Trip reports

Ayahuasca trip reports

1. Handshake dose

Imperceptible

2. Low dose

Meditating with musical accompaniment for several hours. Very slow come up. For a long time it was hard to distinguish if the pleasant sensations and general calmness was due to meditation or Aya. Few hours in, Aya’s effects became perceptible. Closed eye hallucinations were very mild, but noticeably red in color, not very crisp or representative of much, rather just adding some color to the abstract background noise. The line between imagination and hallucination is still unclear. State of mind got deeply introspective. Felt some honest emotions on sensitive topics and was able to dive in deeper with acceptance and empathy. Sadness felt pleasant. Every emotion had an undertone of representing something profound and therefore was welcome.

Tried the Kasina headset. At around 40hz I stopped being able to tell that the light was flickering at all, it looked like the light was just constantly on. This was a stark contrast to sober or mushroom Kasina experience.

3. High dose

Come up seemed very slow at first. MAOI alone had a noticeable feeling. Hard to explain, calm and slow. No changes in visual perception but body felt heavy and light at the same time – easy to move but with resistance to starting movement. When I started noticing DMT-like changes in perception when looking at plants and trees around me, I decided to go for a swim in the ocean. It was very pleasant, and colors were both vivid and different: the sky seemed purple for example. Chilled out for some time to make sure effects had plateaued.

About hour and a half from first dose, another cup. The come-up this time was incredibly fast. Makes sense since first dose was likely mostly just preparing body with MAOI, with a small amount of unmetabolized DMT. Auditory hallucinations are signature to Aya, and they were very prominent. Being in the forest, it was hard to determine if the buzzing sounds resembling massive dragon flies flying around me. The volume and tone of the buzzing would change as if due to doppler effects of the sound source flying towards and away from me. There were no such bugs in this forest, I was well aware they were hallucinations. Though I must admit I had to look around to check a few times. It was constant. Slightly eerie for sure, even if it wasn’t cause for concern otherwise. I was very intruiged that the sounds were always directional. The spatial element of auditory hallucinations were perhaps more crisp than real life sound where there would be echoes and sound bouncing off objects. Another way to describe it would be helicopters flying around with varying motor RPM which modulates the pitch up and down as they move around.

Not much time later, closed eye hallucinations were getting quite intense, and chaotic. Hard to discern what I was even seeing although colors were very vivid. Lots of yellow, pink, purple. Too many different shapeshifting things going on at the same time, some entity-like, some geometric, all kind of mixed together. Lack of symmetry. Very hard to keep eyes open, and an intense urge to go to sleep sets in when I close my eyes – which likely would’ve been a transition into ego loss (or breakthrough experience) more so than sleep or blackout. I actively fought the urge to lose control and decided to get up, thinking I should probably stay able to take care of myself for the evening. Could barely stand up or walk at first, had to practice for a minute. Transition from the darkness of the night to the well-lit indoor was shocking, because that’s when hallucinations became highly synesthetic. The fast flicker of the LED light bulbs that was normally imperceptible sober became visible, but most importantly, they became audible! All the light sources around me were also SOUND sources. The buzzing was coming directly from the lightbulbs, such that the directionality of the sound would change as I looked around. I could hear multiple sources of buzzing, which correlated perfectly with the number and position of light bulbs around me. Total 100% synesthesia between light and sound for these particular light bulbs. Not all light has sound (i.e. fire). Assuming it’s related to AC power source causing high frequency flicker. Confirmed later that the light bulbs don’t emit any buzzing normally, so it wasn’t just an amplification of a quiet sound. It was, undeniably, synesthesia.

Moving from a bright room back into darkness also has an interesting effect that happens consistently: there are colored ripples appearing in my vision, notably the lower left & right corners, in a pattern like \\\\ ////. The patterns are not on the world sheet in my perception, it’s as if they’re on the 2D TV screen that is showing a projection of the 3D environment. High frequency ripples, synesthetic in nature, as if my vision is “buzzing”. My eyes quickly get used to this and they disappear within seconds, but appear again when I go back into bright light and back into darkness.

There was generally a theme of sensory input energizing my perception and the extra energy resonating for a few seconds in the form of hallucination (visual or auditory). Another theme was that all this buzzing, flickering etc. were all strobes of different types, essentially. I don’t recall other psychedelics having such strong strobey, high-frequency effects.

I spent a lot of time sitting still under a blanket. The body buzz was incredibly pleasurable. I noticed that I had zero fidgeting reflexes. Normally I move and fidget a lot. Here I was completely still for very long periods. It felt like all the excess energy that normally flows into keeping my hands busy was being captured into high frequency vibrations instead. It was a nice feeling, even though I had some background mental tension.

Trying to fall asleep was near impossible that night. I had interesting thought loops in the form of melodies or chunks of songs that the Shaman had put on. Very detailed and persistent. Completely new level of “having a song stuck in your head”.

Mushroom trip report

One novel thing I’d like to mention in terms of perceptual effects with the low-ish dose mushrooms was putting on the Kasina goggles, because I could reproduce the same hallucination every time I put the goggles on. It always put me in a space as if I was flying through a Hopf fibration (shown below). Over the course of an hour or so I would occasionally put it back on and immediately enter the same exact space.

The most prominent aspect was that the space was 3d, and there were 3d contour lines in it. The lines are curved, and they are moving & shapeshifting as if they are polynomials having their parameters dialled. The rotations would often change direction as they flew through me. Similar to walking towards a rainbow, the contours never actually passed through me, they were always far away even though they seemed like continuously coming closer or passing sideways.

The Hopf-like contours are the stable aspect of sitting in the Kasina state. Some of the more temporary visual effects would only come during color or frequency transitions in the Kasina headset. Whether it’s slowing, speeding up, or color shifting, there would be an effect of multiple colors appearing in the visual space, likely due to the Kasina’s off states triggering opposite colors. For example a yellow color flashing would induce purple colors, or red flashing would induce green colors. The colored visuals often were made of plaid-like patterns, made of squares and angled shapes, that appeared mostly inside the contour lines of the visuals described above.

Note: the below videos aren’t replications directly, rather resemble the types of patterns that would follow the contour lines, sort of fill them in. The important feature I’m trying to highlight is that there were high-level features that are very curvey & 3d, and then low level features painting them in that were 2d and very angular/square/plaid in features.