Dabbling with insanity, personal accounts.

[Asher7]

Hello, I wanted to get a little feedback from others on this.

What is the closest you believe you've come to crossing the line from stable sanity into "insanity". Anything from just losing your foundation to full blown detachment. What do you feel was the cause? What was it like and how would you describe it?

I'm sure this is a sensitive subject so as always participation is voluntary and if any aspect of it was too personal then of course that is your personal business. I'm just interested in the varying aspects of when your mind has been vulnerable and what led to it as well as what you believe brought you back or if you're still struggling what it is that helped stabilize it for a portion of time. My primary interest is what it was like and how it manifested itself in it's different ways. Thank you for any contributions.

 

[jiva]

when i was at my very first psytrance festival i had a way too big doese of LSD.
it was fine until the point when i had to go to pee through the rain and deep mud. (probably not the best idea i ever had to take acid on a festivals when it has been raining for days)
getting through the shops to the stage area where the toilets where at was hard, but when i was at the stage area there was a spot where a cable or rope was suspended above the road, and in the middle of the road part of it was hanging down.
when i walked by i felt like i was in the middle of a big town right in the middle of a big street crossing.
the cable became an electric cable and right then a group of policemen rushed by me on both sides.
they were looking for someone in the woods next too me, but at that point it freaked me out

it took all my strength to get back to the chillout tent where i knew for some reason the friendly people i met earlier could help me.
when i got there i was hardly able to speak but i could identify one of the nice man from before and just asked him for help.
the did some kind of a ritual to me. i have no idea how much of it was going on in my head but it was the most frightening and at the same time most beautiful things i have ever experienced.
my mind had slipped away and my sense of reality was completely gone. when i looked up the roof of the tent looked like the first aid tent, and part of the entrance to the tent sometimes looked like the backdoor of a first aid vehicle - i was convinced that they are taking me to a hospital.
for parts of it i felt like i was already in a mental hospital and i had already thought about how to tell my parents and boss that i just went insane, i took acid and now my brain is fried.
it took me the better part of the night to realize person i thought was from the red cross was actually just a very friendly man who likes to help out others in need.

As it turns out my samaritan was actually in the place i thought i was, he had taken 16 tabs of acid he found on the ground at ozora and a few hours later a friend of his through a bottle of acid at his face.
he woke up 3 months later in a asylum for mentally ill

this one took me while to process.

 

[nexalizer]

Pretty much on every big dose of a psychedelic that takes some time to build up (so, for instance, not with DMT).

Things start getting so weird, it crosses my mind: "this time I did it, there's no coming back from this" .. as the intensity magnifies and I try to struggle for control.

Hopefully then either the dose was so high that this struggle will be fruitless, or I manage to pacify myself and lean into the trip.


This is not something I do often / at all anymore, it's too psychologically demanding/violent for my taste .. even though without fail, every single time I let go at this level, the result was a mystical experience.

 

[spacexplorer]

extremely intensely high lsd journey, then dropped back down and felt insane, closed off from the experience, retreated into my mind, still healing from it in some ways

 

[nina]

Psychosis definitely inspired a lot of my art - a lot of things went geometric!

 

[CosmicFool]

For four years I battled with a severe case of existencial crisis, not knowing if you really were alive or just a figment of imagination trapped inside a comatose brain would send me into panic attacks every time I had time alone, and I had a lot of it since my girlfriend at the time would be away at work on weekdays and if luck permitted, home on weekends.

I figured out, that if everything around me was just my imagination, the only way it would be true, was that I would not be able to experience new things, since everything were to be my imagination, my brain could only conjure up stuff I had already experienced, i.e. music, movies etc. So every day I had to find new stuff to experience. (found a ton of just awesome bands though)

On a retrospective, it all seems so stupid now, but back then it was my only lifeline to keep myself in check. At some points I wanted to check myself into a mental asylum but I knew that if I did that, I would never have a future working anywhere, and that was not a future I wanted. Eventually I decided that wether or not everything around me was just imagination, it didnt matter, my life was, and still is pretty good, so if I was imagining everything, I was doing a pretty damn good job at it.

Every now and then I get this kind of a jolt in my spine that reminds me of that unnerving feeling of that crisis, but Ive learned to embrace it.

 

[Northerner]

About 25 years ago I had an amphetamine sulfate binge. I'm pretty sure it was right on the cusp of truly overdoing it though. The breaking point/run consisted of about 6 days awake and 3 or 4 grams of amphetamine.

That resulted in a full paranoid psychotic break that left me hospital-izable, but uncatchable for about another week. The paranoia was still strong for another month. It faded again over about 3 months. A year later I was still having minor paranoid episodes but I had pretty much overcome it by then.

2 years after that I discovered psychedelics and quit amps.

I have never truly doubted my sanity since that time. I remember what it feels like to be "insane". I've taken hideous doses of LSD that have smeared me across the universe, strange cocktails that have given me full OOBE experiences without me even realising that I'm OOB, and jumped head first into almost every pool of psychedelia I can find. Though I have totally avoided some things like tropanes and other high risk substances. Even in my most whacked out moments I have always just accepted things as they are and not tried to take control, but rather just allow enough time for control to resume.

Though from that difficult amp experience I did learn temperance. Just because I can eat 8 of those acids and feel "fine" does not mean I can eat 16. And even if I can eat 8 it does not mean I should do that now. (it doesn't mean I shouldn't though :lol: ) There has to be a reason. Just because I can not eat or sleep this weekend does not give me the right to do that do my body again on Monday, he still needs those things.

I've been a strange cat at points in my life though, these experiences do not come without consequences. But still I've come back to baseline. We all do in time, with acceptance.

I completed another degree in my 30's and started a 2nd career and am now firmly settled. Every other person in the lab where I work does not even drink alcohol but somehow I fit in just fine. In fact the place would probably be boring without me. I'd say they are insane for living inside that realm and not venturing out. They would probably reject me if they knew who I am truly... that's ok. I can accept that too.