So almost 3 months ago, I experienced a very traumatizing lsd trip that brought out serious anxiety problems and left me scared to ever do acid ever again. But now i'm getting to the point that i really want to do it again for many reasons. So here's the story- Me and my boyfriend sam live together and have been dating for more than 3 years. I love him dearly and he is my everything. we started experimenting with psychedelics in may 2010. He got into it a lot more than i did but i definitely enjoyed it the first 6 times i did it. The 7th trip i was going to take, i went into it with a completely positive mood and excited to have a trip with just me and sam. everything started off great, we had 2 hits of white on white and everything was going smoothly. exactly what i was hoping would happen. The trip took a turn for the worst and we watched a video we had found while we were sober and decided to watch it. Timothy Leary - How to operate your brain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQq_XmhBTgg I felt fine while i was watching it and i guess i didn't really realize how bad my thoughts were getting. I felt as though i was getting brainwashed and that he was trying to do, i don't know, something bad to me. and i also kept thinking that this was something that would scar me for life. so, anyways, it got to a part where there were some eyes that flashed up on the screen and some weird trippy moving pattern (started at 15 minutes in). and that's when sam decided to turn it off. then i realized just how freaked out i was. I all the sudden started seeing that moving pattern over and over again in front of my whole vision and everything around me started turning into eyes. I started crying and shaking and sam just had to hold me the whole time. i saw that pattern and those eyes the rest of the trip. i got no sleep that night and i was seeing eyes everywhere even when i went to work the next morning. I kept trying to get my mind to think about happy positive things but it kept resorting back to these very strange weird thoughts about these eyes. I eventually decided to start seeing a therapist (which was pretty overdue anyways because of trying to deal with family issues from my past) and that helped a lot. they tried putting me on some anti depressents but none of them really worked for me so i just kind of stuck with smoking weed to help my anxiety (which really does help as long as i don't think about the bad trip) So now it's been almost 3 months and i have pretty much gotten over everything especially the anxiety. but still everyday i think about that trip and my imagination still kind of makes certain patterns or somethings look like an eye and it sort of makes me flashback. It's very weird and difficult to explain. But i feel like the only way to get my mind off of that bad trip is to trip again and have a good trip. like all the other 6 trips i had. But i'm just terrified that if i think about eyes once or if i kind of see something that looks like an eye on a pattern once it will send me into that whirlwind again and i just don't know if i could handle it. any advice? haha i know this is something very out of the ordinary and weird but hey, i know acid is never the same with anyone and anything. But either way, i just want to trip again. i want to have that mind opening grasp on the world again. but i'm terrified of it going sour. please help
What allows you to see the eyes which terrify you, are your two eyes, which you love. Why is it so? Why do you feel fear when a psychedelic compound causes you to see patterned eyes on everything? This was an effect of one of my strongest trips as well, eyes popping in and out of everything, but they held no value for me, and reality was so changed in so many more fundamental ways that really it almost a kind of silly effect, compared to other things going on. Do the eyes have an accusatory nature? Why did you start crying? This is the point you should look into and explore. LSD can make you see eyes, you need to be ok with this. It can make you see a whole lot more things than eyes. The trip did not go sour, your reaction to the trip went sour. Perhaps you were simply not in a good frame of mind to be opened up like that, as you said, family issues and such. LSD also causes emotional hallucination, emotional unhinging; one might start crying about anything, or laughing at nothing. It can cause feelings of paranoia. Maybe you were assaulted by paranoia from the video, and emotional loosening which caused a release of long-overdue tears, and you were seeing eyes, and you put it all together as "I saw the eyes and they made me trip out and cry" but really it was more of a "bigger picture" of you crying, and seeing eyes, and being paranoid, and tripping really hard. One mistake people make post bad trip is they read way too much importance into certain contents of the trip, which in reality, are kind of secondary, and could be replaced with anything, and one would have had the same reaction anyways, because the root of it was elsewhere, deeper.
You really put a lot of things into perspective for me with all of that. I guess I never really thought that anyone else saw eyes like that so it just made me think I was really weird or something. It's still a little weird that I can still point out certain patterns on a wall or something that looks like eyes but I'm kind of just getting used to it. And I feel like if I can make myself trip about life and the universe again I won't care even if eyes did start popping up everywhere again. I need to start thinking about things that matter rather than some weird visual thing. Thanks for the insight. I really needed that.
It is most certainly not unusual to see eye patterns You don't need to look into psychedelic artwork very far to see this:
Actually, i just watched the whole video, and it does get really weird at about 15:00... I can understand why you would have been freaked out. "Who controls the eyes, controls your mind, with the videos you watch"... Just don't watch this video IMO
What makes you think seeing eyes on everything is not a trip about life and the universe? Open your mind . . . Next time give them a chance, see what they are about, look into them, love them, know them, be them. Be the eyes, embrace them, see them on your own skin, see the eyes patterning your own thoughts and emotions, see the eyes on your eyes. Go into it, don't be repulsed by surface-level willies; "Ew, eyes!" lol. Be happy that your discomfort was only brought about by seeing eyes; LSD can be much, much harsher than that. Glad my advice made sense to you. The basic idea is to be ready for anything and everything, have no hope of a controlled trip, you are strapping yourself down onto a thermonuclear bomb. Put your seatbelt on and do your thing, but know that you surrender all power, control, and comfort once that baby gets going.
I can see why that video gave you a bad trup. I thought there was a sort of pervy thing to it when he was saying yes, yessssss, and I wasn't even on acid, just pot. I would watch it again a few times while not tripping to take the power out if it. If you don't it's probably highly likly the first thing you will think about when you drop acid again. It's impossible not to think about something "don't think about an elephant." I think if you warch it a lot and look at lots if things that cause anxiety while sober you wull regain power over what you find frightening.
