So swim has been on many journeys with spice and 99% of them have been awe inspiringly beautiful. Swim had a really intense bad trip where muscles/glands in his face felt like they were spasming and going to pop(among other things). This scared the hell out of swim. He posted a report "my face just split into pieces". Since then the anxiety has been almost unbearable.

He has smoked changa a few times since then but just can't get himself to breakthrough before freaking out. Swim really misses that place when your breakthrough levels out and your just floating in another world. Its some of swims most blissful moments in his life.

Swim now feels almost banished. He's decided to wait for "The Call" and its been weeks. He thinks about it a lot. Its like he's sitting by a phone waiting for a lost friend to call. Will it ever? I hope so. . .

Swims been thinking about doing a pharma trip to maybe work past this. He's only done low doses so far and is thinking about trying a full dose. This sound like a bad idea?

SWIM didn't have a difficult experience like you describe, but life in general got a bit too zany. She's currently in the longest period since joining the Nexus of not receiving the call.

She has been working with Aya, and had her first breakthrough experience with Aya last night. It went very well, though she doesn't feel like it brought her any closer to getting the call to vape.

The pharma idea seem reasonable on the face of it, but she's never tried to see how it compares to Haoma or Aya.

What sort of things are you 'looking out for' when waiting for the call. I believe I have the call right now, the time just feels right for my first attempt. I think though that this is because it will be my first time. I've done enough research to feel comfortable with vaping (naive as that probably sounds to the more experienced lol).

So I am more curious as to what the call feels like after the first experience... so I don't ignore it, or imagine it. (Sorry to hijack your thread.)

Honestly its just a sense of ready. There's still a bit of pre flight anxiety but the set/setting is right and your clear for take off.

Right, just a feeling that the time is now. Its one of those right time right place type of things. You just know.

waiting for the call for me usually means waiting for the perfect headspace, good weather, and a nice solid block of time. while waiting i try to align myself to allow it to happen.

A real call is something like tripping sober! The substance forces you to take it.
At least this is my experience.

When I was using it I would get a call about once a week. I now realize this was probably just me excited about learning more from DMT. Who knows, maybe it was excited to see me too Now that I've had a chance to explore it somewhat I haven't really felt it for several months.

Just recently I've had a gut feeling that I need to eat a few pickles and save the jar...I was never such a huge fan of pickles until I came to this community.

It seems to come out of intuition, speaking different languages at different times. For a while, it would come to SWIM in the form of smelling the spice out about in the world. Just catching a whiff, "hello!"

While you can't directly control the call, there are certain things you can do to help generate the readiness sooner.

A great step is to work with your mind by identifying and learning to disbelieve anxiety-provoking thoughts and attitudes. It's not generally possible to totally control one's thoughts, because undesired thoughts pop up before you have the chance to stop them. In fact, it's usually unfeasible to try to control thoughts at all in hyperspace because the healthily stubborn attitude that can enable a non-tripper to refuse to succumb to negativity can easily be thwarted by the negativity itself in hyperspace. It turns into resistance, which is futile because you can't control what's going on. So then it turns to panic, or despair, or frustration, or some other unpleasant emotion which is heightened by the intensity of the experience. I bet we're all familiar with that sort of thing happening (even if your experience is not exactly the same). My point is that it usually starts out as "not horrible" but under the influence of a psychedelic it escalates because of the tendency to get stuck in mind-loops.

But you can absolutely control thoughts indirectly! You can condition your mind to produce fewer unpleasant thoughts by finding out what underlying attitudes are making you think that way. If you correct the distorted thoughts that are making you feel bad on Monday, you're likely to feel better the whole week.

So what happens in your ordinary life that causes anxiety of this type? Do you have problems with body image? Or perhaps worrying about your body? Or maybe worry in general? Is there something that you walk around hoping doesn't happen? Or fearing that it is happening?

I say this because with the exception of cases where you experience physical discomfort in the body (such as ayahuasca nausea, or burning yourself with a hot flame when smoking DMT), you can safely presume that negative experiences are psychological in origin. Why did you get stuck in the negative mind state? That sort of thing is almost always caused by distorted thoughts.

If you didn't have any distorted thoughts or beliefs, it would of course still be possible to be uncomfortable. Everyone knows that there are some things about life that honestly do suck -- but outside of situations where your life or the life of someone you care dearly about is in danger, when is it really appropriate to be panicked to the degree you were?

So the fact that panic (outside of life threatening situations) is caused by distorted beliefs is really useful to a psychonaut. Getting caught in a negative thought loop while tripping generally means that you have a strong enough habit in daily life of having that thought (or something like it) and believing that it's true. In other words, you may be spending enough time in ordinary life "practicing" anxiety that it turns into a habit. In fact, I'm sure you are, since you say "the anxiety is unbearable." It's easier for that habit to manifest in a major way while you're in hyperspace since you can't directly control thoughts then.

So find out what's going on with the thoughts that are triggering this anxiety. If you don't know how to do that, I can give you some excellent resources. Just let me know.

So that's half the equation for quickening your return to pleasant tripping. (Or at least, to not having any horrortrips.) What's the other half? It's still conditioning, but at a much simpler level. As you've recognized, you formed a new association that says DMT = terror. Working with your thoughts is great, and has a wonderful effect on mood (being sufficient to reverse even severe clinical depression sometimes, and usually mild to moderate depression). But it won't fix the conditioning, because the conditioned response is programmed into the brain at a much more basic level than thoughts are operating at.

How do you reverse a conditioned anxiety response? Gradual exposure. I bet that right now, even thinking about breaking through to hyperspace makes you nervous. So think about hyperspace a lot. Get yourself used to the idea of blasting off again, even if you don't feel less anxious now. The goal in the beginning isn't necessarily to feel totally non-anxious about DMT. It's to get used to thinking about it, and develop some amount of comfort with the thought. (Comfort and mild anxiety can co-exist, unlike comfort and severe panic. It's the severe panic we need to prevent, because mild anxiety does not ruin a trip unless it escalates.)

Next step (or first step if you aren't willing to spend the time thinking about DMT first): Threshold doses. It's the same idea -- go ahead and do some threshold doses, even if you feel a bit anxious. Just get familiar with it. Do this at times when you're already feeling pretty good, or at least feeling nice. Don't do this when you're already uncomfortable about something other than the thought of a threshold dose of DMT.

Then increase the dose gradually over time. How fast? Fast enough that you can notice the progress happening, but not fast enough for your anxiety to go past "mild" into "moderate" or "severe."

By the time you're at medium to high sub-breakthrough doses, you'll notice that you don't have anxiety with threshold and low doses. "What if I don't?" You will. This is how re-conditioning works. It's really hard to screw it up as long as you follow the guideline, "Don't freak yourself out badly. Only let yourself get mildly anxious." The whole idea is to see that even if you're a bit anxious, you're still okay. This breaks the pattern of starting with mild anxiety and escalating into panic. Unlike trying to voluntarily control thoughts, this does work when you're tripping hard because psychedelics don't interfere much with reflexive associations like this. If anything, they strengthen them. So it would only take a few good trips to install new conditioning.

I can assure you of the effectiveness of this process. It's empirically validated, and shrinks use things like this all the time to help people deal with phobias and anxiety disorders all the time, including the severe ones. So these techniques are the "big guns" for dealing with anxiety, and you may need the "big guns" to recondition yourself after a horrortrip. It worked for me, and I had a 4-hour long severe horrortrip followed by a string of ordinary bad trips.

I'm a bit sleep deprived, so parts of this may not make sense. Let me know if something's confusing and I'll explain it better.

Samadhi thats great detailed advice thank you for that. You have lots of good insight.
it's taken me alot of trial and error on my own to learn some of things you mentioned.

These techniques have become more relevent to me now as my journeys lately have reached a whole other level of intensity.

I can feel that i'm on the edge of a huge breakthrough and the thought of it scares me.
I am trying to get stronger in all facets of my life to prepare for the inevitable next level of understanding.

I haven't got "the call" in 3+ months. Not because of a bad trip, just because I have been reevaluating my priorities. I haven't drank in six months, haven't smoked grass or taken xanax in three, and I hope I never get the call for these things again. The past week though, I had several dreams in which I vaped some but didn't break through. Then, two nights ago I had this dream where one of my friends was in my "lab" and was about to drink some lye solution! That one scared me! I feel this is a calling, not just back to the machine, but to a change of setting, due to the negative associations from my dream with the setting im used to; e.g. my "lab". I decided that my closest friend and I will be going to a local mountain trail, walking off trail along a great creek there, smudging, and proceeding to hyperspace to see what THEY have been wanting from me. This has really been the first time I've noticed the call and I believe its due to the ever greater respect I have shown the spice. I'll report the answer.

like the post #10 by Samadhi-Sukha-Upekkha

As i have understood it is more like 'becoming ready' instead of 'waiting'

Its not that I have been waiting really. I just haven't felt the need to in so long. Then I had those dreams and I'm ready. Now I'm just waiting on my GVG to arrive. Then, for me, its about finding the setting to channel the light without distractions.