From: cliftonr@netcom.com (Pope Clifton)
Subject: Re: [anonymous] Bad Trips and their affect on normal
Organization: t.b, t.p.d, & a.d
X-Newsreader: Tin 1.1 PL5
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1992 02:34:54 GMT

Anonymous (ap.6372@cupid.sai.com) wrote:
: In May of 1991, and again in June, 1991, I had bad trips.  These were my
: last and second to last experiments with LSD.  Since then, I've noticed
: that occasionally I see little visual disturbances (dark items leave
: "light" remnants for a few seconds), and that late at night I see little
: pink dots sometimes on walls, etc.
  The visual afterimages are part of normal perceptual mechanics; most 
books on perception or optics have some little experiments to show this.
(Stare at a bright red square, then at a white background; you will see
a square in the complimentary color green, if you keep your eyes still.)
Mostly people don't notice it; I noticed it when I started experimenting
with meditation at age 14.  The pink dots could be phosphenes -- again,
well within the normal range, just not normally noticed.

: I have heard that doing acid can bring on hidden symptoms of schizophrenia.
:  While I have really weird thoughts at night (like conversations I have
: (simulated) with myself, but not really -- nothing I actually "hear," but
: it's weird), and sometimes I see little visual disturbances for an instant
: (I notice the little floaters in my eyes more and see a tiny dot of blue
: every once in a while), I don't think I'm going crazy or anything.
  You're not.  Most of us talk to ourselves ("Why, I'm a little worried that
I've been talking to myself about talking to myself so much", I said to 
myself one day, and then noticed what I was saying.)  THe floaters are 
really there, LSD or no.  Never mind about them.

: My first bad trip was pretty terrible.
: 
: My second, terribly unreal, and something that haunts me to this day.
: 
: I can't handle even smoking pot really, anymore. :(
: 
: It's really too bad.  All I'm asking is -- out of all of you who have had
: "bad trips," does it get better?  I mean, will I stop (not having
: flashbacks) remembering some of the images and being scared by them?  I'm
: really sorry I ever tried acid now -- though at the time, I thought I was
: learning a lot about myself and perceptions of things.

  You probably did.  One of the hard things to learn is that we all have
a LOT of scary stuff inside us, and are quite capable of projecting it all
"out" into the external world as if it were separate from us.  Not all 
truths are happy truths.
  It does sound as though you have become quite analytical about your own
perceptions, which is not at all a bad thing.

: To those out there who have had bad trips, am I just being paranoid, or
: does it really affect your life?  I guess I "unlearned" some visual things
: that I used to ignore...?  Whatever it is, I hope it goes away...

  I hope I haven't been too glib with you.  My second trip on LSD was quite
a large dose, I lost control of myself, and it was very scary and alienating.
It gave me a great shock, and it was a good year or two before I felt that
I was completely steady again.  It was nearly three years before I felt up
to tripping again.  All the same, I felt that it was an ultimately 
beneficial experience for me -- I got a picture of some things that were
seriously wrong with my life and wound up very strongly motivated to fix
them.  I became much more social, more open to people, and ended up with
a much better balanced life.
  I had a second bad trip a few years later; the dose was smaller and 
the aftereffects were negligible (a few days of feeling shaky
and a bit of embarassment.)
  Hang in there.  A friend of mine was quite impressed by something
Shulgin wrote in PiHKAL (paraphrasing) -- "You don't have to believe that
you're sane to take psychedelics; just that you're stable, that you
will come back to your normal self."  It sounds as though a lot of your
worries are due to looking for things in yourself that might be wrong,
and finding a lot of normal perceptions and thought patterns that look
wrong to you.  Once you stop looking for them, they will probably stop
bothering you.  The day may even come when you look back and say, "So
that's what my psyche was trying to tell me with all that scary stuff."
  -- Clifton

--
Home: cliftonr@netcom.com     +1 808 521 9073
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Pope of the Church of the Subgenius in Paradise
"Have a revelation, the first one's free/Soon to be addicted to eternity" - HMR
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