		 DOSE:

		 1 hit

		 LSD
		 (gel tab)

           BODY WEIGHT:
	   265 lb

First Time LSD Use at Age 46

An interest in LSD.

I first developed an interest in trying LSD, I think, when reading the James Gleick biography of physicist Richard Feynman.  While Feynman’s biography mentioned that everyone around him was trying LSD (when it was legal), Feynman mentioned that he would never try it, because the risk to his brain, which was what his entire career had been based upon, was too great.  However, Gleick mentioned that Feynman had actually tried it, but kept it secret once LSD was banned, thinking that his employer, CalTech, might frown upon it.  Then, I read the Steve Jobs biography, where it was mentioned.  An article on Carey Grant trying it made its way onto my reading list.  Tim Ferriss, and Sam Harris, mentioned in separate blog posts trying it for brain power, and spiritual experimentation, respectively, and, when I saw that the writer of the book that became the film “Limitless”, with Bradley Cooper, had based his book, and his fictional pill, NZT, on the book “Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream”, by Jay Stevens, I made the decision to try it if possible.

I turned 46 late last year, and I had never ever tried drugs.  I hadn’t even tried alcohol until my 21st birthday, but always had a fear of any drugs.  When I started dating a 31-year-old, Fleur, who was a three-times-a-day pot smoker, I tried marijuana for the first time (smoking and edibles).  Fleur mentioned that she could get me anything that I wanted to try.  So I told her I’d love to try LSD.

Then we broke up.  Or she broke up with me, because of our fights about money.  And she went back to the rich older generous boyfriend (who is married).  So it was strange when she contacted me again to let me know that she had what I had expressed an interest in, that she had four paper tabs, and wanted to know when I had 8-12 hours to book a trip.

Unfortunately, as a single dad, I had my kid that weekend, so we scheduled the next weekend, with a trip sitter that she knew for safety sake.  She also told me that a guy she knew, and had hooked up with, was very jealous that she and I were going to experiment with LSD, so this would be special.

Unfortunately, during my kid weekend, she had an “oops”, when the guy she used to hook up with came over with the movie “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”, and they did the drug and did the deed.  I decided to search the darknet markets for what I could as far as an alternate source.  Unfortunately, that is right when the Evolution/Bitcoin debacle happened, which scared me.

So I went back to Fleur.  She found out that her supplier ran out, so she found another one.  While on her way to pick up the LSD, he was raided and arrested by the police, and she freaked out and went home.  She spoke to a person who spoke to a person who was very knowledgeable about experimentation with LSD, who got her a source.

I mentioned that I had to be at CalTech on business at 2pm, so she said we would start early.  (Early to me meaning maybe 6am).  She was running late by 10am, and finally arrived around 1040am.  She told me the story about her trip, which I think we finally dosed at 11am.  She pulled open a baggie, which had a strip of a pre-marked and measured gel or gummy substance.

“Are you sure this is LSD?”  I had never heard of dosage this way, only via liquid, paper tabs, sugar cubes, or via dropper onto gummy bears, etc.  She said yes, that her experimenting source said it was good.  I have no idea the dosage, honestly.  But we each had one measure of the gel, which dissolved quickly under the tongue, and had no bad taste.

The Comeup.

I put on some music while we waited for the drug to take effect.  She mentioned that the last time she tried it, with the paper tabs, that she walked during the come up.  But she said “I’m not sure that was even LSD - that might have had cocaine in it.”

“I need to smoke a bowl”, Fleur said, and she smoked some pot.

At some point, leaning against my sink, I noticed that my sink looked FILTHY.  And I thought I had recently cleaned it.  It was as though I was seeing 20 extra shades of grey in the stainless steel that I had never noticed before.  Wow.

“Let’s get out of here”, I said, and we went for a walk.  I saw the yellow and blue shading in the leaves of the trees while we were walking, as never before.  As mentioned, I’m 46, and I have gained weight, am out of shape, and walking, it felt like my heart rate was going through the roof, I was heating up, and I had a slight trouble breathing.  I mentioned that to Fleur.

Fleur said, “I don’t want to have to call the ambulance on you.  I’ve done that for three friends already.”

Taking a spill.

Suddenly, playing a joke on her sounded like a good idea.  So I went face down on the grass, and didn’t move.  And predictably, she freaked out.  Laughing, I got up.

“Your face is bleeding”, Fleur said. I reached up and felt a point where I had hit a root and had a blood spot on the middle of my forehead.  “Let’s keep walking, so that no one stops and asks if you are okay”.

On we went, to a sculpture garden, with a pyramid, rocks, flowing water, and lots of trees.  There were patches of long flowing grass, and they seemed to be moving, and bulging, and I was not sure if it was the wind or the effects of the LSD.  “Let’s sit under the trees, and watch the sparkling dew on the grass”.  Unfortunately, an old man with a fanny pack heard me say that and took the only bench in front of the grass.  So we went and sat elsewhere.

Fleur was suspicious.  “I wonder if that old man suspects something”.  “No”, I said, “we are just like two art students, admiring the sculpture garden”.  I sat on the bench next to her.  We ended up lying on a stone bench head to head, with our legs in opposite directions.

“Look at the wispy clouds — they look 3D!”, Fleur said.  I couldn’t see that.  I expected the sky to look like colors, or to see trails when I moved my hand, but I didn’t.

But I really wanted to walk barefoot in the grass between a large group of trees that I saw.  The amazing different shades of green that I saw really fascinated me.  So I entered a group of about 8 trees.

I speak with the trees.

Walking barefoot through the grass, I felt “drawn to” one of the trees.  It was a eucalyptus.  Right away, I noticed that the knots in its bark made a face.  “Big deal”, I told myself, you can find a face in anything.  But staring at its bark, it seemed to be moving, breathing, bulging, and alive.  That fascinated me.  I saw one patch of the bark in my vision stay still, while the rest of the tree seemed to move.  I tried to focus on the face in the trees, but that didn’t seem to do anything for me.  I tried to feel the trees and the grass breathe with me, but that didn’t seem to work.  So I focused on the moving bark again.

Then I heard a voice inside my mind.  “Look deeper”.

Then I heard a voice inside my mind.  “Look deeper”.

  I looked around, and looked up to the tree and to the new branches growing up on the higher branches. With my more sensitive vision to colors, I could clearly see how the tree became limbs, which became branches, became smaller branches, and became leaves.  And from the older leaves, which were turning a darker green and brown, were younger leaves growing a bright green, at the end of the smaller branches.  “Wow”, I said audibly.

Looking back at the tree, I realized that the “look deeper” comment made me realize that looking for eyes on trees was superficial and silly.  I felt like that was staring at a big pair of breasts on a tree, without seeing what they were attached to.  There was a lot to see, but I had to put aside trying to make the trees look human, or anthropomorphizing them.

I looked at another tree, which was an oak, and yet another tree, which was a birch.  I saw how the oak, with its complex bark, was swirling, and how it faced another oak tree, which was smaller.  And at the end of the grove was a large green tree with spikes (my mom always called those a “Monkey Puzzle”, but I am not sure what it is called).   That tree had a grain that went sideways in rings, like fat rolls, around the tree, instead of the vertical grains of all the other trees.  Every tree was different.

“Look deeper”, I heard again, and at that point, I got a little freaked out and returned to Fleur on the bench.  “I’ve been communing with the trees”, I told her.

'Let me guess', she said.  'You’re a tree hugger now?”

“No”, I said, 'but I feel like, in a way, the trees were speaking to me.'

“Oh, I see now”, Fleur said.  “You are the Lorax. You speak for the trees.”

This comment caused a giggling fit between the two of us for a long time.

“No.  But I did spend a long time with that Eucalyptus.  That tree is Australian, so it is not from here.  But chances are in was brought here to this county between 1865 and 1880, when there was a huge investment of Eucalyptus trees and their rapid growth for farming purposes as a wind break.”  I was trying to impress her with my knowledge of local flora.

“So, that tree is lonely, because it’s so far from home”, she said.  “Maybe”, I said.  '“Come on, let me introduce you,”, I told Fleur.

So I pointed out what I had seen, about the grain of the tree, and about how different they all were.   I pointed out the spiked tree, and how sharp the spikes were, and how different that grain was.  “you know, they make military night vision goggles green, because the human eye can distinguish more shades of green than any other color.”  While she spent the time pricking her fingers on the spikes, I returned to the Eucalyptus.

“You’re wrong”, I heard a voice say inside my head.  “I’m not lonely, and I’m not far from home.  And I’m definitely not different from the others.”

'Of course you are”, I thought.  'You’re different, and I can tell by looking at you.'

“I told you to look deeper”, the tree said in my mind. ' We are all here, roots in the SAME soil, inspiring and expiring the same atmosphere, and with the same sun shining on us.  We are all drawing the same energy and nutrients.  Look deeper.'

That made me gasp.  The metaphor for all of us on Earth, all limited by what we do with the same resources - the air, the sun, the wind, the water, the minerals in the land”, was super obvious to me.  And I felt stupid for thinking how different everything was.  I was part of the trees, and of the Earth also.  We all start with the same resources.

Fleur didn’t like the way that the knots in the spiked tree was looking at her, and she said that she wanted to jump, and run.  But instead she went and sat down again.  When she did, I went over and hugged the Eucalyptus.  I was, indeed, a tree hugger.

The fanny pack man left the throne area, and so I went up there.  I noticed that the dew drops, which had made these beautiful hexagon colors when I walked by there previously, had all dried up.  I frowned.  I walked around and noticed a granite round table and chairs - like a picnic table.  The granite was alive, moving, like it was a pool of water.  All the individual dark grains in the granite seemed to be dancing and boiling.  That amazed me.

Everything has a grain.

Suddenly, I recalled being 12 again.  I had problems with my parents, and was sent to live on a 500 acre ranch in rural Oregon, back then, and I was remembering being with a family that didn’t know me that well.  I hung out with a 20 year old, named Allan, who was into cars and restored and painted rare cars to sell.  I used to help him sand cars and paint them, and he told me the importance of following the contours of the car’s lines.  “Everything has a grain”, he would say.  “Follow the grain”.

Petting Allan’s german shepherd back then, he saw me petting the dog backwards to its fur.  “I told you to follow the grain”, he said.  Later on, when I got a summer job on a lumberjack crew in Oregon, and then would follow them to the sawmill, I learned all about observing the sometimes twisted grains of the trees we cut down and then would saw into lumber.  Observing the grains of the tree, and predicting how the tension would release as you cut into the tree and tried to make the tree fall a certain way, was very important.

The next summer, I helped a butcher shop with a field truck slaughter a few farm animals, including three cows, a pig, a goat, several lambs, and a bison.  Again, and again, the butcher trying to teach me a few things had said while cutting near the bones, “follow the grain of the muscle”.

I had totally forgot about that, and all that came back to me in a flurry of memories, all connected. and very vivid.

While Fleur sat on the bench, I decided to jump up on a granite rock, which was rough in texture.  I saw what looked like a security guard approaching, and decided to go over to Fleur again.  Doing so required that I jump off the rock, and looking down, it looked like the texture of the rock was like spikes, and the ground seemed around a mile away.  Afraid that I was going to break an ankle, I jumped anyway, and landed safely.  I was amazed at how, even though I felt like I was tripping balls, I had an excellent sense of balance, able to sit and stand, run, jump, and walk, without problem.

I could feel, since it was now noon, how hot the ground was, and how burning hot the sun was.

I walked over and could see that the security guard was actually a cleaning lady.  I found myself telling Fleur that I could see the granite in it’s igneous state, moving like lava, when she interrupted me.

--“We are going to get the police called on us, or kicked out”, Fleur said.

“I don’t think so”, I said.   “For all anyone knows, we are just two art students exploring art and exploring the sculptures here.”

“I don’t want to stay here.  Let’s go”, she said.  So go we did. On the way out I stared at the trees, and smiled.  “Look deeper”, I heard again.

Suddenly, I realized that I was still being superficial.  I didn’t have to spit out facts and scientific knowledge just to say something smart.  It hit me that granite wasn’t even an igneous rock.  I was making connections that weren’t there instead of learning something deeper.  I started to cry.

The Carnival at the Performing Arts Center.

Crossing the street, the plan was to walk through a modern art sculpture garden and then through the big mall nearby.  But when we crossed the street, the flags, sculptures, and signs outside the performing art center looked exactly like a very very colorful carnival to me.

“Let’s check out the carnival”, I said.  I could see an interesting round sign that was a mauve color, or a faded red, that was a color I had never seen before.

“Let me guess, you want to get some cotton candy, and a balloon”?  We laughed again.

We stood in front of the Performing Arts Center as senior citizens flied past us and around us for the afternoon matinee of whatever play was showing.  We were looking at the sky and the colorful yellow and blue sculptures and getting some very very judgmental stares.  One Japanese woman in her late 60s turned her head as she passed by and gave me a long stare, and I stared back.  As I stared back at her, her face melted into a cartoonish Peter Max painting.

I saw a security guard who definitely was a security guard walking straight to us.  “We had better go”, I told Fleur.

While we were walking, I kept looking over my shoulder and saw the security guard following us.  She followed us to the property limit, and then we crossed the street and she turned around and went back to the performing arts center.

Leaving the property, I noticed a row of different trees - aspen trees.  They had new sprouts and branches growing mid-trunk from the tree.  “It’s a metaphor for layers of growth”, I told Fleur.  And I remembered how there is somewhere, an aspen grove (Pando) that is supposed to be all connected as one organism and shares the same root system.  I also noticed the building construction - you could see the texture and grains of the rolled stainless steel and the red sandstone used in the buildings very clearly - every detail.

My heart was racing again, and I felt like I was overheating. And I realized how red my eyes were from crying.

Seeing my True Self in a Sports Bar

We stopped into a local sports bar to hydrate and cool down.  I felt like all eyes were on us.  I sat at the bar while Fleur went into the bathroom. No one served us, so I moved to a corner table facing the window.  Still nobody served us, and I began to get paranoid.

“How long has Fleur been in the bathroom?”, I wondered.  It seemed like forever.  Finally a waitress came over and asked what I wanted to order.  “There is someone else coming”, I said.  But I’ll have a diet coke and a water.  I felt like I was sweating and red and overheating.

She paused and looked at me at what looked like forever.  “Diet Pepsi okay?”, she finally said.  “Yes”, I replied.  Where was Fleur?

She was taking way too long.  Maybe I needed to check on her.  I was getting somewhat paranoid.  Everyone was ignoring us rather than staring at us.  I felt like I was overheating.  I left my keys on the table and went to the restroom.

I paused in front of the Women’s restroom and couldn’t bring myself to open the door and call Fleur’s name.  Act normal.

So I went into the Men’s room and put cold water on my face.  I kept patting off the cold water until I felt like I was no longer overheating.  I gave myself a long look in the mirror.

My eyes weren’t dilated like I had thought they were.  But my hair looked so grey and wiry.  I could see so many colors of grey, including in my hair, and on my face.  My face looked so wrinkly.  And my eyes were definitely red.  Why did I think I looked so good for my age?  I don’t.  I thought I had no grey in my hair, but here it is - I can see it.

Everything has a grain, I thought.  Especially my face.  I am so old.  I looked at my posture, hunched over, and my belly, extended from fat.  No wonder I’ve been having so much problems with getting dates lately.  I look horrible.

I went back to the table.  Fleur was still not there, but my diet pepsi and water were there.  I downed it quickly.  Fleur showed up and I told her I was worried about her.  “I’m fine, but I want to smoke”, she said.  The waitress returned and took my Diet Pepsi, which was empty, away.

She had a water and an ice cream sundae and laughed at nothing.  I stared out the window, which had a screen on it, and the screen was FILTHY.  “It’s a metaphor”, I told Fleur.

“Another one?”, she said,  'There’s a lot of metaphors today', she said. “Well, everything does have a grain”, I told her.  But this screen is a filter.  And our filters get clogged up with a lot of stuff - religion, education, stereotypes - and it keeps us from seeing the world clearly, like us trying to see out of this window.

“Why did the waitress take away my drink?  Are we about to be kicked out?'  I was getting to be the paranoid one in here.  I had kicked off my shoes and started to wonder if that was against the rule here.

“mmm,”, she said.  “Try this brownie ice cream sundae”.  I did, and it tasted super sweet and chemically to me.  So did the Diet Pepsi, for that matter.  Much more than I’ve ever noticed before.

We weren’t going to have any alcohol, and I didn’t feel hungry, at all, and I was cooling off.  So I put my credit card on the table.  The waitress refilled the water and Diet Pepsi again and didn’t take the card.  I was getting paranoid about that.  Maybe it was the fact that I didn’t have shoes.  I’m sure that they have a sign that they can refuse service for no shoes or no shirt.

I looked at the couple next to us at another table, sure they were staring.  They weren’t, but the woman stared at me due to my staring at them.  I noticed how grey her skin color was.  She must be a smoker.  While she faced me and looked at me, her face seemed to melt, almost, and she looked like the cartoon Droopy Dog character.

“Your eyes are yellow.  Like really yellow.  You should get that checked out with a doctor”, Fleur said to me.

Leaving the high barstools, getting my shoes on, and calculating tip and leaving seemed to be a challenge.  Looking down at my feet, it looked like they were dangling a mile away.  But we walked back and to my pool.  The pool was too crowded on this sunny day to be a place to be.  I dipped my toe into the jacuzzi, and saw dust enter the water.  The fluorescent bathing suits, beach balls, and the amazing shading of the trees made me feel like everything was brighter.

I decided that I wanted to record my thoughts, and regretted not bringing a journal.  I tried to use the voice memo feature on my phone, but kept forgetting to press the button before and after speaking.  I was starting each voice memo with “hippie thoughts”, and then my thought, but then suddenly obsessed on whether or not I should be calling them “trippy thoughts”, instead.

“Hippie thoughts:  We are all under the same tent.

Hippie thoughts:  Whenever a bee stings someone else, it ends up harming themselves more.

Hippie thoughts:  We need to notice the details more - the subtle shading, and not just the obvious -of our lives more.

Hippie thoughts:  It really doesn’t matter whether you call them hippie thoughts, or trippy thoughts.  That’s not a thing.'

Divergence

Once we got home, I drank more water, and noticed that I had definitely been sunburned.  Fleur went to work smoking another bowl of weed right away, and she started watching kaleidoscope videos on youtube on my laptop.

I wanted to listen to music, and lie down, so I put asked Fleur if she was okay with me not watching her and being alone, and put on a sleep mask/blindfold, headphones, and played pandora and listened to music.

The moment I closed my eyes, I saw patterns very clearly.  On the perimeter of my vision, I saw lightning flashes - white and active.  In the center, I saw a scanning electron black and white image of a grasshopper extremely close up.  And I saw that antennas on the grasshopper, which looked like hairs, had their own hairs/antennas, which in turn had their own hairs.  There were patterns all the way down.  The grasshopper image split into two, and then four, and then turned into this beautiful geometric pattern, with a dark sparkling charcoal liquid mercury forming triangles and other geometric shapes, spilling and flowing over a deep green pattern.

I thought back to that tree, and looking up at the new bright green growth backlit by the sun.  The tree had a branch which led to a leaf, which supported a newer leaf.  My son, who just turned 10, was a green growing new leaf.  And it was the job, naturally, of the larger connected leafs to support the growth of the new leafs.

That growth can happen naturally, if there is a structure.  But if the branch, or leaf, is broken at a right angle, it won’t grow right.  It may even reach tendrils to get nutrients and growth, to another tree, branch, or roots underground.

I thought about my father.  About how he hit me once, and I felt compassion for him.  He always said he didn’t have the best parents. His grain grew as it did, and he was what he was.  And I thought again about Allan, in Oregon, taking on, in a way, the surrogate father role and teaching me about cars, and life, and not being judgmental, just guiding me on the right grains to follow when sanding a car along it’s lines.

And of course, I thought about my son.  It suddenly became super important for me to make sure that I offered guidance to my son and that he grew with my assistance straight and narrow without veering off into something damaging.  I could feel a duty as elders to guide my young son and show him the dangers and the ways to grow up safe and happy.  I wanted to expose my son to good things, and feed the good things in him right.  And to show him that all the sex and shit talking of society is not all there is.  All the marketing that he has been, and will be exposed to, is not all there is.

I started to cry.  Fairly uncontrollably.  I cried for the damaged relationship with my Dad, who was in a great marriage with my mom, and was a great provider, and so smart, and a world traveler, but worked too hard and was never around. And I cried for my son, who I worry about and just want to grow up self actualized and happy and independent.  Here I was noticing every detail of the moment, and I was not taking in every moment of my son as he goes through his childhood.

“Ah, I know what this is.  This is my brain pattern, doing…”  And then I was stuck.

“Ah, I know what this is.  This is my brain pattern, doing…”  And then I was stuck.

  I had this overwhelming feeling that I didn’t really know what was going on.  It was humbling.  I always wanted to insert a scientific answer into something, but this was way out of my normal experience.

I found myself saying over and over again to myself:

I don’t know shit.

I don’t know shit.

I don’t know shit.

Musical Adventures.

Then the Pandora station changed to a Rihanna song.  “What the fuck?  Rihanna?”  I thought for sure I had selected a chill out / lounge music station before the trip even started.  This song shouldn’t be playing.

But I went with it.  The patterns and lights in my brain, and the “lightning” electricity, made colorful disco patterns.  I could hear every detail of the music - when Rihanna took a breath to sing the next line of verse, I could hear the air passing through her larynx.  “Even air has a grain”, I thought.  'I’ll bet if she had a bump, or a polyp, in her breathing tract, you could hear that in the music as the air passed over it”.

The next song was some singer from Iceland, singing in Icelandic.  I couldn’t tell what the words were at first, but I concentrated on the emotions.  My brain thought I was hearing the words, but that was not possible.

I thought about how birds have a certain number of songs used to communicate, and how humans have the same patterns.  You think about two women laughing and making a joke, and you know what they are communicating, as far as emotion, even without the specific joke details.  Or a couple about to make love, and the woman, or the man says something like “mmm yes”, or “mmm da”, or “mmm oui”, or “mmm, si”, and you know what that conveys.  Or when a younger guy says “dude” in a certain tone of voice, or a young woman says “uggh whatever” in a certain tone of voice, the “song” and the context lets you figure out anything.  The details almost aren’t important.

All language is this way - it’s just one flow of grain to try to express concepts, thoughts, and especially emotions.  Like the songbirds we express emotions.  Language gets in the way of that sometimes.

Next song is an old woman singing in Spanish to a slow Tango song.  I can hear her age just from the voice, and I can especially pick up on her Argentinian accent, since I am very familiar with Latin American Spanish and Castilian Spanish. I can especially tell she is a smoker.

My Trip Partner Fights with Her Partner.

I’m getting restless.  I can hear Fleur on the telephone fighting with someone, after she has been in the bathroom a long time.  The fighting is bugging me.

“I’m checking on you”, I tell her.  She has smoked several bowls of marijuana.

“yeah, my boyfriend is really freaking out.  He thinks that I’m over here doing drugs with you and you and I are having sex.  I told him we are not fucking.  I feel like this is where our trips are definitely diverging”.

Suddenly, I feel compassionate towards Fleur.  I was worried about having a bad trip with her, since she likes to fight with me, and she can be condescending, and insulting, and we had a dating relationship.  But I just saw her as she was- dealing with a certain amount of anxiety, trying to feed it with marijuana, and dealing with financial issues.

Exploring the Dimensions that Really Matter.

I really want to draw, and I draw a detailed pen and ink version of the tree branches and color shades that have stuck in my mind.  And then I draw a version of the cartoon senior citizen that turned into a Peter Max painting at the performing art center.

I went back into the room on my bed and put my blindfold and earphones on again.  I started to see long string patterns of hexagons, pentagons, and squares, stretching diagonally in my vision.  All of the repeating patterns I had observed in nature made me realize that things repeat over and over again.  I thought about how much Fleur looked like my first girlfriend, over 20 years ago, and realized that there were only so many ways to make hands, arms, a face.

“Are there other dimensions?”, I wondered, while looking at squares stretched out in my eyes closed vision.  “Maybe”, the answer said.  'But why does it matter?  You are here, in this dimension.  Time is also a dimension, and all you have is the here and now.'  And a bright pinpoint light centered itself in between the long string of squares.  And I realized that we are only here a short time, and I have already wasted half of my life.

I thought about the lines - the tree grains - on my face again.  And for too long, I have fed my body, and my tree bark, if you will, processed foods, alcohol, and sun exposure, including today.  All I have is this moment.  I will be 50 in another four years, but I need to learn then how to be good at being a 50 year old.  For now, I need to learn how to be a good 46 year old.  That means bonding and learning from those my age.  I realized that I can learn from the best people at my age, and the best in people younger than me.  And, certainly the best in those aged above me.  Everyone wants to teach you something, and has something to share with you that will teach you.

Hippie thoughts:  Don’t do except do.  Be the best you, at your age, that you can.

Compassion for Those that Have Hurt Me.

Wow.  I started to cry again.  I thought about a woman that really hurt me 15 years ago, and how year after year, I wonder how I’ll ever get through that hurt, and amazed that it still hurts and I still think about it all the time.  And it seemed pretty easy to forgive her and move on.  She must be older now, and maybe wiser.

“What about my ex wife?”  I thought about her.  We had a nasty divorce and I hated much about her actions, from before and after I filed for divorce.  But it seemed easy to see her as a young girl in her 20s, in love with me, and not knowing what to do with my business, and my crazy life, and wanting to be a good mother and wife.  And I had much compassion for her.

Why am I crying so much?  This is not fun.  It’s probably cathartic, but definitely not fun.

Lessons learned about Money.

“But wait”, I thought.  'What about Money?'  I was supposed to think and meditate on my business during this LSD trip, and figure out what I should be doing with my life, and what I could do to improve my cash flow and merge my passions and areas of skill and change my business to fit that somehow.

Money has a flow also, the thought came to me.  It grows along certain grains, with certain patterns.  Suddenly I realized something.

Money is just a way to exchange something for something else that a person paying is looking for.

That sounds obvious, I mean we all know money is a unit of exchange, but my focus was on “what the person paying is looking for”.  Suddenly it hit me that many of my clients are looking for the same thing (a positive result from a difficult situation), but some are looking for other things - reassurance that they are a good person, education about the process, confirmation that they are not going to be ripped off, someone to take care of something for them, guidance through a difficult time, or in general, goods, or services — and that what they are really paying the money for is that feeling or guidance or getting what they had in mind they wanted.

I realized that with my business, I do so many things that get in the way of that simple exchange.  People WANT to pay me money to take care of their difficult situation, but I make sure I only return phone calls twice a day, so that I don’t get overwhelmed all day, and then I require an in person appointment to size them up, and then a written contract, with much legalese, and then they must pay via cashier’s check or money order, or visa/mastercard/american express/discover, etc.

As you can tell by this report, I like to write, and I probably use many more words than needed. I used to write a custom drafted 30 page memorandum to each client letting them know the pros and cons of each choice we had to make while I was handling their matter, and the probability of success of each option, and my recommended strategy.  And after spending hours on that, I used to find that most clients never read it, or just skipped to the last paragraph that said “conclusions”.  Did they not see how many hours I spent analyzing their matter?  Were they stupid?  Were they not impressed by my education and vocabulary and great writing skills? No.  All they wanted was my recommendation in the first place, and to know that I had gone over their situation and had a plan.  And I put so many blocks in the way of them getting that - so that I can feel important, or because I think they need that, or for no reason at all.  The flow of paying for something and getting what the person wants that they are paying for needs to have as few steps as possible to block that.

Aligning yourself to the flow of what the market really wants (what people really want in the aggregate) is even better.

I thought about a doctor who thought I was well connected and wanted to pay me a small amount to talk about his practice on Facebook and instagram.  I accepted and then griped about it, and when I did what he asked, he changed the terms and asked me to delete instagram and send a message on twitter instead. (this all happened the night before the LSD trip).   I was angry that he changed the terms, which made extra work for me while traveling, and was going to get revenge on him by putting something negative out there, and making a big deal about him being unethical, etc.  Suddenly that all seemed petty.  All he wanted was his business promoted, and to pay for it.  And I accepted that, and so I should promote once I decided and promised to do so.  So I did.  And he was happy and paid double.  Less stress for me, less blockage of the flow of money from what he wants to what he paid for.

I could hear Fleur fighting with her boyfriend again.  “I am not fucking him!”, she said.

“No, all he is doing is crying and crying.  I swear, he is just crying.  Okay Bye”.

The trip turns bad.

I very suddenly had, in my vision with my blindfold on, a vision of a horse head, completely skinned and bloody, all muscle and fat and skin hanging off of it, with eyes staring at me.  That shocked me.  Oh boy, I thought, here comes a bad trip.  From there, a background all over my vision of bone fragments, and blood, and skin, and eyes and teeth were everywhere.  I cringed.  But I thought about, as I had recently been reminded,  how I had worked with a butcher, and had lots of experience with dead animals.  But these look human, I thought.  I’m okay with this.  And then it went away.

Going solo.

“I’m going to leave as soon as I smoke this bowl.  I’m fine to drive.  My boyfriend is really upset, and thinks that this is like going over to a guys house to do a line of coke and fucking him.  I am never doing LSD again, that is for sure.  This is my once in a life time experience. '

I started rambling on and on about my meditations about money.  “Yeah, what is money, and why do we even need it?”, she said.  I told her that we need to not get in the way of money flowing for what people want to pay it to accomplish.

“All I know is that my boyfriend is super rich.  And he does all kinds of things.  But he is really rich, so I can’t piss him off.”  She exhaled and I saw the smoke coming out of her mouth, backlit by the window, turn into a rich rainbow of colors.  Literally stripes of colors in the smoke.  I told her that she was turning into Puff the Magic Dragon with her rainbow smoke, and she laughed.

She hugged me and I told her thank you.  I expressed to her that this felt like 10 years of therapy in one afternoon. I told her she had given me a gift.  “I know, she said”, “everything is a metaphor, and everything has a grain.'

She left.  I looked at my granite kitchen countertops, and noticed that the visuals seemed to be gone.  The grains in the granite didn’t seem to be as interesting any more.

Body sensations.

I laid down and cried again.  I tried to meditate, and noticed that my back and neck were very stiff.  My jaw had been clenching up throughout the afternoon.  My eyes hurt.  I started a body scan meditation and tried to relax, imagining my whole body calming down.

A voice in my head said “of course your jaw and eyes hurt.  You have been crying for hours.  And you have a knot, like the knots you saw in the trees, in the middle of your forehead.”  I reached up and felt the dried blood from falling early in the trip.  I had forgot about that.  “When are you going to see that everything bad, you do to yourself?” Everything you do to nurture or harm any cell in the grains of your body is like that.  It damages or repairs itself depending on how you feed the grains.

“I know”, I say.

“I know”.

And I feel very humbled and stupid.

I realize suddenly that I am holding onto things tightly and causing my own neck and back pain.  And it’s a metaphor for what I need to let go of.

I vowed to myself to sign up for a Yoga class the next day.  I feel that the grains in my muscles need to flow more.  I realize that what others call “flow” or “energy” during LSD trip reports I am experiencing as a grain, like the wood grains I saw earlier.  And I vow to call Big Brothers, and become a Big Brother to a little boy who needs support to grow up like a leaf big and strong, and not get nutrients from bad sources.  And to only feed the grains of my skin with quality nutrients.  And to wear more moisturizer and sunblock.

Hippie thoughts:  Growing up in the universe means letting go of “you'.

Walking

Later that evening, after sundown, I decided to do something good for my body, and get some exercise and think.  My mind felt clear, but I did feel a little ADD, in that thoughts were scattering through my brain at what felt like record speed. I walked and walked, and found myself smiling at every tree I saw on my walk.  “I learned something from a tree today”, I thought.  Amazing. I ended up walking over to a tree and giving it a big hug, smiling, and wished it well, and thanked it for being part of the Universe, and for teaching me something.

When I returned home I saw via my phone that I had walked 7 miles.  And I didn’t feel it.  Usually after 1-2 miles I get tired and feel it in my legs, and the soles of my feet.  What a day.  I readied myself for sleep.

Sleeping.

What a day, I thought, as I tried to get to sleep.  But I could not sleep, try as I might.  I kept going over the events of the day, and what I had learned, and felt sad for Fleur just smoking pot and arguing and not getting any value out of this.  I definitely felt different and felt that I had examined a lot.  Was my brain different?  Was my brain damaged?

Yes, I can feel that my brain is different, but I can look back at all the patterns I was stuck in with the old brain, and see that it clearly was an improvement.

Finally, at 5am, I fell asleep, only to wake up at 6am for work.  All day I felt extremely tired, almost hung over, but with a more clear energy and no headaches, like a hangover would give one.  I skipped Yoga to sleep early that evening.  The next day I felt clear, and noticed that I had lost 6 pounds.  That made me smile.

Hippie Thoughts:  It looks the same. It's the same grain.

Expressing itself

Familiar patterns

Again and again

Gives us a chance to learn

Gives us a chance to do it right

Or lets us do it wrong

--Again and again.

Exp Year: 2015	ExpID: 105918

Gender: Male

Age at time of experience: 46

Published: Jul 6, 2016	Views: 26,197

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LSD (2) : Relationships (44), First Times (2), Small Group (2-9) (17)


		 DOSE:
 T+ 0:00
		 3 hits
		 smoked
		 DMT

		   T+ 1:00
		 1 hit
		 oral
		 LSD

		   T+ 1:15
		 1 hit
		 oral
		 LSD

		   T+ 0:00
		   repeated
		 smoked
		 DMT

		   T+ 0:00
		   repeated
		 smoked
		 Cannabis

           BODY WEIGHT:
	   135 lb

[Note: For about a month before this experience, I was taking 200mg Sertraline (Zoloft) once daily. I discontinued use 36 hours before the experience.]

At five o’clock in the afternoon we were sitting around a friend’s living room with a respectable quantity of DMT and LSD. It was my first experiment with DMT, though I’d been on high doses of LSD, salvia and mushrooms before.

The first hit of the DMT that I did made me feel cold and weird and gave me tunnel vision. I did a second hit and held it in for some time. I felt myself melting into the couch and my head lolled to the side, the room around me fracturing into twisting pinwheels of rainbow-colored light before my eyelids drooped shut. I panicked a bit at first because the stuff was so strong that I couldn’t control my body, but soon enough my ego completely flatlined, taking my worries with it.

I didn’t know or care who or where I was. Before me was a huge carousel of somberly shaded purple, grey and blue lights. I seemed to hover nearer and further away from it. When I began coming back, the room was swirling in a twisting vortex of multicolored light. Spiritual sensations and ideation were completely absent from the trip. These would come soon enough, though.

For some minutes afterward, I felt a euphoric lift. It was now about 6 in the evening and, with both my best friend and myself having smoked a dose of DMT each, we decided to drop the first hit of acid. We each dropped a second hit about fifteen minutes afterward.

By 8 o’clock the acid began to peak. My trip centered around patterns in perceptual streams (much like the last time I did acid), and I meditated about layers of depersonalized intentions behind perceptions for hours, often losing entire grasp of who I was as the room around me twisted, shivered and swelled into patches of rainbows. I began to feel that the LSD had initiated some sort of autodeconstructive process in the stream of perceptions constituting my identity. This was somewhat frightening, but also exhilarating as I began to realize what it meant for our whole universe to be reflected in electrochemical interactions between cells, which could then be reconfigured in a way that temporarily altered the fabric of the universe. Pretty standard stuff for LSD use. My trip felt very material, except at times when I would feel strange creeping flows of spiritual energy slither through the room. I managed to write the following at 10:19 that night, while the peak was still going strong and my ego was totally gone:

“To chronicle the cognitive distortions during an LSD peak requires the utmost concentration and focus. Because the acid-smattering, weirdo-collision universe is out there, and my thoughts don’t know where I am when I’m thinking them.

The body is strangely alienated from me, as well as my cognitive processes, some of which twist into crystal fractal dimensions very far away from where they started. That’s the beauty of LSD—the surprises. I reach out from behind the corner and frighten myself, or catch myself catching myself catching myself…

The sensorium is obviously broken or dislocated somehow—disarticulated. But it’s the resulting logical fragments that are truly terrifying. The most bizarre and interesting aspect of being on acid is that the sensorium has been totally disarticulated and reconfigured—I don’t know where sights, sounds, feelings etc. begin or end, and I begin or end in these data flows, losing myself in tides of beautiful colors and profoundly, sadly incommunicable emotions. Some of the phenomena of my consciousness seem stereotypical and weirdly trite—it allows me to see the tides of media corruption cartoony weirdness creeping as a constant undercurrent in my thinking.

It’s that multicolored stew, underlying all perceptions—making them swirl together. When the flows of sensation become interrupted, patterns emerge in them that reveal intentions that are not my own. That’s the origin of empathy. The problem of empathy is really what I’m after, isn’t it? The problem of empathy with things that aren’t me. The whole wide, wide material universe isn’t me. That’s the central thing that most people can’t grasp. The absolute, horrifying, endlessly multivarious and splentrificalifying multiweirdoverse.

The profound sadness of realizing there’s nothing there to realize—that’s why I do hallucinogens. A perverse sort of jadedness with all sensory and emotional input. Because in striving for an absolutely different sensation, I lose track of what I am. In trying to realize there’s nothing to realize, something interferes between the realizer and the abstract, happening of eventoweirdliness. There’s a process trying to deconstruct itself—a pattern that emerges in the conscious flow of perception, and then catches itself—trying to realize what it is, but in viewing itself it unwinds again into strangeliness.

It takes LSD to realize the true nightmare horror strangeliness of perceptions piecing and stitching themselves into the pattern of a person, which is always endlessly re-echoed in electrochemical reactions that splinter apart and break up and reconfigure the thing that thought it was thinking about them.

There are levels of impersonality and automatism. Personality isn’t simply an on/off switch. When I turn off the light of the ego identity, the perceptions can take on their own logic, and re-echo endlessly. It takes LSD to realize the profound sadness of our whole universe being merely electrochemical states that are disrupted. But of course that simple mechanism is inadequate, for LSD also reveals that there is something pulling the strings. That’s what I try not to remember that the acid is telling me: that something is pulling the strings of my perceptions that isn’t me.

There are multiple not mes, in fact an endlessly re-echoing not me. That’s all the material universe really is—a place where I am not. I can grasp then the really startlingly simple correspondences that German idealism is trying to grapple with—the perceptions autodeconstruct themselves in an endlessly, byzantinely complex fashion—when they begin trying to realize what they are, they initiate a series of logical states that takes over the show and the syntax of the sentence, obviously. That’s probably another problem with LSD—the linguistic faculties are all fucked up too, and they’re trying to reveal these endlessly complex perceptual processes with nothing really behind them.

One thing that’s interesting about the LSD is that it makes certain reaches of thought, certain images, certain lines of self that aren’t normally privileged, come alive. The self begins to figure out that all consciousness is a matter of puppetry, layers upon layers of perceptions and automatism coordinating the perceptions, with nothing at the core. There’s a fundamental mismatch at the core. And then the glitch just plays itself out with a tragically necessary logic. That’s what a human personality is—culture pulling the strings, and making the perceptions dance in a way that convinces most people there’s a semblance of a person there. But really there’s nothing.

And one begins to figure out the cavernous emptiness of the universe when it becomes unclear whether it’s contained inside the skull or not. Perhaps it could never be contained in a human skull. These things were never meant for these poor, blind, ugly organic beings, on this rock in the middle of so much, so much, unending nothingificating unconsciousness—the oddity of the oddverse that isn’t so much me anymore. Revealing that so much of human personality is just this tragically simple game, of here’s the thing, now take it away.

Once I begin to realize how frightening it is that the endless, multivarious complexity of the material universe could be echoed in anything. When I begin to think that what is reflecting the endless complexity of the material universe isn’t a mirror or an unbroken surface of water, but this blind labyrinth of cells firing action potentials in the darkness of something’s skull on a rock that no one can see except for the seers of the rock—the rest of the universe is a blind, staring, undark light. No wonder these patterns of consciousness can never pull themselves together. That’s what styles do—they string perceptions together into a self. But normally the unconscious is there, it’s a tape of weird unprocessable thoughts, sense data, etc. What about all that SENSE DATA my brain is excluding? Those populations of neurons are making decisions about what to show me and what not to show me that are separate from the phenomena of volition. But the LSD reveals how frightening it is to have such a muddy medium be the reflecting mirror for such a complex darkness.”

When the acid had lost just enough intensity for us to realize where we were and what we were doing, we decided to smoke the rest of the DMT. We loaded another dose into one of the pipes we’d been smoking out of before and began to inhale. It didn’t take me long to blast off. The first few times we hit the pipe were almost too bewildering to recall, but afterward I began to see huge grids of rainbow light twisting and warping like a film of oil on the surface of a puddle of water. This began to subside, and then one of my friends informed us that he could scrape together a bowl of pot resin. We placed this in the bowl of a bong we’d been smoking DMT out of earlier and inhaled.

The pot resin mixed with the DMT and began to get us incredibly high. We couldn’t even feel the THC at first, as we were sucking in so much DMT. However, I feel that the THC complemented the LSD and the DMT, making the perceptual phenomena generated by both chemicals gel somehow. The first times I smoked the DMT on the acid, the chemicals seemed to clash, with the DMT overtaking the LSD. It took the pot to bind the hallucinogenic sensorium together into a coherent world.

After lazing around on couches and smoking DMT and pot for about an hour, my eyes drifted shut and I began to see incredibly complex prismatic entities: Mayan gods shaped like stone fish with mouths opening and spewing out clouds of single-cell organisms, lizards, comets, clouds, multitudes of anteaters drooping down the sides of a cliff, the canopy of a rain forest at night seen from below, as if I were lying on the ground, splitting into kaleidoscopic reflections of itself in drops of water which wriggled into the shapes of frogs. My whole body would fragment, shattering into furry mammals and snakes which would scamper and slither into the undergrowth. At other times my arms and legs twisted into vines, tree limbs and roots.

Most of the imagery I saw was incredibly complex, constantly shifting and interlacing like Gothic foliation, but made up of tropical vines, galaxies and molecules. Sometimes this imagery would turn into patterns like those in Aztec or Mayan architecture. I began to feel my soul being flooded with spiritual energy. My mind blossomed into a huge ornate temple, and images of various unrecognizable gods danced through it. I placed my hands together and held them over my head to direct a blasting column of light into my skull. At other times, everything around me swirled into rainbow storms of birds and insects that looked like a cross between moths and the leaves and tendrils of exotic plants. Often I saw myself floating above clouds and mountaintops alongside bizarrely animalistic spiritual beings. Sometimes the DMT would take memories of experiences I'd had and twist them into its landscapes or populate them with animals and gods. I couldn’t open my eyes and kept repeating to my friends that I’d entered a visionary state.

At this point, more people arrived at the house and I escaped to my friend’s bedroom in order to commune with the DMT in solitude. I turned off the lights, laid down on the bed, put on some headphones and listened to Coil’s ...and the ambulance died in his arms. For a while I merely lay there wondering at the incredible beauty of the closed-eye visuals. Suddenly, without noticing the transition, I found myself in the midst of a spiritual breakthrough. Here’s an account I wrote immediately after the experience at 2:33 in the morning, while the euphoria and perceptual distortions were still going strong:

“At a certain point in the trip, I realized that I wasn’t an individual anymore. There was something else, that told me that it was all things, all people, all identities. It told me that it could wear our perceptions like masks. It asked me “how could I ever think of myself as being separate from all that manifold complexity?” I saw huge, spiraling, churning rows of heads, human, animal, stone—and the thing was chasing itself all through them, churning them up, stirring up perceptions into people. This thing showed me, made me feel that my whole identity was nothing more than an empty mask to it, unless it chose to inhabit that mask with beautiful complexity.

It then made me feel that inside my mind itself was so much complexity, that the complexity of those perceptions mirrored, made room for, etched in limned and sanctified all the animal heads, the dancing whirling world, the prismatic voids, threatening to shatter human minds, to show them what they’re worth, that their most intimate contents are nothing more than playthings to something much vaster. It then left me, churning into other waves of images and patterns that the DMT had left me with. I kept asking 'What are you?' but it didn’t answer—it seemed as if it almost laughed at the impudence of the question.

[Later that night, I also felt that inside my head was an infinite number of beings, that the complexity of my perceptions and the colonial nature of my own consciousness united me with other beings as well as separating me from them. It was always a mistake to view that complexity as a barrier rather than a bridge.]

Also this thing was asking me why I denied the spiritual structure of material reality. It then showed me an extra dimension of reality, which was made of interlacing patterns uniting all beings. This spiritual reality was supported by pillars of light, complex patterns of stone and animal heads, and the entity pressed my head into one of these pillars and asked me why I didn’t believe, and my mind was flooded with interlacing imagery. I understood then that I was united with all things. These patterns, these interlacing patterns [the ones generated by the DMT], they froth up the boundaries between entities and tangle them together.”

The heads were all stretched out in a row which curved as if it were the crest of a wave or the slope of a hill. They seemed almost like graves or monuments. The entity that I encountered wasn’t itself visible; I could only glimpse it in the ripples it left as it moved through twisting, churning webs of light. I understood that the complexity of the perceptions in me was what united me with all things; I was merely one stream in an endlessly intertwining river of perceptual streams. I kept repeating to myself “I am many things.” Knowing that even in myself the perceptions of a multitude of different entities were churning together in a little whirlpool of a human mind seemed to unite me with the endless complexity of the universe.

The spiritual reality I witnessed was made of fractal patterns of animals and plants that twisted together and interlaced between all objects, both organic and inorganic. It was a huge, warping, prismatic fabric that wove the universe together. Certain parts of this fabric thickened into towering pillars shot through with intensely glowing bluish light. It was one of these pillars that the entity held my head against, and the zig-zagging animal patterns that danced across it tangled together and crept into my thoughts, destroying the boundaries between my own identity and the rest of the universe.

After this point in the trip, I felt more spiritually energized than ever before in my life. It was only later in the morning that I began to worry I’d seen things that no human being had seen and broken my head for good (always a sign of a great trip). I decided to see if I could sleep it off and surprisingly had very little trouble getting to bed. When I woke up seven hours later, I was a little foggy and disoriented and I had a bit of a headache, but otherwise I was fine. Within 24 hours of the experience, I no longer noticed any aftereffects. All in all, this was certainly the most intense experience of my life and perhaps the most beautiful as well.

Exp Year: 2009	ExpID: 82837

Gender: Male

Age at time of experience: 26

Published: Aug 19, 2010	Views: 38,669

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DMT (18), LSD (2) : Combinations (3), Mystical Experiences (9), Small Group (2-9) (17)


		 DOSE:

		 smoked
		 Cannabis - High CBD

		 5 hits
		 oral
		 LSD
		 (edible / food)

           BODY WEIGHT:
	   165 lb

NOTE: I did not have a tolerance to LSD at the time.

It was a typical Saturday afternoon. A week prior, I had made plans with 3 of my friends to trip on some very potent liquid LSD we had picked up recently. I was given a serious warning from my dealer not to consume more than 3 drops. He sincerely claimed that the vial needed to have a warning label on it. His source had driven several hours to another city just to obtain the acid, because it was such a wicked batch. It was supposedly 'barely diluted'. Being my usual skeptical self, I decided I was going to ignore his advice and go balls deep to see what beautiful places my mind could take me to. My friends were very inexperienced with LSD for the most part; 1 friend (who will be called JAM) had tripped a total of 7 or so times, another (D) a single time (actually 2 days before this trip), and the other (KA) was dropping for his first time for his birthday. The day seemed all too perfect for anything to mess up, despite the fact that during this time in my life, I had had a myriad of personal issues and insecurities (that could possibly lead to bad experiences, but I didn't completely take that into account).

I'm honestly starting to get slightly uneasy even thinking about the experience I am about to describe.

Around 3:30 P.M., my friend (KY, he was sober) picked me up from my house. He was with D and KA, who were minutes away from consuming their acid. We drove to my other friend's house, where my personal stash of acid was sitting in the freezer. The LSD was dropped onto sugar cubes. Our plan was to drive to our friend JAC's house and enjoy the ride in a safe setting, while the people that opted not to trip smoked marijuana.

I walked into his house and saw a couple of my friends there. We briefly conversed and smoked a bowl of top-quality CBD-rich Sativa marijuana (an anti-psychotic chemical in marijuana that reduces anxiety) for a few minutes as a 'way to ease me into my trip' (haha, yeah right, I believe this is what made the come-up so overwhelmingly fast). I pulled a whopping five sugar cubes out of the freezer and shoved them in my mouth, then licked a bunch of sugar crumbles off the foil which came from the edges of the 11 sugar cubes I had in my stash. My friends were a bit shocked I was willing to go that far, but they sort of already were used to my tendency to consume large quantities of psychedelic drugs. I talked with them for another 10 minutes or so, then I went back to the car.

On my way to the car, I noticed I was starting to feel increasingly disoriented. It wasn't that euphoric, confusing sort of disorientation, it was more of a 'I'm losing fucking my mind' sort of thing. I felt slightly anxious, but I assumed the negative feelings would pass as soon as the acid took full effect. A couple minutes after I got in the car, D ate 2 sugar cubes, and KA ate 1.

I suspect this was easily around 1000 micrograms. I have consumed 100+ ug blotter that did not compare at all to this liquid. On a separate occasion, taking two of these was enough for a level 4 experience (hallucinations, ESP, OOBES)

The experience was about to get very, very ugly. To give a little perspective on the unfathomable effects of 1000 mic doses, here is a quote from the Nobel Prize winning chemist Kary Mullis that ingested 1000 micrograms for his first dose:

'When you take 1000 micrograms of LSD, you don't know you've taken anything. It just feels like that's the way it is. You might suddenly find yourself sitting on a building in Egypt three thousand years ago, watching boats on the Nile.'

Yes, it is THAT FUCKING CRAZY.

Ten minutes into the car ride and twenty minutes after eating the sugar cubes, I was rapidly losing all touch with reality. I started wondering what the fuck was going on around me, and why I was feeling so uncomfortable.

I started wondering what the fuck was going on around me, and why I was feeling so uncomfortable.

 I started telling my friends I was really scared, and the intense anxiety was gripping every single fiber of my body. I thought I was going die and that this trip was going to last until the end of eternity. By the minute, I was starting to panic more. This was only the beginning of an unimaginable nightmare that would show me the 'evil' side of LSD and completely change my opinion about the drug in general.

25 minutes after taking the sugar cubes, we arrived at JAC's house. By that time, I was stumbling all over the place and I was already having severe visual distortion. All movements were followed by strobing trails composed of detailed patterns, kaleidoscopes, and rainbows. These visuals that I would have usually considered beautiful were now viewed as a reminder that I was in the middle of a trip that I so desperately wanted to end.

When I got inside his house, I saw a few more of my friends sitting on the couch. My body temperature had elevated to the point I thought I was burning alive. I was completely out of my body and almost felt like I was on a high dose of ketamine. I felt embarrassed because I obviously looked like I couldn't handle my shit; maybe this was just an extreme amplification of my general self-esteem issues. Their faces were assuming demonic forms. I fled to JAC's room. I was already starting to experience ego loss. I was going in and out of consciousness.

This is the point where I lost track of time, so there is no point of trying to estimate anything....

JAC followed me to his room and did his best to comfort me and talk me out of my bad trip. It was a completely ineffective attempt. A couple minutes later, I started crying hysterically. Everything was getting darker. I fell into the most depressive state of my life, combined with the most acute sense of panic I've ever experienced. The floor was covered in spiraling kaleidoscopes that were rapidly shifting colors. I heard thousands of voices call me names like 'pussy' and 'bitch'. The room wreaked of sewage and feces. This was the most negative emotion a human being could ever fathom. I so desperately wanted to kill myself but I was immobilized and unable to move. I realized that the voices were of all of the people I resented in my life the most. Cartoon blood was all over the ceiling and the walls. My vision seemed to stretch off into infinity. I was hallucinating so much I couldn't fucking believe it. I could see many different events of my life playing out as if it was waking reality. Try and imagine being inside of a Saw movie first hand, but a thousand times more horrifying and traumatic. There was a moment in which my mind would shoot out of my body two feet in front of me and then return into my body, and this looped over and over again for what felt like FOREVER at an impossible speed. Time was non-existent, and a second felt like FOREVER. Not hours, not days, but an infinite amount of time.

I kept hearing this bizarre futuristic noise that sounded like a computer glitching. The whole room was flashing as if something was flicking the on switch for a lamp up and down repeatedly. My jaw was rapidly vibrating like I had taken 300 mg of MDMA (I always get major jaw clenching from acid). I had full-blown synaethsia. Everything was one, everything was infinitely interconnected. I would look at the walls and become the walls. I would look at the floor and then become the floor, looking back at my body in a dissociative fashion. I was unable to differentiate any part of the outside world from my own physical body. The concept of 'I' was now a mere construct of my mind, and 'I' was nothing more than a complex bundle of atoms and molecules.

The floor started to wither away and die. It was as if it had human emotions and was feeling every bit of suffering I was going through at the time. Everything started to turn blood-red. I was going straight to the depths of hell. Matrix numbers were literally exploding out of the ground and shooting up and down the walls. I felt like I was on DMT, only it was a thousand times more intense.

Somehow, just a little while after this part of the trip, I regained some degree of consciousness. I stumbled to the backyard, where a group of 8 or so people were sitting and I was watching the sky and everything in my external environment turning black and red. I could barely see anything, my vision was almost completely shot. I forget that I even had a body at this point and I had absolutely no control over my muscular movements. I was in this 'survival mode' where my mind was on autopilot and and I had no idea that I was on drugs. I lost balance and fell backward onto the ground. I continued to see more incredible vortexes of matrix- style numbers and letters spurt out from every direction.

During my friends' attempts to help restore me to sanity, they asked if I knew what time it was. I responded with '8:00 A.M.' when it was late in the afternoon. That was quite enough of a response to prove I was completely and utterly going nuts and there was no real way to help me.

Once night fell, I was full-on peaking in JAC's room. I began to literally have no idea who I was, where I was, or what drug I was on (or what drugs were in the first place). I knew that I was going to die and nothing could be done to stop it.  At some point at the beginning of the peak, I realized that I could not recognize the room I was in. Suddenly, I started seeing several cop cars pull into the room and put their sirens on. Yellow caution tape magically appeared around them as well. This was one of my worst nightmares coming to life before my very eyes. There was a line of already-arrested criminals in handcuffs next to the cop cars, and they were all complaining that I had snitched on them for some unspecified reason. I knew I was in for absolute hell.

Before I could see what was going to happen next, everything started fading to white. I could see nothing but burning white light, like I was looking directly at the sun from 100 feet away. What I saw was.....the ultimate truth. The answer to every question. The reason reality is the way that it is. I existed within the past, present, and future simultaneously. I couldn't see my own hand in front of my face. I dissolved into infinity. I was existing in an infinite number of dimensions, living an infinite number of lives simultaneously for an infinite amount time. Though my memory of this is hazy, I believe I re-lived every event of my entire life during the peak. I could fit our entire universe into a period at the end of a sentence. Time was a point of nothingness. I was everything, yet I was nothing. I was in pure ecstasy. I felt the unconditional love of the universe penetrating every pore of my body. If only this could have lasted forever. I suppose this was a taste of the beautiful part of ego death, but my stay in this ineffable place was cut short when I was suddenly catapulted into hyperspace, where I experienced every ounce of pain any human being could ever possibly experience at one time. The love rapidly shifted to evil in its purest definition. I saw many miserable people I had seen throughout my life, including the homeless and starving. My brain's sensory filter was gone; every last bit of information that could physically be processed at once was flowing through my head at light speed.

I was dropped out of hyperspace directly into a hallucinatory prison facility. I saw hundreds of pitbulls, white supremacists, and naked black men running around. It was a state of sheer pandemonium. I have never been so unbelievably horrified in my entire life. I was now sure that this is where I would die. I was taken to the showers where I was bitten repeatedly by pitbulls and raped by the white supremacists and black men simultaneously. I was sobbing hysterically screaming for it stop. It was physical and emotional torture beyond your wildest dreams. I felt every single sensation, including their penises in my anus and the razor-sharp teeth of the vicious dogs.

Who knows how long this actually went on for, but eventually this torture ended and I was back in JAC's room. I saw all of my friend's faces covered in knife wounds and deep, bleeding cuts. Puddles of blood were all over the room. My joints were still in severe pain from the physical torture I had just experienced.

I looked at the clock, and it read 9:00 P.M. (or something along those lines).

Minutes after I came back to earth, I realized that the purpose for human existence was to love. Love is our higher purpose. I now understood that the ego I had developed my entire life was an illusion all along. Our egos push us away from our ability to feel compassion towards others. As your ego fades away, you slowly dissolve into pure unadulterated LOVE. The illusion of separation created by our egos has been the root cause of suffering all across our planet, and sadly this is the reason the majority of the world kills each other for absurd purposes like religion and resources. Religions like Christianity hide behind the idea that there is an afterlife because they are afraid of death. There is nothing to fear, because when you die there is no “you” to fear anything. THE ONLY THING THAT SEPARATES US FROM OTHER FORMS OF LIFE IS OUR ABILITY TO THINK. Our ego is composed of our thoughts. When we stop relying on our ego, we cannot experience negative emotions. When we stop thinking, our ego ceases to exist, and then we can live a life of pure love, peace, and prosperity. The more we rely on our ego, the more we push ourselves away from the moment which is all. Nothing outside the moment we are in right now will ever exist. Yesterday never is, and tomorrow will never be. Time is infinite. The past, present, and future are all occurring simultaneously. We are merely observers. Free will is an illusion.

This was by far the most profound experience of my entire life.

I quickly forgot all of these things within 15 minutes of the peak ending. I didn't fully understand the lessons I learned for until months had passed after the trip.

I quickly forgot all of these things within 15 minutes of the peak ending. I didn't fully understand the lessons I learned for until months had passed after the trip.

The next day was easily the worst day of my life (excluding the trip). I felt so self-conscious about myself that suicide was all I could think about. I was thoroughly convinced that I had ruined my life permanently. During ego death, I became aware of the severity of my many mental disorders. I realized that throughout my entire life, I had been looked down upon as the 'special kid'. I had not been aware of this until that moment. I felt like the most inferior form of life on the face of the earth.

After I got home I burst into tears. I even thought my family felt sorry for me and had pitied me my whole life because they thought I was a moron.

I had a psychotic break for weeks afterward. This was easily the most traumatic thing I have ever gone through in my entire life and has left a lasting mark on me that I carry to this day. It's been over 6 months now and I think about this trip every day of my life. It's nothing any human being ever deserves to go through and I would never wish it on my worst enemy.

Over time this trip has had a profound impact on all areas of my life, in both positive and negative ways.

Positive: I have very close friends now and rather than the 'special kid', many people now view me as a very insightful and intelligent person. Before this experience, I had very, very few friends. I wasn't close friends with the ones mentioned in this report, but we chilled every once in a while. I now know what true friendship is. I go to parties, I meet new people all the time. I suspect I used to have a mild form of autism and this trip literally eradicated it. My entire family has mentioned multiple times that I'm a transformed person. I have fully developed social skills. I act normally now. I view everyone I meet as a part of my own consciousness. I've earned excellent grades at my community college and have grown tremendously - multiple people have commented that I'm an entirely different person. I've taken up buddhism and adopted a very spiritual lifestyle.

Negative: Several months ago, I was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder. I suspect I was already pre-disposed to this condition and the trip brought it out. I still have mental flashbacks nearly every day and have been scarred by experience. I frequently have nightmares about this trip. My thoughts can be very scattered and clouded at times. My thinking is very impaired on some days, but it's very sporadic. I've learned how fucked up our world is, and sometimes I feel that ignorance is bliss. Our society disgusts me. I think that the human race is a joke.

I am going say one thing: Do not take a high dose of acid unless you have a proper set and setting or it can turn into the worst nightmare of your entire life. 300 micrograms is more than enough to have a spiritual experience. 1000+ micrograms did not provide a near-death experience, it provided a BEYOND-death experience.

LSD is a seriously powerful drug and it has the ability to FUCK a person like nothing they could ever conceive of. In fact, after this experience I firmly believe it is the most powerful drug known to the human race.

Exp Year: 2012	ExpID: 98623

Gender: Male

Age at time of experience: 18

Published: Apr 2, 2018	Views: 28,107

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LSD (2) : Health Problems (27), Overdose (29), Depression (15), Post Trip Problems (8), Bad Trips (6), Small Group (2-9) (17)


		 DOSE:
 T+ 0:00

		 oral
		 Alcohol - Beer/Wine

		   T+ 0:00
		 1 hit
		 oral
		 LSD

		   T+ 3:00

		 smoked
		 Cannabis

           BODY WEIGHT:
	   95 kg

I had my first experience with a psychedelic drug – LSD – 3 days ago. I’ve now decided to write a report from my experiences. There are two main reasons I do so. Firstly I feel that I need to do it in order to better relate to my experience and make better sense of it. Secondly, I want to be able to remember the trip in the future. I also want to share my trip with others in case someone might have fun reading it or even find something useful.

I had been planning this for a long time. About 6 years to be precise. Actually it was the time that I first got the idea of trying psychedelics. As the moment passed I never got around to it until years later, when I happened to read a book by Albert Hoffman, the father of LSD. Instantly hooked again I started looking for LSD in order to experiment with it. I’ve never been a drug user. A few hits of cannabis is the most I’ve ever done. I’m a fairly heavy drinker though, so I certainly don’t patronize myself on that front. Why LSD then? The idea about expanding my mind and perceiving the world from another angle became very attractive to me. Not that I wanted to escape reality - I live a rather nice, albeit sometimes stressful, life – I was just curious about what else is there, I guess. I spent a lot of time reading other peoples trip reports and gathering information about the drug I was about to take. Finding the drug itself was not  an easy task - it took me about 3 months to finally aquire 3 hits. To my delight, they came in the form of foil wrapped sugar cubes.

A week after that me and one of my best friends took a ride to my summer cottage which is situated in a small village near the sea. It was a Friday evening and both of us had been at work for the whole day. We had a little debate whether to do it in the evening or to have a full nights sleep to trip during the daytime. Finally we decided to do it right away in order to leave us a little more time for recovery. We built a nice campfire, had a few beers and then let the sugar cubes melt in our mouths. We listened to some mellow music and talked about anything that came to mind. The night was dark and pretty typical for autumn – windy with the occasional few drops of rain. That didn’t bother us in the slightest since we had an awesome campfire to warm ourselves with.

About an hour after taking the cubes we started to feel a little bit funky. The music started to feel really good and did I tell you that we had orange juice to go with our trip? I’ve never tasted anything so good in my life. The taste was so full and it resonated with all of my taste buds. When we had our first sip, me and my friend looked each other in the eyes and just started laughing in unison as we knew something was up. A little bit after that I noticed that the colour of our campfire was almost white. As we admired it, we thought that we had built the greatest campfire ever. It was just so beautiful.  At one point we were a little bit startled as the music started to feel like it was around us. We quickly realized that it was actually a locust that started singing to the tune of our music.

About 2 hours into the trip we were both very happy and calm.

About 2 hours into the trip we were both very happy and calm.

 Occasionally we would remark on something around us that seemed a little bit unusual. In one moment, when we had let our campfire burn a bit low, we were a bit startled about a huge spotlight lighting us from behind. When we looked behind ourselves we saw that it was actually the usual lamp we have on our patio. It does not burn bright at all, but we perceived it as a huge spotlight behind us. We quickly built up the fire again and the spotlight faded a little bit. A little bit after that I stood up and started looking at the grass that was moving in the wind. It took about 5 seconds for fantastic patterns emerge in the grass. It felt like the ground was breathing and it was amazing.

About 3 hours into the trip we started to feel that the trip was about to end. Maybe it was because I had put on some music that was too energetic instead of the mellow vibes we had before. Anyway, I decided to switch back to the mellow music and me and my friend smoked a little cannabis. About 5 minutes later we were both watching the grass again, as it started to move again. We were just looking at it, mesmerized, when all of a sudden I felt like my head grew a few pounds heavier and I decided to sit down by the fire again.

I was sitting eyes closed and giggling at the funny images that were flashing before my eyes for about 5 minutes when I suddenly started to feel a little nausea. I then decided to go into my house to lie down. I told so to my friend who was still standing, looking and the grass, and entered the house. I also started to feel a little anxious but I tried to reassure myself that it is normal. I took off my overcoat, put an empty bowl in front of my bed in case I needed to throw up and then remembered that we had just added some logs to the campfire. By that time it was pretty hard to concentrate but I still went out and rearranged the logs so that there would be no chance of a fire in case nobody touched those again. Then I went back to the house and lied down and crept under a sleeping bag.

I realized that I was about to start hallucinating and tripping. Images were already flashing before my eyes extremely fast accompanied by meaningless bits of syllables forming words that don't exist. The imagery I saw was very cartoonish. With the images came the thought-rally. I had about  15 thoughts all at once and it was impossible to concentrate on any of them since it just led to new thoughts. This startled me a bit and I felt myself getting anxious again. Again I reassured myself that I was tripping and it was going to be all right. I had a clock in my view and even though I though I had been lying down for a long time, it only amounted to about 2 minutes.

I then decided to experiment for a bit. I took my cellphone and started the stopwatch. I was literally dumbfounded to see that I could count all the tenths of a second and it took forever for the clock to get to the 5 second mark.

I was literally dumbfounded to see that I could count all the tenths of a second and it took forever for the clock to get to the 5 second mark.

 Even further – the seconds seemed to slow down. I decided to write this valuable insight into the memory of my cellphone. As I put my cellphone down I heard music coming in from the outside and the song seemed to be time-stretched to about –infinity. At this point I realized that time was going to stop all together. I was little worried about that but I decided to accept it as I realized I had no control over any of it and it was probably wiser to accept everything and keep myself as calm as possible.

By now time had almost lost all meaning. I remember feeling that my life was divided into ~6 different time-slots and I could have a different thought in each of these time-slots and they kept cycling for a few cycles. „Jeez“, I thought, „This is what going schizophrenic must feel like!“. That effect soon ended and I was left with a neverending cascade of cartoonish pictures and thoughts that I really had no option to concentrate on. I lost all my bearings and I was deep into the trip. I remember thinking that what if this is what going insane feels like? But again I chose to accept everything and deal with the possible insanity when the trip was over.

At some point I remember that I was transported back to my child self who was very confused. A calm entity stood over me and offered reassurance: „Don’t worry, we will take care of you in here“. A bit after that I had a vision about me being one with all the living beings in the universe. I know it's a cliche, but I distinctly remember the feeling of unity and a steady hand guiding me through the experience and reassuring me. I also remember being on a antique roman galley and setting sail on the river with a pat on the back from the people who stayed behind with words „We welcome you among ourselves“. Somewhere around this time my friend decided to come into the house to lie down too. I remember being a little startled by his entry but then I greeted him and told him where his designated bunk bed was. I also advised him to get under covers in order to not get a cold. Afterwards my friend told me, that he thought I wasn't tripping at all, I looked so normal. Actually I really had to concentrate to be coherent to him. I guess it goes to show that even though tripping, it is still possible to maintain human contact on some basic level.

There were some brief respites from tripping hard. I think they came in as a sinusoid and they lasted for a very brief while. During those times I got back to my body to get my bearings. I was also able to watch the clock (20 minutes after starting to trip hard) and reassure myself that all is ok. I had a pretty anxious feeling in my stomach during some points of the trip, but it never got any worse since I was able to keep my composure (I guess I say that alot don't I?).

About 1,5h after starting to trip the effects started to fade and I was able to return to my body for a longer while. The visuals came back of course, but they were somehow fewer and I was able to handle them with relative ease. About 2 hours after that I felt better yet but still not steady enough to climb out of the bed. About 6 hours after starting to trip I finally decided that I was „back to earth“ and decided to celebrate by taking a long piss in the yard and eating an orange in the house. After that I finally went to sleep.

The day after, we just basked in the sun, drank a few beers, had a barbecue and just talked about our experience. My friends trip was an awesome one. He told me that he only started to get a little anxious in the latter stages of the trip when he thought that „enough is enough“, but he was still tripping a little bit.

In conclusion I don't regret trying LSD. Even though I thought I was well prepared for the trip, the intensity of the trip is something that I think nobody can really prepare for. I consider myself lucky that I was able to contain my anxiety and I didn't let this experience become a bad one. The trip literally opened my eyes to another realities in a sense that at times during the trip I was furthest away from home I’ve ever been. I also gained insight into where Salvador Dali and countless other artists and musicians get their inspiration from. I also remember understanding why David Lynch makes his movies the way that he does. As to myself, I found out that I have been suffering from a mild form of anxiety disorder probably related to the stress at work, my alcohol consumption at weekends and lack of regular exercise. I actually understood this while tripping. I had been having the symptoms long before it, but the trip somehow intensified it and I still feel a little queasy 3 days after tripping, while writing this report. It isn't anything too bad and I will most probably be able to cure myself from this problem. However it goes to show that LSD is not to be taken lightly.

Would I ever do it again? I’m not sure at this point. Definitely not in the near future, but maybe in a couple of years? Who knows. However I don’t think I will be smoking cannabis while under the influence of LSD again. It made the trip a bit too intense for my liking.

I hope you enjoyed this trip report as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Exp Year: 2012	ExpID: 97676

Gender: Male

Age at time of experience: 27

Published: Nov 1, 2017	Views: 20,301

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LSD (2) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Personal Preparation (45), First Times (2), General (1)