Is it just me or does DMT have one or the worst tastes / smells that exist?
DMT, Derealization, and Depersonalization
21–30 of 74 posts
Re: DMT, Derealization, and Depersonalization
#22This effect is not uncommon with respect to powerful psychedelics but it does have a mechanistic neurological explanation which in turn helps explain the psychological (or spiritual if you like) knock-on effects. It's really the same kind of thing underlying optical illusions, such as the dancing grid dots illusion: https://mathworld.wolfram.com/ScintillatingGridIllusion.html Fundamentally your brain is interpreting…
This ain’t it
Re: DMT, Derealization, and Depersonalization
#23I'm not sure if I've had these exact experiences, but something related perhaps, albeit milder. When I was in my early twenties I consumed a lot of cannabis in the form of hash cakes one night and it triggered a panic attack. What was scary about the panic attack was this feeling of the world around me feeling dreamlike, or like I was in a dream I couldn't wake up from. It was like there's normally this safe ground w…
> The secret with anxiety, for me at least, is to not care if you feel anxious and to let it pass. I think that's very insightful, since so often the "panic loop" is driven first and foremost by the anxiety over feeling anxious. People feel the stirrings of anxiety, and having had a panic attack, they're terrified of that sensation returning, which fuels their anxiety and focuses them on those feelings. It's a viciou…
Yes absolutely. The insight for me is that the perception itself is totally unreal. One minute I felt one way, now I feel another. Well, which is real? Since I can perceive reality in two ways then they can't both be real. Maybe neither are, but the panic perception is underpinned by all this adrenaline and stress, so it's a much more artificial or contingent state. You never experience this when you're relaxed and in a state of homeostasis. It's just a warped perception, your mind plays tricks when you're tired and certainly when it's anxious.
Re: DMT, Derealization, and Depersonalization
#24This genuinely seems like a psychedelics hit piece. This joombah mentions taking psychedelics with zero preparation: alone, on a whim, without concern for dosage. For real? I have no sympathy for him. Nobody is this naive, and if he is perhaps it’s Mother Nature doing her magic.
Re: DMT, Derealization, and Depersonalization
#25I would assume a bad trip can cause PTSD not unlike other events that are usually associated with PTSD.
Re: DMT, Derealization, and Depersonalization
#26I'm not sure if I've had these exact experiences, but something related perhaps, albeit milder. When I was in my early twenties I consumed a lot of cannabis in the form of hash cakes one night and it triggered a panic attack. What was scary about the panic attack was this feeling of the world around me feeling dreamlike, or like I was in a dream I couldn't wake up from. It was like there's normally this safe ground w…
I found this quote in "Notes On A Nervous planet" by the wonderful Matt Haig a few years ago. It was the first time I felt "seen" and like someone else could articulate this weird feeling I sometimes had...
"People who have never had a period of living with anxiety and panic don’t understand that the realness of you is an actual feeling that you can lose. People take it for granted. You don’t get up in the morning and think, as you spread peanut butter onto your toast, ‘Ah, good, my sense of self is still intact, and the world is still real, I can now get on with my day.’ It’s just there. Until it isn’t. Until you are in the cereal aisle, feeling inexplicable terror. When trying to express what a panic attack feels like it’s easy to talk about the obvious symptoms: the racing thoughts, the palpitations, the tightness of the chest, the breathlessness, the nausea, the tingling sensations inside your skull or your arms and legs. But there is another more complicated symptom I used to get. One which I have come to realise is at the heart of what my panic attacks have always been about. It is the one called, tellingly, derealisation. Within a feeling of derealisation, I still knew I was me. I just didn’t feel I was me. It is a feeling of disintegration. Like a sand sculpture crumbling away. And there is a paradox about this sensation. Because it feels like both an extreme intensity of self and a nothingness of self. A feeling of no return, as if you have suddenly lost something that you didn’t know you had to look after, and that the thing you had to look after was you."
Re: DMT, Derealization, and Depersonalization
#27Is it just me or does DMT have one or the worst tastes / smells that exist?
Cilantro takes that cake for me.
Re: DMT, Derealization, and Depersonalization
#28Nobody wants to discuss potential harms in a grassroots advocacy movement for legalization or normalization - we saw the same thing in decades past with cannabis. The reasons are understandable, but the results aren't great. I would rather see more openness up front even at the cost of complicating the message, than see folks end up with this kind of trouble because advocates chose not to be as honest about the risks…
> even at the cost of complicating the message
The problem is that complicated messages don't scale. If your cause can't be reduced to a buzzphrase, you cannot achieve wide-spread change. I'm not trying to be deliberately edgy or cynical, it just seems like a fatal flaw of mass communication and human psychology.
Re: DMT, Derealization, and Depersonalization
#29I have tried psychedelics at high dose and never had any issues with derealization. However when I started meditating 1/hr per day I started noticing things just started seeming "fake" and like I wasn't a "real person". Backing off to meditating 30 minutes daily, it completely went away.
Re: DMT, Derealization, and Depersonalization
#30This effect is not uncommon with respect to powerful psychedelics but it does have a mechanistic neurological explanation which in turn helps explain the psychological (or spiritual if you like) knock-on effects. It's really the same kind of thing underlying optical illusions, such as the dancing grid dots illusion: https://mathworld.wolfram.com/ScintillatingGridIllusion.html Fundamentally your brain is interpreting…
This ain’t it
No? I resonate with this take.