Emphatogens are literally Deliriants
I keep noticing something in high-dose empathogen trip reports that doesn't get talked about enough.
At a certain threshold, empathogens stop being purely "heart-opening" and start sliding into dirty, deliriant territory. My current working theory is that an empathogen is essentially a conditional deliriant - it just needs a high enough dose to flip that switch.
Looking through dozens of reports, the pattern is pretty consistent: the higher the dose, the more likely people are to describe classic deliriant effects, especially toward the tail end of the experience. These include:
- Severe short-term memory fuckery: losing your train of thought mid-sentence, walking into a room and having no idea why you're there.
- Major disorientation in time and space: You kind of forget what time it is, where you are, or even how sober you actually are. Some people report literally not being able to recognize their own apartment.
- Hallucinating people: hearing voices, seeing full-on figures that talk to you, and actually holding conversations with them
- Extremely vivid daydreams or "waking dreams" that can completely take over: You slip into internal scenarios with varying levels of control, and when you snap back, there's that weird moment where you’re not sure what was real.
- Delirious illusions: things shifting in the corner of your eye, doors seeming to open, phantom sounds, etc.
I’ve done my share of actual deliriants (DPH, pridinol, biperiden, doxylamine) and I’ve also tasted the beginning of this state on a strong empathogen. They weren’t just similar - they were damn near identical in character. Obviously it’s probably not anticholinergic activity causing it, but whatever mechanism is involved produces an almost indistinguishable psychological result.
From what I've read, benzofurans (like 5-MAPB, 6-APB, etc.) seem especially prone to pushing people into this territory, sometimes even at relatively normal doses. MDA sits in the middle, while MDMA needs a heavier hand to get there.
Has anyone else experienced clear deliriant effects on empathogens? Especially the memory wipe, phantom people, or those immersive internal dream loops? I’m really curious how common this is once you go past the usual “nice” range.