thought about posting this in the debate forum, but decided on this forum instead

what do you think are the symptoms of a flashback?

i've read/heard that they are the recurrence of the emotions and visual distortions related to past trips; personally, i've never had the emotional nothingness, but my vision ALWAYS wavers when staring at something

well i've had a few. and i've had instances were i felt really giddy and happy or extremely nervous and paranoid for no reason at all. I've heard from older katz(AZ hippies) that mostly it will be an emotional change for no reason. Extreme Visual disturbances, they say, are few and not to the "At peak" scenery melting type of thing that most experience while actually on LSD. But thats what the old hippies say.
I've had times where i'm outside at sunset or sunrise and the smell of the air and sounds of the surrounding city, strike a memory and i can see everything melt and the landscape turn in to a picasso painting (hope i spelled that right) But I'm sure thats just my extremely vivid imagination, probably also due to lsd usage. Also the one thing i really loved about LSD was how in your mind's eye, you could turn the world in to a painting or claymation movie (as i liked to refer to what everything looks like when you're tripping). . .
now i'm thinking there probably isn't anything physically happening in the body that causes a Flashback. It's probably just people that can't deal with remembering they tripped acid, or the shame involved for them having done so. People that are that susceptible to emotional stress probably can't handle the incoming stimuli from the outside world that spawns all of our common day to day memories and fits of nostalgia.
but thats just me being Freud. and that only pertains to the cases of severe flashbacks that you hear of, from time to time, like people thinking they're oranges. I imagine its probably the route cause of bad trips too. Maybe its the people that have had really bad trips, that get flashbacks. Traumatic stress syndrome, isn't it called. Like Vietnam vets flashing back to thinking they're in the 'nam and shit. I imagine somthing happens to someone or around someone that causes them to remember their past bad trip (would have had to have been a satanic demons, and blood type bad trip filled with hours of gruesome images and thoughts, which to me constitutes trauma to the emotional psyche) and that memory causes and emotional overload in the person that may cause them to actually relive a trip or feeling of a trip.
thats my theory but you should ask syberdelic, that fool knows a lot.

i think they're much more about spacial distortion and a quick, drastic shift in your mental state than of visual distortion. sort of like, all of a sudden space feels weird and your mind gets funky; hints of things that happen when you're actually under the influence.

i've had what i'd call a flashback once, maybe twice. neither time was anything huge though, just something i noticed and felt was strange enough that it could be attributed to certain substances. for all i know i could never have actually experienced a "true" flashback though, whatever that is.

basically, i think it's kinda like post traumatic stress, but i've never had that either, so who knows.

andy

you don't have to do drugs to have flashbacks. More than likely everyone has had a flashback at one point. Your brain is constantly changing and molding itself. It is a term called brain plasticity.

It makes associations.

When I smell lighter fluid, hear Henry Rollins, or smell peaches, I am taken back to the winter of 7th grade. When I hear the music from Fallout 2, taste Mountain Dew, or smell Nag Champa, I am in my friend's room in the summer of '99.

Mountain Dew does not have the same effect on me, because I drink it all the time, so it has different associations.

I walked by the craft section of a walmart, saw the products, and smelled the scent of crafts, and I had a flashback to when I worked at Michael's.

A flashback is a sensation of similar emotions, thoughts, and experience that you had at one point in your life. Ever notice an odor that has "the smell of childhood?" That is a flashback.

Flashbacks have triggers, and if your brain is like everyone else's, you have an unlimited amount of triggers. Play some music you haven't listened to since middle school, and you will be back in 6th grade.

Obviously, flashbacks have a lot to do with long term memories.

http://ahsmail.uwaterloo.ca/kin356/ltm/ ... gdala.html

that would make such a good name for a cd

I'm sticking with the PTSS theory. I think flashbacks are just a myth. I mean the actual sensory overload that you endure while actually tripping could constitute traumatic stress.

but flashbacks don't necessarily have anything to do with drugs. Look at veterans who have flashbacks when they hear gunfire.

To me, a flashback is a cop out on reality; a way of using drugs as a scape goat. About 3 or 4 years ago, I came to the realization that I have induced both a greater volume and potency of TRUE hallucinoges than any other individual that I have ever shared my knowledge and experience in the subject with. I would estimate that I have spent between 1 and 2 thousand hours in a state of consciousness elevated enough to be at least legally impared and I lost count of how many times I have completely transversed to the other side quite a while ago. Sometimes I think of myself as an unofficial guinea pig if for nothing else, but to prove to myself that psychedelics are generally safe both in the short term and long.
The closest experiences I have had that might be described as flashbacks are the colored or flashing specles I see painted over reality and the occasional dissociated or odd feeling, but these things are just part of life. I remember feeling such things as a child and young teen before I ever even had a puff of ganja. Actually, I remember having these occasional experiences as a child that where often very frightening. I would be completely in the middle of something and I would get an extremely heavy feeling as if my body had an infinite mass. There were occasions that this happened when I was standing or walking, but I did not fall. I was simply frozen in both space and time. I would attempt to look out on the world, but as I would percieve, things would distort and become a frightening landscape. Not like any movie or dante scene, but frightening in the manner that it somehow threatened my essence or soul by it's very existance. These experiences never lasted for more than 2 or 3 seconds but they seemed very real and had no external explaination. The frequency of these experiences fadded as I aged and the last one was probably around 10 years.
My belief is that everyone has these experiences where things aren't quite right. I believe that something such as evolution may be responsible for filtering out things that would be considered in the face of survival as extraneous information. For instance if you were being charged by a rhino, percieving information that is not immediatly vital would be a negative survival trait. And as everyone knows, no filter can realistically achieve 100% effectiveness. Every once in a while something seeps through just to remind you that nothing is perfect.
According to this same idea, substances such as LSD simply act as a inhibitor to certain portions of this filter.

Maybe I am a bit off the deep end, but I just call em as I see 'em.

here is a good article about what you are talking about.

http://apu.sfn.org/content/Publications ... order.html

take my suggestion, and listen to music from middle school.

Do remember that sensory overload is NOT an excess of things to be percieved. It is fully what your' mind does with the information. Although it is astronomically unlikely, it is theoretically possible to suffer sensory overload while in a sensory deprivation tank simply from sympathetic hallucinations and emotional loopbacks while completely sober.

flashbacks of the memory type are a given; obviously , they can elicit sentiment

but memory flashbacks don't typically elicit depersonalization, or distortions of sound and vision

When i stare at walls my mind fills in the blanks. Whenever i get a large rush of adrenaline, like 5-10 minutes afterwards i feel funny.

I don't doubt the validity of flashbacks, but the word itself is a bit misleading. But when used in the context of being caused by drugs that are no longer in your body or by the memory of a drug induced experience, I think this is just a cop out way of dealing with the imperfection of mortality.
Society teaches that "hallucinations" are a product of insanity so they will either not admit to them, or try to blame them on an external force. How many times have you heard someone say "I think I got up too fast," a minute or two after they got up or "I feel weird, must have been the food," long before it has had time to digest. Even if you want to talk about an extreme case of schitzophrenia, there is really no fine line between them and any other "sane" person walking the streets. Psychological texts attempt to draw a line between sanity and insanity by quantifying experiences, but this is fuzzy science. I would agree that some experiences are more intense or seem more real or novel than others, but these comparisons are purely relative. For example, someone who rarely has headaches or migranes could have what they would describe as a painfull throbbing migrain, while another person could have the same experience and consider it a simple irritating pain because they deal with such experiences more often.
I sometimes feel that modern(classic) psychology was inadvertantly influenced by western religions tendancy to distance themselves from individuals with grossly abnormal traits by assuming that these traits were created by some different force than that which has created things such as intelligence and beauty.

when i stare at anything for about 4 or more seconds, my field of vision ebbs and flows/wavers; it's mildly entertaining

so are you all saying that a bad trip for all the physical and psychological signals sent to your brain does not constitute ptsd or does?

that's where definition of a flashback becomes relative, hence, the reason for this post


some people get flashbacks from bad memories, and as you point out, may be exacerbated by stress....

....but that's not quite the same as tryptamine flashbacks; the latter type involve a certain type of depersonalization, integral to tripping, and vivid visual/audio distortions; it's still unknown what the chemical mechanics are regarding flashbacks

Bad trips are usually symptoms of something a bit more serious than the drugs.
I have had my fair share of bad trips in the past, but instead of blaming it on the drugs I would try to uncover and/or remedy the cause.

oops....mixed up bad trips and flashbacks


yeah, bad trips are sometimes ego-related (to some), or caused by thought association with certain events or other thoughts, or some sort of underlying fear regarding them

I've only had one once, It was like some one was just telling me to run and do it now and do it fast.

Bad trips involving paranoia are always the worst, I personally enjoy the more religious, talking to god bad trips. Conspiracy trips suck ballz too.

You only get out of it what you put in

tru, what your mind set when you enter a trip is, is a big factor, but a large part is the outside stimuli and how you brain misinterprets it during that contributes more to a bad trip.