I just found Hunter S. Thomson in the search engine and read a little about him.
Indeed, I can understand the fear and loathing and Las Vegas is predestined for this form of polar sensations. So then, if one can engage with the grotesque display of human voluptuousness, it is a trip within a trip. You can embrace it while it lasts.
I know from my days of techno and goa parties that people sought to increase their high, which unfortunately resulted in their facial muscles stiffening into grimaces as the teeth in their mouths began to grind incessantly and the fun turned into effort. You could tell from their unsteady looks that they had just arrested themselves and the famous spontaneous flow eluded them. Tripping is a tightrope walk. The gaming table as a material accelerator of the high feelings is a fitting encore, both cause mental flights of fancy, but one should jump off when it is most beautiful. The contrast to the high is the low, as always. To endure the low without remorse, shame and guilt, a way of life. A trip makes no sense if you demonise it afterwards.
I once had a frightening experience from an overdose of quite pure liquid ecstacy. The distortion of reality began with a very intense sensation of the dance crowd surrounding me, the bare sweat-covered upper arms aroused my disgust when I came into contact with them and the bar, which was about three metres under normal vision, suddenly stretched infinitely before my eyes. I decided to leave the overwhelming impressions and took a taxi back to the hotel. But each encounter held its own grotesque scenery. The taxi driver, for example, had his eyes bulging out of his sockets, and the hotel and the corridor again proved to be an infinitely long ribbon, with the same doors everywhere, the carpet made me feel as if it wanted to swallow me up. Nevertheless, I found the right room and went to bed. There it was to go on really great, I had visions of galactic events in space, saw spaceships and lights and all that. I really wished it would stop soon. Which I knew it would. Part of me always stayed sober, so my fear was contained.
I don't regret the experience in any way, I respect it as a unique experience of a special intensity. I neither ascribe to it an exaggerated mysticism nor do I trivialise it.
How about you? Similar experiences?
That's right, that's how I had experienced it before, as extremely stimulating and making me awake. I didn't take a pill at the time, but it was in liquid form, I was told it was "pure MDMA liquid ecstasy". So I was surprised myself that it gave me a trip. Who knows what was in it.
I can confirm the overwhelming effect you describe and had actually only experienced it with shrooms. At the same time, I always had an irrepressible need to laugh at the beginning and only once did I cry for about two whole hours and retreat to a dark room where the party people visited me from time to time to check on me. I said everything that night that I would never say otherwise, for example because my girlfriend only said stupid things. LOL. Truth serum, but not of the evil kind, rather an inability to lie, but without spitefulness. Yes, the sense of time goes down the drain, eternity is not one :)
For a while I had considered taking part in an ayahuasca ceremony, but there was no real reason to do so, other than curiosity. Which I feel is insufficient, because it seems like it's a very earnest thing to do.
Those times are long over and today I have much more respect as my body wouldn't cope so well any more. Or so I guess. (Same with alcohol, drinking is not so much fun as it was).