I wanna be where the Old Gods are.
I wanna see, wanna see them writhing.
Tearing souls apart with, what do you call 'em? Teeth?
Up where they watch, us tiny ants
We cannot comprehend their plans
I want to be, I want to see
Ṕ̵̨̹͙̮̯̜̙̹͚̈͑͗́̉͊̋̊̉͗̕͘ā̵͇̩̟̲̬̼͔̹͇̥̱̪̭̲̈́̐͒͂̂͌͂̔ͅȑ̴̨̛̞̪̰̟̠̠̓̈́̀͜͜ͅt̵̝̘̙̪̖̱̰̘̦̜͕̖͎̿̃̃͊̐ͅ ̴̧̢̛̲̤̭̟̲͉͚͖͔͍̞̭̀̽̿̎̇̐͗̀͘͠ọ̴̡͉̻̹̍̀͋̌̃̈͋̈́͘͝f̸̡̢͔̰̹̟̔̇̈́͑͆̿͝ͅ ̵̛̘̒̅̆͐̌͂́̓̕̕ͅt̶̨̿̏́̿̑̍h̷̨̛̞̤͖͙͚̗͉̳͒̈́̂̀̽a̷͈͙̱̗͂̌̽͗̕t̸͕̝̫͚̝͓͎̳͙̟̰̠̅̑̆̽̏̃̍̓̈͆͘̚͘͝ ̸̢̧̫̤̤̯̠̗̻̩̬͉̠͉͘w̷̡͍͖̪̄̍̈́́̾͆o̸̧̪͍̮͉̟̲̜̟̎ͅr̴̡̪̞̳̣͖̺͓̣͆͛̆͂̓̈̌͝l̷̠͎̣̼̥͖̫̣̔̍̽̓̉̀̀͆̎̉̽͘͠d̸̢̛̥̭̮̜̪̼͚̟̦͗́̇͌͆̓̏̏͝͝
One of my greatest fears is that there is a fourth dimension of space where they are watching us, only inches away. Waiting.
They can see us poop!
Even worse they are FORCED to watch us poop. That makes them angry.
Putting aside for the moment the fact that psychedelics are essentially just causing your brain to [temporarily] malfunction, this description eerily resembles the post-trip phase of psychedelics. You come back from essentially getting your blindfolds taken from you, seeing the world in ways that make sense only during the psychedelic trip, and even then it’s all overwhelming, only to come back and question just about EVERYTHING about reality. It’s been 3 years and I’m still going down the quantum physics/cosmology rabbit hole (as well as the philosophy and metaphysics rabbit holes, thanks exurb1a), all due to a strong bad LSD trip. It’s beautiful, it’s expanded my knowledge of things, but it is, indeed, very much like madness.
Psychedelics definitely aren’t causing your brain to malfunction. If anything, most of the research around neuroplasticity and using psychedelics for traumatic brain injuries and dementia and such show that they seemingly kick your brain into an overdrive mode where it is able to form connections at a much higher rate than normal.
Taken in measured, clinically understood doses, sure. Taken to meet Vishnu, I assure you, none of what your brain experiences is normal function. Not to say they cause damage, but your brain definitely operates way out of spec for a while there.
Fair enough, I like the “operate way out of spec” language much more than “malfunction” but you obv have a point.
As someone who has met Vishnu more than a few times though I’ve very very rarely come back with a Lovecraftian dread (though the rest of the ant metaphor in OP not that bad at all)
but your brain definitely operates way out of spec for a while there
Overclocked maybe
I mean, they kind of are…
LSD especially “breaks” pattern recognition and so does mushrooms to a lesser extent.
That’s why faces can freak people out, especially your own. Very very few people have faces that are perfectly symmetrical, and our brains do a lot of subconscious processing to make them symmetrical. That’s why symmetrical faces are enjoyable to look at. They’re literally “easy to look at”.
On LSD and mushrooms, that just stops happening.
It’s why people gain insight from psychedelics, their “autopilot” stops functioning. It might not seem like a malfunctioning brain because that’s the entire reason people choose to do those drugs. But it’s still making the brain malfunction
Speaking of broken facial recognition…
Pro tip: if you’re experimenting with microdosing shrooms and you’re testing your upper limits, under no circumstances should you watch a pirated Nicholas Cage movie with poor, low quality compression. That was a fucking nightmare.
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At that dosage, I wasn’t hallucinating but the part of my brain responsible for recognizing and making sense of faces and, in particular, facial expressions wasn’t working anymore. For example, if my wife smiled, intellectually I knew it was a smile, but instinctually it gave the same feeling you get when you watch badly animated characters smiling or if someone were to make a surprisingly realistic face out of pineapple slices and ham or on a carved pumpkin. It just seemed wrong and made me intensely uncomfortable because I knew it should feel like a person, but instead it had that creepy uncanny valley feeling. Multiplied by 100. I’m finding it surprisingly hard to describe, I hope that conveys it somewhat.
With that in mind, now imagine the faces Nicholas Cage makes.
I’ve experienced LSD a few times and Mushrooms once. They are subtly different but I like to lean into the difficulty of the experience (when or if it starts to go that way). I feel like I’m being taught something important and doing so has been beneficial. To me it feels like a death and rebirth experience. I’m not foolish enough to think it’s the answer to my problems, but boy does it ever shine a light on things! For me, they bring me back to being a kid, experiencing everything with wonder and curiosity. It’s a breath of fresh air because I spent my young adult life trying to “grow up” by trying to fit into everyone else’s expectation if what adult means. It made me realize I am individual as well as connected to the human race and I should enjoy and embrace that.
The ego death many experience can really teach us a lot. The self replicating machine elves found by doing DMT offer a totally different perspective too.
Honestly, even bad trips are good trips. The trip I reference in my post (500ug LSD + cannabis during the peak for added mindfuckery) was, by all means, a bad trip that left me with PTSD and on at least one occasion I had a panic attack during a work call, where reality felt a bit too much. Not something I enjoyed, but even then I could appreciate that it had changed me for the better. I got a lot of my shit together after that trip and I appreciate life a lot more than I used to. I was fat, single (and had been all 28 years of my life), had no aim in life, had no hobbies, no appreciation for leaving my room at all or interacting with people in real life. Today I proposed to my girlfriend of two years, I do photography as a hobby and actively try to go out and appreciate the world around me, reached my target body weight, vastly increased my social life, and I am paving the road to a life I desire to live. Not everything is perfect, and maybe I am attributing too much to the trip and not enough to simple aging and maturing through that time, but there was a stark before and after for me. As far as I’m concerned it’s been the most positively life changing event in my life that I absolutely cannot recommend anyone in my life to ever try.
As far as I’m concerned it’s been the most positively life changing event in my life that I absolutely cannot recommend anyone in my life to ever try.
My thoughts exactly. I treasure the experience but I could never recommend it to anyone as it hits everyone different. The best I could say to someone considering it is that you better be willing to confront yourself and your most difficult feelings.
I’m happy to hear that it was a net positive for you that’s wonderful.
Ayyyyy, exurb1a fans rejoice!
Incorrect, it’s not a malfunction, it’s your thought process in overdrive. You’re thinking so fast and so clearly that your brain literally can’t keep up. You have overclocked yourself.
I’m not sure if you’ve tripped before, but that hardly explains the reality-obliterating hallucinations on all sensory inputs. There’s feedback loops everywhere at that point. The moment there’s hallucinations or synesthesia you could argue the brain is not operating to spec and, at least temporarily, malfunctioning, as in, you probably wouldn’t usually be able to use your brain to overcome challenges it’s been designed to overcome when operating normally.
Hey I’m all for it, you can argue you learn a lot about reality itself once your senses go out the door and your brain stops processing reality the way we normally process it, but it’s still not how the brain has been designed to sense and respond to reality.
My experiences with it leave me lamenting my humanity and finding it way too limiting
This is the Cthulhu post I can’t stop thinking about
https://img.ifunny.co/images/e2b6d159130c074adda63fe1ee4e7c2efd6a297ff6c9b5d5429843121c5bb116_1.jpg
So good.
Pro tip: in lemmy you can embed an image in your comment by using the following markup syntax:
Oh! Like markup! Which is obvious in hindsight!
Fiction aside, you can learn how to resist this sort of madness.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/pieces-mind/201207/radical-acceptance
This isn’t just a defence against the eldritch, radical acceptance is a paradigm that will let you move past being a victim of circumstances, it will allow you to transition yourself into a person that dictates your circumstances.
You couldn’t have known it, but this is exactly the article I needed to read right now. Thank you.
Radical acceptance has gotten me through a lot of things, and my wife is going through a tremendous amount right now so she’s trying to accept also.
The problem is that down the road you may look back on the situation and decide that you handled it entirely wrong by dissociating. YMMV
See funny enough acceptance has just made me casually suicidal and uninterested in participating in the grander world because of it’s bullshit. I’m not directly suicidal just completely done with self interests or dealing with others so… You know… Be careful if what your normalize and how you feel about things.
You can’t accept what hasn’t happened yet. You could do something about circumstances to position yourself for the future.
Imagine a commoner from the Roman Empire waking up in a Tokyo Mall for a couple hours… and then going back and trying to explain his adventures…
There was an anime based on that concept, Thermae Romae I think.
I enjoyed that show a lot. Even if you’re not into public bath houses (me), you might have a very enjoyable watch.
The problem is that there’s only so much of that which can be expressed, the only way to experience the latter part is if that madness drove the experiencer to becoming your story’s or game’s antagonist force tearing their world apart trying to recreate the conditions they think will take them back to that higher world of alien understanding.
Congratulations, you reinvented the Faust saga. Faust was given not just a brief moment but several years of understanding before the devil would claim his soul but narratively speaking that’s not a bad idea, gives our protagonist (not every protagonist needs to be a hero) plenty of time to fuck up. Goethe gave the whole thing a happy end, quite non-standard actually.
No I meant antagonist because the best way to actually give perspective to this madness is to see it from the outside. It’s a prospect that inherently defies the ability of humanity to understand, so don’t try to, make our protagonist a secondary actor who enters the story where some raving mad lunatic has already torn through screaming about the flipping towers of lightning or words who’s writings encompass the universe or having witnessed and moved the hands of a god.
Leave the incomprehensible for a perspective we don’t need to fully comprehend to be able to interact with it.
The player will always have a somewhat outside perspective on the protagonist. Gameplay-wise the player could be trying to keep the protagonist sane… or if the player leans into the insanity suddenly the game reacts and punishes the protagonist for trying to immanentise the eschaton. Make the player fight for the fate of the protagonist within the protagonist.
Also I’d highly recommend against going that route if you don’t have a well-marinated schizo as script writer, we know dealing with that “eldritch horror” all to well it’s called the genome. Ever wondered why virgins can have realistic dreams about sex? Realistic as in sensation, I mean. Certainly can’t be personal memory.
I mean babysitting a lunatic from the outside feels like a risky manoeuvre from a game design perspective.
It’d almost have to be a 2nd person game to get the weirdness in a way that doesn’t require you try to explain the incomprehensible to the perspective of the player, because honestly I feel even letting the lunatic act as a narrator has too much of a risk of failing the test of incomprehensibility.
It’s like we’re trying to pass the anti-turing test, you know that protagonist you’re controlling is a human but they’re just so fucking cracked in behavior and mannerisms that they feel completely alienated from the player empathetically, like we’d be trying to send them into the uncanny valley just on how they talk and act.
Also, it can’t be a 4th wall breaker, that’s an obvious reach for “I saw beyond the veil and into the eye of madness” but it’s been done so many damn times that the players would immediately catch wise once the hint was dropped and we’d be the latest cash grab for MatPat by the end of the week.
Honestly the writers shouldn’t be able to imagine what the protagonist saw either, this is a guy we sent into the void of madness and we gotta write him as if we’re just watching someone who went insane then recovered then went insane again in a cycle lasting what could have been nanoseconds or eons by the protagonist’s reckoning.
This guy needs to be the perfect equivalent of that ant that saw the circuitry and understood it then came back only remembering that it understood for the brief moments its was “above”
I seen a similar explanation that would work quite well for a game. It was a 2D world and the knowledge was seeing it in 3D. Combined with your description would definitely be able to be translated into a game.
Super Paper Mario
Flatland: The Video Game!
Oh wow, I was coming in here to mention the novel. I always thought that the square should have gone insane rather than try to convince everyone of the truth.
From an outside perspective, trying to convince people of a truth they can’t comprehend looks a whole lot like insanity.
Fez made me quite mad ngl.
Do you mean something like this?
Yeah something like that. After watching it tough I do believe that while 3D to 4D encapsulates a bit more of the Lovecraftian feel, 2D to 3D would be a better medium to use for a game exploring that that feeling, as unless we actually find some elder gods to show us the forth dimension we really can grasp it. Which would work better for the feeling, but I do think it would also hamper it.
Or we go a step even further and start with a 2D game then go to a 2D/3D game and then transition to a 2D/3D/4D game. That would probably be the best way of showing of the feeling.
So, basically the plot of Star Trek Generations?
That’s why I like shrooms, god I hope the afterlife is just that… forever…
I’d like a nice phasing between shrooms, lsd and DMT while being fellated for eternity thanks
I just want to evolve beyond humanity
Yeah. I don’t see how everyone doesn’t see that as the goal.
People who try to hold on to " the way it’s always been" or tradition or whatever just don’t fucking get it.
Blasphemy in the face of evolution itself
Here here. It’s about time we start controlling the trajectory of our development. Evolution through natural selection is a shit system. I’d know, I studied it. I’m ready to CRISPR my (figurative) ass until I’m what I want to be.
I wanna be immortal psychic catgirl.
CRISPR plz…
Would definitely have huge tits and ass
This reminds me of Taravangian from the Stormlight Archives. He experiences exactly this, a few hours of clarity when he understands everything… and then it is gone. Those few hours determine his actions for decades.
The ant trying to tell other ants about the incomprehensible world beyond sounds a lot like the allegory of the cave.
Or like trying to explain something to someone who’s sober while you’re tripping on psychedelics
This is why I like to visit the internet.
The Rats of NIMH live on the edge of madness, it would seem.
what a pleasant children’s novel
Like in Life Of Brian:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slSb72vwaBc&t=0m27sAs someone who experiences audio and visual hallucinations due to a sleep condition there are days when it feels like Cthulhu could show up at any time and I would ask him if he wants to get lunch.
especially since ants can’t see
You needn’t worry, it’s a fictional character from a book.
