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erowid — a map of experience

An interactive atlas of 24,788 first-person psychoactive experience reports, arranged so that reports which read alike sit near each other.

What you're looking at

Every point in the Reports map is one experience report. Reports are placed purely by the words they use — no categories are fed into the layout — yet substances, doses and kinds of experience settle into their own regions. Colour is added afterwards, showing each report's substance class (or its sentiment).

The Words map places every distinctive word the same way, by the company it keeps: geometry near fractal, nausea near stomach, ego near universe. The two maps are linked — click a word to light up the reports that use it, or pick a filter to see its characteristic words.

How it's made

• Each report is turned into a bag of words (TF-IDF), reduced to 100 latent dimensions (truncated SVD), then projected to two dimensions with t-SNE. Both maps share that one vocabulary space.
• A word–report incidence matrix links the two maps.
• Sentiment is the mean VADER score across each report's sentences — red for negative, green for positive.
• Substances are grouped into psychoactive classes by a keyword classifier over the substance name; experience "themes" are curated word-sets.

It reuses the pipeline built for buddhomics, a map of the Pali canon, retargeted from scripture to trip reports.

Data & credits

• Reports — 24,788 experience reports from Matti Vuorre's tmasc R package (Text Mining Altered States of Consciousness), originally scraped from Erowid.
• Substance notes — brief descriptions from general public knowledge, each linking to PsychonautWiki for detail.

Experience reports are the personal accounts of the people who wrote them and are hosted by Erowid, whose content is copyrighted and shared for noncommercial use. This is a research and harm-reduction visualisation, not medical advice, and nothing here endorses drug use. If you or someone else is in danger, contact emergency services or a poison control centre.