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Comment by vokep | Hacker News Reader

The difference is rarely do people wake from a dream and feel they ought to change their life in major ways as a result.

Curious what "high" doses of "plain old psychedelics" might be? I've never gone further than 200ug LSD.

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Check out erowid if you want some high dosage lsd stories. In the early 90s I encountered some "mop up" doses that were claimed to be in the 3000 mic range. I tried them twice.. first time during the Rodney king riots in SF (took half a mopup, started out really fun then devolved into a nightmare. Hid in the garden of a high end restaurant, literally inside a bush, watching the mayhem unfold on market Street.. Second time was while backpacking in pt Reyes and that was the best, most transformative drug experience I've ever had. I talked to a mushroom and learned a lot about my self and humanities relationship to nature.. But, at peak, I was completely disassociated. Basically blind/deaf to external reality for about 3-4 hours. I was with 3 other people.. and I think we were just rolling around in a meadow the whole time. Eventually we somehow ended up at the ocean, and the sunset brought us all to tears. In the 90s, the most commonly available doses here on the street were about 150 mics, and cost around 2 to 6 bucks. And the comedown was ugly. I've been told that cheap/old lsd, degrades into strychnine.. which is why the comedown is so harsh. On the high dose ones I did, the comedown was completely different. Nowadays I stick to the occasional couple of shrooms or a hit of molly once or twice a year. I think today I would have too much emotional baggage and ties to my consentual shared hallucination with humanity to do psychs that powerful again.

> The difference is rarely do people wake from a dream and feel they ought to change their life in major ways as a result.

I dunno about a major way, but I've had dreams which took days to properly snap back after, because the experiences felt so real that I felt an emptiness similar to bereavement for the fictional people that I dreamed about. That felt just as real to me as my experiences on DMT. I've also had Ketamine experiences that were similarly profound and have stuck with me since. Once I had a K trip which felt like I was outside of time, watching the cogs of the universe tick past instant by instant for all eternity. That experience snapped me out of a pretty depressive period of my life.

People of course have profound meaningful experiences on DMT, but I don't think its exclusive to it and any strong hallucinogen or dissociative can, in my opinion, have similarly strong impacts for some people.

I've had an experience and ego-death on 500ug. I've done DMT once. That LSD experience produced hallucinations, including 'data' in my field-of-view like I was using an AR app. I was looking into a mirror as it was happening - the 'resolution' of the experience was so high-fidelity it seems impossible to have occurred. I wrote a very detailed report after and even have a video of me describing what I'm seeing only moments after I can back to my 'self' post ego-death. It was every bit as fascinating as DMT. That experience was the most significant of my life.

Highest I've ever gone was 500ug LSD, and still, it was a more intense experience of the same "quality", not something completely different.

Five grams of a dried Psilocybe Cubensis strain.

Note: The experience lasts significantly longer than a non-ayahuasca DMT experience.

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