Author: Andromeda ✨
First written: 2021-07-19
Context
Demographic information:
Age: 24
Sex: Male
Ethnicity: European descent
Weight: ~70kg
Height: 5’9
Substances consumed:
T+ 0:00 110ug LSD (sublingual)
T+ 0:25 55ug LSD (sublingual)
T+ 1:15-5:00 6 balloons nitrous oxide (inhaled)
T+ 2:45 180mg MDMA (oral)
T+ 2:45-7:00 Various supplements to protect against possible MDMA harm (ALCAR, ALA, Vitamin C, Magnesium, Noopept)
T+ 6:30 4mg zopiclone (oral)
Set and setting:
In a group of 10 people (mixture of close friends) at a psychedelic / burner party with >200 attendees. We were all wearing trippy costumes, and the event was underwater themed with different rooms containing different sensory technologies. We were all well-rested and in a good mood, most of us had been to these parties before. Two music stages at the event, and lots of spaces with couches and interactive art to chill out and have fun.
General information:
- Well-rested.
- Generally high hedonic setpoint.
- Lots of experience with LSD (taken semi-regularly for the past few years, usually outdoors).
- Some experience with MDMA (ranging from 50-170mg doses).
- Have candyflipped twice before, but on lower doses & spaced further apart.
Report
My experience at the event was fairly typical of taking psychedelic drugs at trippy parties, which is to say that it was a lot of fun and involved dancing, eye gazing, and nangs (i.e., nitrous oxide baloons). The remarkable experience which prompted me to write this trip report occurred later in the evening after leaving the event with my two friends Stardust and Moonlight (pseudonyms). They were staying on the far side of town, so I offered them my sleepout and I planned to sleep in a spare room in the main house where I was staying. Before going our separate ways, we each took approximately 4mg of zopiclone to help us sleep – a drug which I had taken several times before on the comedown of LSD to kill the trip. The following reported hallucinations were completely unexpected and occurred on a roughly similar timescale for me and Stardust, despite being in separate rooms and not communicating with one another about our experiences (and thus, potentially biasing any observations we might have made to one another).
Lying in bed I began to notice shadowy outlines of people huddled together and standing over me. Focusing my vision on them I couldn’t notice any hard lines separating different parts of their bodies, which were partially translucent (dark, but I could see faint outlines of objects behind them). Their faces were smoothed over with no discernible features, and they appeared to be oriented toward me looking down at my lying body. When I shone a torch from my phone, they shuffled away from the beam and dissolved into the walls of my room, returning after I turned off the torch. The second interesting thing about these entities was that while listening to music with my IEMs (in ear monitors), I could hear them talking to each other and make out certain words (for example, my name being spoken). At times it seemed like they were taunting me, but at other times it was unclear. The voices I heard sounded like reproductions of familiar voices from friends that I had attended the party with, and when I stopped the music their talking ceased. It is worth noting that I have never hallucinated autonomous beings before – either drug-induced or otherwise – so I was rather excited by the experience.
Rather than lying on my side, I decided to lie on my back so that I could not see these shadow entities and increase my likelihood of falling asleep. On the contrary, after a few moments of staring at the celling a woman in white robes manifested above me and began to drift downwards. Like the shadow entities, she did not have a face, but I could see her garments in remarkable detail. She was oriented horizontally to my own body, and when she was about a foot or two away from me, she stopped and just floated there. I could sense no ill will from her; it was instead as if she was observing me. At this point I turned over to get my phone from the bedside table, and she disappeared. I had received messages from Moonlight during this ordeal, saying that Stardust was “losing her mind” and seeing figures and objects all around their room (which they were sharing). I decided to investigate and exited the house.
When I arrived at the sleepout the lights were on and both Stardust and Moonlight were sat up on the bed. After briefing each other on our experiences I discovered that Stardust had been seeing entities as well, with a striking resemblance to Moonlight’s costume at the party that we had attended. Like my hallucinations, she reported that she couldn’t see their faces, and that their bodies were also partially translucent. Unlike my experiences, Stardust’s entities had interacted with her, holding out unidentifiable items for her to take (but which she of course could not). Then, with the lights on, Stardust began to see small pieces of plastic raining down from the ceiling – like snowfall. She also began to see the carpet in the sleepout being pulled from side to side by little people who were running around, the size of insects.
After she reported this, I too began to see the carpet being pulled from side to side, though my hallucination was more as if the carpet was a foot deep with multiple layers drifting in different directions. I then began to see small people running around on the carpet, building small houses and sailing down small canals which segmented the streets. As the hallucination progressed, the small people began to build larger buildings, and more of them appeared, until the carpet was brimming with hundreds (possibly thousands) of these figures going about their daily tasks and continuing to expand their civilisation. Then, in the corner of the carpet, I saw thousands of tiny black dots suddenly erupt, spraying all over the city. This did not seem to perturb the small figures, who continued about their daily tasks without much regard to the dots (which looked about the size of large boulders to them). While Stardust and I were observing this miniature unfolding civilization, Moonlight wasn’t, but at some point it just clicked and he reported hallucinating it too (minus the black dots).
At this point I decide to enter back into the main house and try to get some sleep, but on my way to the guest bedroom I see the same phenomenon occurring on the carpet (which was a different colour to the one in the sleepout). I happened to glance outside, and saw Moonlight standing on the deck of the sleepout smoking a cigarette. His movement was odd, so I exited the house once more and began walking toward the sleepout. About halfway there I looked inside the window of the sleepout to see Moonlight sitting on the bed. Looking back at the deck I noticed that the figure on the deck was just another entity that happened to look like Moonlight from a distance, but on a closer inspection his details were blurry, and he lacked a face. “Right” I thought, “best to get back to bed and sleep”.
Once I was in bed again, I saw the same shadow entities as before, but it did not bother me so much. At this point it was around 4:30am and I was feeling very sleep deprived. I closed by eyes for a short period, and upon opening them was greeted with a large translucent sphere hovering beside my bed. It looked to be about a meter in diameter, and its colour was a murky shade of grey. The most interesting feature that it possessed was one very long black ribbon which was coiled around its body from bottom to top, like a spring. The ribbon was rotating slowly in a counter-clockwise direction, giving the impression that each visible line was slowly moving upwards. Fascinated by this experience, I sat up in my bed, and the spherical entity remained still in 3D space (suggesting that the hallucination was being tracked by my mind within my internal representation of the room). I then reached out and passed my hand through it, from top to bottom. While I felt no tactile sensation, and the transparent sphere remained intact, the black ribbons dissipated in reaction to my hand. The nature of this dissipation was like a cloud of vapour vanishing into the air.
I then returned to the sleepout to report this experience to Stardust and Moonlight, who were still awake and actively hallucinating. Moonlight appeared to have had a delayed onset, because now he was seeing rotating boxes floating in the air with mathematical and hieroglyphic symbols on each side. They were also seeing random strings of numbers floating about the room. After briefing each other once again on our experiences I went back to bed and finally managed to sleep. In the moments before I fell asleep, I hallucinated Moonlight’s body lying on the floor staring at me (in the same sleeping posture as I was in), and in that moment I believed myself to be back in the sleepout. 10 minutes later I realised that it was just another hallucination, and I was back in my room again.
Concluding remarks:
The following morning, I thought about the experience and came up with a hypothesis to explain what we had seen. I believed that, due to the combination of LSD and MDMA at the party, we had become used to seeing many people entering and exiting our environments and our priors had adjusted to this fact. In particular, I thought that the MDMA might have caused my mind to attribute personhood and intentionality to otherwise empty hallucinations which the acid brought on. While this might have explained the shadow people that we saw, it did not seem to explain the objects, nor the lack of any similar experiences reported in other online trip reports with this combination of drugs.
Later, I revised my hypothesis in light of the zopiclone that we had taken to sleep. While I was unaware of any interaction between this specific drug and recreational drugs (there is little information available online, and a prevailing sentiment that zopiclone has no recreational value), further inspection revealed that some users have experimented with this drug in conjunction with psychedelics & MDMA and experienced similar effects. These accounts are rare, and I spend a long time on erowid and reddit finding them (see below for links). In the time since this trip, I’ve taken zopiclone once after an LSD trip (at the same dosage) and had no noticeable effects. Stardust has experienced similar effects on another trip where she took zopiclone on the come down, so it seems somewhat unpredictable. Based on the information contained within the reports that I found, I suspect that our experiences had more to do with the MDMA / zopiclone interaction which was amplified by the LSD. In the future, I plan to test this revised hypothesis.
Zopliclone interaction trip reports:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Drugs/comments/270e3x/2cb_and_zopicloneimovane_the_most_intense/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Drugs/comments/1ei5dw/trip_report_500ug_of_25cnbome_and_4mg_of/
https://www.reddit.com/r/LSD/comments/57c38a/ambien_lsd/d8ss1lp/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Drugs/comments/fepda9/took_mdma_and_zopiclone_ambien_together_and/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Drugs/comments/9r84my/weird_drug_interactions_zopiclone_and_nangs/
https://erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=73406
https://erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=22930