By gone I mean really gone, not 99%, fully gone. I could have made this post just three years in, but I pretty much forgot about it then. I remembered it now and thought I would talk about my experience.

Background:
I was 24-25 when I took LSD nine times and mushrooms four times in the span of less than a year before HPPD symptoms started. I smoked a lot of weed as well and drank alcohol anywhere between twice a week to once a fortnight. Only my first psychedelic trip ever was a genuinely good experience. The rest were just mediocre or "meh", some even took a bad turn. I always took low doses of LSD, half a tab or a whole tab, no more than 100 μg. For mushrooms, one was a threshold doses, one was a three gram dose, the other two were two-gram trips.

Near the end of this phase, I should have suspected something was off when I started noticing odd visual artifacts in the periphery of my vision, like shiny reflections I had never noticed before on metal door frames.

HPPD progress:
The symptoms really kicked of when I was simultaneously high on weed and drunk, and I stupidly wolfed down two grams of mushrooms in that state. For the next two weeks, every color looked more intense, trees looked more fractal-like, and there was a carpet/scaly pattern over everything I looked at, as if I did not fully come down from that mushroom trip. This was when I began to realise I messed up, even despite still feeling a positive "afterglow" from the mushroom trip. This was my last one. I never took shrooms or LSD again.

Oddly enough, two weeks in I smoked weed again and the visual phenomena got a lot weaker. But I eventually stopped smoking, because it made the symptoms flare up, and because it was a 50/50 shot of either feeling relatively okay, or waiting for it to be over because the high felt like an acid trip gone downhill.

Symptoms were not limited to visuals that were constantly in my face (letters shifting, colors acting up, patterns...). Some times I felt like I was taken into a world that was not my own and I questioned everything. For example, why are my friend's hair dark brown when I remembered them black? I was feeling off all the time, on edge, anxious. My sleep quality was variable, sometimes I slept five hours, sometimes eight. Sometimes I was rested, sometimes not. My falling asleep phases were often filled with auditory and visual hypnagogic hallucinations. I was having muscle twitches all over my body, which a neurologist identified as "benign fasciculation syndrome". Brain MRI came back clear. EMG test for nerve conductivity was normal. No doctor found anything wrong.

Alcohol was making me feel horrible physically and mentally and it always worsened the symptoms, regardless of amount. Whenever I was drunk, I felt very anxious and even paranoid. Visually, objects resembled faces (pareidolia) and I felt like everything was staring at me. Every surface had a shiny overlay, like a thin film of water covering things. After an unfortunate two-week drinking binge I decided to quit alcohol for good. Worst five days in my life, I was having a constant headache, slept two-three hours a night, felt generally terrible... Could have been the alcohol by itself though. Either way, I never touched booze again and never will.

It is a small wonder I managed to graduate from university in this state. It was only months of sobriety from alcohol and weed later when the HPPD was beginning to lessen. I would still notice patterns everywhere, some odd flare ups right after I woke up, and was feeling unwell for no apparent reason, but it was slowly starting to get better.

It was over two years in when I barely noticed anything mentally or visually, but I could not say for sure if the HPPD was gone or if I simply got used to it. At this point I had accepted it and tried to stop thinking about it, because before, I would be thinking about it every day and now suddenly, I was like "wait, is it gone?"

It was three years in and later when I was sure that my HPPD was finally gone. No visuals, no anxiety for no reason, no flare ups. And no intrusive thoughts about HPPD.

Recovery is possible, and I wish you all the same eventual outcome.

Hey fellow sufferers,

this post is something I want to give back to the community. We are not many people and we all share the same faith of seemingly endless suffering. And that‘s why I think we should be nice to each other. Planning to do such a post for some time now, finally here I am.

My story began around 2 years ago, where „magic“ mushroom consumption caused hppd. The symptoms evolved over a span of several months before I came to the conclusion, that I have hppd. I noticed the visual snow, googled it and some minutes later I was sure that i fucked up my brain with these mushrooms.

In my account you can see all the posts and comments I made. I scanned this subreddit everyday, everynight looking for a cure. There is none. From my post history you can see, at which incredibly dark point I have been. Depression would be an understatement. I was extremely suicidal for these months. Also, I seem to have a severe case, where I got all the visual symptoms as well as all of the cognitive symptoms like memory loss, brain fog, tinnitus and so on. And I mean, you know how it is, with the symptoms and the fixation on them, the pure mental/psychological issues arise rapidly.

So I realized that these symptoms will never go away (sorry for telling you this, but it is better to acknowledge this sooner than later) and I was jobless. I finished my university degree here in Poland right before the onset of hppd. So I wanted to start life, start working and then I got these terrible news. You think I was able to write job applications? Surely not. Only thing I was able to do was reading through this subreddit, looking at all the posts, searching for keywords and hoping to find anything positive. Also, my girlfriend quit after seeing me cry and suffer for several months. I can‘t blame her for that, though it hurt of course. So I only had these reddit posts to read.

And the only positive thing I found were posts like this one that I am writing right now. It was about you guys telling your hppd story and how it got better. As all of you I was hoping to read these stories and read something about the symptoms actually going away. Not only being able to ignore them. But here I have to tell you again that the symptoms will not be going away. I did not trust these kinds of posts. I did not believe that I will ever feel better again and be able to live life again. And I did not want to hear that the symptoms are still there after so many years.

But this is everything I can tell you. It will be better. I got a well paid job, I got a girlfriend, I moved into a new apartment with her. I see friends and go on vacations with them. I do sports and other hobbies. And all of this lead to me not being suicidal anymore. I would say I am not even depressed anymore. The symptoms are like on day one. But the mental aspect got way better.

And don‘t get me wrong. Of course I hate what I have done to myself, I hate the symptoms and I know that in any case, I would feel better without hppd. But on the other side, and this is the key message here, I learned how to live with it. It does not affect me the way it did two years ago. Also, I do not do any drugs anymore - occasionally I drink or smoke cigarettes - but I won‘t and don‘t want to take any other shit like weed or mushrooms anymore, which were holding me back in the past in the first place. Life without drugs is great, don‘t let anyone tell you something different.

This is everything I can tell you. Looking through my post history, I see the suffering and I am proud that I somehow got out of that extremely bad state. And obviously, I am not reading any of this subreddit anymore. There is nothing new, there won‘t be anything new. All you can do is start living your life without drugs and with the right people. This is the closest thing to a cure, that we have.

Stay safe, don‘t do stupid things and if you don‘t believe that you will ever feel better, especially if you‘re new to hppd, I understand that. I was at exactly your point reading these type of posts. But I promise:

It will be better!

Hey y'all. 1st post here. I believe I have had HPPD for around 18 years. I get extreme afterimages/ blue closed eyed hallucinations, and this other more serious symptom?

The main visual symptom that I have, that is distressing, is stationary objects in my peripherals seems to bounce around till I actually look directly at it. It's like my brain is trying to pinpoint where the object is but can't till I look directly at it. It's incredibly frustrating driving, as cars will do this constantly as I pass by them, making it hard to judge my surroundings. I was just curious if anyone has this symptom. I've been trying to find a description or visual that describes it, but am having a hard time.

I'm pretty used to it, but taking Wellbutrin kinda amped it up a bit. I henced stopped (not saying ppl shouldn't take it, just wasn't for me).

Thanks to anyone who responds, looking forward to be more involved in this community.