If you’ve been a part of online drug culture for any length of time then you’re undoubtedly familiar with one of the most important foundations of the space: trip reports. Trip reports are detailed, written reports of an individual’s experience with a specific substance or substances. With so many new drugs on the market, ranging from lysergamides to tryptamines and arylcyclohexalamines, it’s important for people to share their experiences for others.
These reports allow others to temporarily envision the perspective and shift in consciousness produced by a certain substance. This, in turn, allows them to better determine whether or not the substance will be a good fit for them. They may also learn what sort of things can be done to ensure that the trip is successful and that it will produce positive results.
But how do you write a good trip report? What separates a good trip report from the bad? If you really want your trip reports to leave a mark in the memory of those who read it, then these are the questions that you should be asking yourself. These are also the questions that we hope to answer in this article.
What Makes a Good Trip Report?
What makes a good trip report? Ultimately, the answer to that question is subjective. What one person finds enjoyable may not necessarily reflect what the next person finds enjoyable.
However, there are those trip reports that seem to be elevated to a certain legendary status that sets them apart from the rest. What qualities do these trip reports possess that makes them so powerful? There are many factors involved.
Since trip reports are a form of written work, then you can imagine that having a strong relationship with the written word would be an important component of a good trip report. However, this might mean different things to different people. There isn’t one defining quality that makes a piece of writing ‘good,’ and despite what traditional linguists might assert, proper grammar and articulation aren’t necessarily the hallmarks of good writing nowadays.
Especially when you’re dealing with psychedelic trip reports.
In fact, when it comes to capturing the sensations of psychedelia, delirium, paranoia, mania, or euphoric bliss, sometimes articulation and punctuation can be a bane. Some psychedelic writers find that their work reaches deep within the soul of the reader precisely because they allow themselves to shape the language of the piece, rather than have the piece shaped by the limitations of language.
For example, sentence fragments and breaks, repetitions, and unreliable narrators can all be important components of a really impressive and transcendental piece of writing. None of these would really meet the criteria for being a ‘classically correct’ work, but nonetheless, they can produce a stronger sensation of actually being in the shoes of somebody high on drugs.
Present & Past-Tense Reports
Trip reports could be separated, in terms of chronology, into reports written in the present-tense and those written in the past-tense.
Present-tense trip reports are those that are written as the experience is unfolding for the user. Present-tense trip reports are also often the raw notes and material that are later refined into past-tense reports. Many people find that they prefer to submit reports once they’ve had a chance to reflect on their experience and figure out exactly what it was that they were seeing, thinking, hearing, and feeling so that they can articulate it properly.
However, there are also those who somehow manage to maintain a sense of articulate writing even when they are in the midst of a psychedelic or intense drug experience. In these cases, the trip reports seem to spill from their fingers as if the drugs themselves were writing the reports.
Many of these reports come out as gibberish, but once in a while, a trip report written in the present tense will tap into something otherworldly, something that a sober individual would never have the wherewithal to produce. These reports are the cream of the crop, the ones that really capture the feeling and sensation of being under the influence of a certain substance.
However, it’s not always possible to determine how and when you might be able to capture this feeling. This is much like searching for one’s muse when trying to produce a creative work on demand. Sometimes the muse shows up on command, other times she springs up unbidden and demands that you commit her feelings to paper.
Trip Report “Levels”
Many people and websites prefer that their trip reports are categorized by “level.” By doing this you can get a sense of what to expect from the report prior to even opening it.
For example, the guidelines on www.shroomery.com encourage people to label their trip reports as either microdoses or trips between levels 1 to 5. Although shroomery’s “levels” tend to refer only to the strength of a mushroom trip, these levels can easily be applied to other drugs as well.
- Microdosing. Microdosing trip reports are those that describe the use of a sub-threshold amount of a substance. This means that you use enough of a substance to cause some biophysical changes that are so subtle as to hardly be noticed. Many people microdose with psychedelics to enhance creativity or to improve anxiety, depression, or other mental conditions.
- Level 1. A level 1 trip report is usually characterized by a mild ‘stoning’ effect. It is noticeably stronger than a microdose in the sense that users will certainly recognize that there is a substance working in the background of the experience. There may be subtle changes to visual or sensory input, although hallucinations and distortions will not be had at this stage.
- Level 2. At level 2, the sensory distortions will become more apparent. Neurochemical effects will become more pronounced; sensations both physical and psychological will be more apparent in the user. At this stage, the tripper’s writing will usually start to be influenced by the drugs that they’ve taken.
- Level 3: At level 3, users are going to be experiencing a full trip. The visual distortions caused by psychedelics will be pronounced enough to dominate the experience. Other drugs, such as stimulants, will be providing significant effects at this stage. In terms of writing, it becomes easier and easier to go on long tangents describing the thoughts and experiences.
- Level 4: At level 4, users are going to be approaching the highest tier of drug experience. At this stage, their writing will likely become increasingly hard to comprehend, although some users manage to remain articulate throughout their level 4 experience. These reports are often some of the most amusing to read, given that the user is able to record their thoughts without diverging too far.
- Level 5: At level 5, users will have lost connection with base reality. Notes taken at this stage will likely make little sense. Oftentimes people in the midst of a level 5 experience will take great pains to write down a profound thought that ends up reading as something like, “God is a hot dog without ketchup.” For the most part, level 5 trip reports often require users to review, reassess and reflect on their experience before they can turn the report into anything useful.
Second-Hand Recording of Thoughts and Ideas
One of the most important ideals for most psychonauts is surrendering to the experience. It’s important not to put up any resistance to what’s happening, nor to hold onto anything that might arise during the trip.
Some might find that the very act of writing during an intense trip could violate this. Trying to capture thoughts, ideas, or visuals as they emerge can obstruct the flow of the experience, jamming things up and preventing the trip from unfolding naturally as it might.
If this is a concern for you, then you may wish to opt for some second-hand recording of your thoughts and ideas. This can generally be done one of two ways:
- With a recording device. Setting an audio recording device to begin recording after you’ve consumed your dose of drugs can be very useful. Committing yourself to verbally narrating your experience as it comes to you is a great way to capture the moments of psychedelic or substance-influenced spontaneity as they come through you. Speaking, rather than writing, allows you to flow with the passing experiences rather than trying to commit the experience of a previous moment to paper while the next moment has already come crashing down upon you.
- With a trip sitter. If you’re going to be tripping with a friend or trip sitter, you can have them record your words. However, it can take a great deal of effort to try and recall what you were thinking or feeling when you look at what they’ve recorded later.
The Issue With Recollecting a Psychedelic Experience
A trip report is often an attempt to reconcile the subconscious and the conscious mind. What we see during a drug experience is often the unfiltered contents of our unconscious minds. The unconscious mind communicates via symbols and imagery, and without proper consideration these images can seem senseless and confusing even to ourselves – let alone to anyone else.
This is one of the biggest issues faced by anybody who wants to share their experience with other readers: the potential for the actual feeling to be lost in translation. In fact, this is probably more common than not. When recording down what seems to be a profound visual experience – “a lightning bolt striking the top of your mind and reverberating down your spine,” for example – might carry a great symbolic meaning during the moment that could be hard to recapture in writing later on.
There’s also the issue of profundities seeming cliche once you’ve returned to the realm of society. For example, feelings of “oneness,” and the “unity of all consciousness” never fail to overwhelm the individual during the trip. However, once returning to baseline and remembering that these feelings are generally the very reason that people tend to use psychedelics in the first place, they may seem embarrassingly commonplace.
The Surface and the Depths, the Inner and the Outer, the Exoteric and Esoteric
A trip report can be considered a culmination of two seemingly disparate viewpoints: the surface-level, outer, or exoteric viewpoints, versus the deep, inner, esoteric meanings.
The surface-level approach is the literal, written words that create the report. For example, “a pervasive scent of citrus twisted its way betwixt my nerves.” This report of synesthesia may conjure an image of an orange-like scent dancing between nerve cells; a very colorful image, but just that: an image.
To attempt to penetrate the inner, esoteric meaning of the trip, however, one must attempt to put themselves into the shoes of the writer themselves. And for that to happen, the writer must set the stage for the reader to actually do that. They must write in a way that allows for the full absorption into their state of mind, which means treading the precariously thin line between garbled stream-of-consciousness nonsense and over-edited, simplified prose.
What might it take for a piece of writing to actually take a reader into the mindstate required to produce an all-encompassing feeling that the scent of citrus actually danced throughout one’s nervous system? Perhaps the sharp pungency of the aroma might represent the lurid vibrance of colors penetrating the sensory spectrum, in which the ‘citrus’ colors – lemons, oranges, yellows, limes – actually worked their way through the visual cortex, crossed through the olfactory epithelium, and left the user in a state defined solely by citrus itself.
In this case, it’s just as much up to the reader as it is to the writer to produce the right effect in the writing. A reader has to be sufficiently dedicated to absorbing what the writer has penned, otherwise, the work will be lost on them. Conversely, the writer must dedicate themselves to ensuring that their prose has been touched up enough to convey their feelings appropriately without cutting off too much of the psychedelic ‘nonsense’ that actually makes the trip report worth reading.
Conclusion
Writing a trip report is a great experience for both the tripper and those reading the reports. Trip reports can be a source of information, an opportunity for a reader to step into another person’s imagination, or an artistic avenue for the self-expression of non-standard states of consciousness.
There’s no way to easily define how someone can effectively write a ‘good’ trip report. There are as many different ways to do that as there are different trips to have. Ultimately it’s a matter of figuring out how to best capture the experience in a way that captures a reader’s attention and conveys your feelings and vision without getting too lost in a nonsensical stream-of-consciousness rambling.
Written by Nigel Ford, holistic herbalist and addiction outreach worker.
