Hey there guys,
My name is Calum, and I'm an 18 year old student from Hampshire, England.
I am studying Philosophy, Music Technology and Computing.
Right, so here's my story - was wondering if I could get a few answers from you oh-so-beautiful people
I apologize if it is pretty long - I have never really told anyone my whole story.
Right, so where do I start...this year has been a real rollercoaster for me.
I always described myself as an agnostic, later on developing to an "agnostic-theist". I was born a Christian, however none of my immediate family practiced nor truly believed in the Christian religion. All of us seem to have fairly open minded views on life after death, believing that "there's got to be something", and that "this world is too perfect".
I guess you could say my interest in alternative science and psychedelia began about three or four years ago, when I was 14/15. I was lurking on the website "Newgrounds", and came across a post about sleep paralysis. One thing led to another, and I discovered the wonder that is Lucid Dreaming. To this day, I have been off and on practicing Lucid Dreaming, with no more than 20 or so under my belt. I haven't been successful in a long time - however, I do hope to get real good at it some day soon, with practice Now, I can't really remember the chain of events or the chronology too well, but I'm sure this was the beginning. I remember telling my parents about it and they thought I was crazy, laughed at me, thinking I was in some sort of cult :lol: So at some point halfway through being 16, SWIM took their first tokes on a joint. Not too much - just a few, and they loved it. Really took a warming to it.
Sooner or later, SWIM started bunning fairly regularly. He went through a bit of a stupid stage doing it a tad irresponsibly, affecting his college work and attitude in general - but now he does it much more responsibly when he has time to relax. See, nothing too spoony happened for a while, but it was in late March 2012 that stuff really started to get weird. This was when SWIM's curiosity towards psychedelics became very strong, resulting in him organizing a day for himself and three friends to try LSD. All I can say was SWIM had a very bad trip. It started off with euphoria, he was loving it, everything and anything. However this shortly turned on itself. Cartoons became terrifying for no reason, and...well I don't really remember a massive amount. SWIM remembers asking their friend to take him to bed which he did, and in closing his eyes in bed traveled to another world. He was trapped in an infinite loop, a white background with black static sort of visualizations. I think the all seeing eye was inside a triangle in the centre of the visual vision. He felt trapped in an infinite loop, thought that this is what acid takers experience on acid, as a completely objective hallucination. He thought about people he knew who have taken acid, and how naive he must have seemed to them. However, SWIM started to remember all the research he had done on LSD, and never came across any information like this. What was it? A conspiracy or what??? He felt this pure terror, fear at it's purest form. Fear as you experience it as a child.
After a very restless sleep and horrifying trip, SWIM awoke surprisingly fresh and positive. Although he ran around telling everyone taking the acid was the worst decision of his life the night before, he now just looked upon it as a bad trip, and the next one would be much better. After all, he'd taken what was described as a "very strong microdot... be careful with this shit...". With a positive outlook, he began to look into his next trip experience, looking for a single tab this time. I don't remember his life being changed that significantly - he still seemed to be pretty connected to physical reality. However, it was the first joint after the trip that triggered his first flashback. He had a few tokes on a great joint one night with his friends, and wandered back to the friends house. This was the same house, setting and people that he was around on his trip. Whether that has anything to do with this forthcoming events, whether it was to do with the weed he smoked when on acid, I don't know. His friend Richard said something, which literally made no sense. Typical stoner error. This is where all the laughs come. Everyone began laughing hysterically, that kind of stoned laughing you simply cannot achieve in any sober state. Absolutely brilliant. Until He almost felt like he broke through some sort of sanity threshold and BAM. He was stuck in a loop. He was sat on a sofa, nobody else about other than his friend richard, sat on a sofa to the far left of him, staring right at him. Everyone who's done psychedelics knows what an infinite loop feels like - fucking awful. He imagined reality to have multiple floors (or dimensions maybe?), and that what he was experiencing was one "floor" above. As in, it actually felt like his reality was in a tall building, one story higher than "our" reality. There wasn't any sound of anything going on, I don't know what happened. All he could see was the all seeing eye and triangle in the center of his vision again. He would have these epiphanies, trying to express his sudden understanding of what the fuck was going on. He would say, "I get it. I get it now...see, that's the thing....that's the thing with acid, it's...", but would never finish. And it never came out of his mouth, it came out of Richard's. I don't know how it stopped, but it stopped, and he went to bed, telling everyone he had the most horrendous flashback. From this moment on, everything was turned upside down.
He returned to college the following weekend, terrified of what he had seen. He was a mess - he couldn't really roll a cigarette anymore, he was scared of the television, scared of darkness and silence and sleeping, he was quite a mess. He occasionally smoked weed, thinking "Ah, the flashbacks will have gone by now - i'm sure it was just a one off!!", yet everytime he would flashback, experiencing the same kind of stuff. Extreme incoherence of reality and conversations, major time distortions making everything feel like infinite time, and this was often off of very small doses, even 2 TINY tokes on a joint. Yet every time he planned to smoke, he almost forgot how terrible each flashback was. He forgot the pure terror, and when he realized it again, he would think that every stoner in the world felt like this. He had two good friends who are large stoners, and he was convinced that this was how they felt all the time.
Eventually, he just stopped smoking, stopped watching spoony videos about LSD and DMT and all this stuff, and just tried to live a normal life...and so he did. However, he would always go through waves of this stuff. It started off just reading loads of Erowid reports of trips and stuff like that, but eventually became more mature and informative...watching documentaries on DMT, reading books about astral projection and meditation, watching Spirit Science on youtube, and ending up with an extremely positive outlook on life. I could now say that SWIM is one of the happiest people I know. He feels wonderful, most of the time. He feels a bit spoony occasionally and reality is very fractured - he doesn't understand why other people don't "get it". They don't "get" why life is so weird. He has still never Astral Projected, but purely do to fear - he will lift himself out and experience pure terror again, and want nothing more than to be naive for a bit, immediately feeling disappointed in himself. But the question that I would love to be answered is, should swim trip again? Should he try a smaller dose of acid, to get over his fear and gain a more pieced up puzzle with an even more positive light? He would love to continue tripping, discovering DMT and psilopsybin and all sorts and accounting his studies, but he doesn't know where to begin now. He has tried ketamine and loved it, however he would not put that in the same category really, and doesn't plan to do it again.
SO YEH. That's Swim. My name is Calum, and i'm looking forward to looking on this site, exploring and seeking wisdom. I am also a musician, making a lot of stuff at the moment under the pseudonym "wise owl". You can hear my latest work here . Much love to you all xo
My name is Calum, and I'm an 18 year old student from Hampshire, England.
I am studying Philosophy, Music Technology and Computing.
Right, so here's my story - was wondering if I could get a few answers from you oh-so-beautiful people
I apologize if it is pretty long - I have never really told anyone my whole story. Right, so where do I start...this year has been a real rollercoaster for me.
I always described myself as an agnostic, later on developing to an "agnostic-theist". I was born a Christian, however none of my immediate family practiced nor truly believed in the Christian religion. All of us seem to have fairly open minded views on life after death, believing that "there's got to be something", and that "this world is too perfect".
I guess you could say my interest in alternative science and psychedelia began about three or four years ago, when I was 14/15. I was lurking on the website "Newgrounds", and came across a post about sleep paralysis. One thing led to another, and I discovered the wonder that is Lucid Dreaming. To this day, I have been off and on practicing Lucid Dreaming, with no more than 20 or so under my belt. I haven't been successful in a long time - however, I do hope to get real good at it some day soon, with practice
Now, I can't really remember the chain of events or the chronology too well, but I'm sure this was the beginning. I remember telling my parents about it and they thought I was crazy, laughed at me, thinking I was in some sort of cult :lol: So at some point halfway through being 16, SWIM took their first tokes on a joint. Not too much - just a few, and they loved it. Really took a warming to it. Sooner or later, SWIM started bunning fairly regularly. He went through a bit of a stupid stage doing it a tad irresponsibly, affecting his college work and attitude in general - but now he does it much more responsibly when he has time to relax. See, nothing too spoony happened for a while, but it was in late March 2012 that stuff really started to get weird. This was when SWIM's curiosity towards psychedelics became very strong, resulting in him organizing a day for himself and three friends to try LSD. All I can say was SWIM had a very bad trip. It started off with euphoria, he was loving it, everything and anything. However this shortly turned on itself. Cartoons became terrifying for no reason, and...well I don't really remember a massive amount. SWIM remembers asking their friend to take him to bed which he did, and in closing his eyes in bed traveled to another world. He was trapped in an infinite loop, a white background with black static sort of visualizations. I think the all seeing eye was inside a triangle in the centre of the visual vision. He felt trapped in an infinite loop, thought that this is what acid takers experience on acid, as a completely objective hallucination. He thought about people he knew who have taken acid, and how naive he must have seemed to them. However, SWIM started to remember all the research he had done on LSD, and never came across any information like this. What was it? A conspiracy or what??? He felt this pure terror, fear at it's purest form. Fear as you experience it as a child.
After a very restless sleep and horrifying trip, SWIM awoke surprisingly fresh and positive. Although he ran around telling everyone taking the acid was the worst decision of his life the night before, he now just looked upon it as a bad trip, and the next one would be much better. After all, he'd taken what was described as a "very strong microdot... be careful with this shit...". With a positive outlook, he began to look into his next trip experience, looking for a single tab this time. I don't remember his life being changed that significantly - he still seemed to be pretty connected to physical reality. However, it was the first joint after the trip that triggered his first flashback. He had a few tokes on a great joint one night with his friends, and wandered back to the friends house. This was the same house, setting and people that he was around on his trip. Whether that has anything to do with this forthcoming events, whether it was to do with the weed he smoked when on acid, I don't know. His friend Richard said something, which literally made no sense. Typical stoner error. This is where all the laughs come. Everyone began laughing hysterically, that kind of stoned laughing you simply cannot achieve in any sober state. Absolutely brilliant. Until He almost felt like he broke through some sort of sanity threshold and BAM. He was stuck in a loop. He was sat on a sofa, nobody else about other than his friend richard, sat on a sofa to the far left of him, staring right at him. Everyone who's done psychedelics knows what an infinite loop feels like - fucking awful. He imagined reality to have multiple floors (or dimensions maybe?), and that what he was experiencing was one "floor" above. As in, it actually felt like his reality was in a tall building, one story higher than "our" reality. There wasn't any sound of anything going on, I don't know what happened. All he could see was the all seeing eye and triangle in the center of his vision again. He would have these epiphanies, trying to express his sudden understanding of what the fuck was going on. He would say, "I get it. I get it now...see, that's the thing....that's the thing with acid, it's...", but would never finish. And it never came out of his mouth, it came out of Richard's. I don't know how it stopped, but it stopped, and he went to bed, telling everyone he had the most horrendous flashback. From this moment on, everything was turned upside down.
He returned to college the following weekend, terrified of what he had seen. He was a mess - he couldn't really roll a cigarette anymore, he was scared of the television, scared of darkness and silence and sleeping, he was quite a mess. He occasionally smoked weed, thinking "Ah, the flashbacks will have gone by now - i'm sure it was just a one off!!", yet everytime he would flashback, experiencing the same kind of stuff. Extreme incoherence of reality and conversations, major time distortions making everything feel like infinite time, and this was often off of very small doses, even 2 TINY tokes on a joint. Yet every time he planned to smoke, he almost forgot how terrible each flashback was. He forgot the pure terror, and when he realized it again, he would think that every stoner in the world felt like this. He had two good friends who are large stoners, and he was convinced that this was how they felt all the time.
Eventually, he just stopped smoking, stopped watching spoony videos about LSD and DMT and all this stuff, and just tried to live a normal life...and so he did. However, he would always go through waves of this stuff. It started off just reading loads of Erowid reports of trips and stuff like that, but eventually became more mature and informative...watching documentaries on DMT, reading books about astral projection and meditation, watching Spirit Science on youtube, and ending up with an extremely positive outlook on life. I could now say that SWIM is one of the happiest people I know. He feels wonderful, most of the time. He feels a bit spoony occasionally and reality is very fractured - he doesn't understand why other people don't "get it". They don't "get" why life is so weird. He has still never Astral Projected, but purely do to fear - he will lift himself out and experience pure terror again, and want nothing more than to be naive for a bit, immediately feeling disappointed in himself. But the question that I would love to be answered is, should swim trip again? Should he try a smaller dose of acid, to get over his fear and gain a more pieced up puzzle with an even more positive light? He would love to continue tripping, discovering DMT and psilopsybin and all sorts and accounting his studies, but he doesn't know where to begin now. He has tried ketamine and loved it, however he would not put that in the same category really, and doesn't plan to do it again.
SO YEH. That's Swim. My name is Calum, and i'm looking forward to looking on this site, exploring and seeking wisdom. I am also a musician, making a lot of stuff at the moment under the pseudonym "wise owl". You can hear my latest work here . Much love to you all
xo
