Hello,

SWIM has had a couple of cacti experiences, but he is still not sure if that's what it's supposed to be like.

An example would be from the most intense San Pedro experience.

The mental effects were hard to control at times, outbursts of insanity/euphoria happened, it felt a lot like what SWIM imagines a combination of LSD and MDMA would be like.

There was also some auditory effects, it sounded a lot like chants and folk music from Native Americans, all in all more then just threshold effects.

Pupils were definitely wider, and physically there was an huge urge to move around, quite speedy.

However, visuals? Not that definable...

Barely noticeable, except the color enhancements, visual disturbances, patern recognition and everything looked a bit cartoonish and goofy.

No tracers, breathing, transformations, color shifting, or CEV.

It was hard to put a finger on it what was different, but something was different.

Surprisingly the mental trip was not mild at all, it was forgiving but intense.

Mushrooms or acid would produce much more visuals for the same intensity, which left SWIM somewhat confused.

Is Mescaline generally not as visual and more mental or does this change with a higher dosage?

SWIM is also not sure if he has courage to do a higher dosage, but his experience with other psychedelics suggests that SWIM can handle a level 3-4 intensity without freaking out and doing something stupid.

Can anybody more experienced explain to me if there seems to be a limit on how visual mescaline can get?

Edit:
SWIMs recent ayahuasca analogue experience, was just a tiny bit more mentally challenging, however the visual aspect was making him almost blind. CEV were like looking at a picture, open eye was so intense that he needed another person to take him under the arm and guide because he couldn't see properly. The trip sitter in this case his girlfriend, confirmed that SWIM was acting more sober on Aya then on San Pedro.

For me lower doses of mescaline lack visuals other than general shifting/flowing of surfaces, tracers and enhanced pattern recognition. Music enhancement is already present at lower doses. At low doses I close my eyes and see nothing other than an undefined slowly roiling cloud that shifts between red and green. The higher the dose the more the cloud churns and the more intense the red and green shades become.

At mid-level doses objects begin to look vaguely plastic and sharply acute. The MDMA feeling kicks in more and my mood becomes malleable and sensitive to outside input such as music, video and conversation. CEV's start to shift to add more colors to the churning cloud behind my eyelids and begin to morph into liquid surreal objects, faces and scenes. I know I'm at a solid mid-level dose when the churning color cloud is gone, replaced with bizarre liquid neon visions.

At a higher dose everything in the room comes alive and seems to be moving. The stimulation at this level makes it more difficult to shut my eyes but when I do the visuals are filled with intense colors and lots of them. I can judge how high I am at this point by the sheer number of different colors in my CEV's. They look peculiarly liquid, organic and flowing.

The pic accompanying this video is a good representation of a closed-eye mescaline visual for me:


At the highest doses I've done people's faces twist up like taffy and look like faces from a totem pole but in a beautiful serene way as compared to the way human faces appear while on LSD, which is jarring at times for me. The tracers are solid and seem to hang in the air for several seconds. The CEV's are so rich and intense I can only keep my eyes closed for a few seconds before I have to flee from the scene by opening my eyes, being too grotesquely beautiful to bear. At this level I can sometimes see inanimate objects "breathing" and "blocking" and am fascinated by these effects. Psychonautwiki has some very good representations of those effects.

Agreed. Low doses of mescaline are not particularly visual and are a slightly trippy stimulant. Low doses also show a different metabolic profile than higher. As the dose increases it becomes progressively more visual; intensely so with a strong dose even with eyes wide open. Objects can breathe, radiate light or even appear to be crawling around.
Mescaline has a relatively poor affinity for 5HT2C (or at least this has been reported by all workers other than Tom Ray) so it requires a higher dosage level than most psychedelics.
At a stronger level (400-600 mg) the experience has quite a different flavor than at 100-250 mg and will be found decidedly visual. For most people the threshhold for that seems to be around 350-400 mg.

Mescaline can be pretty visual. I found the visuals in that blueberry clip pretty close to actual cactus visuals. They tend to be a little less colourfull than tryptamine visuals, and more geometric. With eyes open it sometimes looks like everything is crawling with little vibrating things.