		 DOSE:
 T+ 0:00
		 0.5 hits
		 oral
		 LSD
		 (blotter / tab)

		   T+ 0:30
		 0.5 hits
		 oral
		 LSD
		 (blotter / tab)

		   T+ 1:00
		 1 bowl
		 smoked
		 Cannabis
		 (plant material)

           BODY WEIGHT:
	   145 lb

Three days ago, my husband, E., and I went up hiking to Muir Woods. My mindset was good to begin with - I was looking forward to a wonderful, mellow trip in the redwoods with the person I love most in the world. I asked E. if he'd mind if I took a 1/2 hit of good blotter because it'd been a long time since I took a 'low' dose and tripped during the day. Ten years, in fact. I tripped quite often in high school (at least twice a week), and since then have also worked with Morning Glory, Mushrooms, opiates, E, crystal…in short, I am an experienced tripper and drug user in general. I was overjoyed to find a small obliging piece of white paper hiding where I thought there was none. E. was pretty much neutral- not happy or unhappy about my taking the dose, so I listened to my gut and chewed my little white piece of joy as we drove through the sunshine, over the Golden Gate Bridge, and up to the woods.

Even though I'd tried this batch before with my usual trip partner, K., I suppose that either storage or the set/setting made what I took particularly potent…I had chewed up my 1/2 tab at around 3:30, and at 4 I realized that it probably wouldn't do anything, so I ate the other half for a grand total of 1 hit.

At about 4:30 it started coming on. E. and I were hiking through the Cathedral grove - a very, very beautiful place. The air was rich and loamy scented. The trees were green. The woods were deep and vibrant and breathing and I felt very safe, and cared for as we wandered through the woods. I had been smoking cannabis earlier on that day to quell nausea and boost my trip. I took several hits of my best Indica while in the woods and it really did feel like the sacred act that it is.

Unfortunately, darkness was coming and the park closed at 5. No more smoking in the woods for me. My husband led me through the darkening woods to the gift shop. I was enchanted- in the middle of the forest was a little pixie house! All lit up! Then I realized we were going in: it was the Gift Shop! I was very much having an awesome time. There were small 'window boxes' in the gift shop which were 3D and had pics of the redwoods. It looked like each individual one had a little TV in it. That was really neat, and something I haven't had acid do to me before. I do believe that had we stayed in the Redwoods, things would have been great…but an hour in the car later, we got home, and the blotter got stronger…which was very unexpected…

I didn't want to leave the woods, but we had to, as the cops came in to clear the parking lot. Unfortunately, I was still coming up, and resigned myself to peaking in the car. The car ride caused me a bit of nausea, but that wasn't surprising to me. After all, anyone who's on a mind-expanding substance really isn't best when put into an enclosed space. I was alright, though - I had brought my I-Pod, and was jamming away in my own mind. E. drove us home, and I happily took in the beauty of the Golden Gate and the full moon which had risen earlier in the day. Riding in the car felt as though I were in an old fashioned horse and buggy, and the cars around us were starting to assume more interesting shapes…I wondered briefly about the strength of the acid, and then shrugged it off, concentrating instead on the musical orgasm that is the Grateful Dead on acid.

Around 7pm, the world was still doing it's 'beautiful glowy' thing, when we got home and I decided to take a walk outside. While walking down the street in the moonlight, I got the odd idea that I should walk out to a dark place and talk to the Dark Goddess (a Diety I believe in and work with on occasion). This of course, I recognized as a Bad Idea on several levels because I was 1.) too messed up and 2.) didn't want the darkness to scare me,  so I compromised with a walk out to the beach. My husband and I live 30 seconds from the shore, so it's not a big deal to walk there normally.

When my last trip came around, both myself and my tripping buddy, K., noticed a kind of 'odd' feeling to the high. We both wondered what it was, as we're both fairly experienced with psychedelics…but we just figured it was one of those trip things. As I walked, I felt the feeling again - and it became stronger and stronger.

I was starting to wonder why the acid was so strong. 1/2-1 tab shouldn't really be that large of a trip, but I realized there was nothing I could do and attempted to accept things in stride.

Then, as I was walking, I started to feel like someone was running their nails down a chalkboard- really loudly. This grinding, uncomfortable feeling grew, until I felt the need to pray to calm things down. I dropped to my knees on the side of the road. I was worried because my immediate impulse had been to stay in the road, and I recognized that as Not Good thinking. Under the moonlight, I grounded and centered, and prayed with all my strength. Then, the world shifted.

Somehow - from being on my knees, I found myself walking down the  road (again) for what felt like 10 minutes, and upon close inspection, I realized that I'd been walking past the same house, again and again. I knew that this wasn't possible, so I tried to look at 'markers' along the roadside. Well, my subconscious did a hell of a job, because the house I was walking past was the same - from the same mini-van in the driveway to the same street sign in the front. I must have passed it about seven times before I came to the end of the street. This was a worrisome thing. I am nothing if not experienced with fry, and even with pot (of which I hadn't smoked all that much and certainly not recently enough to cause this) my trip was a little on the strong side… I decided to go back to my house because things were getting the potential for hairiness. I wasn't so much afraid at this point as a little concerned. I had experienced the 'mysterious multiplying houses' before while on a 4 hit trip…however, then I had been too messed up to care. At this point, I decided to focus on the positive and go on with my trip. Now, my memory gets a little garbled.

The safety of the apartment was a big relief. My husband and I live in a small apartment by the beach with our big block dog and ferret. I opened the ferret's cage and started to play with him and my dog. The ferret was so happy to be free that he immediately started jumping about and doing what my husband and I call 'bupping'. It's a little 'bupbupbup' sound they make when happy. Well - he was literally jumping all over the place - running up to me, then he'd have a fit of bups which I can only describe as completely hilarious, bite me, then run about two feet away, bup again, then come bite me again. He repeated this process several times. I laughed for ten minutes straight and was unable to respond when my husband asked, 'What's wrong with you?' due to the unstopping laughter.

Suddenly, in the midst of the bupping, I felt a 'psychic scream'. It seemed like nails were suddenly being run down a chalkboard. This was the same feeling from my last trip, but intensified. Again, I tried to ignore it…but this time it didn't go away. I also noticed that the trip was seeming to be getting stronger.

I asked E. if he knew of any reason why the trip should be getting stronger instead of wearing off. Besides pot, he had no idea. I decided to abstain from marijuana for the rest of the night.

I tried to distract myself - I petted my dog, whose coat was now changing colors under my hands, listened to music, and took a shower....but I still heard and felt the Sound. I felt like it would crawl my skin right off my body.

I told E. that things were going badly, and I felt I needed 4mg of Ativan but I knew enough not to let myself near the bottle lest I forget I'd taken the pill already and keep swallowing away until there were none left. Time at this point was extremely distorted. I remember E. telling me that two pills was too much - they were 2 mg pills (I usually take 2-4 mg for anxiety as needed). I, however, disagreed. My memory is foggy…back to the trip. I took the pill and waited anxiously for it to kick in. E. tells me I talked him into letting me have a second one, for a total of 4 mg of Ativan.

At this point, I was standing next to a wall in our kitchen. The world had started to appear to be on a giant merry-go-round, whose music only I could hear. Every few minutes, it would pop and whir and then start to spin again. This popping and whirring sounded very cartoonish and fake, and I didn't like the sound. Forgotten was the fact that I was me. I tried to remember who I was, and a vague flitting of memories about E., K., and my dog came back. I realized that I'd forgotten who I was. This, I knew, for some reason, was not desirable to me at this point in time. I felt like my spirit was being torn away from my body with each repeat of the sound. I was near to breaking, but pretended to be alright for my husband's benefit.

I started drawing, thinking that I'd calm down a little that way. I grabbed a piece of white paper and a red pen. There were 100s of characters on the paper, all un-drawn, waiting for me to give them life. I started tracing them as fast as I could, and actually got a few little cartoon guys down for posterity. After drawing for probably around thirty minutes (two complete pages of LSD doodles), I had noticed that the whir-pop of the merry-go-round world was continuing, and was making me feel like nails were sliding down a large blackboard next to my head. It was horrid. I stood up, knowing I needed to get help, but not really understanding what to ask for. I think I communicated to E. that I was having problems. I remember that I didn't think he understood, as I next called K., right in front of him.

I talked to K. on the phone and told her the state of things. She seemed confused as to why I thought the trip was bad. But it *was* bad - so I thought. I didn't like not remembering who I was. I felt so bad for 'cheating' and taking a trip without her that I think I started crying. She asked me a bunch of questions - I think to get me more grounded in reality, however, that was an exercise in futility. I remember being really bummed that I was soo far gone, as the back of my mind knew that I normally would have really enjoyed myself…and then the whirring sound started up again. I felt as though I couldn't talk on the phone anymore, so I told K. I needed to go. She advised that I talk to E. I sat on the couch and started to think of what to say.

It sounded like the whir of a Star Trek New Gen door opening combined with a metallic clang each time the 'acid merry-go-round' I was on cycled again. Each time, I felt like I was drawn more and more into the trip, experiencing loss of ego and great fear of death. For some reason, I felt that I needed to deal with the fact that I would die someday. And then, sitting on my couch, I aged forward by about 60 years (in my head of course).

I was suddenly very old, and wrinkled, and breathing was labored. I was in my deathbed. I was terrified. I took one last big breath, and it hurt to fight for it. Then, there was blackness in which I felt my heart stop. Darkness pervaded my awareness and fear shook me. This was cause for distress. I felt as though I 'popped' back into my body on the couch. Tears came pouring out of my eyes as I tried to convey to E. what had just happened to me. I had a great sense of dread and fear. This was not right, and I admitted that it was too much for me to handle.

I tried to direct E. to the Erowid vaults to show him what to do in case of a bum trip, but apparently, I didn't communicate this well to him, and gestured at the page futilely for about five minutes. He's been around bum trips before, but never had sole responsibility.

I told him I needed him to hold me, as I felt a strong urge for bodily contact. I was starting to feel 'psychic winds' which were blowing past our house. Each breeze felt like it would tug my spirit from my body and throw it into the Abyss. I held to E. for dear life, pretty much convulsing from the fear and terror of loosing myself. He held me calmly while I ranted at him for some time about how I was *NOT* okay with dying. I protested my fate with hot tears streaming down my cheeks. This seemed to confuse him, and I didn't know why at the time. I remember him holding me, with me looking at this big dark scary hole that was death staring at me in my mind, just waiting for him to release me to it. I started thinking about it. Really, I HAVE to be okay with dying, because it's going to happen. Do I get upset at the rain for pouring? Of course not - it just is. Likewise, I saw that I couldn't be upset about dying, because I already had. The feeling of 'nails on a chalkboard' ceased, and for a moment, things got calm. Yes, I would die. No, that wasn't a problem. For an instant, everything was calm.

I felt right for the first time in years.

Then, my paranoia came flooding back with a shap left hook, 'No! It's not okay to die! Are you just going to allow this? Hell no!' My ego screamed for help. I, sucker that I am, felt bad for me and so got sucked back into the whirlpool. This continued until the Ativan calmed me down. E. continuously tried to get me to not think about death (he figured that if dying was causing me such distress, I shouldn't think about it). I got very upset at this. Of COURSE I should think of death now. In my state of mind I could think of no other logical thing to do. It was, after all, right in front of me, and all around me.

Then, I had another moment in which I saw myself taking his advice and not thinking of death - I still died…but this time it was worse and even more horrifying because I was so scared and unaccepting - unprepared. Back into my body while being held I snapped. I held onto E. for dear life while the Fear shook me.

In about ten more minutes, the Ativan kicked in. The 'evil-merry-go-round' sound had faded. I was so relieved…and then I got pissed at myself.

I *nearly* got over my fear of death, and am very upset at myself for terminating the trip early…still, I know that next time I trip, it's going to be on again, and I've got to face death, but in an odd way I'm looking forward to it.

The feeling of exhilaration and absolute freedom and happiness when I resigned myself to death was amazing. I want it back, and I want to live my life with that freedom, so am preparing myself for another trip. This time, I shall bring K. along, and I will be comfortable taking a larger dose (probably about three tabs). Just to illustrate how potent set and setting are, I tripped with K. about six months or so ago, and had no problems (and a shitload of fun and good revelations) from around five tabs. (We can't be exactly sure…but I think it's closer to six). One tab really kicked my ass a few days ago.

From now on, I will reserve three days for my trip experience as so many who are wise in such matters advise. I shall also be bringing a copy of 'The Psychedelic Experience' along for whomever is sober and trip-sitting. It really could have helped me. This was actually my strongest trip to date, and I really wish I had prepared myself better for it. If I had prepared, I would have come out fine on the other end rather than needing to terminate the trip. Ah well - this is what experimentation is there for. Please, be careful and be safe!!

An odd after effect: As I was meditating last night, I started to feel very altered, so checked my pupils…and they were dilated. This is pupil dilation three days after I dosed. I decided it was a result of the meditation, and continued meditating until I fell asleep. On waking this morning, my eyes were still dilated. Things look a little brighter than normal.

I react in this way to E. too: after falling asleep after a roll, when I wake in the morning, my eyes are dilated and I feel like I'm rolling again for a good few hours. At first I was worried about this, but it seems to be my particular brain chemistry. The dilation has not hurt me in any way, and I still feel wonderful. Blessings to all - may you learn from my mistakes!

Exp Year: 2006	ExpID: 57989

Gender: Female

Age at time of experience: Not Given

Published: Jun 5, 2007	Views: 69,016

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LSD (2), Cannabis (1) : Difficult Experiences (5), Nature / Outdoors (23), Glowing Experiences (4), Small Group (2-9) (17)


		 DOSE:
 T+ 0:00
		 4 hits
		 oral
		 LSD
		 (blotter / tab)

		   T+ 3:00

		 smoked
		 Cannabis
		 (plant material)

           BODY WEIGHT:
	   160 lb

BACKGROUND- My next-door dorm neighbor freshman year of college was an extremely eccentric, not overly stable, ambiguosly gay southerner named Ian. And by ambiguously gay, I mean he rubbed on guys' chests when he was drunk and a platonic girlfriend of his told my roommate in Spanish that he had told her that he was gay. Ian, of course, denied this and then insisted that he had sex with women in England with knives but now thought sex should 'mean something.'

Ian was basically Ignatius J. Reilly on drugs. Ian wasn't fat like Ignatius, but he said he was in middle school. And despite being named Ian, which was his middle name anyway, he was as American as apple pie, as were his parents. But you'd never know this from talking to him. Ian constantly spoke with a fake British accent, smoked weed out of an Egyptian hookah in his room, had a large collection of Persian daggers, often broke into Persian folk songs, and his favorite exclamations were 'Bloody Americans!' and 'That's barbaric!' He was also obsessed with the movie version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

One day, a campus dealer named Rob who looked like a big surfer with long blond hair, a goatee, and sunglasses wandered into my room on acid following Ian. I then watched an African cable channel with Rob and Ian and, in theory, we were all on DOC, an obscure hallucinogenic designer drug. I felt nothing and Rob and Ian wondered if I had some kind of weird 'high tolerance to hallucinogens.'

Ian then made some business connections with Rob and his little shaggy brown-haired dealer friend Dan. These dealers knew a local washed-up hippy woman who they got acid from. Most of the acid they bought from her was fairly weak, as in people would do four hits of it and not cross into the 'psychedelic' threshold of 'ego-death' and 'life-changing' mystical experiences.

I wanted to try acid simply out of curiosity and I planned on starting with a small dose. I had no delusional aspirations of connecting with any kind of higher power and thought acid was just going to be a cheap thrill. I was about to learn that on large doses, acid is a very expensive thrill. My only prior experience with drugs was weed and alcohol. I had already seen the Fear and Loathing movie, but it did not prepare me at all for the weird, wild Native-American, Buddhist, and beatnik shit I was going to be dealing with.

I told Ian I wanted to try acid and he ran out and bought ten hits of white blotter paper from Rob and Dan, who were splitting profits at the time.

'So, Ian, how many should I do?'

'Well, I just bought ten hits. And I'm going to do six, so...why don't you do three? Or, if I do six and you do three, then there will only be one left and that won't be any good at all by itself. Do you think you can handle four? I'm sure you can because you seem to have a high tolerance to psychedelics.'

'Alright, whatever.'

STAGE 1:SPEED- I gave Ian forty bucks and ate the four tabs all at once at around 8:00 P.M. on a Friday. I also ate 4 vitamin C tablets. I was in an extremely good mood that day. I listened to 'Cleetus Awreetus-Awrightus' by Frank Zappa on repeat for about an hour while looking at Latina porn to try to put myself in an even better mood when Ian came in to get me out of my room because my prudish narc roommate who doesn't even drink was coming back to the room and I was already starting to laugh uncontrollably with huge pupils. I ran around outside laughing maniacally. I never had so much energy in my life and it felt great. Everything seemed extremely windy, although it's not clear how windy it actually was outside, and hills seemed infinitely steeper. As I ran, all my surroundings were very gradually bending as if everything was getting sucked into one point, which was whatever point I was looking at. In other words, everything looked like a fish-eye camera lens from a Busta Rhymes music video.

Around 11:00 P.M., Ian led me to his room with the Rob and Dan and two girls I had never met before, one very tall and one very short. They were all smoking out of Ian's hookah, and by the girls' request, there was no weed in the hookah, just shisha. Ian walked in letting the girls know that he and I were tripping on acid and the tall girl didn't look too happy to hear this. She had, after all, requested that there be no weed in the hookah. The short one was having a great time, though. I thought I remembered the short one alluding to the fact that she had pornographic pictures of herself posted somewhere, but this is debatable as I was on acid. They turned on some music and Dan said, 'Is the room just like filled with music?'

Although everything already looked like a cross between a rap video and an Edvard Munch painting in ultra-high resolution, I looked around the room and didn't see music 'filling it', so I calmly answered, 'No, but I feel like everything's getting sucked into one point.'

'Where's the point?' the short girl asked, laughing.

'Wherever I'm looking.'

Dan then decided that I must be having a really lame trip since it had been 3 hours and the room wasn't even filling with music. When I said I had done 4 tabs and Rob and Ian mentioned that I had done three milligrams of DOC and didn't feel it, Dan responded, visibly drunk, 'You have a problem with psyches. Are you on any SSRI's?'

'No.' I wasn't and never have been.

'That stuff'll screw you up, man. You need to smoke.'

Dan and Rob's advice at this point was for me to smoke a lot of weed to intensify my 'lame trip.' Someone accidentally knocked Ian's hookah over and the glass bottom shattered and hookah water spilled all over the carpet.

'Don't worry about it, Ian,' Rob insisted. 'Worry about it tomorrow when you're sober.'

Then the short girl went to our hall bathroom to vomit from overdrinking and Dan took me and Ian outside to smoke weed and meet someone named Walt, who he said was 'the same person as Ian.' This is a hardcore bad thing to tell someone on acid. Outside the dorm building, Dan said to me, 'I like that girl.'

'The porn one?' I inquired. As soon as I said this, I wondered if it had actually made any sense. I thought that girl had something to do with porn, but I couldn't remember what this connection was as soon as I said it and I wondered if that was just the acid talking.

'Yeah.' Dan replied. I guess it did make sense.

As we were walking outside to go smoke weed out of Dan's pipe, and his weed was pretty potent by campus standards, I began to get massively hyper again and felt great. I was also beginning to feel my thought process deteriorate and felt like I kept seeing the same four greasy New Jersey guidos with popped collars scurrying around and felt like they were 'planning something.' I decided against telling Dan this because a part of me still realized that was the acid talking. I also kept biting my lip uncontrollably, but it didn't hurt at all and I felt great while I was doing it. Dan started to get nervous, saying, 'He looks like someone who just coked up. Uh, we haven't really tested this batch so we're just trying to see how people react to it.' He told me to stop biting my lip and I told him I didn't see why it mattered since it didn't hurt and it's not like I could stop biting it anyway. It was this automatic thing I couldn't control.

'Areyougettingthisweirdstimulanteffect,Ian?' I mumbled at blinding speeds.

'Uh...no.'

Anyway, I smoked a greater amount of potent weed than I probably had ever smoked in one sitting before because I didn't feel any full mechanism or any normal weed high, so I just kept on smoking. I also met the extremely eccentric, faux-British, hookah-smoking Walt. Walt was in fact very similar to Ian, except he literally looked like he had walked off the set of Beetlejuice or The Nightmare Before Christmas. When I saw this guy again sober, he didn't even look that far removed from a skeleton or a ghost as he was bony, emaciated, and very pale. On acid, he had hair and everything, but I literally could not figure out how this undead claymation leprechaun was human. At first, I thought this was funny and thought the LSD had just conjured up some ridiculous claymation skeleton character for me to talk to. I kept getting right up to his face and saying, 'He's not real! There's no way he's real!' and laughing.

Dan laughed and said, 'Yeah, that's how I feel on acid. I feel like I'm the only one that's real.'

And I knew what he was talking about, that depersonalized, virtual-reality simulator feeling that is the foundation of the acid experience at any dosage. It's the feeling of looking down at your own arms and wandering if they're really your arms or if they're just as much a part of the scenery as everything else. But this was very different. I literally couldn't figure out how Walt could be human.

Then I realized that Dan was talking to him too and he wasn't on acid. Dan had also told me earlier that acid doesn't make you see things that aren't there and then everything froze into a still frame for a second as I panicked and felt too far gone and started to fight it. But then I quickly realized it was far too powerful to fight and trying to make sense of what was really going on at this point was fighting it. So I gave up. I just laughed and thought to myself, 'Well, if the claymation skeleton guy wants to talk to us, I'm sure he's a friendly claymation skeleton and we'll all have a good time. Good trip.'

Then some really hardcore visuals started. I was still hyper and biting my lip like someone was paying me to do it, but now everything I could see looked like it was made out of a tapestry of 2-inch glass crystals. Then the features of people's faces were being outlined like someone was drawing them with a pen. Then my entire field of vision was outlined with a black border like a frame from a comic book and I exclaimed, 'I feel like I'm in a comic book!'

We were smoking on a hill next to a building that even sober looked like some kind of Mayan temple step pyramid. Then for a few seconds, everything below the top of the hill turned black and I felt like we were floating on a hill high in the sky with a mystical Mayan temple. I then felt like I was growing another pair of eyes through which I began seeing very elaborate images. I'll call them 'mind's eye visuals' for future reference. And in these mind's eye visuals, I kept seeing everything as being extremely tall and skinny and distorted and I said, 'I feel like everything's tall and skinny!'

Walt said, sounding not unlike the Dark Lord Lucifer himself, 'Noowwww IIIII bellliieeevvveee you'rrreee onnnnnn accccciiddddd.'

Walt also blew pot smoke out of his nose like some kind of a goddamned dragon and made a truly distrubing facial expression opening his eyes really wide that I don't think is physically possible to accomplish unless the beholder is on a lot of LSD. Walt and Ian then sat next to each other discussing hookahs and finishing each other's sentences. Everything went into slow motion for a few seconds as they stared into each other's eyes and said pretty much in goddamned unison, 'Why haven't we met? Yes, why haven't we met?' This was way too intense for me to be dealing with on acid. It seemed as though Ian and the claymation skeleton were becoming one entity of completely incomprehensible behavior.

Anyway, after a few jitters, everything was going great. Dan had to leave for a few minutes and Ian wanted to go to CVS to buy some stuff to fix his hookah. Ian made me follow him to CVS and I kept telling him that I shouldn't go in there because I still couldn't stop biting my lip and it would look weird to the people in CVS. Ian didn't care and we went into CVS anyway.

I ran around CVS like a meth-crazed marionnete puppet making weird gestures with my hands as they perpetually hung by my head. And then I saw the Pearly Gates of Heaven. I was standing in front of an ATM machine looking at Ian buy duct tape for his hookah at the counter of CVS when time slowed down to a crawl. Everything turned black except for the counter, which, in a flash, transformed into a white podium with huge white gates towering behind it. Ian was at the podium holding a brown briefcase facing the angel/CVS clerk, and he then set the briefcase on the ground. This lasted about three seconds and then flashed back to regular old CVS. But where did the brown briefcase go? And this brief hallucination was as real as my own hands, not like the mind's eye hallucinations I metioned earlier. And Dan had told me I wouldn't see things that aren't there. This was the first moment where I wondered to myself, 'Sweet Son of Satan, how much LSD did I put in my body and why did I do it?'

And that's about when I stopped biting my lip and I no longer felt like I was on speed. We left CVS and I began to worry because I had just seen the Pearly Gates of Heaven early in the trip and Ian said he was on more acid than I was. I thought acid was just going to make the room fill with music. Instead I was about to enter a Satanic crash course in Native-American Studies, Existentialism, and Eastern Philosophy. And that's when the journey to Zeesersow began.

STAGE 2: THE JOURNEY TO ZEESERSOW- Outside, we met back up with the dealers Rob and Dan. I was now becoming overwhelmed with mind-blowingly elaborate mind's eye visuals of dancing beatniks wearing berets and claymation skeletons. I kept getting the feeling that I was in this weird parallel universe stuck in the art-deco 1940's.

This is also when the telepathic communication began. I wasn't literally hearing voices. I could tell what the voices sounded like, but they seemed to go straight to my brain without taking a detour through my ears. In my mind's eye, all these crazy beatniks were dancing around like marionnete puppets and acting like they were, well, on acid. They told me telepathically, with cadence a la William Shatner, 'You're...on...aaaaaaacid. This...is how...people...on...aaaaaaaacid move' and they danced around like one would imagine crazy beret-wearing beatniks on acid would. One beatnik said, as if he was reciting a coffeehouse beatnik poem, 'What...is...college?!' and another said, 'Ich... bin... college' as he danced.

I also kept getting images of these claymation skeletons spiraling out of nothingness into existence and just sitting or standing there coldly and not saying anything telepathically. These silent skeletons looked startingly like they were from The Nightmare Before Christmas or the computer game Grim Fandango. They didn't really look like real human skeletons, but cute little cartoony midget skeletons that aren't necessarily very sinister and perhaps even friendly and humorous.

The beatniks then began sending me telepathic messages of completely meaningless words. One that was repeated far more than the others was the word 'Zeesersow.' And it rhymes with 'zeeserwow', not 'zeeserbo.' Anyway, they said it so many times you woulda thought that word 'Zeesersow' was the goddamned meaning of life or something.

Now I thought all of this was absolutely hysterical at first, couldn't stop laughing, and kept thinking, 'Where is the crazy beatnik that made this terrible student art film that I'm stuck in?' I became convinced at this point that Tim Burton, David Lynch and beatnik poets owe their entire careers to hallucinogenic drugs. I also became convinced that Grim Fandango was based pretty directly on a huge dose of acid. I also kept getting the feeling that I had thought acid was a hippy drug, but really, it's more of a beatnik drug, whatever the fuck that means. The phrase 'mescaline dependscaline' was also repeated pretty frequently.

Then the song I had listened to over and over right after I dosed, 'Cleetus Awreetus-Awrightus' by Frank Zappa, kept playing in my head and I kept getting this image of human teeth rattling in a can. I think this was synesthesia from the tack piano. That's about when things started turning from hilarious and pleasant to just plain weird and I kept thinking, 'Uh, is this good or bad?'

Human teeth continued to rattle in a can somewhere in my mind's eye and I kept getting this mind's eye visual of a one-eyed midget claymation skeleton playing chess by himself. You read that right. A one-eyed midget claymation skeleton playing chess by himself.

Now I really started to feel like I was going somewhere. I felt like I was going on a literal 'trip' somewhere and that I now understood why they call it an 'acid trip.' And it was becoming mind-numbingly confusing to figure out exactly how many people were coming with me. Thinking back on it now, the only people there right then were Ian, Rob, and Dan, but I could have sworn there were about 30 of us. I increasingly began to feel like I was going to some mysterious place farther away than the 1940's art-deco place was from Earth and I was picking up beatniks and claymation skeletons on the way to join me on the journey.

Then a train started to go by and I kept getting these crazy mind's-eye visuals that were beginning to blend with my regular field of vision in a way that was hardcore confusing. The visuals were of a huge dark green alien flying saucer taking off and the whole ground shaking and smoke everywhere. So when the train was going by, I nervously asked Dan, 'What's that?' and he just laughed and said, 'It's a train!' He clearly had never done this much acid.

And then I knew I was getting close to the mysterious place I had been approaching for some time. And it seemed to be called Zeesersow. At least, as I felt like I was getting near, I kept getting these mind's eye visuals of some kind of eerie machines or aliens disguised as Rob, Dan, and Ian singing this eerie chant that featured a ton of alien words I can't remember, repeatedly ending with 'in the Zeesersow.' And it even had a little bit of a tune. It seemed like I was entering a place called Zeesersow that had its own theme song. And that's when shit started happening in circles.

STAGE 3: EGO DEATH/ ONE WITH NATURE- By this point, I was beginning to respond telepathically to the growing onsluaght of telepathic communication until I felt like telepathic messages were coming at me faster than my brain could process. The mind's eye visuals were also becoming so overwhelming that I felt like I couldn't tell which set of eyes to look through in order to just walk forward. Then I felt so overwhelmed with sensory information that I felt like I was going blind.

And then the mind's eye visuals stopped and I felt like time and space had completely collapsed around me. I was on top of a hill in front of the cafeteria building and my entire field of vision looked completely flat to the point where I felt like moving forward would hurt. I felt like I was literally stuck inside a flat surface, stuck inside a beautiful, distorted, ultra-high resolution painting of a college campus. I’m stuck inside a motherfucking painting!

I then began walking down the hill, and my field of vision froze into a still painting of the hill. I kept moving down the hill and could feel my muscles moving and could still hear things in real time, but all I could see was the same painting  from five seconds ago. I was literally blind, except, instead of staring at darkness, I was perpetually staring at a painting. I felt like I was running on a treadmill in another dimension staring at a painting.

And then finally I was rewarded with a new painting of my field of vision further down the hill that still had about a five second delay. I felt like my brain was flying apart in all directions and it was no longer able to process sensory information. And then I began to worry that my completely frozen and flat field of vision was starting to wobble and was about to fall over and shatter into pieces of glass and I was going to wake up screaming, seeing reality for the first time. Good trip.

Then my vision caught back up with real time on the bottom of the hill and I was relieved... until I watched myself disappear. As soon as I began moving in real time again, I looked down and literally watched my feet disappear and very quickly my whole body disappeared after it. I presume I became 'one with nature' at this point. And I'm pretty sure I was transcending some hardcore shit. I'm also sure I had a very intelligent facial expression at that moment.

I could tell that I had left this body to some far away place. Then I turned to look ahead and I thought to myself, 'Well, there goes Nichols,' and I didn't even really understand that it was me anymore. It was just some guy that left. I now wasn't sure who I was and I felt like I was actually about five people at once. And that's when God showed up and I remembered I was from Zeesersow. Or perhaps we were from Zeesersow. It's a judgment call.

STAGE 4: ZEESERSOW/THE EDGE/THE WORST PLACE EVER- This is where the trip started to get hardcore. If you thought any of the other stuff I mentioned was hardcore, you are a pussy. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Anyway, as I continued to walk through the quad next to Dan, I felt like my entire reality was crumbling before my eyes. There were 2-inch white blobs flying past me like I was in a wind tunnel and I was literally walking on a giant chessboard. That's right, the entire ground of the quad was literally a chessboard as real as my own hands with alternating dark green and light green spaces for about three seconds and then it flashed back to normal and back to a chessboard on and off for a while. The chess motif was getting stronger. Then someone whispered to me telepathically, 'You're not even paying attention.'

Then I felt the massive pull to look at Dan. I turned to look at him and his eyes lit up and tore right into me like Persian daggers. He grew a sinister, knowing smile and I knew God had possessed his body to talk to me. And I don't even believe in God. And I literally didn't even know that people on acid could talk to God. And I just thought the room was gonna fill with music, man! Fuck!

God proceeded to tell me telepathically that my entire life had been a sick, sick lie and that I was actually from Zeesersow. He told me that I was some sort of failed messiah that had disobeyed Him and escaped from Zeesersow long ago and I had done something to my brain to block out his constant communication with me and to forget about Zeesersow and assume a fake identity in an essentially fake reality. He told me that every feeling of deja vu I had ever had in my life was Him briefly breaking through to me. He also told me that I had done so much LSD that I had completely broken through whatever I had done to my brain before and was now able to remember the truth.

But the bitch of it all was that I remembered. He didn't even have to tell me. As soon as I saw the look of God in that arbitrary college drug dealer's eyes, I started to remember everything He was telling me. I had deja vu coming out of my ass. Normally, being the optimist that I am, I would have thought, 'Well, maybe God's just pulling my leg, and in a couple of minutes, we'll both have a good laugh about this little prank he's pulling on me.' But I 'remembered' that what he was telling me was true. And I remembered that God, who I used to know personally and work for, was an evil tyrant ruling the universe with an iron fist. He wasn't so much some magical, omnipresent androgynous force as much as some cocky male asshole with a sadistic sense of humor who had hijacked the universe. But He sure as hell knew what He was doing. And He sure as hell was way more powerful than me or anything else I had ever experienced.

Now that's pretty much the definition of bad news. I mean, if someone says they have bad news, you'd say 'Oh, no, did somebody die?' and if they then said, 'Reality's fake and God is evil,' its hard to know what to say next. Shit? Fuck? Son of a bitch? Son of Sam? What facial expression are you supposed to make? What emotion are you supposed to feel?

For quite a while, I felt an emotion I have literally never felt sober and I don't know if it is possible to feel unless you are on a monstrous amount of a psychedelic drug. There have been times over the years that I have been kicked in the balls so hard that I no longer felt pain in my balls and instead just keeled over in nausea. This was probably because my brain was flooded with more pain than it could process and my brain just gave up and made me nauseous in a state beyond pain. Talking to God, I was beyond fear.

At this point, the acid's hold was so strong that three-space navigation didn't make a whole lot of sense anymore. I felt like I was in the middle of a revolving door of absolute insanity, not unlike the orgy scene in Zoolander. Everywhere I turned was either Dan or Ian and God would jump between their two bodies and light up their eyes. God was closing in on me from all directions.

I immediately apologized telepathically for coming back to Zeesersow and tried to explain it was an accident and that I had done way too much acid. Although, confusingly enough, I couldn't even remember that the person who had done the acid was a college student. I then told Him that I would turn around and leave Zeesersow immediately and never return again. But then He told me that no one can leave Zeesersow. What do you mean no one can leave Zeesersow? He again reminded me that one can not just leave Zeesersow once one enters. Why did I do so much acid?

I then felt like He was about to tell me Everything. He was about to destroy me with absolute knowledge and doom me with permanent insanity by giving me more knowledge than the human brain can handle. Thinking back on it sober, I was reminded of a quote from All the King's Men about how the end of Man is knowledge and he can't figure out if it's going to save him or destroy him. And I was convinced that knowledge was going to destroy me. And what the hell kind of crazy, corny, flaky, philosophy major shit is that? Jesus H. Christ! I can smell the weed and incense. What the hell corny part of my brain did that come from? I felt like I was trapped inside a philosophy textbook. Bad trip!

Anyway, I felt like the meaning of life was on the tip of my tongue and God was telling me that I already knew it and He was laughing at me beginning to remember and how fucked I would be once I remembered. Give me a break, I was on drugs. And then it became clear to me what would happen if I remembered. I would be in a state worse than death, unable to make sense of or apply meaning to any sensory information. I would effectively be blind, deaf, etc. and in a world of shit. My 'doors of perception' would be 'cleansed', or some William Blake shit like that.

And then I 'remembered' about 'The Tribunal' made up of the '12 Lords of the Universe' working under God and I got some mind's eye visuals of 12 old white guys with closely shaved grey beards standing in a circle on a circular pattern of cobblestones floating in the middle of empty black space. And then I remembered how much those guys sucked. They had a pretty pointless cameo and had no real effect on the storyline. Maybe I was going to be put on trial for previously escaping from Zeesersow or something, its hard to say. The drugfucked human brain is not the most coherent storyteller.

Then I started getting mind's eye visuals of Zeesersow itself, the crazy existential dystopia/land of forbidden knowledge I was stuck in. In case you're wondering what Zeesersow is like, it is the worst place ever. It is the other side. It is the dark side of the moon. Zeesersow is a maddening labyrinth of blindingly white rooms, Parisian cobblestone streets, giant chessboards, and abstract marble sculptures. It always has been and always will be the 1940's in Zeesersow and the place is filled with dancing beatniks, one-eyed midget claymation skeletons, and other completely ridiculous characters whose brains have been destroyed with absolute knowledge and are doomed to permanent and total insanity.

Zeesersow is past nirvana. If Buddha had meditated a little harder and gotten to Zeesersow, he would have scrapped Buddhism and just given up. Zeesersow is the edge of meaning and the edge of acid. At least, I'm pretty sure it is. If there's something past Zeesersow, God help us all. I think Zeesersow is the end of the tunnel. The best representation of Zeesersow I have ever seen is the music video for 'You Are What You Is' by Frank Zappa.

But, yeah, back to my trip. There was still plenty of weird, wild shit to come and shit got even scarier. Tell the kids to go to bed.

STAGE 5: FOLLOW THE SNAKE/ NATIVE-AMERICAN VISION QUEST- This is when I started to trip hardcore Native-American style. This is not to say I was beyond Zeesersow, though, because I wasn't. It was the set up for the long, hard road out of Zeesersow. There were considerably less mind's eye visuals. But it was still hardcore. We're talking lizard tails as real as your hand and God coming out of the television to scream at me hardcore.

Dan and Ian led me back to the dorm to Ian's room and we made a stop in the hall bathroom. And, yeah, I took a piss on that much acid. And it was completely ridiculous. So ridiculous, in fact, that I'm going to devote an entire paragraph to it. This paragraph is designed to be read aloud by William Shatner because William Shatner is acid. The familiar noises of urination are significantly louder on that much acid. Was that whooshing sound a jet engine, or was it my urine hitting the toilet water? You decide. I was sucked toward the toilet in a wind tunnel and my trail of urine was a seamless umbillical cord between me and the john. Deep. The urine trail bent in ways it shouldn't have, but still it landed neatly in the bowl. It also took forever. Very Zen.

Ian brought me into his room and shut the door. Then Rob came in and sat down next to me on a couch. Ian was on one side and Rob was on the other. And they both had long blond hair. This seemed profoundly symmetrical and meaningful at the time. And I was still stuck in Zeesersow. Ian's Egyptian hookah looked like it made a lot more sense in Zeesersow than it did in a college dorm room on Earth.

Ian turned on the television and began playing some recent Prince of Persia video game with the lights off. The game motif marched on. What was taking place on the television screen seemed absolutely just as real and right there with me as everything else in the room. The character in the game, who I'm guessing was some kind of Persian prince, was shimmying across a ledge and the ledge was crumbling into rotating Tetris pieces as real as my hand literally coming out of the television. And they weren't just flash hallucinations, either. They seemed to stay there as long as the television was on. My entire field of vision felt extremely fragile like it was all painted on glass and there was this crazy intense surge of positive and negative emotions simultaneously. I was touched in places I didn't even know I had. I felt like God had reached up my ass and found a bunch of g-spots and anti-g-spots and he was playing them like a piano. He was manipulating my entire reality in order to explain something to me.

And then came the lizard tail. The Persian prince running around in crumbling Tetrisland grew a green lizard tail out of his ass. And the tail swung back and forth, back and forth like something had agitated the Lizard Prince. It was at this point that God started whispering to me, telepathically, 'Follow the snake...Follow the snake...'

Now, I don't know about you, but that kinda reminds me of a Native-American vision quest. 'Little Feather, this is the Great Spirit. Follow the coyote, Little Feather, and one day, you will be a great warrior.' Or something like that. And for some reason, to me, lizards are just a Native-American animal. There's something about lizards and Native-Americans that just go hand in hand, at least with tribes in the Southwest. It felt like I had fallen into some kind of Native-American rite of passage/character-building exercise. And Native-Americans scalped people.

Anyway, my number one priority right then, as you can imagine, was following the snake. I wasn't about to argue with God and I had a hunch this snake was my ticket out of Zeesersow. Now I looked around and didn't see any snakes to follow, so I began to realize it was symbolic. What could the snake possibly represent in this realm of absolute Native-American insanity?

Then I realized the struggle of the Lizard Prince in Tetrisland seemed to be my struggle. The Lizard Prince was the snake and I was going to follow him with my eyes. And then it seemed as long as I was following the Lizard Prince, things were going to be alright and I was feeling way better and it felt like the bad trip was turning good again. And luckily Ian was sober so he was playing pretty well and the Lizard Prince was thriving. Had the Lizard Prince been impaled on a wall of spikes, I probably would have been very concerned about my own future. But he seemed to be doing fine.

And then a steroid-abusing Long Island guido joined me, Ian, and Rob in the room. His name was 'A-Mo' and he was Ian's roommate. A-Mo constantly spoke in a clueless Italian's version of ebonics, shoplifted 'ill shirts' from Banana Republic, and had a downloaded music collection consisting mainly of Bette Midler, Backstreet Boys, 'N Sync, La Bouche, and 50 Cent, which is still just dance music with tough lyrics if you think about it. He also gelled his hair like a Dragonball-Z character, went on diets, and had numerous Jewish American Princess platonic girlfriends.

Anyway, now it seemed like God was trying to make some kind of connection between A-Mo and the Lizard Prince on the television screen he was standing next to. A-Mo did not grow a lizard tail out of his ass, thank God, but there was something suddenly and indescribably reptilian and even Native-American about him. He did have really dark skin for an Italian and was often mistaken for being Indian, although we're talking about red-dot Indian here.

Then I  looked back at Tetrisland and, I wish I was kidding, the Lizard Prince was gone and, in his place...was a steroid-abusing Long Island guido who looked way too much like A-Mo. Now if some hot Asian chick in a bikini had walked in there right then, I probably would've seen her on the screen. Why the fuck did A-Mo have to walk in instead?

Virtual A-Mo now seemed to be 'the snake' so, clearly, I had to follow this swarmy Italian with my eyes as he journeyed through crumbling Tetrisland shimmying across walls. The real A-Mo then barely succeeded in changing clothes and sat down at his desk.  A-Mo then climbed up to his lofted bed like King Kong and passed out..

Anyway, God kept reminding me telepathically that I had to 'follow the snake' and basically continue and keep on truckin' and fuckin', when, out of fucking nowhere, the word 'CONTINUE?' literally came out of the motherfucking television.

Then Ian turned off Prince of Persia and asked if I wanted to watch a movie called Waking Life. Why the fuck did you turn off Prince of Persia, Ian? The snake was in there! I didn't say this, but it did upset me. I then told Ian that I had seen Waking Life in high school in theaters and didn't like it all that much. But wait a minute. Who saw Waking Life in high school? Did I say that? Did we say that? Who am I? Who are we? Who's the guy that saw Waking Life? What? Whatever. Follow the snake.

After I told Ian that I didn't want to watch Waking Life, Ian put the Waking Life DVD away and I began to wonder if this was a hardcore mistake because maybe Waking Life was the snake I was supposed to follow. Ian then suggested watching, of all things, Lord of the Rings. And then I realized that Lord of the Rings was the snake. This is the part when God came out of the television to scream at me.

Let me go into more detail. God was telling me through the symbolic meaning of Ian and Rob's arbitrary conversation as their eyes lit up that He was about to tell me something hardcore about the universe or something. He also basically said, 'You thought you could forget about me. And you know what I think about that?' And He said this telepathically pretty deadpan and I wasn't completely sure what He thought about that yet. Then, right at that moment, there was a close-up of this guy I have since learned is Sauron screaming on the television screen and God jumped in Sauron, lit up Sauron's eyes, and used Sauron to explain how pissed off He was at me for forgetting about Him. He was pretty pissed off.

And right when He did that, I noticed that the room was filled with these extremely elaborate golden patterns coming out of the television. If you close your eyes and press on your eyelids and wait a few seconds, you'll see them. Except, for me, these patterns were huge and absolutely as real as my hand and stayed there as long as the television was on. It literally seemed like they would hurt me if I stood up and tried to walk around. But at the same time I thought they were the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life.

And there was that weird, tiny, distant, sober part of me that thought, 'Oh, these must be those fractal patterns I heard that people see on acid.' Who's the guy that heard about fractal patterns? What? Whatever. Follow the snake. And there was also another one of those wind tunnel things that seemed to be coming out the television.

Anyway, God screaming at me through the huge guy with spikes on the television got my attention and I was definitely gonna do what He said now. God then told me telepathically that I needed to be obedient and that, as a symbol of my obedience to Him, I needed to respond affirmatively to whatever arbitrary things Rob and Ian would say in the next few minutes.

Rob then took out some cocaine, chopped it up with his student ID card, snorted it, and proceeded to tell me and Ian about his manic-depressive weekend. He apparently went home the weekend before for a funeral and learned that his little brother was suicidal and then blew off steam by going to a shopping mall on acid. Now if he had gone to that shopping mall on the amount of acid I was on, God help him, but he was clearly on a lot less than me. Rather than God screaming at him and telling him to follow the snake, there were apparently some lights that freaked him out. Wuss.

Then Rob told us about how he and Dan both liked the short porn girl who had been smoking hookah in Ian's room at the beginning of my trip and how she wanted to hook up with him, but he didn't because Dan liked her. I said, 'Yeah, you did the right thing.'

I didn't say that because that was my genuine opinion of the situation, but because God had told me to respond affirmatively to everything Ian and Rob would say and I wanted to make God happy for obvious reasons. My opinion sober would have been, 'Well, if she likes you and you like her, just do it. If she likes you instead of Dan, then that's that and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Dan will move on.' But instead I said that he did the right thing because I was trying to save my own ass from intergalactic hatred.

Then Ian put his laptop on his lap, turned the screen toward me, and said, 'Watch this.' He showed me a video that occurs between levels of Prince of Persia. This video was apparently the snake so I was going to watch it carefully. It was extremely intense and three-dimensional out of the laptop. I said to Ian, 'Are you...playyyyyinnng?' This was really directed at God and was a metaphorical way of asking Him if He was still controlling my reality.

Ian just laughed and said, 'It's an FMV, man! I'm not playing!'  'FMV' is short for 'full-motion video' and is a nerdball term for the videos between levels in video games, in case you didn't know. The video featured some dramatic music and Ian said, 'You can tell that the hero's not going to die in this scene because they're playing in A minor.'

I then said, 'Yeah,' because I still had to respond affirmatively to everything.

Ian then said, 'You don't know anything about music!' and then Rob said, 'Well, I do.' I then said, 'Yeah,' a bunch more times in random places because I was still trying to obey God and follow the snake. And as long as I was successfully following the snake, I was actually feeling way better than you would probably guess I was feeling. Although, I didn't feel so good when Ian then put the video on slow rewind because, for an instant, I thought maybe God had succeeded in reversing time. That would not have been cool.

Rob then said, 'When I'm on acid, I kinda feel like I'm in this other dimension.' KINDA? I'm in a place called Zeesersow right fuckin' now!

Then Rob left. Now it was just me, Ian, and sleeping Homo Kong. And I was acting like a monkey with cerebral paulsy. I looked over at Ian and he was just staring ahead deep in thought. He looked sober and horrified. There was still another one of those wind tunnel deals and I felt like I had no control over my arms for a few seconds as they flailed around, outlining the wind tunnel. Ian looked somewhat concerned that I was doing this. I didn't think I was making any weird noises, but Ian told me later that I was in fact making weird noises.

By this point we were watching the second Lord of the Rings movie. And, amazingly, I actually started to feel really good watching the blue and white sand that Frodo and Golem's faces were made out of blow all over the place and out of the television. I felt good because I was successfully following the snake and making God happy. And I began to realize, 'Hey! It doesn't really matter that God's evil because he's so powerful that you have no choice but to love Him 'cause if you don't, he'll completely destroy you! I love God!'

And, strangely enough, this was a happy thought at the time. Earlier, I decided that I hated God because He was being a real asshole to me and when I started to think that I hated Him, I could feel Him reflect the hate back onto me a trillion times stronger. And once I loved Him and gladly followed His orders, I was happy and the trip was just starting to turn good again.

Then Ian turned off the television and all the fractal patterns and multi-colored sand disappeared and I felt like a small part of me had died. Uh, why the fuck would you do that, Ian?! The snake was in there! Then God whispered to me telepathically, 'Follow Ian...Follow the snake...Follow Ian...Follow the snake...' But how was I supposed to follow Ian if he was just sitting there on the couch?

Ian then stood up and I stood up and walked closer to him because I was gonna follow that motherfuckin' snake all the way out of Zeesersow. Ian told me to just sit down on the couch and relax, but like, no, I had to follow the snake. And I actually did realize that there was a separate world back on Earth where Ian lived and that the Ian that lived on Earth was not going to understand what I was going through so I was going to have to explain it to him. The problem was that I was only able to communicate in beatnik poetry and was not able to distinguish between what I was saying aloud and what I was saying telepathically. Oops.

I started to try to tell him that since I had to follow the snake, he was going to have to just keep walking around outside and I was going to have to keep following him until I had successfully escaped from Zeesersow. That sounds pretty logical. Now, this is difficult enough to explain sober. And on acid, it didn't quite come out right. There were these sentences I was directing at Ian, but I could tell as they were coming out that they sounded a lot more like beatnik poetry than normal human speech. 'The snake...Follow...I need to follow...Forward motion...Need you to walk forward outside... let'stakeawalkoutside...the snake' or something like that. And I honestly have no clue how much of this I successfully said aloud and how much of it I was just staring at him with monstrous pupils and not saying anything because it was telepathic. I could tell by the look on Ian's face that he did not understand.

'Uh, you're really starting to freak me out, man!'

'The snake?' That was probably telepathic.

'Uh, why don't you, uh, just go back to your room. I need to...do some thinking before I go to my doctor's appointment.'

And this is when I had to play 'The Game.' This is why people climb over the barbed wire fence of a government research building and get arrested like this other kid at my college did while on a massive amount of shrooms. When somebody comes between you and the snake, even if, ironically, that somebody is the snake, bad shit can happen. And thank God my room was next door.

STAGE 6: THE GAME- Ian led me into the hallway, went back into his room, and closed the door on me. Uh, WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU DO THAT, IAN?! YOU'RE THE SNAKE! God told me to follow the snake and I was now locked outside of the room that the snake was in. This was no good. I felt like Ian had just thrown me out of an airplane without a parachute. I was really fucked now.

But then I realized that God intended this to happen. This was all part of 'The Game.' I remembered now. I had played this game before. The snake had actually left Ian and God wasn't going to tell me where it was anymore. I was going to have to figure this out for myself. And I was going to have to make sense of every little detail that had happened so far on the trip. Everything was a clue. Every little detail along the way had hardcore symbolic meaning. Everything was a symbol. And God was done talking to me. I was going to have to escape from Zeesersow on my own.

'Oh, I get it.' I said this out loud to no one with huge pupils acting like a monkey with C.P. in the middle of the hallway, yes. I mean really I said it to God, but onlookers would have been pretty confused as to what was going on with me. Luckily, everyone else was asleep in their rooms by this point. And 'Oh, I get it' was the best sentence I had gotten out of my mouth in a while. I was proud of that sentence. And, clearly, I was gonna have to go to my room and figure out where the snake went.

I followed my hand with my eyes as I pulled my room key out of my pocket and slammed it in the keyhole as I was being sucked toward the door. And then I was sucked into sitting down in my chair in front of my desk and laptop computer. There were a ton of icons on my desktop, but I couldn't make any of them out. It looked like a blur of alien symbols. And then it hit me like a truck. The one-eyed midget claymation skeleton playing chess by himself, the chessboard on the quad, Prince of Persia, Tetrisland, and now 'The Game.' They were all games! And this game I was playing now, scrambling to find meaning in completely arbitrary things, was the game I had been playing my whole life. Life is a game! Work with me here, I was on a lot of acid.

Life is a game we think we're playing with other people, but really, we're just playing by ourselves. We're all just playing chess by ourselves. We're all living in a fake reality trapped inside our own brains assigning meaning to completely meaningless sensory information and making everything and everyone into symbols. Everything is a symbol of our own creation. Everything we see and everything we experience has more to do with us than it has to do with anything or anyone else because everything is only the way we perceive it.

Everyone else's personality is really just an aspect of our own personality that we assign to them to make sense of the, uh, 'personality data' they've presented us with or something. But it's not who they really are. And we filter out everything that gets in the way of our ability to believe that things have meaning and we are all therefore basically 'following the snake' and not realizing it. Or something. And, above all, we spend our whole lives just looking in the mirror because everything else... is really just us. And we will all never really get to know anyone else or anything else ever!

Now, I mean, that's all basically just a corny way of explaining common sense ideas that I already knew anyway. Yeah, we're all stuck in our own biased brains. Get over it. But on that much acid, I was feeling that shit rather than just thinking it and it was really fucking intense.

I was still determined to escape from Zeesersow and return to my fake life right where it left off. And playing 'The Game' by figuring out the rest of the clues of the trip was the only way to do this. And I was running out of time. I felt like I was James Bond and God was Dr. No or Goldfinger or Blofeld or somebody and he had put me in one of those stupidly complex traps with a timer and he was laughing at me thinking I'd never get out of it. I'd be stuck in Zeesersow forever.

But I was gonna prove that fucker wrong. I had to focus on turning back into my fake Earth identity. I remembered my Earth name, but not a whole lot else. How was I supposed to turn back into myself if I couldn't remember a goddamned thing about myself?

Then I remembered Rob offering me the swigs of alcohol. This was a clue. Then I realized that drinking must be the first step in returning to Earth. That's where the snake went. It went into some kind of drink. So I bolted over to the fridge with my hands still dangling by my head, grabbed my roommate's bottle of milk, and drank that fucker right down like my life depended on it, which I thought it did. I could tell I was making progress.

Then there was the song, 'Cleetus Awreetus-Awrightus' by Frank Zappa. I listened to this song on repeat right after I dosed and it had been playing in my head over and over earlier in the trip. Clearly, I was gonna have to have this song playing over and over to get back to Earth. And the CD it was from, The Grand Wazoo, was still in my walkman sitting on my desk. So I grabbed the walkman, shoved the headphones in my ears, and I realized that the room was FINALLY gonna fill with some goddamned music like Dan had said. Except not in a good way. The instant the song started playing, I got mind's eye visuals of enormous hollow Keebler elf trees filling my room. I realized this was an omen of things to come if I set the volume too high. So, to solve my potential tree infestation problem, I turned the volume way down.

As I sauntered in circles around my windy dorm room listening to my walkman and making strange gestures with my hands, it began to dawn on me that God, Zeesersow, and the snake were all a bunch of drugfucked nonsense. This was a relief. However, I now had an equally serious problem on my hands. Had the acid made me permanently insane? I struggled to remember anything about the college kid who had accidentally ingested an extraordinary amount of lysergic acid and I couldn't come up with much. His name was Will Nichols, but what else? I still wasn't him. But I used to be. Could I ever be him again? I felt like my brain was completely rearranged and I now had to perform brain surgery on myself to return it to the way it was before I did acid. And playing this nutty game with nearby objects and clues from the trip was the only way to reassemble my brain so that I was Will Nichols again.

I looked at my laptop screen again and I could now make out all the desktop icons. I was making progress. Although the captions of the icons looked like they were written in Klingon. I still had a ways to go. The laptop screen then changed to a screensaver of stars flying by and it felt like a window out of my dorm room spacecraft as it was returning to Earth at the speed of light. I realized this was not literally the case, but it felt like a pretty good metaphor for the progress I was making. And this was the end of 'The Game.'

STAGE 7: STARTING TO COME DOWN- All I had to do was sit it out and come down. I looked over at my digital alarm clock and I successfully read it to be about 6:00 A.M. That meant it had been ten hours since I dosed. I figured in another two hours, I'd remember everything about myself and I'd be completely sober and I'd go to sleep and all would be well with the world.

But everything was basically going well. I eventually got tired of listening to 'Cleetus Awreetus-Awrightus' on repeat, so I turned off my walkman, took the headphones out of my ears, and stared at my laptop screen as I got more strange mind's eye visuals. Then I heard the door to Ian's room open. He was going off to his doctor's appointment. But then I noticed that it was past 8:00 A.M. and I was still tripping. This meant it had been over 12 hours since I had dosed. And I had read on the internet that an acid trip never lasts more than 12 hours under any circumstances. Hmm.

STAGE 8: WHY AM I STILL TRIPPING?!/ AM I STILL TRIPPING?!- Being the optimist that I am, I thought to myself, 'Well, maybe that means 12 hours after I started really tripping and not just twelve hours after I dosed. So, I bet in another hour or so, I'll be sober.' No such luck. 'Well, maybe it means 12 hours after I started tripping hardcore as opposed to that puny, windy, Busta Rhymes shit. So, yeah, I'll be sober in another couple hours.'

When it got to be noon on Saturday and I was still tripping, I was no longer an optimist. Am I stuck like this? Am I gonna be tripping the rest of my miserable life? Have I become one of those legendary 'acid casualties'? Was letting an unstable gay southerner with a fake British accent decide how much LSD I put in my body the biggest mistake of my life?

I now remembered everything about myself, but all my memories still seemed a distant, surreal blur. I also felt like even if I did eventually become sober again, I would be a completely different person from now on. Had the acid completely changed me? And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't even remember what it felt like to be sober. I was still completely depersonalized. I looked down at my arms and they still seemed to be just as much a part of the scenery as everything else. I looked around the room and everything looked like it was slowly moving forward on its own. I was still getting mild mind's eye visuals and I still felt like I was getting ever so slowly and slightly sucked forward as I was sitting at my desk. I could now read English words and actually think pretty clearly, but what the fuck was wrong with me? It couldn't have been the acid at this point, could it? It was supposed to be long out of my system by now.

The sounds of people walking outside my door gave me mind's eye visuals of a huge gray robot with fork-lift arms stomping through the dorm hallway. Then someone on my hall started blasting 'Everything is in its Right Place' by Radiohead. I'm not a big Radiohead fan and everything was definitely not in its right place. But the song gave me mind's eye visuals of a deep blue control panel with little robot heads and this was oddly comforting.

Then the burping started. I burped a lot that Saturday. And every time I burped, I felt like I was getting just a little more sane. This was probably just a placebo mind game I was playing with myself, but who knows?

But then things got really shitty. It was now 8:00 P.M. on Saturday and I was still tripping. It had been 24 hours since I dosed. It was beginning to seem like God was right. I'd never escape from Zeesersow. I fucked up my brain for life. I now had the forbidden knowledge of what it feels like to be incurably insane and I had forgotten how to feel any other way. But real schizophrenia's a walk in the park compared to what I experienced. All real schizophrenics do is hear voices and think the government is after them. I dealt with shit way more hardcore than that, albeit briefly.

Then I got a mind's eye visual of my mom's face looking at me and crying. Her son's brain was permanently damaged from doing a drug. I couldn't face her. I knew what I had to do. I'd wait a couple of days and if I was still tripping, I'd go to the university hospital. If the doctors told me there was nothing they could do and I'd be stuck like this for the rest of my life, I'd jump in front of the train that comes through campus and end it all.

But then things got way better. By 9:00 P.M., I could feel it wearing off. I knew for the first time that I was returning to the proud, stiff world of sobriety. But I still worried that I'd never be the same again.  I laid down on my bed and pictured myself slowly flying off into the sunset on a magic carpet with two dark-skinned people I didn't recognize. What? Who are you? Whatever. I was still pretty dazed and confused.

I took off my headphones, turned off my laptop, and decided I was finally able to sleep. I didn't feel like I was tripping anymore, but I still only felt about 37% normal. I wondered if I'd be the same person I was before I did acid when I'd wake up on Sunday. I was still so confused that I literally hoped I wouldn't have permanently adopted the personality of someone I had seen during my trip, such as Ian, Rob, Dan, and Walt. I didn't want to turn into any of them. I wanted to be the same old me again. Give me a break, I was coming off drugs and I was very sleep-deprived. I looked at my clock and saw it was 10:00 P.M. 26 hours. I struggled to breathe as I fell asleep thinking to myself, 'I'll never do an hallucinogen again. I'll never do an hallucinogen again. I'll never do an hallucinogen again.'

CONCLUSION- 'Hell, I'd do it again.' That was my first thought waking up early Sunday afternoon. And why the hell not? That was one nutty Native-American ride. I had survived a beatnik nightmare multiplied by a skeleton festival in a paranthesis of ego death and Native-American horror to the power of an evil God. Could it really have been much worse? And I'm fine afterwards? Hell, this acid stuff must be pretty harmless afterall.

And I did it again two weekends later. I mean, I did less. I did two hits of that same batch and watched a cartoon with Donald Duck and a bunch of Nazis dancing around and heiling Hitler. And shockingly enough, this was a good trip.

But what the hell is acid, anyway? And how seriously should I take it? Is the center of the universe really just a bunch of dancing beatniks and one-eyed midget claymation skeletons? Where is the universe? What is the sound of a one-handed clap? Why do most people love things that suck? What is college? Is it all a sick joke? Is life really just a game?

Even if life is a game, you might as well win it. If an hallucinogenic drug changes your life or your worldview, you are too much of a flake to have done it in the first place. But if you've got your head screwed on tight and you've got a sense of humor, acid is great fun. There is nothing funnier or crazier than a massive dose of acid. And, hell, like dreams, there probably is a little bit of valid insight underneath all that craziness. But, uh, take it with a grain of salt.

But do acid. Or don't do acid. I don't care. I'm gonna keep doing it. I'm gonna find one-eyed midget skeletons to play chess with, have telepathic conversations with dancing beatniks, walk on chessboards, follow snakes, watch pharmacies turn into the Pearly Gates of Heaven, watch myself disappear, visit places in the universe we're never supposed to see, and get screamed at by God all while you brag to your pussy emo friends that you were once so drunk that you fell over in a bush. Wuss. And you're asking me if I'm glad that unstable, ambiguously gay southerner with a fake British accent gave me way too much acid my first time? And I'm answering that question with a question. Is a frog's ass watertight?

Exp Year: 2006	ExpID: 57725

Gender: Male

Age at time of experience: Not Given

Published: Apr 7, 2007	Views: 134,929

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LSD (2) : Various (28), First Times (2), Overdose (29), Guides / Sitters (39), Entities / Beings (37), Music Discussion (22), Mystical Experiences (9), Glowing Experiences (4), Difficult Experiences (5)


		 DOSE:

		 oral
		 LSD
		 (blotter / tab)

           BODY WEIGHT:
	   185 lb

After reading many of the LSD trip reports, I thought I'd add mine, which I feel illustrates pretty clearly the effects of a VERY large, unintentionally severe dose of acid. Take it as a warning, or an enticement, or just entertainment if you choose.

Summer of 1999, Highgate, Vermont...It was one of the last Grateful Dead shows before Jerry ate that fatal pint of Heroin Garcia. Two friends and I made the journey in my bedraggled hatchback. Now, we were not fans of the Dead, nor did we have tickets...what we DID have was a few paycheck's worth of cash and a powerful hunger for some good old-fashioned visceral experience after a summer of hard work. We hadn't been there ten minutes, having parked the beater back in a field which was rapidly filling up with freaks of all shapes and sizes, when we encountered a pale little hippie who asked if we'd been 'hooked up' with acid yet. Is it good? we naively asked. (Like he was gonna say no.) We gave him some money and he ripped us off a huge chunk of plain white, unperforated blotter- maybe half a sheet. In minutes the first couple were in our mouths as we wandered down the highway, watching this tiny town rapidly becoming the biggest city in the state.

Half an hour or so later, J was expressing skepticism about our purchase...It was too cheap, it didn't taste like anything, we didn't feel any tingle in our mouths or stomachs yet...'I think it's fake,' he said, 'or really weak. We should just eat it all.' What the hell, I thought, he knows more about this stuff than me. We offered some more to B, but he was more interested in finding some mushrooms. So, down the hatch it went; ragged chunks the size of postage stamps or matchbooks.

It was probably only fifteen minutes or so later that I noticed a fly buzzing around J's head. A fly which grew to the size of a ping-pong ball, turned red, then, blue, then multiplied into a cloud of giant flashing flies which sounded like a chainsaw. 'I don't think it was fake...' I said to him, and he turned to me with pupils already swelling towards dinner-plate proportions, and grinned like a dog eatin' bumblebees.

Well, what followed was a full THIRTY-SIX HOURS of madness. There are two things I am eternally grateful for; the acid was not only strong as hell, it was clean as a whistle and I never experienced more than a twinge or two of physical discomfort. Second, we were in possibly the one environment where, screwed up as we were, we were practically blending into the wallpaper amid 150,000 or so other bits of human flotsam and jetsam. There's no way I could describe all the outlandish, incomprehensible things I felt, saw, heard and experienced there, but a few deserve mention.

At one point, probably six hours into the trip, I decided that I just needed to leave for a while. Just go away, into the woods, AWAY from this seething mass of lunacy swirling around me. I walked into the edge of the forest, into a little sunlit glade filled with white flowers here and there. Ohh the relief I felt! here was a perfect spot to lie down and grab ahold of the fraying edges of my sanity and...wait...that's not a flower!! I had stumbled into a shithole. The white flowers were wads of toilet paper that had recently wiped some dirty hippie's ass. THERE WAS NO ESCAPE. The crushing blow struck me between the lobes and i was paralyzed, stark still for several minutes. Then I pulled myself together and plunged back into the howling, gibbering carnival of humanoid creatures which now spread out for miles and miles. I knew I had no choice but to surrender myself to it.

Later, I reconnected with J and B (who had indeed found a gigantic bag of mushrooms) and we locked ourselves in my car for a while. We turned on Nine Inch Nails and rolled up the windows in a desperate bid to block out our surroundings for a bit. J and I had a full on conversation about our situation without opening our mouths; this is not a myth, folks, it IS possible. I later saw him hackysack in complete darkness for thirty minutes without dropping the ball. B was throwing handfuls of caps and stems around the car and drooling. He was not able to participate in the conversation. The trees outside, tossed by the wind, were a wriggling electric frieze which screamed and vibrated at an impossible pitch.

It was about this time that I realized, as I looked in the rearview mirror, that I did not know my name or anything at all about myself. I literally had no idea who was staring back at me. Ego death, i believe they call it...It should have been terrifying. Instead it felt wonderfully liberating. It gave me the freedom to concentrate on other, more important things. Things like the sentence I was hearing over and over in my head, drowning out even the buzzing screams of the trees, a sentence not in English or any other earthly tongue but in some older, more primal language. I could never attempt to transcribe it but to this day, if I concentrate, I can hear a faint memory of it. This sentence goes around and around in a vast wheel, a carousel or Ferris Wheel of light, sound and knowledge. This sentence contains every bit of information that has ever been and will ever be known to man and to God. I realized that if I could just figure out where to put the PERIOD, where to make it stop, I could read it out clearly and thus would become the most knowledgeable, powerful being in the universe.

I have no idea for how long I rode this wheel, listening to the sentence repeat and blend and swirl around me, desperately focusing on finding its beginning and end. At some point I realized that if I did not stop, I might never be able to get off of the wheel. Some blessed part of me recognized a potential future life at the Shady Acres Home for the Incurably Psychotic, and forced me to jump off. When I landed it was dark and J and B were gone. There were huge fires raging out in the human wilderness and electric snakes shooting through the sky. I set out again into the chaos, with my name and identity now recovered, and had a blast.

Two days later when we finally woke up from a few hours of cracked and broken sleep, at four a.m., we fled the vast metropolis of Highgate, where two hundred thousand residents had loved, fought, fucked, died, and created a complex society complete with its own economy. The car was strewn with camping gear, spilled beer and coffee, and littered with mushrooms which we did our best to collect before getting on the highway. When I got home that day and emptied my pockets, I had about eight packs of cigarettes, a big ball of opium, a chunk of hash, some microdot pills I couldn't identify, some mysterious feathers, and a scrap of paper with a scribbled circle on it. The 'wheel' didn't look quite so amazing anymore...I laughed and we went swimming naked on the microdots in the glorious August sun.

I've taken acid a couple times since then, but never has it done much for me...I just kinda get a 'been there, done that' feeling; like it has nothing left to offer. I'm certainly not suggesting that anyone go out and gobble twenty or more hits of Fluff. I'm actually very thankful that I emerged from this as an intact, sane entity. So, I guess the lesson is that even if your smart-ass friend tells you to eat it all...give it a few more minutes, O.K.?

Exp Year: 1999	ExpID: 52084

Gender: Male

Age at time of experience: Not Given

Published: Oct 31, 2007	Views: 136,997

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LSD (2) : Multi-Day Experience (13), General (1), Festival / Lg. Crowd (24)


		 DOSE:

		 5 hits
		 oral
		 LSD
		 (blotter / tab)

		 smoked
		 Cannabis
		 (plant material)

           BODY WEIGHT:
	   125 lb

To start, this happened many moons ago and took place near the end of my high shcool years with a good friend I'll call Dan. Dan and I were both unusually acquainted with hallucinogenics and general mind alterants for our respective ages, so what we were about to do did not seem that unreasonable. Of course, we had no idea how the night would unfold.

We set off on a mission to split a ten strip and watch the movie Scream that was playing at a theater in a mall in a neighboring city (and state). I worked at this mall, and the plan was that he would meet up after I got off work from the department store, we'd split the strip, walk around the mall until the movie started an hour later and my coworker I'll call Sara would then pick us up at the end of the film when the mall was closing. Sara would then drive us around town for the evening, stopping by a carnival that was set up near the mall and we would trip in joyous rapture.

I did not know that the state police had set up a convention of some sort in the mall that night. I didn't know this until I ate the strip and wound my way with Dan to the far side of the mall, where the state police had set up displays warning of the dangers of drugs, guns and other police-like warnings. I was mortified. Some snippets of my thoughts at the time would probably read like these : This is not good. I just ate 5 hits of acid, and I'm in a building with no less than 15 state police and a radio DJ. I need to go. Oh god no.

We head back around the mall and into the theater. So we're now sitting in the front row of a pretty crowded mall cinema and we're watching the movie Scream, which neither of us had seen up to this point. The shit kicks in, and I'm literally petrified. I can't breathe. I can't think. All I see is the Ghostface Scream killer peaking out between my feet and Dan seems completely oblivious to it. I drop my soda on the ground and pull my feet up on the chair, sitting on my knees so the Ghostface killer won't get me. Dan is just the picture of cool.

I somehow made it through the film, not moving an INCH until the houselights came on. At this point, I followed Dan out and back towards the mall. I was tripping balls. Dan, still so cool, commented that the movie let out earlier than expected so let's walk around again. I said sure. I commented on my legs feeling strange, not realizing they were completely asleep from my sitting on them for two solid hours. And so we walk. I'm so preoccupied with my rubber legs I don't notice we head right back to the fucking police display.

Three cops are leaning on a display table and staring at us as I am nearly clinging to Dan and he is browing a display of weapons made in prisons. 'Go ahead and pick one up' the cop said. It took a mini-eternity for me to register he was speaking to me, so I grab the first thing in front of me which happens to be a shank made from a toothbrush and some wooden thing sticking out of it. I just said 'This is cool.'

'I lost a buddy to that thing. I don't think that's cool at all, actually.' was the police mans reply. All I remember seeing were thousands of pulsing, writhing worms all over the place. I wanted to vomit. Dan pulled me away and we headed through the department store I worked in, looking for Sara. Moving from literally one horror (Scream) to another (Angry police) and now moving to me being surrounded by my coworkers while tripping my nuts off, I was not really feeling this trip if you're with me. As people said random things, I hear my name occasionally but kept walking straight ahead, following Dan the whole time, just looking for Sara.

The colors, the amazing clarity of the store in its neon evil, the whorish looking people I work with in their makeup and fake smiles, I was very near a breakdown when Dan said 'There she is.' He spotted Sara walking out of the store and into the parking lot. I literally bolted through the store and out the door, running outside and yelling 'HEY!!!! SARA!!!' I get outside and remember the Ghostface killer man, and turn to run right back inside when Dan catches my arm and guides me to the car. Now Sara had just got a new car. Literally the week before. She had never owned a manual before, but was learning how to drive one. We piled into her Cavalier, me in the front, Dan in the back behind me.

Her having no idea what it is like to be tripping, bitching about customers as she stalls the car twice before pulling out of the parking lot. I look at her and see a giant raccoon with a wig on, driving this car and the fucking raccoon keeps sticking its tongue out at me. I get a bit freaked out, so I can't look at her. Which makes her start asking 'What is your problem?' This question inevitably will lead anyone tripping face to dissect their entire life, which is exactly what I began doing as she sped toward the interstate ramp. 'You're going really fast!' I said with a laugh, finally getting comfortable as Dan leaned forward and adjusted the radio to a local rock station. 'You call this fast? Watch this!' She said, laughing too. We all laughed as the red and blue lights started flashing behind us at that exact moment. She said the words 'Watch this' and the cab of her car turned into an amazing array of red and blue pulsing waves.

Oh fucking fuck.

Now, I was sitting with my right foot resting on my left calf. I was wearing Doc Marten boots, brown in color. I was holding my right foot in both hands. This is a detail you should know before I mention the flashlight that started shining in my window, in my face as a nightstick tapped against my glass. Not hers. Mine. I'm just tripping, I thought to myself. I'm not really getting spotlighted by a cop, no fucking way! Dan grabbed me by my shoulder in a vulcan death grip. 'Dude, stop saying that you're tripping. Roll down your window.'

I was saying that shit out loud. OK. Roll down window. I can do that. Sara did it for me. I was greeted with 'What is in the cup son??' Now I knew for a fact he wasn't talking to me, I had no cup. I had nothing that could hold liquid so I am gonna sit here and not say a wor- 'I SAID WHAT IS IN THE CUP SIR' His light was shining on the foot I was holding in my hands. 'IT'S NOT A CUP! IT'S MY FOOT! I CAN'T DRINK IF IT'S A FOOT SO I HAVEN'T DONE ANY DRINKING!' Those were my exact words, I will never forget them as long as I live. And I was ocnvinced this police officer was Deputy Dewy from Scream.

The police left us alone after giving Sara a nice fat ticket for speeding 20 miles above speed limit. She was in tears, but proceeded to take us to the carnival. I just wanted to go home. I wanted to never ever ever come out of my room again.

So we get to the carnival.

The definition of pure fear, already established well for me that night, was now truly revealed. Enormous inflated clowns. Cheap blinking yellow lights. Dozens of people meandering about, nothing to do but stare at the people coming in. Grating sounds from the rides that were bound to break apart at the slightest breeze. Dan told me I needed to relax, and instructed me to sit at a picnic table while he got us drinks. Sara was bitching to someone she went to school with about her ticket and she was crying hard.  OK. I can sit still. I sit at the table watching people walk past me, some with cotton candy, some with giant cheap stuffed animals. I wish I had a stuffed animal, I thought to myself. And then I saw the little kid and the stuffed banana.

This kid, all of three years old, walked by holding up this great stuffed banana. He held it out to me, I swear he did. Assuming he heard my wish for a stuffed animal, I took it. He began to scream LOUDLY. I panicked. What follows panick when tripping is natural. I ran away. With the fucking stuffed banana.

And the LSD, how she loves to fuck with me. Coming and going, ebbing and flowing, just when I think I got it all under control another tidal wave crashes into my soul. That wave decided to crash right as I was sprinting with the banana, no clue where Dan was or Sara for that matter. I just ran. People staring, voices yelling behind me, I just ran. And this banana, it had a face on it. And this nose, like a little button sticking out of the face. It didn't look like it wanted the button sticking out like that, and before I knew it, Dan and Sara were rushing me into the car after finding me sitting on the sidewalk, chewing the nose off of this stolen stuffed banana.

Back in the car, I was contently chewing as Dan and Sara were exchanging heated words. Sara, it seems, was no longer going to drive us. We had to drive ourselves back home. All I saw was the flowing water of colored sounds and vibrations, and my happy little banana with a mangled, soaking wet nose hanging by threads.

 [Erowid Note:
Driving while intoxicated, tripping, or extremely sleep deprived is dangerous and irresponsible because it endangers other people. Don't do it!]

The next thing I know I'm in Dans car. He's driving. And I know he is tripping as hard as me. He has to be. He's just a lot cooler with it all. I now had a drink that Dan bought me, and my banana that my mind was somehow linking to a tribal consciousness. I was set. Dan was not. I realized he was just as fucked up as I was as I noticed he was driving the wrong way on a one way road, that was under construction. I pointed this out rather calmly, because this banana kept telling me not to panic, that Dan needed me. So I told Dan that he was going to get us arrested very calmly and the banana was pleased.

We were all actually cool until I realized that Dan had no idea where we were or how to get us home. The banana, the drink and all the zen in the world didn't keep me from tweaking out at this point. That's when Dan told me to pull the ashtray out of his dash. I did so. And there were two more ten strips wrapped in cigarette wrappers, and some joints. 'Do not freak on me.' I agreed with him. The thought of prison can sober someone up fucking FAST.

I felt in my pocket and found a pack of stickers. They had STATE POLICE - 911 emblazoned on them. I must have had 200 or more of these things. How I got them, I have no idea to this day. What I do remember next was Dan pulling down a heavily wooded dirt road and bringing me to a secluded hiking path and saying 'Let's walk' at around 1 in the morning. So I followed him. The banana nodded in agreement, and with him in tow we began walking. It was a full moon in the middle of the woods, just me and Dan, tripping nuts and now passing a joint back and forth. The joint, I think, is what made the banana start fucking with me.

I know I heard a voice that was not Dan's come out of the bananas mouth when he said 'Watch out for Mr. Ghostface.' I became paralyzed with fear. Not for the first time that night, but probably the worst. I was surrounded in white moonlight shining through tree branches. EVERYTHING LOOKED LIKE A FUCKING SCREAM MASK.

'Don't move.' I breathed. Dan stopped walking ahead of me and came back.

'What is it?'

'Don't...move'

He then turned and exclaimed 'Dude, good call!' And started walking towards a tent I had not even noticed was set up five feet away from me. With the moonlight, I could not tell if it was an old tent or a new tent. It looked abandoned. I noticed holes throughout it, and the banana chimed in that what I was seeing was knife marks and the tent held the corpses of Mr. Ghostface.

We walked up to the tent and I sat down on something. I wasn't paying attention. I told Dan the camp looked abandoned and we should get going. He told me he didn't think it was abandoned because I was sitting on a cooler. I opened the cooler up and stuck my hand in ice and black tarry shit that I was convinced was blood. I ran back to the back, Dan following me quickly.

'What is it?' he asked. I held up my hand. It smelled like cake. I had stuck my hand in someones ice cream or chocolate something. But where were the people who should be in the tent? WAS THIS HAPPENING????

We kept along the path and within minutes came into a clearing that lead to a series of cliffs overlooking the river. I realized Dan had found his way back to familiar turf and had brought us to the cliffs, a local hangout where I had been many a time. Sitting 250 feet over the river one could observe a great peace-sign made of rocks on the embankment below. We climbed onto the rocks, Dan warning me to be careful. The banana had other plans. He informed me that the only thing I could do that would matter would be to place stickers on the face of the cliff that had the police logo on them. I looked at Dan, who was sitting indian style on a jutting rock and I was instantly reminded of the Hermit from the game Rygar. I decided not to disturb him and went about my business of hanging over the cliffs edge and placing stickers as far as I could reach. I hung from my stomach down over the cliff and started feeling heavy.

I was sliding. I remember my exact thought as I started feeling my weight shift towards my head. 'That fucking banana killed me.' Then blind pain as my chin smashed the rock ledge and my face was dragged along ground. Dan had leapt over, grabbed my feet and dragged me back to safety. Neither of us said a word yet he knew to come and help.

We spent the rest of our trip exploring, chilling out, finishing another J and letting the trip unwind before he drove me back to my house where I climbed in through my window and slept for nearly a full day.

This story taught me several things, one being that tripping can induce fear. Another being that fear is not always bad as this will forever be my favorite trip of many, many MANY trips - even though this one was spent almost entirely in some state of disbelief or panic. And finally it taught me that if you find yourself tripping and weilding a stuffed banana, get a second opinion before taking any advice it may offer.

Exp Year: 2005	ExpID: 48973

Gender: Male

Age at time of experience: Not Given

Published: Nov 30, 2007	Views: 52,403

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LSD (2), Police / Customs (60) : Various (28), Guides / Sitters (39), Entities / Beings (37), Difficult Experiences (5)