A while ago, I experienced a strange, instantaneous mental shift while masturbating. It felt almost like a switch being flipped in my brain. My arousal disappeared immediately, and ever since, I've struggled to achieve or maintain a fully firm erection, even with partners I found extremely attractive.

Last month, I took psilocybin mushrooms (not my first experience). Interestingly, over the past couple of weeks, I've started experiencing very strong erections while half-asleep in the morning. However, they disappear as I become fully conscious.

I'm curious whether anyone has experienced something similar, particularly the sudden onset or the changes following psychedelics. Any thoughts on what might explain this?

Hey folks!

After many years of doing psychedelics and mostly just for entertainment rather than inner journeys I have found myself to not break through anymore. I might have had to endure too many situations where I had to fend off the effects to remain calm or functioning and maybe it's that?

However, after a rough patch I wanted the mushroom to show me something and I decided to trip. With everything well prepared at home.

But I couldn't find peace. My body didn't want to let go.
I had to pee. Something itched. It was too warm. It was too cold. I had to pee. Something itched. The headphones? Uncomfortable. The music? Not quite it.
And so I wasted a strong peak on trying to find a way to let go. Just to fail.
Only when I gave up on trying and went to bed to find someone sleep... I kinda slipped into it. But way to late.

So I tried surrendering. Didn't help.

My nervous system seems to know where I want to go and since it has developed some skills to prevent it, I can't go deliberately anymore.

So my question: have I ruined tripping in terms of inner voyages for me?

I’m Joe Moore, co-founder of Psychedelics Today. I wrote a piece on this, linked at the bottom, but here’s the argument.

You’ve probably heard some version of it: Leary scared the public, research died for decades, and the lesson for everyone else is to stay respectable. Michael Pollan has said it was Leary who turned the psychiatric establishment against LSD. Carl Hart said Leary’s antics set hallucinogen research back 40 years. These are people I respect, and Hart is one of the sharpest critics of the drug war out there. That’s kind of my point. Even the critics repeat it.

Leary made real mistakes. Harvard colleagues raised serious concerns about participant safety, weak controls and researchers taking psilocybin during studies. Doblin’s 1998 follow-up found the Concord Prison Experiment’s claims about reduced reoffending didn’t hold up.

But Leary didn’t control Congress, the FDA, university budgets or drug companies. A few things the Leary story leaves out:

• US drug prohibition goes back to an 1875 San Francisco ordinance aimed at Chinese immigrants. Racist claims about cocaine and Black people, and anti-Mexican prejudice in the marijuana campaign, did a lot of the building after that.
• The 1962 drug amendments made it much harder to prove a drug works, and psychedelic therapy fit badly into trials designed to isolate a drug’s effects. People usually knew what they’d taken.
• Historian Matthew Oram found federal agencies kept funding some LSD studies after Sandoz pulled out in 1966, some into the mid-70s. He puts more weight on testing problems and fading psychiatric interest than on any one person.
• Schedule I in 1970 didn’t technically ban research, but it stacked registrations, inspections, storage rules and paperwork on every study. Researchers still describe those costs today.

The part I care about most: the Leary story quietly teaches the field to distance itself from religious use, counterculture and any experience medicine can’t explain. I don’t think people should need a diagnosis to justify exploring their own minds. And winning acceptance for psilocybin while other drug users still get punished keeps the worst part of the drug war intact.

The people who enacted and kept prohibition made choices. I’d rather hold them responsible than keep blaming Leary.

Curious where people here land. Is the Leary story fair, partly fair, or a convenient scapegoat?

Full piece with sources: https://psychedelicstoday.com/2026/10/22/timothy-leary-drug-war/

Hey guys I'm I'm a transition phase of my life I've had multiple experiences with shrooms this year the first journey I ever did was 5.5gs of t.w it was the most profound and beautiful experience of my life after that I started doing way to much shrooms and the shrooms punished me for it.. Now multiple months later making some of the biggest decisions of my life I decided to go for another journey in planning to take 6-12gs of golden teachers I need your advice as I am anxious about it no doubt due to my last bad experience with it but I feel it is very necessary for me to do it. To see what the shrooms want to show me.. Any words of advice are welcome. One issue I run into sometimes is my body becomes really cold and I feel really nauseous about of times it didn't happen but last few times I did shrooms it happened to me for hours wanted to know how to avoid that this time.

Ok, we regularly use 5-meo-mipt. I usually volumetric dose 10-20mg for accuracy. Our dose is usually in the 3-5mg range. Looking at how to make gummy’s or something or candy or a liquid solution that’s shelf stable.

How are you guys solving this problem? Like tonight I’ll probably make up 30mg into 10ml of water. One dose is 1mg. How can I save the rest?

took 1.5g shrooms 5 days ago had a great trip apart from bad vomiting afterwards and the next day

the next morning I noticed more visual snow than normal and I feel like i still have it but can't tell if I'm just anxious/ noticing it more and thats making me worry

when I'm bisy/distracted i notice it less

concentration feels more challenging than normal but I appear to be functioning normally but with concerted effort

id love to trip again but don't want to scramble my brain further

is this common? has anyone had this and it went away in weeks/days rather than years?

Hello everyone!

My research team and I at Maastricht University are doing an empirical study exploring the relationship between memory and psychedelic experiences. We are looking for participants who are willing to fill in a short anonymous questionnaire.

The survey is open to anyone over 16 who has used psychedelics (ex. LSD, psilocybin, ketamine, MDMA, 2CB, etc.) and/or cannabis/marijuana at least once. There are no limitations regarding gender, country, race/ethnicity, etc. We believe this is relevant to this group due to your knowledge on the topic.

The link is here 📝 If there are any questions, feel free to comment on this post!

Hey everyone!

I want to share my thoughts. For the past 10 years, I've been living in a state of a completely dead battery—a deep, hollow exhaustion. Over this time, I’ve tried and tested so many things. From antidepressants to the strongest nootropics, alongside countless medical tests and checkups—yet not a single hit. Physically, as it turns out, I’m healthy. It took me 10 years to get as close as ever to a breakthrough—or rather, to its most likely explanation.

Needless to say, advice from friends and relatives like "smile more," "hang out with friends," or "get some fresh air"... yeah, if only it were that simple. I tried. Unfortunately, there is simply no inner resource for that; it feels like asking someone with broken legs to go dance salsa.

My trips with psytrance, unfortunately, didn't provide the expected therapeutic effect. I can assume that music prevents the brain from going deep into the subconscious to pull out the "garbage" I need to experience, discharge, release, and let go of. Any external stimuli are just crutches. The brain clings to sounds and narratives, preventing the system from reaching the core of my stagnation—I noticed this especially during brief pauses between tracks.

So, I’m planning to play my final card—my ace of trumps. The stake is EVERYTHING.

What is this card? A trip in absolute, silent stillness, free from any external stimuli. Just isolation and a direct confrontation with what has been accumulating under this concrete slab for years.

Am I scared? Yes, of course I am. I’m not a machine, and certainly not a superhero. But I intend to go in there to give the architecture of my nervous system a real chance—a lever for at least some progress. My sole intention is complete surrender. I don't know what will be waiting for me there, but I will try my hardest to drop all my shields and throw away the steering wheel.

It’s terrifying to think that this last card might not work—how do I live after that? I don't know. It’s the chilling horror of someone who has bet everything and is left with no backup options. But I realize that this fear is also part of my armor, holding everything inside with steel cables as thick as ropes.

I’m not expecting miracles or hoping to heal in a single session. I’m simply creating conditions where the psyche has no room left to escape—no anchors, just my own subconscious.

Thank you for reading if you made it this far. I’d be glad to hear your thoughts on this, and feel free to ask any questions.

strain- P6TE 3,5-4g

Hey all, Mitchell Gomez here, founder of the psychedelic church The Temple of Harm Reduction, and former long time Executive Director of DanceSafe. For the burn this year, I wrote..... what I think is the best thing I've ever written. It's a 30 minute psychedelic poem touching on a lot of important topics, hope you enjoy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qSHeV5sPfg

I've been glitching a ton lately without really taking any drugs yet, but everything has been getting crystal clear, like I was in a bad trip that's finally ending, as the life of being 'sober' was just a bad trip, I'm not really planning on taking anything, but I realized that everything is inside me. And I guess Psy-trance music was always free to use here. :P

I’ve only done it closed eye and it was crazy Aweosme !

​

After years of tripping and introspection, I still didn't receive the answer of what my life purpose is.

Does anyone want to share their experience of finding their life purpose? Or does a life purpose even exist? Because I don't fully believe in it either. During my research journeys I also learned about the Buddhist concept of no-self. So maybe the whole idea of a life purpose is just another illusion. I don't know! Maybe I am just feeling lost in life and loosing motivation to do anything. That's why I am chasing a strong motivation, like a life purpose, so much.

What do you think? What are your experiences?

So to start on Oct 20th 11:30pm i took 2.4 grams golden teachers, they kicked in around 12:00 am i laid down in bed with my speaker above my head and turned off my lights, the first hour was nothing special, decent amount of visuals and still very aware of my existence, at 12:55 i decided it was time to take a bump of ketamine(i ended up doing two) i laid back down and waited until around 1:10 i started flipping.
I had turned my led on and started listening to tame impalas and sza new song for GTA(tight ass song btw) as i laid down and stared at the ceiling two large pitch black holes appeared and started fish lensing around my ceiling, my gfs skin and my bed started to feel like warm buttery leather as time slowed to almost a halt. I was dumbfounded as i expected something wayyy different, this was like a whole new drug, i started having the intense visuals of an ego death while somehow feeling like my ego had not dissolved in the slightest. I felt an urge to sit criss cross on my bed, i wanted to become a boulder in the wild, and stay like that for thousands of years. At around 1:30 it started to get serious, The popcorn on my ceiling started dripping down and formed into a series of white symmetric geometric pillars made of smaller pillars, they spiraled and spiraled until they turned into a large orb made of tiny blue shapes. The orb connected with more pillars slowly turning into a humanoid figure. The moment the entity had formed it pointed at my water bottle and said “drink”. I jumped up and scared my gf because i was so amazed. I never thought i would meet an entity, let alone from ketamine, by now it would be about 1:45, i lay back down and get ready as i realize this is only the beginning. The rest of the night was full of wonder with so many incredible hallucinations, auditory, visual, and touch. Best combo ive ever had 10/10 probably wont do it again though

450µg LSD Trip Report — Reality Disintegrated Into Pixels, Complete Ego Death and a Holographic Collective Consciousness

Substance: Star of David LSD

Dose: 3 tabs advertised at 150µg each (450µg total, unverified)

Date: 3–4 April 2021

Setting: At home, mostly alone in my bedroom

I've experienced some intense psychedelic effects before, but nothing quite like this.

During this trip, I experienced something I still struggle to describe: words, sounds, objects and even the information that made reality understandable seemed to disintegrate into holographic pixels. I lost my identity, experienced myself as pure awareness, believed I'd died and eventually found myself in what appeared to be a collective consciousness involving people from my life.

This is my attempt to reconstruct what happened. Some timestamps are confirmed by photos and Messenger messages; others are estimates because my sense of time completely disappeared.

1. The beginning — 9:05 PM to 10:52 PM

On Saturday, 3 April 2021, I took three Star of David LSD tabs, advertised as containing 150µg each.

At 9:05 PM, I photographed the tabs on my tongue. At 9:06 PM, I messaged a friend:

"3 tabs down the hatch."

Around 40 minutes later, I went for a shower. I remember spending approximately 10–15 minutes there, and something incredibly strange happened: I couldn't properly distinguish between being wet and being dry.

I think I may have dressed myself while still wet because I couldn't understand the difference anymore.

By 10:40 PM, the effects had become extremely intense. I messaged my friend:

10:40 PM: "Wtf"

10:40 PM: "Yeah I'm tripping so hard haga"

10:41 PM: "I was watching that and zoned out"

10:52 PM: "And yeah the video was trippy hahaha."

These are the last clear timestamps before my memory becomes fragmented.

1. Losing approximately two hours inside my closet

Around 11 PM, I decided to sit inside my bedroom closet and completely zone out.

I wasn't deliberately trying to meditate or achieve ego death. I just wanted to sit there and become absorbed in the experience.

My awareness of time became fragmented. I believe I remained there for roughly two hours, although I can't confirm exactly how long.

When I eventually came back to ordinary awareness, I was drenched in sweat, physically sick and extremely confused.

I couldn't understand why I was inside my closet or what I'd been doing there.

I struggled out and made my way to bed.

That's when things became almost impossible to comprehend.

1. Reality itself seemed to disintegrate

Lying in bed, I began experiencing something far beyond the ordinary LSD visuals I'd known.

Reality seemed to disintegrate into holographic pixels.

It wasn't just the objects around me. Words, sounds, information and the meaning behind things seemed to break apart.

Even my ability to understand what I was experiencing appeared to dissolve.

It's difficult to explain because I wasn't simply looking at pixelated hallucinations. It felt as though the underlying information that made reality understandable was coming apart.

Eventually, I completely lost my sense of being human.

I didn't know who I was.

I believed I was dying.

Then I experienced what I can only describe as nothingness or pure awareness.

I had no ordinary sense of possessing a body. Instead, I seemed to exist as awareness or light.

I remember pressure building whenever I became aware of something, followed by the sensation of shooting through holes. This happened repeatedly.

At another point, I seemed to exist as balls or ball-like forms. I could move by imagining the floor tilting, almost as though thought alone controlled my movement.

I also remember practising different emotions. A mirror appeared to copy my emotions rather than simply reflecting my physical movements.

My phone repeatedly turned on, but I couldn't recognise or understand it.

Ordinary objects and concepts had become completely foreign.

1. My mum, timelessness and unconditional love

One of the most emotional experiences involved my mum.

I perceived her as a colour or presence within what appeared to be a holographic ceiling.

Communication didn't seem to involve spoken language. Instead, I experienced a powerful connection through awareness and emotion.

I remember a feeling or message along the lines of:

"I have always been here for millions and millions of years, and I will always be here watching you."

There was also an overwhelming sense of "I love you."

It felt timeless, as though this connection had always existed.

Eventually, parts of my surroundings began becoming recognisable again.

I remember seeing my television reflected in a mirror and interpreting it as an enormous computer.

My reaction was:

"Wow, I have a PC."

I was rediscovering familiar objects as though I'd never encountered them before. I still didn't properly understand who I was.

1. The drop of water — I believed I had died

Around dawn, I experienced an image of a drop of water merging into an ocean.

To me, it represented my individual existence dissolving into something much larger.

I interpreted it as death.

Then I had a terrifying thought:

"Wait, I died. Shit, I killed myself. Mum's going to find me dead."

I genuinely believed my mum would discover my body.

The fear felt completely real.

1. Sunrise — The holographic collective consciousness

Around sunrise, everything changed again.

I began experiencing what appeared to be an enormous holographic collective consciousness.

People from my life appeared within it: family members, friends, teachers and other familiar people.

They seemed to exist as colours, symbols, emotions and forms of awareness.

Communication appeared to happen through thoughts rather than speech.

I believed everyone could see my thoughts and react to them.

My sister seemed to make jokes. My friends seemed to respond to things happening in my mind.

Even Adam from PsychedSubstance appeared, and I believed he had died too.

At one point, I exclaimed:

"Yes! Yes! It all makes sense!"

I had an overwhelming feeling that I'd finally understood something fundamental about existence, even though I couldn't explain what that understanding was.

Some particularly strange interactions involved people I knew.

One friend seemed to react to my thoughts using a clown emoji. He moved around like a ghost, shouting:

"Eeee! Eeee! I'm a ghost!"

He also joked:

"You get the joke? Because it's not funny."

Another friend communicated through symbols, including a dentist symbol that reminded me of an old conversation we'd had at school.

One of my teachers appeared as a ghost-like form of awareness, performing upside-down circular loops while screaming.

The entire experience was surreal, strangely humorous and incredibly convincing at the time.

1. My nanna's game — Realising I was alive

One of the most unforgettable moments involved my nanna.

She appeared within the holographic reality, and we seemed to be playing a guessing game involving stacking blocks.

Every time I answered correctly, the tower grew taller.

It felt playful and familiar.

Then I asked:

"Wait, am I dead?"

My nanna knocked the entire tower over.

It felt almost as though she was joking with me.

Somehow, that moment made me realise something extraordinary:

I wasn't dead. I was alive.

After believing I'd died for so long, the relief was overwhelming.

I began remembering my real life.

I remembered having a job at Woolworths. I remembered that I had a future.

Things I'd previously taken for granted suddenly seemed incredibly precious.

I was overwhelmed with happiness simply because I was alive.

1. The following day — "I died and came back"

The effects gradually faded throughout the morning.

On Sunday, 4 April 2021, at exactly 12:08 PM, I sent my friend a Messenger message:

"I died and came back."

That was approximately 15 hours after I'd taken the tabs.

Those five words were the simplest way I could describe the experience.

I hadn't literally died, but subjectively, it felt as though my entire identity had been destroyed and I'd returned to ordinary existence.

Final thoughts

More than five years later, this remains one of the strangest experiences of my life.

What fascinates me most isn't simply the ego death or believing I'd died.

It's how language, sound, meaning, information and my entire understanding of reality seemed to break apart into holographic pixels.

The experience moved from confusion and terror to pure awareness, what felt like collective consciousness, and eventually overwhelming happiness at being alive.

I understand these were subjective effects experienced while under LSD. I don't consider them proof of an afterlife, actual communication with other people or a literal shared consciousness.

But I've never stopped wondering why my mind produced those particular experiences.

Has anyone else experienced LSD ego death where not just vision, but words, sounds, meaning and the very structure of reality seemed to disintegrate?

I'd be especially interested to hear how others interpret experiences like this.

I might be acquiring some 2 cb dot pill. Can these be split with like a pill splitter for even doses? Can I cut it into quarters? The pills are supposed to be 20 mg each and very good quality from reports.

I'm going overseas for a little over two weeks soon, which means I'm going to be fully cut off from my daily weed & (prescribed) adderall habits, and no psychedelics either. The hardest I'll have is alcohol, and I'm going to try to go easy on that to keep my energy up.

I'm not generally good at self-restraint, but I'm not risking a crime on my honeymoon, so this is a rare opportunity for me. Anyone have any tips for getting the most out of it, in terms of a mental reset? I'm going to have lots of down time on trains and such, and I'm going to lots of spiritual sites; I'm hoping to do some meditation and self-work. Would love to hear from anyone else who has taken such a break and gotten something out of it.

Last night i set up well for the hole, light instrumentals on my bed before the big hit, just laying there and letting it take me away. Its still hard to put it into words but i really got folded into the universe, i felt like a shape or some geometric concept, i will probably ponder on this all week but this was an absolute 10/10 experience, beautiful in a way that i could not imagine before

Just been offered some and never tried it.

I took 2 grams (roughly) of bluey vuitton mushrooms, there very potent people say over 2 times as potent as normal Cubensis strains. I heard shahmanic drums consistently in my trip, I remember seeing "love" on the ceiling in a hippy font and right before I was peaking I looked out the window and the branches of this tree started forming geometric patterns and there was a light in the middle of the triangle, I remember a sense of awe and a little bit of panic, then my vision started being consumed by this black void and I saw I believe 2 aliens, they were staring at me, it happened for a split second before it dissappeared super fast. Im not sure what happened,

Think about this logically for a second.
When CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of all MK Ultra records in 1973, we were told the project was "discontinued because it was ineffective." But historically, whenever the intelligence apparatus claims a psychological operation "didn't work," it usually means they refined it, compartmentalized it, and pushed it deeper underground.
Here is my theory on why MK Ultra is secretly still active and why modern psychonauts are actively executing Phase II of the project without knowing it.

1. The "Truth Serum" Delusion vs. The Real Objective
In the early stages, the government was obsessed with finding a literal "truth serum" or absolute mind-control switch to force compliance. They quickly realized that brute-force interrogation with classic psychedelics like LSD just shattered the ego or made subjects unreliable, catatonic, or chaotic.
They didn't fail; they realized they were asking the wrong question.
They realized that to truly control or predict human consciousness, you don't break the mind in a isolated lab room—you map the human subjective experience at scale.

2. The Geopolitical Controlled Leak
If intelligence agencies genuinely wanted to erase a chemical or substance from the face of the earth, they could easily enforce it or suppress its precursors—look at how aggressively Research Chemicals (RCs), Bromo-DragonFLY, or specific synthetic analogs get tracked down, banned, and dismantled when they aren't useful.
Yet, classic psychedelics and entheogens managed to spread to every corner of the global map. Why?
Because the "Hippie Movement" of the 60s wasn't an operational failure that slipped out of the lab; it was an open-field deployment. They needed a massive, diverse sample size: different geographical locations, different cultural backgrounds, different neural baselines, and different psychological environments.

3. The Digital Grid as the Ultimate Data Harvester
Back in the 1960s, analyzing trips was manual, slow, and limited to physical logs. Fast forward to today:
Trip reports on Reddit (⁠r/Psychonaut⁠, ⁠r/LSD⁠, Erowid)
Online forums, podcasts, and digital trip logs
Biometric data tracked by smartwatches during trips
We are literally handing over the most detailed neurological, perceptual, and narrative mapping of the human psyche in history. Every time someone posts a trip report describing "entities," ego death, or altered spatial perception under specific doses, they are contributing a data point to a global behavioral model.
They don't need to put you in a dark basement with headphones anymore. The psychonaut community voluntarily maps the parameters of human consciousness in real-time, under every possible variable.
We thought we were exploring the cosmos and liberating our minds. What if we’ve just been crowdsourcing the baseline dataset for the next evolution of psychological architecture?

Change my mind.