Elastic Minutes and Eternal Moments: How Psychedelics Affect Time Perception
Time distortion is one of the classic effects of psychedelics (although I rarely see this mentioned as an expected effect of psychedelics on educational, retreat, and therapy sites). I think that time distortion needs to be discussed more from a harm reduction point of view: many challenging experiences are related to alterations to one’s perception of time. Not being informed about it or aware of how to handle it can result in a great deal of discomfort and distress. On the other hand, changes to time perception are also related to more mystical states, which can be related to philosophical insights and therapeutic effects. Jules Evans writes:
There’s less interest in psychedelics’ affect on time-consciousness these days, because we’re so focused on these drugs’ medicalized uses. But time-alteration can affect people’s moods and mental health, in both heavenly and hellish ways.
What It’s Like to Experience Time Distortion and Timelessness on Psychedelics
British MP Christopher Mayhew took mescaline in 1955, under the supervision of psychiatrist Humphry Osmond (who gave mescaline to Aldous Huxley). He had his experience filmed for a BBC Panorama show, although it was never broadcast. Under the influence of 400 mg of mescaline (the same dose Huxley took), Mayhew described strong time distortion effects. He said to Osmond during the experience:
I assure you that from my point of view, from the time I begin this sentence and the time I end it, I shall be gone…a long time Humphry. I am moving from one time into another time, and back again. There is no absolute time, no absolute space, there is simply what we impose on the outside world.
About half a dozen times during the experiment, I would be withdrawn from the surroundings and myself and have an experience, a state of euphoria, for a period of time that didn’t end for me – it didn’t last for minutes or hours, but for months.The psychiatrists afterwards and common sense all say that’s nonsense, you couldn’t have these experiences because there was no time. I accept that. At the same time, they didn’t have the experience. And when I look back even now, after 30 years, I remember that afternoon not as so many minutes spent in my drawing room, but as years and years of heavenly bliss…I think the simplest explanation is that I had these experiences, they were real, but they took place out of time.
On the more mystical side of the experiential spectrum, it can feel like one has the experience outside of time, or time becomes a meaningless concept. (The loss of the sense of time and space, or the experience of timelessness and spacelessness, is one of the core characteristics of the classic mystical experience.) One may have the sense of existing in eternity, or an ‘eternal now’. This is the kind of experience that Huxley was hoping to experience. It was one of the main reasons he wanted to try psychedelics. His mother died when he was 14, which brought into focus for him the suffering caused by duration and the finitude of life. As he wrote in Brave New World Revisited (1958), “The most intractable of our experiences is the experience of Time – the intuition of duration, combined with the thought of perpetual perishing.”
Huxley hoped to escape time consciousness through mysticism, of the kind explored in his novel Time Must Have a Stop (1944) and his book on mysticism, The Perennial Philosophy (1945). As he wrote in the latter work,” Immortality is participation in the eternal now of the divine Ground.” He also practised Vedantic meditation in California in the 40s, intending to escape the suffering brought on by time consciousness. He didn’t have much luck through meditation, but he did through his mescaline experience; psychedelics, he discovered, could chemically catalyse the experience of eternity or timelessness. As he opined in The Doors of Perception (1954):
To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended directly and unconditionally by Mind at Large – this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.
A review from 1964 on hallucinogens reveals how long we’ve been playing with the dials of time—speeding it up, and slowing it down—through drugs. One account from 1913 on mescaline intoxication said that mescaline made a person feel like “the immediate future was rushing on at chaotic speed, and the time was boundless.”A study from 1954 found time disorders in 13 out of 23 people under the influence of psychedelics. Most of them felt a “sense of temporal insularity,” where only the present was real and the past and future were far, far away. “One subject experienced a ‘timeless, suspended state; a few felt time to be slipping away very quickly, whilst in others the passage of time was slowed down,” the review wrote. “In one case where the mood fluctuated between elation and depression, the passage of time was experienced concurrently as rapid and slow.”
Psilocybin-driven FC [functional connectivity] changes were strongest in the default mode network, which is connected to the anterior hippocampus and is thought to create our sense of space, time and self. Individual differences in FC changes were strongly linked to the subjective psychedelic experience.
The Heavenly and Hellish Sides of Time Distortion and Timelessness
Alan Watts discusses the time-warping properties of psychedelics in The Joyous Cosmology (1962), defending their value:
Those of us who live in this driven and overpurposeful civilization need, more than anyone else, to lay aside some span of clock time for ignoring time, and for allowing the contents of consciousness to happen without interference. Within such timeless spaces, perception has an opportunity to develop and deepen in much the same way that I have described.
Mental illnesses like depression involve distortions in self-consciousness – excessive self-rumination, disconnection from others and the world, self-criticism – and distortions in time-consciousness. Time, for the depressed person, weighs heavy, it drags. Their present experience is polluted with ruminations over the past or anxieties about the future. When they try psychedelics, meditation, music, or other means of altering consciousness, people can alter their time-consciousness, be liberated for a moment from the weight of the past, and feel the fullness of the Eternal Now.
[P]sychedelic time stretching can work the other way – if you’re having a ‘bad trip’ or an emotionally difficult experience, it can feel like the experience is lasting years, decades, even several lifetimes.
I completely lost any connection with the passage of time whatsoever. And I had the distinct experience that I had been tripping for 10,000 lifetimes.The experience itself had distorted my perception of time to feel like an eternity had passed, and was incredibly intense.
The actor Megan Fox also had a distressing experience of eternity while under the influence of ayahuasca, which she took in Costa Rica. She recounts: “On the second night, I went to Hell for eternity. Just knowing it's eternity is torture in itself, because there's no beginning, middle or end.”
Cannabis, especially ingestion of high doses of high-THC cannabis, is also known to have time-stretching effects, which can sometimes lead to states of panic, as seen in this video of someone who felt he “was stuck in time” after doing his first dab (a highly concentrated form of cannabis).
I have previously written about how the sense of infinite time (or eternity) induced by psychedelics can lead to the feeling of ‘the sublime’, which is more or less synonymous with awe. It is a paradoxical marriage of both positive and negative feelings: excitement and fear, joy and anxiety, attraction and overwhelm. Even if one is enjoying a state of time distortion or timelessness, there can be a sense of uneasiness involved because of its intensity, strangeness, and unfamiliarity. Alterations to time perception are not always felt in such simple terms as either positive or negative, or good or bad. The experience can be a mix of the two or swing between positive and negative emotional states.
A Harm Reduction Perspective
Given that changes to time perception are a common and predictable effect of psychedelics, it’s important to be aware of the varieties of time warping that can occur while tripping. This ensures that these effects aren’t unexpected and, in turn, overwhelming. But of course, even being aware that these effects can occur doesn’t mean they won’t feel overwhelming. It’s one thing to expect an experience of time dilation or timelessness and another thing to experience it directly.
As with any other intense or strange psychedelic effect, there are some tried and tested ways to prevent negative thoughts and feelings from spiralling. Remembering to focus on one’s breathing and to breathe deeply and slowly can have a calming effect. An attitude of non-resistance and acceptance is typically helpful as well, encapsulated in attitudes/phrases like ‘Go with it’, ‘Let go’, ‘Trust’, and ‘Surrender’. Understanding that changes to time perception are the normal effects of the drug and not a sign of some kind of damage to oneself or reality is crucial too. Examples of attitudes/phrases that remind oneself of this include ‘This is OK to experience’, ‘This is temporary’, and ‘This is the effect of the drug’.
Psychedelic retreat and psychedelic therapy providers should also ensure that participants are aware of these time-related psychedelic effects and that both they and the participants know how to handle them should they arise and prove to be distressing. I think that more research is also needed into challenging experiences related to time perception, such as the factors that predict whether someone has a blissful or hellish experience of stretched or eternal time. We also need research into what helps people cope with having had negative experiences of time distortion or timelessness, as some people experience extended post-trip difficulties.
On the other hand, it would also be useful to know how positive mystical experiences of timelessness and spacelessness are related to therapeutic effects. Do they only have therapeutic value when they encourage belief in an eternal afterlife? Or could naturalists – who don’t believe in the supernatural – also find some comfort in these experiences? Perhaps the temporary experience of timeless joy and peace, without the normal chattering of the time-obsessed ego, could act as a lesson on how to feel more content in everyday life, without the assumption that life continues after death. It’s important that we know how people can best work with positive, negative, and mixed experiences, irrespective of what someone’s metaphysical beliefs may be.
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