Drug Effect Taxonomy Mk.III

DISCLAIMER: This is gonna be one of my less edgy posts because this topic doesn’t intersect with the Culture War. It’s more a cultural prescription I’m offering. It’s basically a lecture on a facet of Transrightsactivism. You have been warned.

When someone asks you to describe your experience on a drug trip, what memes do you really have at your disposal? At first you might think simply recounting what happened with as much detail as possible would make sense. You’ll quickly realize there isn’t a whole lot of practical language for describing the effects you experience: “CEVs”, “OEVs”, “tracers”, and not much else. I find tracers to be a useful term, but I hate the terms CEV and OEV. They’re vague to the point where they confuse more than they help.

Sometimes people attempt to describe the entities we encounter on the trip like the infamous “machine elves”. Unfortunately, even the guy who started calling them that also described them as jeweled self-dribbling basketballs. Is that really what you thought of when you heard the phrase “machine elf”? That description wouldn’t be useful even if it was accurate.

That’s why people often resort to focusing more on the emotional states or events experienced during the trip, rather than the trip itself. In addition to boring notes on physiological stuff like heart rate, this is mostly what Alexander Shulgin did in TiHKaL and PiHKaL.

And forget about trying to explain a dissociative trip. Unlike with psychedelics, we never developed a cultural vocabulary that’s even somewhat useful in that regard. This is why I’m proposing a new way to classify drug trip effects; what’d otherwise typically be thrown under the umbrella term of “hallucination”.

Delusions: fleeting false beliefs

If you take nothing else from my classification system, take the meme of delusions. These aren’t technically hallucinations because they aren’t false sensory input, but rather fleeting false beliefs. Because they take place “deep” i.e. in the higher-order parts of the brain. In my drug effect classification system belief is not a component of any class except delusions.

I almost never hear anyone talk about these, yet they’re very prevalent in a wide variety of drugs and my personal favorite type of drug effect. I think people just don’t know what to call this. For instance, most people experience and enjoy the “feeling of being one with everything” on shrooms or acid but make the mistake of genuinely believing it and turning spiritual.

Delusions can be anything from thinking you’re god, to thinking you’re in hell, to thinking the Russian government is out to get you. Delusions are what can make that quest for taco bell on shrooms feel like a quest, not the mild warping in your visual field or even the overwhelming love. When you think you understood the secret to life on the peak of your most recent trip, but forgot it, you really just had a delusion that felt profound.

I def see how it might just sound like being stupid with extra steps. I need delusions to enjoy a trip. Take it from a 20 year psychonaut: plain hallucinations grow mundane fast without that delusional icing. Most people take psychedelics because they want to “get out of their own head”. It’s a drug trip; you “go somewhere”. When you have plain hallucinations with no delusions, all the dank visuals in the world might not be enough to trick you into thinking you’re not in your living room.

Most phenethylamines like 2C-E are great at inducing hallucinations with little delusion. Tryptamines like DMT are the best of both worlds. MDMA is the most notable exception to this and kind of does the opposite. Of course, take enough and anything works. Generally, deliriants are the best at inducing delusions, then dissociatives, then psychedelics, then weed. Even stims or opiates can cause very mild delusions. If you want to experience these yourself, I recommend a combo of 300mg DPH and 700mg DXM.

Projections: focused on mind’s-eye

When I first started doing drugs I read online these were “mind-movies” and that’s almost a worse descriptor than “closed eye visuals”. They’re kind of the inverse of perceptual distortions.

Basically your mind’s-eye becomes super vivid and you actually pay more attention to it than the information you’re receiving from your actual eyes. Ever had a hallucination that disappeared when you looked right at it? You’re still somewhat alert and looking around, but these little “movies” will simultaneously play in your mind’s-eye. The best approximation I can come up with is a really really intense open-eye daydream.

They’re more visual than delusions, but much easier to ignore. They’re less concrete than hallucinations, but much more interesting.

Once again I found it necessary to coin a term to describe dissociative effects. A generic projection would be taking a shit and seeing in your mind’s-eye that all the toilet paper rolls are flying around. The best example I’ve experienced was living what felt like a week in someone else’s life in a mind’s-eye projection. It was kinda like that game ‘Roy’ from Rick and Morty. The more I let myself slip into a trance, the more intense it became.

Projection combined with distortion and at least a hint of delusion results in astral projection and out-of-body experiences. It’s certainly possible to get these with acid or shrooms, it just takes higher doses, which I’m sure shamans do.

What distinguishes hallucination from the rest is your senses are actually being fooled. The tricky part of my new paradigm is making hallucination a class so I gave it 4 subclasses.

Alteration hallucinations: bits of false reality somewhere

With these, what you see is altered in clear ways. Unlike overlays you will be able to stare directly at these without them disappearing.

Undulation alteration is common on nearly every psychedelic. Most often people experience this by watching undulating walls or trees. Strangely, I find it difficult for these hallucinations to work when you look directly at other people.

Morphing alteration is something you’ll only get with tryptamines. I definitely get these the most easily on shrooms. If you really want to see this a great litmus test for some reason is watching cartoons while tripping. If Peter Griffin grows some extra eyes, you’re experiencing morphing alteration.

Color alteration is more common in phenethylamines. Often you’ll see these as flashes, but they can also occur as a general tint to everything you see. It sucks, but in my experience a common version of this is hallucinated cop car lights.

Tracers are tracer alteration hallucinations. At first you might think this is a type of perceptual distortion. However, even though your “framerate” of vision is lowered, your visual field is still actually seeing things that aren’t there.

The crystalline alteration or plastic way everything appears on the come-up of DMT is another perfect example. You don’t really hallucinate that you’re in a crystal palace. You simply look at your living room and it looks shiny enough to be made of crystal.

You can get alteration hallucinations for smell, sound, taste, and touch as well, but the best way I can describe it is feeling like I’m experiencing those senses in higher fidelity.

If you haven’t realized it yet, these are really the strongest visual hallucinations most psychedelics are capable of giving you. No fairies, aliens, or freaky shit like how hallucinations used to be portrayed in media. But that crazy intense shit that some trippers claim to see on a quarter of shrooms isn’t bullshit. What’s usually happening is a delusion causes people to genuinely believe these alterations hallucinations look like or are clearly indicative of that crazy intense shit they’re describing.

Overlay hallucinations: psychedelic patterns everywhere

Overlay hallucinations are definitely the least tangible hallucination type. Usually when people talk about CEVs or OEVs they’re referring to overlay hallucinations, although those terms are so ambiguous they could be referring to anything I’m talking about here.

Overlay hallucinations have a couple subcategories. By far the one most people experience are psychedelic overlays. This becomes really apparent on high doses of psychedelics and typically just phenethylamines. On lower doses, you only see these fractal patterns with your eyes closed, but these can quickly lead to mind’s-eye projections.

These are the easiest to explain because it’s basically the classic psychedelic pattern most people have been exposed to from pop-culture, just overlayed over your vision.

Sometimes these are combined with color alteration hallucinations, but usually these overlay patterns don’t have any discernible color. You know those phosphenes you “see” when you close your eyes and press on them? That’s the “color” of these hallucinations.

I’ve discovered that DPH can also do something similar to this with patterns copied from your memory, which I call deliriant overlays.

I remember camping and staring at the triangular tent logo on the come-up. During the peak and the come-down I saw that same triangle overlayed into a pattern on everything. Another time my friend saw the black and white outlines of an episode of the Simpsons on a turned off TV. Again, the “color” of these is that of phosphenes.

Fabrication hallucinations: complete sensation fabrication

Rather than merely altering or overlaying your visual field, it’s also possible to completely hallucinate fully autonomous entities. Because these hallucinations also tend to be accompanied by the sensation that there is a presence there, a “sixth sense hallucination”, some people are convinced these are real. Trust me, they’re not.

The most prolific drug that induces this is DMT, but again, I’ll recommend DPH. In my experience, DMT is like you get teleported to an alien party for 10 minutes and you get to stay pretty lucid. Ironically, the lack of delusion when doing DMT is what leads so many people to become evangelical about it.

DPH is more like all the people stored in your memory come out to play at random with the catch being that you forget you took a drug. At low intensity you’ll get these pussy shadowpeople who disappear when you look at them, and at high intensity you’ll look old friends in the eye, talk to them for 30 minutes, and only realize they don’t exist when you try to smoke the cigarette they hand you.

The auditory fabrications can be extremely vivid too even on weed. Most people who do DMT experience the crinkling/tearing sound, but when your fabrications talk to you it always seems to be telepathic. On DPH you clearly hear other people’s voices. If you try listening to music you will likely hear additional sounds.

I don’t think it makes sense to separate these into further subcategories because any difference in the experience of fabrication hallucinations on different drugs can almost always be chalked up to different delusions, emotional states, or other factors.

Distortion: skewed sensory input

Search for “hallucination vs distortion” online and the results are not very helpful. Shulgin himself even used this term, but he pretty much used it as a synonym for the umbrella term hallucination. As someone cooler and better than Shulgin, I have the authority to supersede him. I’m using it to describe the effect of perceiving things incorrectly without any actual change in the raw sensory input.

Basically, the part of your brain that processes size, direction, time, and other more numerical qualities of space-time transforms those perceptions in a consistent way. Unlike with other hallucinations, you’re not actually perceiving anything that isn’t there, you’re experiencing what is there in an incorrect way.

It’ll make more sense with some examples. Okay so imagine you’re holding a quarter in each hand and their sizes appear to be vastly different. Then, when you press them together the illusion breaks. They’re the same size. The quarters didn’t quickly grow or shrink in size to match their true form when you pressed them together, you just stopped experiencing the distortion.

Time dilation or time perceptual distortion is the most common example. Everything isn’t super-slow-mo, yet you still perceive time as taking forever. An example of an auditory perceptual distortion is music sounding lower fidelity or “washed out”, albeit with the same exact notes.

Kinesthetic perceptual distortion is the coolest distortion in my opinion is gravity rotating on DXM. I perceived the incorrect orientation of my body. This is also a key component in out-of-body experiences. Again, dissociatives in general are your best bet for experiencing this one, but even alcohol is sufficient to get the gist.

I’m down to debate the details in the comments. Do you at least agree my two main additions, delusion and projection, are useful for describing dissociative trips? Regardless, next week we’re getting conspiratorial with “Nofap: Feminist Psy-Op?”.