A trippy feeling is the awareness that one’s perception of reality has come untethered from its ordinary foundations. It’s an altered state of consciousness which is commonly associated with the use of psychoactive drugs. In fact, the word trippy comes from the drug-centered counterculture of the 1960s.
Drugs aren’t necessary to experience a trippy feeling, however. A psychedelic frame of mind can be achieved through drumming and dancing, through meditation or encounters with art. Sometimes, things that seem perfectly ordinary trigger trippy episodes. A word, a familiar object, or an evocative vista can unexpectedly launch a person into an awareness of an all-pervading abnormality.
There’s an implication of lightness in a trippy experience, a suggestion that the weird perceptions being experienced are more amusing than momentous. A trip is a little bit of travel, after all, something less than the grand journey of a pilgrimage. There is transcendence within a trippy experience, but it’s just a glimpse of another level of reality, not a full immersion that enables the person to arrive at a profound new vision of life. A trippy feeling is mind-opening, but not fully mind-blowing. Trippy moments give us just a hint at the strange territories that we could explore if we dared to venture through our wide open doors of perception.
