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Inside Hyperreality: Horrifying & Overwhelming
DMT & Salvia divinorum
Citation:   Ijdfoiodi. "Inside Hyperreality: Horrifying & Overwhelming: An Experience with DMT & Salvia divinorum (exp112767)". Erowid.org. Jan 12, 2019. erowid.org/exp/112767

 
DOSE:
  repeated smoked Salvia divinorum
  40 mg vaporized DMT
  40-45 mg vaporized DMT
BODY WEIGHT: 76 kg
PROLOGUE
I have always been reluctant to write down and submit an experience like this, due to two reasons. Firstly, because I don´t feel very comfortable expressing something which is so personal. And secondly, because in my opinion, the perception is so disorganised or, more precisely, so differently organised from the one I have during the usual experience that the writing of the sensations, feelings and thoughts I have in a strong psychedelic experience is usually quite inaccurate and not very precise.

However, I have had recently two trips that had been considerably more important than the rest, and they are so stunning that I think it could be nice to write down something about them (although this writing is short, imprecise, incomplete and inaccurate).

Even though both trips are independent, and can be read separately, it is interesting how they show in some way very different facets of the psychedelic experience (although they have lots of things in common, too).

The first trip is probably the most powerful experience of my life, and the second one is probably the best (and most beautiful) experience of my life.

So after this introduction let’s move to the matter of this experience report: the first trip.
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PERSONAL BACKGROUND:
I am a quite experienced psychedelic user (even doing psychedelics almost daily or very regularly in some periods). Previous to this trip I had had lots of experiences, specially quite a lot of DMT ones, including strong breakthroughs. I had also experimented with trips and substances in different contexts and settings.

On the other side it is also important to know that my main interest in life is Geometry (also other parts of Maths), in the sense of understanding and visualization of beautiful, complicated, stunning and new, geometrical phenomena related to intersections, hypersurfaces, higher dimensions, etc. I am a String/M-theory and Algebraic Geometry researcher. This intellectual/professional interest is also my main interest about the psychedelic experience and without it you cannot understand why this concrete trip was so significative to me.

As an aside it is normal to understand part of my interest in DMT, taking into account its visual and geometrical richness. For example quoting PsychonautWiki: “The geometry present with smokeable DMT is considered by many to be the most profoundly intricate and complex set of visual geometry found within the entirety of the psychedelic experience”.

SETTING:
I live alone in my house. On this occasion I was sitting at my desk with my laptop and several monitors showing different images and videos about geometric visualizations.
I was sitting at my desk with my laptop and several monitors showing different images and videos about geometric visualizations.
There was also some psychedelic/spatial music playing. In the beginning the lights of the room were on. I felt quite nervous and I couldn´t relax very much, unlike the majority of previous times (this turned to be significant later).

DOSAGE AND PRE-TRIP/FIRST-TRIP:
There was a initial trip just before the main one so I´ll relate here separately. I started smoking quite Salvia in a bong. I can´t precise which quantity. Even though I knew the exact quantity it wouldn´t be very accurate due to the following reason: as I didn´t want to breakthrough/dissociate with Salvia I started smoking gradually more and more Salvia but without maintaining it for a long time in my mouth/lungs. As a result I was quite high but quite conscient too. Although I managed to do this in a very efficient way it was also true that just since the very beginning things started to go wrong… I do not really know why…

I kept on remembering and thinking about a specific kind of things I was obsessed and worried about at that time. This strongly stranged to me because even though some thoughts/obsessions are sometimes potentiated in some (more or less bad) trips this particular kind of thoughts had always been removed when I was tripping…

I kept on smoking Salvia and at some point (when the ferris wheel effect started to intensify) I was thinking “Man, this is so ridiculous, these stupid obsessions are not going to allow you to trip… Imagine people saying “XXXX couldn´t enjoy the amusement park of the trip due to these stupid reasons””.

After some time I achieved to calm down those obsessions (but in a bad way, because I knew I was lying to myself) and I took the first GVG pipe, loaded with 40 mg of DMT. I smoked it but not perfectly (I think I didn´t manage to maintain it for a long time/I didn´t smoke the pipe completely).

And then…. man, I should had realized that something was not normal! (I mean, it is difficult to realize that when you are high on salvia and DMT, but anyway…) For example, I should have understood it when the song I was listening mixed with the 3D-spiral/tunnel of the video I was watching and a kind of coloured 3D-whirlwind come to me, but MIXING ALL: music, visuals, thoughts… I mean, lot of elements: sounds, visuals, thoughts, patterns, colours, feelings seemed to come to me in a whirlwind but in a kind of hypersynesthesic way: ideas or relations came to me, almost spatially like all other elements of vision in a completely disorganised/mixed perception… that was fucking CRAZY.

Anyway, the case is that I was quite high but still quite conscient, and I still hadn´t [had a] breakthrough either. So I said “Let´s smoke the other pipe, but this time in a PROPER way”. So I walk to the bathroom (because it was dark and I could see the flame clearly) and I torch the flame to the GVG pipe (with around another 40 mg of DMT) and I did it perfectly: a huge white column of smoke appeared and I swallowed it completely. I walk to my room again (the light was now off although there was a certain illumination coming from the different PC monitors), I stood in front of the bed and I held the smoke. I did it perfectly, I almost swallowed it but I managed to keep it in my mouth/lungs for a huge period of time. My intention was to lie down in my bed… I don´t even know if I managed to do it because just a few moments after smoking that pipe the main thing irrumpted in a BRUTAL WAY…

THE MAIN THING
(Even today I cannot understand what happened then. It was such a crazy, terrible, brutally powerful thing that I cannot understand why that happened. I had always wondered about that kind of Lovecraft’s idea, why necessarily to enter in a completely different plane of reality has to cause terror. I had already had several experiences like that (both of positive, neutral and bad), and even at this point I didn´t have a clear idea about that).

I penetrated completely and stayed in the hyperspace. It was a BRUTAL, TREMENDOUS breakthrough (I would say that it was my strongest breakthrough ever). I was completely inside some kind of HYPERREALITY. It is quite useless to describe it. Some of the elements of my room stayed there, but anyway, it was another world, another reality.

A common effect (in my experience) in lots of breakthroughs with DMT which can help to describe the scene is that all the reality becomes DENSER*. All the colours and things become more powerful and brighter than ever, saturated, and the space itself becomes denser, like more things happening, and more shapes, colours, images, being perceived at the same time than in the usual world and perception. As Icome back to reality I cannot avoid the sensation that that was the real reality.

In this concrete trip that sensation was brutally, crazy, overwhelmingly strong. The scene was hyper-powerful and dense and instantly I fell into a brutally, deep, profound horror. It seemed that I had arrived to THAT PLACE. It was obvious that I was dead or at least that my normal life and world had finished abruptly. I felt alone, conscient of all my familiars and friends werent there. I was alone, CAUGHT, IMPRISONED in that world. I also felt the presence of the beings. But these weren´t kind beings like in other DMT trips. These were also superhumans, but in the sense of Lovecraft’s tales: they were completely above humans, cruel to our eyes, and I was there to be tortured by them or caught by them, at their will, like a toy for them.

One of the strongest thoughts I remember, which also crystalized in a clear way when all the thing ended, was kind of: “Wow, I have to warn everybody to not to do psychedelics because THIS PLACE EXISTS, and its horrible and nobody should take the risk to fall into it, I have to tell everybody!!” (I have just remembered right now those verses of “The Number of the Beast”: “This can't go on I must inform the law/ Can this still be real or some crazy dream?!”-this was kinda the spirit/idea. Some ideas that came after the trip to (inaccurately) describe that place was a “Horror Hyperreality Amusement Park”, way beyond our simple and little world, deep into a hyperspace/dimension where those beings tortured us, and play in a cruel way with us.

Another thing I remember is that the scene was mostly obscure but also bright in some sense (partly owing to the “all-denser-effect”), it was illuminated by general strange lights, there were also other strong bright lights coming from the images of the monitors and I could see all very dense and clear, and the brights (for example in some contours of some objects) were sharp and powerful/metallic/digital and in an aggressive way. As I said, at some moments that reminded me of being in a mechanical-futuristic-horror amusement park.

A bit later, one idea/feeling that I had very few moments after the crazyness ended was some sense of sadness and specially deception. It was like “Ok, I have been lots of times in the hyperspace and finally for the most insane and profound breakthrough ever, this is what you have for me, to offer? Just a crazy, absurd torture?” I mean, for the time I was completely inside, more than ever before, in the very foundations of hyperreality and I only have received this message? It was true there had been more interesting things in the trip apart from that, and the trip itself had been spectacular and overwhelming, but the overall message seemed a bit poor (coming from such ultimate hyper-dimensional aliens/beings)…

(However just a month and a half later I would come back to do DMT and I ended up being completely wrong. As the other stunning trip would show, the substance had incredible, beauty and positive things to show me.)

Retrospectively, in some sense I panicked when I became aware that I had fallen into another reality, which it is not bad by itself, but the idea that all the other things I had lived werent real and to appear into that superior place turned out to be… quite terrible. This sensation of being alone, in such a delicate situation, and the certainty that things had changed so fast was probably a main cause of the horror I felt.
This sensation of being alone, in such a delicate situation, and the certainty that things had changed so fast was probably a main cause of the horror I felt.
Another cause, specific to that trip was that those powerful psychedelics acted by multiplying to the infinite some loops I had regarding the obsessions I was worried about during the pre-trip, giving the trip a quantity of unpleasant cyclic taste, which I think contributed to the feeling of being imprisoned.

Although all of this, the trip itself was indeed a bad trip, but it was not only bad. It had a powerful bad part, but it also had a powerful neutral part in the sense of falling into a place which was just overwhelming, because the proper nature of being so fully in that hyperreality. (As an aside, the normal reality and world was kind of a naive and limited dream/place compared to that, a very little and unconscient room in a enormous hotel.)

As you can see, the word hyperreality, is a main word to describe this trip to me. In this occasion the hyperreality character of hyperspace had more prominence than the hyperdimensional character.

This trip had not such a geometrical character like a lot of other trips (including the other one I reported and lots of others) although it certainly had several geometrical visuals, patterns, repetitions and thoughts. But its main characteristic was not a geometrical splendour.

It some sense it also had a kind of hyperdimensional character too, but in quite an unclear way. I wouldn´t say that it was hyperdimensional (or an illusion extremely similar to that, like the other trip mentioned above) but it has certain strange phenomena regarding spatiotemporal perception. Maybe there were some resemblance to hyperdimensional pheneomena in the sense of all was denser and there were much more things, much more relations…

For example in lot of Salvia trips I feel a kind of ferris wheel effect and like an attraction to the center of the scene (or to the “center of the reality”) that makes me walk or even think and feel in circles
in lot of Salvia trips I feel a kind of ferris wheel effect and like an attraction to the center of the scene (or to the “center of the reality”) that makes me walk or even think and feel in circles
. In this occasion due to (also) the DMT influence, things became much denser in the sense that I perceived so many elements in a very short period of time. Apart from the usual 3 spatial dimensions I kinda felt the usual time like a spatial dimension. The different 3D scenes at different times would be perceived kind of at once, similar to normal sections of a 4-manifold (3D-scene x S^1,) in which time was similar to S^1, a cyclic, circular dimension. So time was like a spatial thing, but very constrained (in quite a bad way; I felt chained, being tortured again and again--this contributed to the cyclic nature of time: the same things happened periodically). However I must say that this description is extremely imprecise and I couldn´t say that I perceived time exactly like that, it also maintained a portion of its time-like character so I wouldn´t identify it with a truly extra spatial dimension in the sense of a independent additional direction. This is more like a conceptualization or analogy rather than a real geometrical perception of extra dimension. I mean, at some times I probably could say: “ No, I am not perceiving different 3D scenes at the same time, it is just my train of thoughts, which is very exhalted and hasty, they are different mental images of different moments”. If you really want to read about a very accurate hyperdimensional illusion read my other trip, in which I really had a very pronounced impression of hyperdimensional perception. Anyway the sensation was quite impressive, unclear and a rare spatiotemporal distortion of perception, and has a reasonable interest by itself.

In a similar way there were a kind of extra time, a real time, which was more general and ampler, which identified with my thought in a bird-eye perspective. This time was, as I said, more general (hypertime) and linear (it flows onwards and progressed as I was thinking in the overall progression of the trip and the events). The same thing I said for the other case applies for this fake extra time-like dimension; in some sense I could have said that it was really more like a different train of thoughts (almost parallel to the rest of the thoughts, but not quite), rather than a real extra time dimension.

And finally, as I have said, the reality was kind of more dense and as I moved my arm or focused my sight in different places I perceived strange and unexpected things. For example I first looked to a representation of a 2D projection of the 12-cube that was displayed on a monitor and then I turned my view to another part of the room and that figure emerged in a plane inclined 30-45º with respect to the area I was looking. That was quite beautiful, and impressive (also, the figure is beautiful by itself). That also suggested to me a kind of extra dimension inclined in that strange way with respect to the others but again, this was also more an exaltation of my thought rather than independent direction, however, again, it was quite curious and strange.

*Concretely the “denser thing” effect varies among different DMT trips. When I have a DMT+Salvia breakthrough this effect is almost always quite powerful. The effect could be equally stronger with only DMT and with other combinations too, but I would say the frequency of the effect happening is more common with that concrete combination. I would say, however, that this trip was mainly DMT-driven, say 80-75% DMT + 20-25% Salvia (I had had different weights in this mix and I know how to differentiate them). This was a bit unpleasant in the sense that DMT has never treated me so badly but I want to remark that probably the bad sensations present in this trip were mostly originated by my previous obsessions rather than the proper nature of these psychedelics. What the psychedelics did (as usual) was multiply and potentiate some of these feelings and thoughts.

This trip was certainly a point of inflection. It was dreadful… it was so strong, so… so difficult to explain, so difficult to understand. It supposed a very profound before and an after. Incidentally it made me want to stop doing psychedelics for a while. It is true that I didn´t think to stop doing them forever (not even for a long time) because (among other things) I consider them an interesting tool to explore some geometrical concepts I work with and which I love. However I felt I needed time to assimilate and integrate the experience and I did not feel like tripping again in the days after.

Another consequence is that it reinforced and stressed the idea that I need to clarify my mind and overcome certain obsessions in order to exploit the trips. I already knew that the mental state is important when you are using any psychoative substance, and specially strong psychedelics, but this helped me to be more conscient of that.

Exp Year: 2018ExpID: 112767
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: 25
Published: Jan 12, 2019Views: 11,809
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DMT (18) : Combinations (3), Entities / Beings (37), Bad Trips (6), Alone (16)

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