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any help? I feel like I'm drowning in derealization and visuals


driftingaway

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I went to a party with some new friends. I had just met them and they seemed really chill and they were older. (I'm 17) they were all in their early twenties. We got back to one of their apartments and hit the bong for a while, and conversation started flowing. Acid came up. I was interested since I hadn't really researched acid and my virgin mind thought it would just make someone laugh and have fun, be social etc. I have some social anxiety when I first meet people, and this was a room full of them. So I chirped up that I hadn't tried it, and a guy pulled three tabs out of a bag and handed me one.I later found out this particular tab was 25i. They told me what to do. Under the tongue yada yada yada. It tasted like shit. After about thirty minutes I was noticing that the walls were compressing and flowing and I freaked. My mother is schizophrenic. I was convinced I was having a psychotic episode, or my first experience with schizophrenia.. So I'm trying to act cool, playing it off, but I was panicking hard. Insanity has been a long standing intense fear of mine. I wasn't paying attention to the group now, I was really concerned so when they all got up to go outside I followed. When I stood up I started tripping pretty hard, and the walls were now looking like vortexes and I was seeing kaleidoscope-like patterns on furniture. My anxiety really kicked in and I started breathing heavy. I remember on the way out the door the feeling of just sheer dread and hopelessness pushed me onto the couch. I no longer felt in control of my mind. Little did I know all this was normal.. The group looked at me all stupid like why are you sitting down we're going outside and me desperately trying to fit in, I said idk I'm just stoned and got up and followed them outside. I do not remember most of the trip, I just recall this one part particularly where I was walking outside with two others that were tripping and two that weren't . I had a full fledged hallucination in which the world was completely stranded and dingy. I saw the two others that were tripping acting normal and talking on the phone walking in circles, yet I was looking at them from one focal point so I only saw them when they came in my line of sight. Simultaneously they both would appear, and look like they were just walking, happily talking, eating burgers, whatever. Every time they would get more sluggish, and I'm freaking the fuck out. They dont see me or acknowledge me. It got to the point where both of them were so sluggish that they were hunched over, stumbling, and their mouths were open and their eyes were desolate. Zombies. This is when I began thinking I had died and gone to hell. I was convinced. And I was so tore up inside because in church they described hell as a place of great torment, and I remember thinking, yep. This is it. I'm dead. And in hell. The world looked so slow, so desolate, and sad. This kept on going for a while, and suddenly stopped. I felt relieved of course, and i remember the female who was tripping say, "im tripping balls dude" to me. She looked normal again only her words trembled and seemed to vibrate. Her body looked like it was buzzing and when it did, colors would outline her like nothing I'd ever seen. we went into a room in the complex with a pool table and air hockey, like a lounge area. By this time I'm starting to let loose and enjoy it, and at one point me and the other two trippers stood in a sort of triangle and all saw the same exact pattern on the floor, it was like a beautiful mandala but bright purple, which we all agreed on. Now I'm buzzing, feeling fucking fantastic, all this is just the drugs, I'm not dead, hell yeah. So I decided to walk away and look at things and when I did I noticed myself going what seemed to be very very slowly... Like a slow motion movie, and when I turned around I saw them again. Making circles. Sluggish. All thoughts of being alive completely abandoned me and again I was convinced I was dead, and it was worse this time because I had been alive again. It was exactly how church described it. Torment. The plunging back into my only known reality and consciousness and then like a vacuum sucked up into this desolate wasteland where I was the only breathing feeling entity. This lasted about two hours. Two hours of pure, impenetratable hell. I don't remember coming back to reality. I just remember that I knew for sure that it was the drugs and I wasn't crazy and this time it was real. I don't know I just felt absolutely human. No visuals or sudden shard trips. We were just sitting on the bed in the apartment listening to techno talking about our trips. Mine was way different than the others described. Mine was not bad, dreadful. They talked about seeing the weather change suddenly as they walked,feeling colors, seeing the world as an animation. They said they loved it. I said nothing because I didn't want to look like a pussy or be the party pooper. When we were all absolutely positive we were back in a good frame of mind, we left. And I felt bad. Can't explain the feeling. It was just a looming sense that I experienced something that I wasn't prepared for. I went on about my life for about a month. And learned what a flashback was the first time I smoked pot after the experience. I felt myself fade out of my comfort zone to a place very familiar that just felt like death. I derealized. But I felt crazy because I only smoked pot.. I wasn't tripping, it wasn't so intense. I was fucking baked one second and then like an Axe, I was suddenly seeing the world as it is, except my sense of color was heightened. Everything looked so fake and surreal and I started wondering if I was an illusion and the growing sense of panic in my gut ruptured into a full blown panic attack. I couldn't make sense of the world, the room I was in, I recognized the people talking but it just seemed so wrong, out of place. They were laughing and looking at me, and I felt horrible. Like they had found me out for who I was . a loser. I thought I was going to die my heart hammered so fast. And as they continued to laugh my world became smaller and smaller until I felt like I was cooped up in a bubble, and being made fun of. These people were actually starting to become good friends too. Everyone I smoked after that the same effects popped up. The anxiety never flipped off. I didn't enjoy my weed highs. I was high once and felt myself shut off, panicked, by now I had learned to control my breathing, which was replaced by a physical feeling in my hands and ears that I was cold. The same sensation I got as a child when my dad molested me and I felt so guilty around my mom that my ears felt freezing. So I was fighting this attack while I was walking and I happened to look at my feet and for about three seconds I felt the exact same way as I did when I was in my own hell. Everything looked so fake, especially houses. Like cartoon cutouts, and I felt myself fade away and the zombie returned. I kept my panic episodes inside, and didn't tell a soul. I used the internet to alleviate my quiet that i was going insane. I learned of flashbacks and saw the hate posed by acid junkies online. They claimed flashbacks weren't real. They were so tell for me, but only when I smoked weed. I didn't quit though. I went out every night, with these same people, desperate as hell to fit in, and I smoked. Never paid a dime, just chilled. And most of the time my anxiety plunged me into a non responsive basket of self hatred. I wanted to experience a good pot high again and just be stoned but no, I saw a fake world, static and lonely. People talking, giving me awkward looks, and all the whole I just kept inside my own head criticizing myself endlessly. Them shit got worse. I was spending the night at a really good friends house, whom I had shared my anxieties and pain with. She wasn't worried and told me to stop smoking but I just couldn't let myself go back to not having friends. I was in bed, about to close my eyes when the same fluorescent mandala pattern just took over my vision. I was completely sober. But it was so pretty and I just decided at that moment that I was going to enjoy this. I was going to be normal. I was staring at the ceiling as this display of light transformed and morphed into different patterns. It was so beautiful but I let my eyes shift out of that trans-like encompassing focus just for a second to see if it changed colors or something. It disappeared completely. I looked out the window and this wave of cold shot through every part of me. My visuals were extremely vivid, exactly like acid.. The leaves on the trees morphed into spikes, a pinkish beam of light seemed to erupt from behind the trees, it just lit up what was a starry night. If I thought I had anxiety before, I was wrong. I was so scared I wanted to die. I felt so alone and I wanted to scream out but the fear in my spine just fixed my gaze on the visuals.I could see the yard and the porch and her cat so clearly yet it was 2 in the morning. I decided to look somewhere else to get my mind in a better place, my breathing was so rampant I was beginning to get light headed and I could feel my heart thumping so intensely i could hear it like the bass in a song. I looked at the room and it was stretching, I mean straight up.. like a rubber band vertically thrusting in and out. Everything looked like it was melting and the edges of the walls were undulating. I was in a state of pure terror. I had never wanted to die so bad in my life. I got up out of bed and ran to the door, scared to death that the room would somehow melt into nothing before I reached the door. When I opened it and saw the house, it was stretching in every direction and that same eery pinkish tint replaced every window. It looked like a haunted house. Dark, gloomy.. So fucking lonely. I went in my friends room and woke her up. I told her I needed her to just talk to me and be there, I couldn't stand being alone for one more terrifying second. I looked at myself in the mirror by accident and noticed that my skin was snow white. I felt numb, yet cold. I wouldn't let her touch me for about five minutes, I didn't want to look at her face, I had never seen her in one of my derealization, and it seemed like if I saw her in a new light (literally) then she wouldn't ever seem the same. I just felt like she was my last hold on reality. The last thing that had never been skewed by my altered perceptions. She was a glimpse into the reality I once lived in. So I didn't look at her. I let her hold me after a while. That took every ounce of fight and faith left in me. I read somewhere that "visuals came hurt you" and I was so tired of anxiety that I felt like to be held by my best friend would really help take some of the loneliness away, you know, like someone understood. There is comfort in understanding. It certainly helped and after a while I fell asleep. This has been very long so now I'm going to explain my symptoms of hppd so it doesn't get too tedious; but I wanted to kind of outline in depth some of the psychological triggers of my anxiety. Over the course of five months I have learned to control my anxiety. The derealization is very active to this day but I know that I am not an enigma or doomed like I did before. My visuals have been worse than that night at my friends house, but recently they haven't gotten better. They've transformed completely. I still switch into panic mode at least once a day, sometimes lasting upwards of an hour, yet i have learned to tamper with my feelings of complete isolation. The kind that fucks with me when I am convinced I am dead and the world is nothing but a panoramic projection. Now when I derealize, I panic for a second at the onset of it, because if you too go through it you know it hits you like a ton of bricks and it's completely overwhelming. Then I calm myself down, look around, colors still look extremely bright and people seem to be almost alienish, yet I know in my heart that I am real and that hppd is not only my personal hell. Knowing that is key if you are struggling. It alleviates symptoms so much, especially anxiety which in my experience is the main stressor. Aside from derealization and extremely bright colors, I have recently started seeing after glows. If I look at a fluorescent light and look away, especially at night, I see a floating orb, the size of the light, that starts as an outline and fills with color in seconds. Usually red, sometimes blue. Then the orb either spins really fast as It changes colors or it grows and intensifies and then floats away as a ball of fluorescent light that dissipates. I sometimes see walls, especially textured ones expand and contact. I don't see very well in the dark and if I do it's a glowing pattern or a shifty shadow in the corner of my eye. That is a common one. Shadows that aren't there that suddenly move. If I see a pattern like diagonal stripes, sometimes it stays in my vision and anywhere I look is accented with diagonal stripes. Objects often appear to be tilting, shaking, buzzing, or even melting. The tiles on my keyboard I'm using right now are looking like italics that are sliding around. This is almost always there, I've accepted or and sometimes it's even funny. I see shadows or dark images conjured by my eyes that look like irregular shapes. Lights sometimes flicker, and when I'm about to derealize, often my perception of light dims and give in to the kind of blinding light I mentioned before. Sometimes I get colors mixed up. Say I look at a red neon sign and then look at a street lamp, the street lamp will glow red instead of yellow. Visual snow is pretty common for me, as well as static like a TV that lost signal only way less intense. I have seen drifting dust that my friends couldn't see. Light is just very very radiant. And random. And I've learned to accept trails of colors coming into my vision. Weird I know. But it's pretty frequent. Seeing some of this stuff is sometimes easy on me psychologically. Almost humorous. Like I get to see a different world, with a different perspective. But a lot of the time I am very depressed. It's a very deep rooted depression, nothing really seems fun when you see shit that simply isn't there. I often feel frustrated, anxious, paranoid, and very afraid of nothing. And yeah, sometimes I take a massive leap outside of myself and observe. Observe the world in that strange light that makes my heart pound and chest tighten, contemplating whether I am real or not. My symptoms used to be absolutely horrible when they happened, but seldom. Now they range from okay to horrible, but it is pretty much constant. I have learned through my experience that thinking about visuals too much leads to anxiety and depression, or just a feeling of complete hopelessness. Like you can slowly feel yourself drifting and detaching from this world into a biting pit of insanity. Sometimes it makes me so upset with myself for doing so many drugs that ultimately gambled my sanity, that i want to die rather than slip away slowly. I worry a lot and question whether I'm going to make it out like the lucky ones or if I'm going to die seeing shadows creeping around me, and slinking around corners. It's terrifying. Insanity is just nothing short of terrifying. I have also done lots of drugs in order to cope with the depression aspect of this disease, which worked until the comedown exacerbated my paranoia. Especially MDMA. I was so sure I was done for, mostly because I took a hell of a lot every forty five minutes so my body was shit but also because my visuals had this glinting tinge to them that I had never seen, and I saw my friend that held me through glasses manufactured in hell. It really tore me in two seeing her bewildered face crumble in tears as I ranted about being an illusion in her head. Drugs will NOT help. You can't fight fire with fire. I hope someone reads this

and feels understood, I want you to teme your input on my hppd. Anyone that's roughed through it and came out scotch free... Does it sound like I'm making progress? Thank you anyone for reading until the end, and I hope you have gained understandimg from my experiences. I've done acid three times, trying to reverse the effects and each time I think I scratched my way into a new fold of my brain. But I do believe that there is a chance this will all fade away. Hold onto that hope like its motherfucking gold. And whatever you do, Don't let anyone tell you hppd is a myth or make you feel like shit because it was essentially your doing. It's hard enough that you have to be reminded everyday that your sanity isn't garuanteed.

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  • 6 months later...

woah that would take like all my brain power and 10 minutes to read ... anyways i read some of it ... i had a similar experience with 25-i it sucked. hardly remember anything 

 

my mom has bipolar and i have adhd, i thought i was schizophrenic i had the same fear. now i have hppd but it was from 2 months later, shrooms. 

 

message me if u wanna talk and have questions

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  • 3 weeks later...

You should know that derailization is brought on by fear and anxiety; but there isn't actually anything physically wrong with your brain. Once you manage to ignore the hppd as much as possible and not worry about it, even if its bad, the derailization will stop completely. But even thnking about hppd can bring it on instantly. Just keep on ignoring it as much as possible.

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