version

Well-known member
It's a famous quote of his. I don't know what it actually means but I've taken it as essentially meaning something along the lines of "the devil finds work for idle hands" in the sense that the unoccupied mind will start to construct things to occupy itself, sometimes negative things like paranoid structures.
 

version

Well-known member
I saw that post you deleted, patty, and remember what you were on about now. It was more about anxiety than paranoia, but they can definitely feed into one another. It's that thing both you and Luke have mentioned about extreme self awareness and how debilitating it can be.

I've found that at it's worst it's an almost unbearable awareness of my own body, all the background processes that are normally unconscious become conscious and I'm intensely aware of breathing, that my hands are attached to my arms, how my tongue sits in my mouth, how my clothes feel against my skin and so on. It's completely overwhelming, far too much information to take in and continue to function properly.

There are those people who feel their arm or whatever isn't theirs and that they have to have it amputated. I imagine that's kind of how it feels for them, like you're wearing a prosthetic or a glove despite it being your actual arm.
 

version

Well-known member
I think ducking the news is a good way to dampen any anxiety or paranoia one might have. I've often read an article about some freak occurrence where someone was kidnapped or developed some incredibly rare condition which has then burrowed its way into my psyche and nagged at me for hours.
 

luka

Well-known member
It's Suicide Bridge by Iain Sinclair. A book largely concerned with paranoia. Still can't believe the very paranoid people on this forum have no paranoia stories to tell.
 

kumar

Well-known member
there were a couple of times i was very rattled having taken psychedelics and coincidentally had someone really have a go at me in front of others, total character assassination, nailing down with exact precision in which ways i was such a twat, leaving me unable to do anything but gibber and froth for a while. then when i might have calmed down i couldn't distinguish what had actually been said, if anything at all, and whether the whole thing had instead been a complete projection based on a relatively innocuous comment they made. none of the scenarios seemed preferable really. one of those ones where the comfort of knowing it was all just the drugs talking dont worry youll come down didnt really apply, cos i never worked out who was talking. never able to speak to those people again lol.
 

luka

Well-known member
I’ve been cloned as part of a secret underground breakaway military operation. This is an entire breakaway civilization that uses very advanced technology to dominate the world. This isn’t to say that there are no groups of military operating in the benefit of humanity.

I believe we have come to this age in civilization because of both an increase of human awareness as well as various factions working in their own ways towards the preservation and protection of the Human race.

I was part of a genetic engineering program that sought to combine various elements of DNA from various sources in order to create a more easily controlled yet powerful and defined person and personality. This involved chemicals, advanced (relatively) scalar wave technology, ritual trauma and programming/mind-control, and many other aspects of conditioning, training, secret operations, physical enhancements, cognitive enhancements, virtual reality, off-world operations, temporal manipulation, spiritual and etheric training or conditioning or programming.

This is just the beginning, these operations span across this civilization and involved advanced technology that goes far beyond what is released publicly.
.
 

muser

Well-known member
I find the link between paranoia and anxiety (I think they're basically the same ballpark) and depression interesting. I don't think you really fully experience both at the same time but they feed into one another, in a general malaise you don't really care enough to be paranoid about anything.. I definitely experienced it a lot more when I was younger, I think the nature of weed consumption being a daily thing , keeping it in your system 24/7 is a big factor, allows you reinforce thought cycles and keep looking for patterns in things that arent there.Most of my paranoia manifested in social scenarios thinking I was being judged, looking too wasted, assuming innocuous comments were covertly about me and whatever I was feeling insecure about at that time.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
when i was about 10 i had a real problem with all the magazines my sister left in the bathroom; i had the feeling that the photos of the people on the front covers were watching me poo. in my mind i knew it was impossible, but i did actually turn them over so that there were no pictures looking at me.

it'd have been a nightmare pooing at craner's house next to his collection of vintage italian vogues.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
i've got a friend who goes a bit nutty every now and then and he had to move house because he thought there were duppies in the walls.

i bumped into him the other day. he was on the way from the foodbank and had an ankle tag because he'd "been a bit bad". he's the sweetest, gentlist bloke but you can see the firey madness in his eyes. the rage bubbling under the surface. susceptible to possesion.
 

luka

Well-known member
One of persistent intimation of my early childhood was of being the focal point of a Truman Show scenario (although this was roughly 50 years before the film was released)

This complicates the question of how you act when you are alone, in a similar way to belief in God would I suppose.
 

luka

Well-known member
As far as the notion of living in a kind of game or simulation goes DMT can certainly give you that impression at times, though often the sense is of a simulation in which the stakes are very high, a kind of religious framework. What you do matters very much.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
oh fuck, i forgot about this one.

when i'd wank or when i'd poo i'd sometimes wonder to myself if i was actually living in a delusion and that rather being in the safe confines of my bedroom or bathroom i was actually a disabled person in wanking in a pizza express or something.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I've got a mate who has lost it a few times on drug binges at festivals, thinking everyone is against him, talking about him, laughing at and verbally destroying him. It's very hard in that situation to talk someone out of it. They think everyone thinks they're weird and that of course makes them act weird, making their delusion real.

Anyway, a connected problem he has is when he is fucked sometimes he feels like he's shat his pants and has to keep checking. It's very Freudian.

He's the nicest person you could know and constantly apologetic and worried about his behaviour.

Luckily he avoids drugs now.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Goes back to the Rogan thing about weed making you feel vulnerable. I'm pretty sure weed is the main culprit for aforementioned friend.

Some drugs make you feel POWERFULLY vulnerable. MDMA is what I'm thinking of. You feel happy to be vulnerable. You recognise everyone else is, too.

It's a shame that MDMA high can't be our default mode, really. If there was no comedown/sleep deprivation and if you could drive on it etc. I'd recommend we all take a pill every morning with our toast and tea.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
A few years ago I got thread worm. It was a bit of a horrifying experience because I opened up my asshole in the mirror to check what the weird sensation was and saw all these creatures crawling out of me. I remember picking them off with tissues and watching them squirming and writhing. It’s a surprisingly visceral feeling to know you’re body’s inhabited by parasites. They’ve inside you (a common delusion of schizophrenics). I didn’t sleep all night out of discomfort and horror, but the sleep-deprivation made it all worse. Made it all more nightmarish and hallucinogenic.

Every single time I’ve shat since I always have an inspection. Every time I feel a slight twitch or a twang in my bum I get paranoid. My life will forever be compromised by that experience. PTSD- Post-threadworm shitting disorder.


it's strange (and maybe very telling) that all my paranoia's revolve around poo.
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
my favourite person once broke contact so harshly and abrupt that it made me wonder if she was real at all. i didn't have any photos. no social media connections either. her friends disappeared as well - everybody who both knew me and her. i thought i had just made her up. we would do these games where we would write stories together, each person writing a sentence after the other. my room was full with little papers with little stories and i started to think it was just me by myself writing those. a bit like that movie.

ironically, it was paranoia that made her break contact. she thought i was secretly aristocratic and out to oppress her.
 

luka

Well-known member
A few years ago I got thread worm. It was a bit of a horrifying experience because I opened up my asshole in the mirror to check what the weird sensation was and saw all these creatures crawling out of me. I remember picking them off with tissues and watching them squirming and writhing. It’s a surprisingly visceral feeling to know you’re body’s inhabited by parasites. They’ve inside you (a common delusion of schizophrenics). I didn’t sleep all night out of discomfort and horror, but the sleep-deprivation made it all worse. Made it all more nightmarish and hallucinogenic.

Every single time I’ve shat since I always have an inspection. Every time I feel a slight twitch or a twang in my bum I get paranoid. My life will forever be compromised by that experience. PTSD- Post-threadworm shitting disorder.


it's strange (and maybe very telling) that all my paranoia's revolve around poo.

This would make a great subject for the 'Matthew Ingram draws' thread
 

version

Well-known member
A friend of mine took a bunch of pills at a festival and hid in his tent for hours. We later found out it was because when he went to leave he noticed a pair of feet right outside, got freaked out that someone was just stood in front of his tent and decided to wait it out. Once he came down he realised they were his own shoes which he'd taken off and left outside.
 
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