A strange, paradoxical problem while attempting to WILD

**John Updike** · 07-23-2008 09:11 PM

I haven't posted here in a long time, but just a few minutes ago while relaxing and attempting to enter body paralysis to WILD, I was halted by something strange and familiar.

It started off like many of my other attempts over the years, I began by relaxing my mind and body to prepare myself for the experience. Soon, I felt warm waves of relaxation as I counted upwards mentally, focusing on my breathing, and an increasing sense of detachment from my body. Nothing was out of the ordinary so far.

Like a few other times I've been lucky, this time I continued past the beginning stages and I began to experience intense waves of pleasurable vibrations. My heart began to race and my corporeal awareness continued to diminish, until I felt the familiar sensation of my heart pounding throughout my entire body.

This is where it went amiss, however. I started to feel the intense electric vibrations that follow, like I'd cut off my circulation and my limbs and body began to fall asleep starting in my thumbs and radiating outwards, until nearly my whole body seemed to be pulsing with electricity. The sensation got more and more intense, and I started feeling an anxious mild nausea in my stomach.

At this point, I started to feel intense cramps in my hands and arms, and tried to dismiss it as a physical hallucination of some kind, but it was oddly familiar. It travelled to my eyes and lips, and finally the pain grew so intense that I was either going to try something mental to enter a dream or get out of bed in real life.

When I did get out of bed, everything was a bit surreal and I made sure to repeatedly do reality checks, and swiftly went to the bathroom to look at myself in a mirror. Sure enough, my hands were cramped into a weird, cerebral palsy like position with my fingers scrunched together and pointing, which resulted in intense cramps, and my lips were puckered. My eyes were also twitching rapidly, making my vision tremulous and surreal.

So how did relaxation result in my body screwing itself up into a cramped, painful position? The electric vibration feeling didn't subside for almost 5 minutes after I got out of bed, and I couldn't keep my hands from sticking in that weird, seized position for the duration, as well as my eyes continuing to twitch and lips remaining puckered.

It so happens, that this is the exact thing my body did last week while on magic mushrooms. For the last several hours of a fairly intense trip, my body felt almost numb and my lips, eyes, and hands were stuck in the exact position I described earlier as if seizing under the force of intense internal energy of some kind.

Does anyone have any insight? The first time, I'd figured it was some sort of additional effect of the psilocybin on my peripheral nervous system or something, but it's been more than long enough for my system to clear itself of any substance remaining, so my feeling now is that this is a larger, more general property of my body or mind that's causing this. Needless to say, this is an interesting obstacle to successfully achieving a WILD, and has stumped me. Any thoughts, help, or personal experience with something similar is greatly appreiated. Sorry if this is tl;dr.

**drewmandan** · 07-23-2008 10:02 PM

Dude, you took magic mushrooms. It's probably a seizure. Get an MRI or something.

**Envix** · 07-23-2008 10:41 PM

what you experienced is actually a typical trance symptom. The vibrations/heart pounding you experienced are actually precurcers to an OBE, or astral projection. you shouldn't be too worried of this, as it's all in your head (or soul, depending on what you believe). the human body does not "vibrate". The pain you experienced was probably due to intense strain on your mind/chakras. next time this happens, just continue what you were doing, and try to go deeper into it. you'll either enter a lucid dream, or project. good luck!

**ChaybaChayba** · 07-23-2008 10:54 PM

You took mushrooms. When you meditate or smoke a joint up until months after you done the trip, you can have flashbacks. WILDing is very similar to meditation. The reason why you had these effects were because of the "flashback".. I know this through personal experience. I can call back mushroom trips without taking mushrooms if the trip wasn't too long ago. You can try it out right now, meditate on that moment when you took mushrooms, try to remember everything and the feeling you had then will come back. Theres no need to take the shrooms again to re-experience the trip, like you just found out for yourself.

**John Updike** · 07-24-2008 12:09 AM

Originally Posted by drewmandan

Dude, you took magic mushrooms. It's probably a seizure. Get an MRI or something.

now here's a great, well informed piece of advice.
sarcasm aside, I clearly didn't have a seizure, and mushrooms having a single thing to do with seizures in the first place is all but impossible.

As for the other repsonses, the flashback theory seems most probable, though since before now I'd never been taking psychedelics and attempting to WILD or "astral project" so closely together it was pretty surprising. My first guess was that the mushrooms triggered some intense somatic awareness, and that the sensation of entering sleep paralysis somehow triggered my body to "remember" what that was like, since the two states are close to begin with.

My hands cramping like that still baffles me though. The pain became so intense, I was forced to get out of bed and do something about it. During the trip, I was thinking that the hand position was a semi-voluntary repsonse to the intensity of sensation I was experiencing, but this time my hands did the same thing through no conscious attention at all. I was hoping for perhaps a slightly more elaborate answer than "the brain is a mysterious thing, man" but that's probably the best answer I'll get on this. I would, however, like to hear from some people who are into energy channeling and chakras and the like. I probably won't adopt a chakra perspective as my dominant explanation, but oftentimes alternative medicine and eastern philosophy has interesting insight than can be worked surprisingly well (and often, quite usefully) into a western, neuro-psychological framework.