Wait...Are We All Part of the Same Trip?

Last winter, I found myself knee-deep in an iboga experience where I confronted my fear of getting in trouble with my lawyer parents, a trip that seemed to last for months after it ended. It felt like everyone in my waking reality was in on it. Conflicts erupted with friends and romantic partners who started speaking in legal language and threatening legal action over minor rifts, saying dramatic things in heated moments, such as: “I have the right to defend myself,” “if you text me again, I’ll file a restraining order,” and “if you write about this, I’ll hire a lawyer.” Had they eavesdropped on my trip?

Apparently, I’m not the only person this has happened to. Kate Hawke, a 71-year-old therapist in Santa Fe, New Mexico, tripped on mescaline when she was 16 years old and saw a phrase written in the sky: “God takes care of his children.” A week later, her mom — who didn’t know about the trip — told her she’d had a dream that her daughter ran out into the night while she stood there looking out and heard the phrase: “God takes care of his children.” 

Psychologist Carl Jung might consider these synchronicities — outer reflections of our own minds, which all have access to a universal web of symbols and ideas called the collective unconscious. Others may say they’re mere coincidences or, on the flip side, deeply spiritual experiences stemming from the interconnectedness of all beings. 

According to James Giordano, Professor Emeritus of Neurology at Georgetown Medical Center, these interactions may stem from the person who took psychedelics themselves more than those around them, thanks to a phenomenon called déjà rêvé, which is when something you experience in a dream state occurs in waking life. The person “may behave in subtle ways throughout the trip that invite others to bring up the themes of the trip,” says Giordano. “The themes or feelings or intuitions that they incur or that are evoked during their trip will persist or will recur during the non-trip state.” For instance, in my case, I may have expressed feelings of guilt or belligerence that triggered others’ combative sides.

“When you've been through something intense and transformative, people may respond differently to you because they sense something has shifted,” says Shebna N. Osanmoh, psychiatric nurse practitioner at Savantcare, a mental health clinic that offers psychiatric care and therapy. “So while it can feel like they're part of the same trip, what's often happening is that your internal changes are subtly influencing your outer world and relationships.”

It’s also possible that someone might be more sensitive to subtle social cues from others that relate to their psychedelic experience right after it ends. “There’s a change in your brain activity so that you are becoming more perceptive to inferences and innuendos that are relevant or referent to things that happened in your trip,” says Giordano. “You become more intuitive, more implicitly perceptive of something that may be subliminal in the way individuals are interacting with you.”

More specifically, after using psychedelics, “your attention becomes finely tuned to symbols, words, and themes that connect to what happened during your journey,” says Osanmoh. “You may start noticing coincidences or synchronicities — moments when people mention things that feel directly related to your trip. These experiences can feel almost magical or telepathic, but from a psychological point of view, they're a mix of heightened sensitivity and pattern recognition. The mind is looking for meaning and coherence as it integrates powerful insights and emotions.”

The interactions we have with other people after a journey can reflect changes in both our inner and outer worlds. “Where we often trip up is the question of: Did reality change, or did my perception of reality change?” says Richard Hartnell, VP of Outreach at DanceSafe. “These things are intertwined. You're going to treat people differently because you've had these experiences.”

Another chicken-or-egg issue: Could those around you be behaving as if they’re in your trip because they already shaped what happened in that trip, thematically or otherwise? For instance, did I trip about lawyers because we already live in a litigious culture? Maybe what I saw after the journey was part of the same social trend that contributed to it in the first place. “This is becoming part of modern humor: ‘I’m calling your manager,’” says Hartnell.

Some researchers theorize that psychedelics put our nervous systems in an interconnected state that allows us to reach each other’s subtle physical and emotional cues. Psychopharmacologist Robin Carhart-Harris, for instance, posits that psychedelic use creates an “entropic brain” in the user. Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapist Margot Kahn says that psychedelics “relax the brain’s rigid predictive models in the default mode network, and it increases more fluid connections between all the areas of the brain.”

This brain state helps us access what Mexican neuropsychologist Jacobo Grinberg calls the “syntergic field,” a shared consciousness all our brains can tap into via the “neuronal field,” or neural activity that extends outside the brain. When we tap into the entropic brain and access the syntergic field, we can create a sort of shared lucid dream, which Kahn has seen in group ceremonies. For instance, she recalls a mushroom ceremony where, without any prompting, a circle of older men all began reconnecting with their inner children.

“When the container is safe — when there's a lot of psychological and physical safety and emotional attunement — people can tap into the syntergic field of the space,” says Kahn. “Our nervous systems relax enough to allow our brains to be more fluid and enter that entropic brain state, and that helps us get in touch with the visceral feeling, the emotionality that's going on. That’s the alchemy that leads to really deep attunement, and some people really believe that in that shared consciousness, you can almost telepathically communicate with other people through that exchange of energy and emotion. It literally is the web of life. If we’re able to connect to that energy — that life force that pulsates in the web of life — we’re able to communicate with each other energetically.” 

In more scientific terms, psychedelics contain compounds that act on the brain’s serotonin 2A receptors, increasing connectivity between networks that are normally more segregated, explains Zach Skiles, a psychologist for the Mission Within Foundation. “Areas of the brain which govern self-related thought and social cognition, which help us recognize the intentions and emotions of others, can become highly active. Substances like psilocybin, MDMA, ayahuasca, and 5-MeO-DMT influence these cortical regions responsible for self-referential processing, social cognition, and sensory integration. The end result induces pro-social behavior that can foster a greater sense of acceptance, connection, and empathy. When a person returns to baseline from a psychedelic experience, many people maintain these pro-social behaviors for a length of time.”

This connection can exist with both animals and humans, says Skiles. “Months after a personal 5-MeO-DMT session, I was attempting to domesticate a wild horse, which walked over to me and lovingly rested his nose on my forehead,” he recalls. “The horse elicited a great emotional response of awe that caused me to re-experience sensations from my psychedelic experience, reminding me of the narrative developed in the psychotherapeutic follow-up sessions: That as part of the natural world, I am enough.” 

I myself remember encountering a cat in the yard right after an iboga ceremony and watching it puff up in fear as I tensed up with surprise, solidifying a lesson the medicine had taught me about how, when people fight, we’re often just afraid of each other.

A few studies have demonstrated people’s ability to read minds through tasks such as “card guessing,” where one person guesses what card another is visualizing, as reported in Dean Radin’s The Conscious Universe. There is some evidence of a neurological basis for this ability — specifically, the right parahippocampal gyrus of the brain appears to be activated during successful telepathic tasks. There’s research suggesting this brain area may also be more active under the influence of psychedelics. “If you look at data and research on psychedelic compounds and medicines, there are countless case studies on abilities to communicate with past loved ones, with animals, and with folks that aren’t physically present right next to you,” says Gavin Dawson, Director of Medical Operations at Stella Mental Health, who administers ketamine therapy. 

Some even postulate that shared consciousness is possible through the tiny vibrating strings that make up everyone and everything, according to string theory. “The web of life is the invisible strings that connect all of us: humans, animals, plants, and the inner realm,” says Kahn. “It connects us to what once was and what will be. Many people who have done psychedelics say they feel this grand unity, this universal connectedness — and that's what the web of life is about. The invisible strings that connect all of us. Physics is trying to explain certain cause-and-effect [relationships] through string theory. I think that is part of this collective energetic field that we all are a part of and that it's easy to get disconnected from.”

When people share a strong bond or have used the same psychedelic substance, their brains already share similarities that may facilitate this blending of minds, Giordano adds. “I have supervised practicums and been on it myself, and it's not uncommon for people to say they experienced someone else's trip while on the medicine,” says Vincent Bruno, a licensed therapist and psychedelic facilitator. “People are tripping in the same room, so there's not much of a physical barrier between them — and I believe what is happening is that once we get into the medicine space, our central nervous systems become much more attuned.”

Then, after a journey, people generally have lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol and higher levels of the endorphin serotonin, making them bolder, which might cause them to lean into triggers and uncomfortable interactions that dig up wounds the trip tapped into. “If people are in this raw state, your demons are out on display,” Bruno explains. “Your demons are beginning to rattle their cages.”

Whatever the cause of these shared psychedelic experiences, they can help us examine what in our own minds is creating them. “Maybe you can find this will help you lighten up or take the cue to self-scrutinize,” says Hartnell. “You have this process running in your mind. Decide whether it’s worth it or not.”

“The key is grounding,” says Osanmoh. “Gentle self-care, time in nature, journaling, and integration therapy can help your mind and body recalibrate. Talking with a therapist experienced in psychedelic integration can be very helpful to make sense of what you felt and saw. Over time, the boundaries between you and others usually become clear again — but the insight of connection often remains, in a healthier and more grounded way.”

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