Everybody should have a psychedelic experience once in their lives. I think people have the idea that it's just a visual thing and you can look at stuff but it's not really, it's a change in consciousness which more allows you to see things in a way you've never seen them before and think about things in a way that wouldn't otherwise be possible. It's a fantastic experience but you need to do it somewhere you feel safe and where you won't be interrupted, because you won't be able to deal with any real world issues in that state.

I’ve done a fair few psychedelics in my time, generally I find the visual side of things to be a bit overrated. There are visual effects, but nothing particularly solid, not for me at least.

The thing that gave me proper hallucinations was a combination of weed and MDMA. That caused me to genuinely see things that weren’t there.

Come on mate, this is "weird stuff" not totes made up nonsense.

I still say cannabis was better in the late 80’s than it is now. Black was just hilarious. Used to give me the proper titters after a smoke, actually crying with laughter at everything for a good 30 minutes. This cheese and haze bush stuff just makes me want to veg and tastes like shit. Very disappointed.

None of this sounds appealing

Did my share of psychedelics, reckon those days are past me now but I doubt I'd say no if offered. Never done acid and it's on the bucket list, but yeah as I get older I reckon the window for experimenting is closing.

Craziest experience was tripping on salvia, short and intense. Done shrooms plenty and I've always known that whatever I was experiencing was due to the shrooms, but on salvia I had a complete altered reality, transported to an alternate world full of melting things, sinister faces in the sky laughing, my body melding into the environment. I had no idea why I was in this place, had no recollection of taking anything, in my mind this was my reality and I was there for life, no escape. It was crazy and I was pranging out. Then, just as fast as it started, I snapped out of it and I was back sat on the sofa, my two mates stood over me asking what it was like. Whole thing lasted about 30 seconds.

Did salvia a couple more times, you only trip balls if you do a big bong of it. If you smoke it in a joint you just get the weird floppy melty feel. Strap a fat bowl though and it's bye bye reality, see you in a bit. The woman in the shop warned us about it when we bought it, likened it to DMT for the intensity. No idea how accurate that is, but it's the most intense thing I've done. Comes on instantly, total disassociation, altered reality, lasts for a minute tops then bang, you're back.

The vortex incident was on day 3 of trying to find acid, giving up and then mentioning it in passing to some lads from Swansea we were chatting to who shrugged and said "Yeh we have loads if you want some". My mate spent the whole of Radiohead lay in the mud giggling at a crocodile someone had sculpted in it.

Probably a better experience tbh.

Fun times but wouldn't even dream of it these days. Best left as memories.

I like Joe. And his take on the Nimitz stuff is similar to meeeee

Huzzah I fixed it

Yossarian wrote:

Half an hour? Yeesh. I managed two minutes.

He is strange. and the opening..bit is shit..but watch the vid. its a decent summary of the events

Yossarian wrote:

I won’t be spending half an hour of my life on that, I’m afraid.

Joe is really good. Skip the start where he talks about being young. It's to illustrate that he once believed in all sorts of outlandish things, but now is a skeptic. 

Actually talking about the UFO stuff starts at 4 minutes.

superflyninja wrote:

So all this talk of psychedelics. Who here has done them and did you experience anything fucked up?

Oh god yes. I have so much to say about this that it’s quite hard to find an entry point. But so as to avoid this turning into a much longer post than it will inevitably be, i will try to jump straight to describing my most nightmarish experience, which I may or may not have typed up before.  

So anyway, trip report no. 1: my DMT nightmare

This happened about 4 years ago. At the time i was smoking on a weekly basis, although most of the time i wasn’t aiming for a breakthrough dose (where time and space just evaporates into impossible abstract thoughts and shapes). However, it was a beautifully sunny day, the first really good one of the year iirc, and i decided this time i wanted to jump in the deep end, so i packed my pipe and blanket and headed out to Gorlitzer Park for a smoke. 

The park was full of people, and i perched myself down on one of the peripheral hills for a decent viewpoint. I loaded my pipe, and began to puff away at it. Despite having countless trips under my belt already, i was unusually confident. I say unusually, because normally when i smoke i’m nervous as fuck, and have to really gather my composure to push myself to go deeper, but on this day it all seemed to happen so easily,without any lingering fear or anxiety over what might happen. 

I smoked and smoked, and it wasn’t long before the hallucinations began. First, what appeared to be some sort of giant alien spaceship thing moved  across the sky, shining a beam of green light down into the center of my view, and from there two parallel lines shot out horizontally, tearing open a portal. Above and below this panoramic portal the park remained largely the same, but inside the portal seemed to be some sort of twisted alternative reality, with apocalyptic scenery that stretched to the horizon. This landscape was populated entirely by clones of the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Her face and curves were unrealistically perfect. I remember she was wearing cut-off jeans and a little white crop top. Her hair was blonde, tied back and, weirdly, her skin was sort of blue. 

Anyway these clones- and there were hundreds of them- were having some sort of giant orgy. Some of them were also riding weird abstract neon exercise bikes at the same time. They were licking each other’s bodies and sucking each others’ nipples and sometimes they would turn to wink at me invitingly. I really couldn’t believe what i was seeing, as somehow it all looked even more real than reality. And then i pondered to myself, is this actually real? 

At the exact moment i had this thought, the girls read it from within my mind, and burst into fits of laughter. ‘Wait, you really think girls like us, looking like this, winking at you, are real?!’. They continued to mock me sarcastically amongst themselves for my fleeting optimism. ‘Yea sure, there’s just an army of perfect clones riding neon bikes and having an orgy, and they want you to join in!’. At this point they are laughing so hard they were almost crying.

I also found it pretty funny too, when they put it like that. Real or not though, i definitely wanted more of what i was seeing and feeling, so i began loading another pipe to take a few more hits. Suddenly the girls stopped laughing, and their expressions became quite serious. ‘No no no, you’ve had enough’ they said while shaking their fingers in disapproval. But I ignored them, and instead tried to cram even more changa into the pipe. I raised it to my lips and began to puff away. My mood at this point was as high as it has ever been.

After a good few lengthy tokes, held in extra long to gain maximum effects, i finally exhaled the last of it, eagerly awaiting what might happen next.

But then nothing happened. Or at least not what i was expecting. The girls disappeared, and so did the portal. The park returned to its normal state, albeit completely silent. All the people who had been sitting about the grass on blankets, talking in small groups of friends stopped what they were doing and turned to face me, staring. 

As i looked around i noticed the grass changing shape. Each individual blade began to morph into a tiny little hand, with the middle finger raised. Everywhere i looked these middle fingers appeared. From the branches on the trees to the leaves; it was all giving me the finger. At one point there were even self-erecting road signs springing forth from the ground, again displaying the middle finger. Then came the voice in my head. ‘You were warned to stop. You didn’t. Now you will be punished’ it said. ‘We can keep you here forever if we want. Forever. Dont fuck around with this stuff; you don’t know what you’re getting into’.

At this point i was understandably freaked out. Everyone in the park is still staring at me in silence. Then i hear a tiny squeaky voice coming from somewhere near my feet. It’s the blades of grass talking to me, ‘say you’re sorry’, they say in unison. ‘Say you’re sorry’ they keep repeating. Suddenly everyone in the park joins the chanting. ‘say you’re sorry, say you’re sorry’. Some people have started clapping above their heads to the rhythm. ‘Say you’re sorry, say you’re sorry’. 

Naturally i start apologising. ‘Louder we can’t hear you!’ says a guy who has materialised beside me. I start saying sorry louder, channeling all my concentration to locate the most sincere apology from within my brain. Still it’s not enough for the people nor the talking grass/trees. ‘It’s still not loud enough, say you’re sorry, we still can’t hear you’. At this point i’m actually crying, shouting out sorry louder and louder and louder, with my face buried in the ground. 

I don't know how long this continued but it felt like an eternity, until suddenly i was back in reality. i have never been so relieved in my life. I glanced down at my pipe, and a woman sitting nearby shot me a look that turned my stomach, making me question whether i really was back in reality at all. I decided to leave my pipe and rest of my dmt exactly where it was, and left the park immediately. I’m still not sure whether i was actually calling out sorry in a park full of people. It must have seemed weird as fuck if so.

Since that day I cut my smoking right back. Maybe just once or twice per year, and even then if I get any weird signals from my surroundings I stop immediately. Still, I wouldn't change a thing about the experience I had, as it somehow left no residual trauma.

equinox_code wrote:

superflyninja wrote:

So all this talk of psychedelics. Who here has done them and did you experience anything fucked up?

First, what appeared to be some sort of giant alien spaceship thing moved  across the sky, shining a beam of green light down into the center of my view, and from there two parallel lines shot out horizontally, tearing open a portal. Above and below this panoramic portal the park remained largely the same, but inside the portal seemed to be some sort of twisted alternative reality, with apocalyptic scenery that stretched to the horizon. .

Shoulda told the Gorlitzer Gazette, that'd be yet another confirmed sighting

Heh they were great reads. Seems very Monty Python like! No sign of machine elves then??
The blue-skinned people are similar to a race of aliens described in many encounters.

I think I have seen what many people describe as the machine elves. For me it seems as though trips often fall into 1 of about 7 difference presets, each with their own visual style. The portal based   example I outlined above was something of an exception in that it didn't conform to the aesthetics of mood of my previous experiences, which quite often feature these weird little striped bouncing balls with faces, which then split open allowing more of them hop out. They're really hard to describe, but they definitely have a mischievousness to them. 

I don't find this guy's style of artwork pleasing on the eye at all, perhaps because the beauty of the subject matter he is trying to replicate is beyond human capacity,  but he somehow does a fucking good job of capturing the general gist of the environment in which these smiley ball things emerge.