I have at different points in my life had chronic sleep paralysis, which has lead to some incredibly vivid experiences. I don’t know if they count as “hallucinations”, in that it would technically be more akin to a lucid dream I don’t have control over.

The themes have changed at different points in my life but the worst point I ever hit was around 2015 or 2016. I would get sleep paralysis where I’d feel like an immense amount of weight or pressure was on my chest and panic thinking I was going to die, all the while I was unable to move or speak. It was happening multiple times a night every single time I would be about to fall asleep.

I now know that one of the major things that triggers sleep paralysis for me, is something disrupting my usual sleep schedule for more than a night or two, and during this time the sleep paralysis itself was massively disrupting my sleep schedule and causing me to get very little sleep overall. It basically turned into a vicious cycle where the sleep paralysis got worse the more sleep deprived I became, but the sleep paralysis stopped me from getting hardly any actual sleep, because I was afraid to try.

I hit a point where the sleep paralysis turned into vividly seeing aliens coming into my bedroom to abduct me. They appeared consistent between different episodes, and I had one in particular where they were drilling into my skull and when they noticed I was aware telepathically told me to calm down because they’d done this to me before.

In my normal waking life I believe in aliens in the vague sense that I find it hard to accept life on earth is the only life in the universe, I do not generally believe in ETs abducting people and whizzing around the earth in saucers, but given the massive sleep deprivation and vivid sleep paralysis “hallucinations”, there were several days where I alternated between panicking that the aliens were going to finally either kill me or take me away, and panicking that I was losing my damn mind.

I had one last sleep paralysis “hallucination” then where I felt someone put their hand on my shoulder and tell me they were going to put an end to it, and then, while I still had sleep paralysis, I didn’t hear, see, or feel anything else when it happened. So while still not pleasant, the sleep paralysis was significantly less frightening from that point and I managed to actually get some sleep and calm down.

So while I have never had a substance induced bad trip, I feel like I’ve had multiple naturally occurring ones. I could be entirely off base with that comparison, since I really wouldn’t know, but it has definitely made me want nothing to do with anything that has a reputation for bad trips like Benadryl or Salvia.