Newsgroups: alt.drugs
Date: Sat, 25 Jul 1992 18:11:03 -0400 
From: Chris Koenigsberg <ckk+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Subject: flashbacks, bad trips, etc.



Some recent postings on "LSD After effects" discussed flashbacks.
Personal reminiscence on this subject follows:

As someone points out, it is not so much the little "floaters" and
"trails" themselves which are the effect, as the unusual intensity and
concentration on them, and perhaps the instilling of some kind of
systematic, strange, connected, cosmic significance to these and other
visual phenomena.

Perhaps there is a certain amount of latent or minor schizophrenia in
my psyche. As a kid I used to try and go into these weird
daydream/trance "scenes" where my perspective would change, vertigo
would set in as if I was flying down a long tube or something, or
everything would "rotate" in a weird way, lights would turn to strange
"diamonds" for a moment, or a weird "largeness" thing would happen
where I momentarily would seem to get very small as everything else
got very big, and I could temporarily not tell how big or small things
were. this was years before trying any psychoactive drugs. I found
that other friends did occasionally experience something similar,
mainly when they were sick in bed with a high fever. But I could do it
with no fever...

Then smoking dope for a few years and finally trying acid a bunch of
times as a teenager added the psychoactive principles on top of this
already "strange" underlying experience...

I had a number of what you would call the classic "bad trip"
experiences, more than 12 hours of confusion, terror, desperately
hanging on to a sinking sailboat tossed mercilessly on the open stormy
ocean of raging consciousness.

Once due to being stuck in a very bad public situation on a very
strong trip and basically calling for help myself on the security
emergency phone (!!:-) I even got taken by the campus security patrol
to the local psychiatric ward and left there for a few hours
overnight, where I babbled about all kinds of neat things, thinking
that I was on a spaceship where the aliens cleverly took images from
my brain and made their bodies up to look like doctors and nurses so
as not to alarm me and to collect more information about Earth and
humanity from me (repeatedly I announced that I was on LSD, that I was
not the normal typical human subject, so their data would be unusually
skewed :-). I was released in the morning from the psych hospital with
the advice from the psych doctors to maybe lay off acid for a few
months at least.... ahh, the long gone 1970's before the "war on
drugs"... I think they had a lot of fun watching, listening to me
babble and make free associations during a total meltdown session, and
they even performed a battery of standard psychological tests on me
while I was there, so I'm sure I gave some researcher a bunch of data
to work with :-) But I felt bad for years afterwards when facing other
students who had seen my that night, laying on the floor, .... :-)

Another time, years earlier just out of high school in 1976, I took
too much at a party where someone's parents came home unexpectedly
early, and ended up having sort of strange epileptic-like fits, laying
outside in the bushes by the front porch, then being collected by
friends, loaded into the back of a van, and driven around for a few
hours, while they partied in the front, and I experienced the end of
the universe in the back......

The whole history of the universe was divided into two sections,
positive and negative. Human experience fell down on one side of the
dividing line or the other. There was an airplane going by overhead. I
was the airline pilot and the plane crashed and I was responsible for
hundreds of deaths. World War II came and went, and I was Adolf
Hitler. etc. etc. on through history, beyond the present thousands of
years into the future (kind of like the end of the movie "2001: A
Space Odyssey", this was all rushing nonstop through my head -- no
brakes, only a sort of steering wheel :-) then on beyond the human
race, on beyond all forms of matter and energy, down to the moment of
naked singularity again, I guess it was the Big Bang backwards, the
Big Crunch... anyway, it came down to just two particles, or a
particle and anti-particle, and I was the anti-particle, and I
annihilated the universe into a singularity....

And then they had driven the van to an empty house (my own, my paretns
were out of town :-) and I had taken my clothes off in the back of the
van, and I kind of came back to the present age and woke up. I told
them I was OK, and described some of what I had gone through, and
invited them into my parents' house, and we had a nice party and I was
still higher than I'd ever been in my life..... (I was like 17 years
old in the real world :-)

Another time before that, some friends all went down to a house at the
Jersey shore for a night of partying and of course I dropped another
big trip dose on the way... and of course I got terrified, confused,
etc., turning into a sort of wild apeman who had to be coaxed by
everyone else into simple forms of communication... the funny thing
was that I had some paper with me and a pen and frantically wrote down
as much as I could, of the entire evening... much is incoherent or
incomplete but I was glad alter to capture the essence of some of the
situations I felt myself to be in.... I had been reading Castaneda and
there was all kinds of stuff about the tonal vs. the nagual, how this
actually was manifested as my right side vs. my left side, being left
handed, comparing the view from my two eyes, my left eye is much more
nearsighted than my right by my left hand is stronger than my right,
the whole thing gets confusing if you concentrate too much on the
details especially if you're heavily dosed on 300-500 micrograms :-)

Anyway, when you have experiences like that, a flashback is a sort of
qualitiative thing, not a quantitative thing.... i.e. it's a state of
mind, a certain perspective. It's not just a couple of trails, it's
like getting into a whole new room, a segment of history, something
like that.

In early trips of mine, certain symbols from my childhood visions
reappeared. A particular kind of strange "twist" would take place, in
my peripheral vision. Things would move, yes, but not arbitrarily.
They would "twist" into these symbolic things. Many years later, when
Pink Floyd made the movie "The Wall", I was shocked to see that they
used exactly the same kind of "twist" and change..... the boy Pink
sees a train go by, for example, and suddenly all the faces on the
train turn into horrible masks....that's exactly what I mean by the
"twist", when it took on its most anthopomorphic characteristics it
would look like scary or comical cartoon masks, but sometimes it was
just an abstract change in shape on lights and other points of
attention in the visual field.

(actually, my first bad trip at age 17 was on peyote, not on acid, and
was greatly affected by someone's putting on Pink Floyd's "Echoes"....
it started with my seeing a huge goat face coming out of the walls
everywhere, because I had some friends who were practicing Satanists
down the street and had goat faces in pentagrams on their walls, and
shot bows and arrows into them for fun :-) but when someone put on
"Echoes", the music had a way of channeling, guiding the terror down a
musical passageway, which was easier to take than pure unguided
terror, so I was grateful to Pink Floyd for trip-guidance).

Another thing that would come back in flashbacks was a kind of
connection among images that are ordinarily unconnected, from the
difference in perspective between my two eyes. You are normally not
conscious of the difference, but there are moments when you can sort
of exercise your eye muscles a certain way, and see two images come
together into one stereo image, or relax them and see a stereo image
break apart into the two component images from your eyes..... and when
you get very tired late at night, and your eyes have trouble
focussing, .... I had trip experiences where the images would both
come alive separately and become animated, and sort of spin around in
these crazy little circles! and this would recur in flashbacks
sometimes.

I mentioned the big huge trip with the end of the universe..... and
that there was something about an airplane in it... I never really
figured this out, if it was completely a figment of my imagination, or
if maybe there was some kind of psychological thing that I was
dragging out and associating with the sound of airplanes, but anyway,
for years after that, I would have an occasional flashback when an
airplane would fly by overhead and the sound would reach a particular
quality.... it would trigger a recurrence of a trememdnous paralysis
and fear, and a memory of the idea that I was responsible for the
crash and death of all passengers since I was the pilot..... i.e. it
was projecting into the future, that this plane going by was doomed to
crash, because I was flying it and I was messed up, or something like
that!! 
 
I also should point out that the movie "Jacob's Ladder" accurately
portrayed the general feeling of some of my intense trip terror
moments, and flashbacks of them...

I never quite stopped tripping, but cut down and hadn't done another
huge dose for years...... but there were one or two more in the early
1980's... there was one when I was the bass player of a popular rock
band and we played at a big house party, except I was totally
over-dosed and could barely keep my fingers on the bass, and I was
having these paranoid visions of time running forward to the end of
the party, where supposedly the police came in and busted the whole
thing and it was my falt. Then I was living backwards in time, from
this awful end back to the beginning when I actually was in reality
standing there playing bass before hundreds of people who were dancing
to my music.... ! after I was done playing, I wandered through the
houseful of partying people, terrified, unable to take my bass and
unstrap if from my shoulders..... I couldn't figure out where to put
it down, and I couldn't find my case for it. I actually walked into
the kitchen, in front of like 20 people, and tried to put my bass in the
refrigerator!!! Then after that incredibly enlightened moment :-)
I also remember realizing that it was a new age, a new decade (1981),
time for a lightbulb idea, a new realization.... and I took a
lightbulb out of a lamp and ran down into the basement where another
band was playing by now, and greeted someone I knew, and said some
nonsense about "It's 1981!" and smashed the lightbulb on the floor in
the middle of the room!!!! what a nightmare, I've never been such an
asshole :-)

Then someone was talking about the old woman who lived in a room
upstairs and who we must not, under any circumstances, disturb......
and somehow I was drawn like a magnet up the stairs...... and wandered
around on the top floor looking for the bathroom, and of course
wandered into the old woman's room where she screamed at me, "Get out,
you animal, you disgusting monster!" or something like that, only
confirming the whole thing that I knew in my head, the continuation of
the bad trip from my teenage years with the end of the universe thing,
i.e. I was STILL the tip of the negative pole of the
universe-annihilator.... whew.

That party was in 1982 or so, gee, it's been 10 years....

More recently I found that not taking acid nearly so often (once every
couple of years, instead of every couple of weeks :-), and also NOT
smoking dope during the trip, helped a lot in preventing the out of
control terror rollercoaster delusional thing. I found that some of
the deranged terror actually came from the reefer, and not from the
acid.... the acid just took the reefer psychological paranoia and
said, OK, let's have some fun with THIS!!!....

Tripping after being married, with my wife also tripping, and having
sex :-) I had a wonderful culminating moment when all the bad stuff,
the pinnacle of negative annihilation, etc., sort of came together in
a moment of understanding and psychedelic calm, and I was suddenly at
peace with everything and it all clicked positively and I was never
troubled by any of the bad stuff again.... 
Newsgroups: alt.drugs