so. That dose for me is juuusst above the perceptual
Threshold.
Thanks for sharing your experiences, I'm glad it went well for you. :)
I wouldn't give up hope on it just yet. There are several compounds out there that tap into this part of our brains and we don't know a lot about it all yet thanks to research on this topic being banned by most governments or rejected for funding until relatively recently. One session, or even one drug, is not the whole picture by a long shot.
I'm still learning how to use this stuff myself. I related my experiences here a while back. I have an update for that, though. That second time I didn't take 4 grams. I had 1/4 ounce, or ~7.3 grams. The friend I got the mushies from thought I wanted 1/4 oz when I asked for 4 grams... damn metric/imperial mistakes are messing with my high. I didn't find out until I mentioned it in conversation weeks later. :P
I got the mushies version of the hero's journey without the pressure of knowing I was about to take it - and I still barely hallucinated. My ego/id were unfazed, I just regressed to being mentally twelve years old for six hours - which is a wonderful way to spend an afternoon once in a while. I need to try LSD sometime and see if it hits the same brick wall my aphantasia throws up for mushies. I am really curious about this. Apparently DMT/Ayahuasca can break through it for some people, perhaps even reverse/cure it. Haven't tried those yet either, and I get the feeling that those are best saved for last, after I'm more practiced and comfortable with this stuff.
I'm still interested in microdosing. For me at least, mushies beat back depression. It didn't stay gone, but it was in retreat for a couple weeks both times. If I can take small doses on the daily or slightly larger ones on the weekly to get that effect, I'd do it. Beats the pants off of prozac or depakote for me.
Agreed that mushrooms kill depression for about 2 weeks. Thankfully I’m in a better place now. Made a lot of healthy changes to get here.
Perhaps this should start a new topic, but I hesitate at the thought of spreading mushrooms all over Tildes.
On the verge of embarking on a trial I read some disturbing content that is frightening me away from psychedelics. The fear is of "Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder," which apparently can permanently alter a user's vision, leaving an aftertaste of visual snow, outlines, patterns, what-have-you, overlaid on the world. Like a visual tinnitus, it sometimes never improves. I looked at medical papers and an online forum to try to get a feel for its prevalence. One of the possible answers for a mushroom forum poll asking how many people have this was, "No, but I wish I did!" This is in no way a representative sample, but many respondents reported dealing with this side effect (most embracing it positively).
I just... I need to feel relatively secure going in that a low dose won't do this to me, for goodness sake.
I am suspicious that what a lot of people consider HPPD is just paranoia and just noticing things they were already perceiving but not necessarily noticing.
I myself have mild visual snow (more prevalent in the dark) and floor patterns and carpets and whatnot seem to "breathe" when I stare at them despite me never having taken psychedelics. I do smoke weed on occasion but I noticed these things before I had ever smoked my first joint.
There are almost certainly people with real HPPD but a lot of it just sounds like plain old freaking out over nothing imo.
I'd never heard of this until it was mentioned in this thread. I looked it up and wikipedia has a nice visual for it.
I thought that was normal vision until about five minutes ago. I've had that sort of static as long as I can remember, just like aphantasia and tinnitus. All of that was present in grade school. The image in the article is pretty close, but mine's more transparent (about a quarter as loud as that image) and mine are every color, like pixels morphing through the rainbow, not so much violet and red and blue. The dominant colors for me are white/yellow/blue, red is way down the list.
Mine is also nowhere near that hyperactive - if it was I'd go mental. :P It's much lazier, like drifting snow, and it tends to bracket objects slightly, even the letters on the screen as I type this post, kinda like a halo that likes to hang out between the lines. Just like the tinnitus, I don't really notice it unless I'm thinking about it, or in the dark where it's the only thing I can see. It's not hard to ignore something when you have no alternative to compare it to. I've never seen 'nothing' and I've never heard 'silence' either.
I get more annoyed at floaters due to my age than I ever did from that visual static. I didn't notice any change in it at all while I was on the mushies, or afterwards - though I did get the 'breathing' effect while I was high (and it went away after). This is pretty wild. Seems like my visual/auditory cortex is more than a little non-standard.
Edit: Looks like migraine and tinnitus are common comorbidities with this condition, so that checks out. I'm one of the lucky ones who can keep the migraines away with a single cup of coffee in the morning, but I do have them.
My hot take on HPPD is that it really isn't a big deal. I had it for a couple years, to where looking at any noisy or patterned surface would lead to it idly drifting and morphing, tracers followed most movement, and visual snow was ever-present. That didn't come from just taking a gram or two of mushrooms occasionally. I never had a problem discerning the real shape of patterns or details, it didn't interfere with life, and cannabis was always more tied to it than true psychedelics. Since then it's basically shifted to an ability to turn it on and off at will.
While only a single datapoint, I had HPPD for a couple of years and it wasn't anything life-destroying. Basically whenever I saw static/noise (this was back in analog TV/video days so a lot more common then) or patterns similar to static/noise, or closed my eyes while wide awake, I would see animated fractal-type patterns. Friends used to say they were jealous and wish they had that, but rather than being fascinating/fun like during a trip it was just annoying as it didn't go away. That was it though, just the recurring fractal patterns for a few years then one day it just disappeared. I was so used to it by that point that I didn't really notice it stopping, I just realised one day that it was gone.
Thanks for the insight. I think it's a question of temperament, but even benign little reruns would disturb me. The threat of having the show play for years without stop really pushes me away from trying.