I was wondering about the statistical prevalence of bad trips. Whenever conversations about psyches come up, everyone makes a big deal about set and setting, which is important, but it kind of creates the impression that a hellish experience is waiting to jump you at every turn unless you do everything exactly right.

How frequently (like say, % of total trips taken) do serious 'bad trips' actually happen?

This can be about any substance. I suppose DMT would be the most appropriate to discuss, but I'm wondering about serotonergic drugs in general.

I'm inclined to think that's it's probably less than people think.

There is no definitive answer to this question. When used properly in conjuction with risk management/precautionary measures i'd say that i've had very few bad trips.

Each of the psychedelic compounds have their own unique characteristics that can influence the tendency for a bad trip as well. (LSD/Mushrooms/Mescaline/DMT/ayahuasca/Dissociatives/various phenethylamines/tryptamines/RC's/etc...)

Not to mention all of the other variables that effect an individuals trip
(diet, sleep, combinations with other drugs, mental state, intentions, set and setting)

I'd say that if you know what substance you are taking, know the purity of the substance, proper dosing for your particular experience is adhered to, set and setting are safe and stress free, you are properly rested, hydrated, and are have considered the implications of combining with the usage of other drugs then the probability of a "bad trip" is relatively low. But there are so many factors/variables that can change and easily effect the outcome of your experience that all you can really do is be smart, safe, minimize the possibility of suprises, and be prepared to deal with a "bad trip" as much as possible. If you are inexperienced with the substance then a sober sitter is ALWAYS wise.

Having some benzo's can be a life saver if you plan on getting courageous. lol. I cannot mention that without also mentioning the obvious dangers of benzo's as well.

BE SAFE!

There are many reasons a bad trip can occur.

I have at several stages in my life had multiple kinds of trip off of the same dosage of the same substance, sometimes even at lower doses which parallels my most glowing substances I've had at higher doses.

For me there is a large grey area between a glowing experience and a bad trip as all the emotions can meet in the middle in a collision of joy and fear. My milder definition of a bad trip is when I get stuck in a pattern of negative irrational emotions where a common theme is intense guilt where I feel like I've done the worst thing a person can possibly do, yet I can't quite recall what it was. I haven't felt that emotion for quite some years now and I believe these feelings were usually due to combining cannabis with other psychedelics. Sometimes when I just smoke a joint alone it gives me a very negative view of my life. In my teen years I used cannabis for leisure quite frequently and never even realised until recently what a strong effect it has on me personally.

Then the worst kind of trip for me is a perception of dying for a reason I believe to be physical. For example a feeling my heart is about to explode inside of me and I can feel the pressure of my circulatory system which I'd guess is the result of raised BP and intense anxiety. In my most beautiful trips I felt like I was dying in an ascension to something more holy, but these trips feel like I'm just about to die and cease to exist.

I've never had any of these trips when in a comfortable environment or when the ceremony has been carefully planned ahead. It's like a response to any negative in the external and internal now and in my opinion, this can be very easily avoided if you're a good judge of yourself and those who surround you.

The bulk of my bad trips happen'd when I was 20-21 where I first got into using psychedelics for more than just glossing my everyday world. Before I mainly used substances to enhance music because I loved it, but there came a transition phase as I started to go inward as if by instinct and I was completely unprepared now I look back. I remember having a mindset that if I had a negative experience I had failed and would try again the very next day. At one point I had bad experiences 3-4 days in a row before I finally gaveup. Obviously to those reading, without integration this eventuality was near enough certainty.

After this period I took a break of 2-3 years and since then I've had very few negative experiences and have only had truly bad experiences from negative reactions to lesser known chemicals which I have no bond of trust with. I think this is why DMT has been so good to me. After reading so much about it I approached it with absolute caution and other than a few low doses in the early days which were just for novelty sake, I always have some sort of calculated reason for using it. Hence I believe that the probability of bad experiences have less to do with the substance, but with the users own relationship with the substance.

So I suppose I believe the regularity of negative experiences can not be standardised from person to person or indeed attributed to one substance over another.

Hello

There has been some who claim that the spirit of DMT is a water spirit and it likes being in the vicinity or close to water.

The author claims that when taking DMT near a fire or in arid regions he has had some quite terrifying trips.

He claims that taking DMT close to water significantly increases the positive effects of the trip

There is a whole section of a book dedicated to this issue ( link below )

DMT water spirit

I have smoked DMT looking at a lake from a friends apartment window and it was very grounding, its well worth a read and it may be just the edge you need to keep the trip happy.

Hope this helps

Peace

In my experience, the most bad trips come from taking some compound for the wrong reasons. For example: a person looking for an easy high or an escape vs a person using to look deep inside oneself so (s)he can find the answers (s)he needs.

All the bad trips I have had were earlier in my life before I had learned to respect these compounds.

In short if you just want to get high and have no respect, you may be punished. However, if you have honest intentions and an open heart and mind,you will be rewarded beyond your wildest dreams.

It all depends on the factors listed above.

For myself, I've noticed that all of my bad trips stem from uncertainty; if I'm reluctant to take something, and I take it anyways, it's a bad trip. If I want to take it, I usually have a great time, unless I am forced to deal with something I'm very uncomfortable with, which isn't often.

As far as frequency of bad trips, for me its anywhere from 10-20%. This would be a lot less if I would quit doing the aforementioned behavior, but I've always been a hardhead

I had a fairly bad trip on mushrooms that was due to the fact I had found out my gf had probably cheated on me. I had hesitant thoughts of dosing at first but decided it was best not to dwell on negative emotions or allow them to effect my ability to enjoy myself.

Well that didn't work.

I had a mild negative trip on a low dose of DMT once but am unable to determine what caused it. I wasn't in a bad mood or stressed out. I was comfortable with my surroundings and everything else was normal. As far as DMT goes I think you can have a bad trip even if everything is perfect. But with LSD and mushrooms mental stability plays a role for sure IMO.

On the longer acting psychedelics, "bad trips" for me often result in the form of anxiety and the inability to deal with uncomfortable sensations. On DMT however, I'm rarely anxious or uncomfortable in that sense at all. On DMT, bad trips occur for me when a negative entity makes its way onto the scene. Thing is that I can't really prove this thing is negative. These guys look different than other entities in the sense that they look malformed as if they were unintended glitches in the system. They're usually dark brown and all knotted and bunched up. Very messy and malignant looking. Usually things can be going just fine, and then they show up out of the blue (usually one, sometimes two) and they'll get up in my face, and it's just extremely disconcerting because they are rather ugly and visually repulsive and they never communicate and I have less and less of a clue in terms of how to deal with them with each succeeding experience. It's become more prevalent lately and it's growing to be rather annoying.

You can learn to enjoy what was at first a bad trip. The problem is that there is always the possibility of an even more formidable bad trip; One that you have not yet prepared for or learned to cope with. That is just part of tripping: You reach walls and your break them down. Occasionally you experience hell, but you later realize that hell is simply heaven viewed from a different angle.

I think the point about getting set and setting and all that stuff right is reducing the risk of a bad trip. Not getting them right is not a guarantee for a bad experience, but you are increasing the chances of it happening. Taking the appropriate considerations will not guarantee that your experience will be entirely positive, but a) you have a greatly reduced risk of it happening and b) if it does happen, at least you are not going to get into really bad trouble or hurt yourself, as you might if your setting is bad...

I have had very few authentically bad experiences in about 12 years of using psychedelics on and off. The really bad ones are in my experience triggered by internal conflicts with wide ranging implications for our selves (e.g. job, love, lifestyle, social standing, etc related) or due to psychological imbalances such as depressions for example.

There are other types of experiences that can seem bad due to physical stress (endless purging, nausea, etc.) but, oh well, you survive and get over it. There are dark experiences or very difficult experiences, but with the proper integration you can usually give it a good spin, and if you are open enough, or I guess just ready for it, then you can even manage to transform the difficult experience into something very cathartic.

Either way, if set and setting are bad, a difficult experience can easily turn into a hellish experience without anything positive to be gained. Even a good trip can turn sour with the wrong setting...

*rambling*

I've always tried to take set and setting into account, but inevitably there have been some poor judgements here and there. A rough trip is much rougher on a high dose, so I don't even really count the challenging low-dose ones. But so far:

200 acid trips/ 2 really rough ones
100 shroom trips- one where I lost control and broke bones
30 DMT trips- one where I was tied to the car and dragged

Out of all of these, 3 of the 4 could be prevented in future circumstances. But there are always X factors that can surprise even the most well prepared psychonaut.

As Enoon said, you can usually turn the rough ones around somehow...for me, in some cases, this has mostly happened later during integration. And the rough ones seem to often be the most valuable, on a longer term basis.

Mushrooms have caused me a handful of terrifying trips as well as quite a few uncomfortable ones. The terror and discomfort always taught me something about myself. I'll be forever thankful for these experiences that have helped mold me into the strong integrated being I am today.

Not literally... It just felt like it. Sleep deprivation plus slight cold plus stress plus the wrong music plus 75mg....

Glad to here it. you had me going there...

Negative or unpleasant psychedelic experiences have been rare for me, however the few times that I would genuinely describe as bad trips were hellish enough to impart a healthy respect in me for these substances. As others have stated, when I am mindful to align the set and setting variables, my experiences are nearly always wonderful. All of my asskickings have been deserved... Usually when I trip on a whim, and in uncontrolled settings. The caveat here is that some of my best experiences where on a whim. Some of my worst involved police. Southern US police on a roadtrip. No sense of humor w those guys.

"Bad" trips for me usually involve extreme confusion compounded by unpleasant physical sensations. This has been most pronounced on high dose mushrooms, which I seldom do anymore. I much prefer the moderate doses with mushrooms... It can just get so 'menacing' or hostile feeling on high doses sometimes, even in good environments. I remember one trip where the winter tree limbs in my neighborhood were like these awful needle hands, penetrating my mind. Sounds silly now, but it was so visceral and frightening at the time.

Keep breathing. Try to relax. Don't forget your towel.

A favorite quote of mine by Carl Sagan, "But the gates of heaven and hell are adjacent and unmarked."

I have had the shit scared out of me by mushrooms, DMT, and to a lesser extent, mescaline. Maybe I am just a wuss. I actually think it's important to be shaken up once in a while. It makes one more alert. I always just tell myself, it will end. It will be over at some point. Many ages of men may pass before then, but it will end. That at least keeps me from freaking out too bad, but I usually stay down a while because it is such a contrast to what I had wanted (a good time).

The roughest was when I was having a bad time on cactus, and it started early. I knew I had about 12 hours to go of that, which was excruciating to think about. Time gets all wacky as it is, throw on a rough ride, for 12 hours and I was seriously lacking any hope.

I think all of my worst times (which still haven't been that bad)were due to tripping while having too much stress in my life. So, total, I've had about 6 rough shroom trips out of around 100. 2 rough DMT trips out of about 50 (all smoked). And 1 rough mescaline trip out of 8.

This is very intresting and calming to read. So far I have very few experiences under my belt and only two that I would consider genuinely psychedelic. One, the first one, was extremely beautiful and the second one was the exact opposite - fear of dying, panic, guilt. I felt like I had made a huge mistake in taking the aya.

Now I can't say for sure what caused the bad experience but these days I tend towards saying it was a mixture of the admixtures in the brew and the company I was in. Since the person admitted to lying to me and mixing in other things into the brew from what we had discussed, I have seen him for what he truly is (not a nice person), and I believe that this on some level was affecting my trip. So I think the right company is important as well as the dose and mixture of what you are taking...

Once you use psychs a lot, well at least for me, your perception of "time" becomes so altered a "bad trip" doesn't have much ties with the present. Like the past, present and future are no longer this simply linear relationship so a bad trip wont really effect you that much, it will be somewhat akin to a nightmare that u barely remember, you will know you had a bad experience but it's just an experience with no real negative emotion attached to it, viewed from ur present perspective. I've had around 30 - 40 shroom trips, around 100 DMT trips, around 5 proper salvia trips and 100s of weed trips(i'm VERY sensitive to weed so its very psychedelic to me). I've only had one real bad trip so far, which was my first, and on weed. The rest I would say have been negative, but not necessarily a bad trip, though that could be because my bad weed trip was so bad none of my other negative experiences can match my perception of a bad trip.

My bad weed trip was 4 hours long, it started with me turning into a worm and thinking this is how u leave ur life...smoke weed turn into a worm and feel great! then i left my body and went into this astral plane, seeing many people across the world taking high doses of psychs and entering the same realm i was at, then I was suddenly slammed back into my body and what followed for the rest of the 4 hours was fear so intense anytime i dared open my eyes or perform conscious movements like breathing, a level of fear akin to knowing you were about to die a painful, certain death, was bestowed upon to me. The worst part was that time was ridiculously dilated, after 3 mins I thought the weed trip was already over, usually i would trip on weed for around 4 hours, I really felt like in 3 minutes 4 hours worth of experience had passed.I could literally write like 5 books on how hellish the experience was, that much negative shit happened, that to me is a real bad trip. Time is so elongated it feels you have been there for many lifetimes, every moment of existence is pure terror, there is absolutely no escape, everything is against you, even the air you are breathing. Such experiences to my understanding are rare and usually only occur when ingesting unexpectedly high doses of a pcyhe.

With my shroom and DMT trips the negative experiences i've had usually leave me with a lesson, as for salvia, i'm too disconnected from my emotions to feel true fear, so it's most like i'm just observing fear. I've had only 2 negative shroom trips, the 1st made me realize the bullshit within myself, at the time i fooled myself into thinking I was using psychs to achieve enlightenment or something, but really I just used them because they were interesting and most importantly, felt good. Once I realized that my shroom trip got much more euphoric, same with DMT. With DMT i've only had about 3 negative experiences, all of which I account to unexpectedly intense experiences. I always measure my doses but sometimes they are more intense, recently I found out that it's most likely due to a build up of DMT resin in my pipe.

Another thing i notice is that anytime I have a negative experience the next negative experience is less intense(emotionally speaking), I think as time progresses and depending on how you rationalize things, you eventually get use to it, and a bad trip is no longer something you fear, just an annoyance that will usually teach you something about urself. I believe the psychedelic experience has VERY strong ties with your subconscious mind, heck if not for my DMT experiences I'd believe it was all in your mind but some of the experiences i've had seem far to alien to exist solely in my mind. The way I see it, a bad trip is inner-conflict between your sub-consciousness so if you analyze your bad trips properly you find there is usually a reason it happened. More inner peace = less bad trips. There are various of ways to get more inner peace within ur mind, meditating works well, another is to bring up all your issues and fears, regardless of how trivial, and deal with them.

Any type of stressor in your life will become magnified and your thoughts can loop in repetitive worry and anxiety. It is a scary spiral and then you don't remember what you were worried about, but now you are in a bad trip. Filled with uncertainty and anxiety. If a trip sitter is there, and no stressors are occurring I think all trips can be transformed positively although some parts may be challenging. I wouldn't call it a bad trip though. A difficult journey of self realization may be bad for some people, not me.