		 DOSE:
 T+ 0:00
		 1 hit
		 sublingual
		 LSD
		 (blotter / tab)

		   T+ 10:00
		   repeated
		 vaporized
		 Cannabis
		 (extract)

           BODY WEIGHT:
	   175 lb

A few days ago, I had my first solo trip. I am a 20-year-old male in college, and I have had 3 previous trips in a group. It is nearing the end of the school semester, so I had some free time and wanted to trip before returning home for winter break. I live in the campus dorms, not an apartment or house, so originally the plan was to take a light dose (1/2 to 3/4 of a tab) with a friend here for his first trip; however, he was not in the right headspace leading up to the target date and didn’t want to join anymore, so I decided I would instead trip on my own.

T-12:00:

The night before the trip, I made sure my setting was as ideal as possible. I vacuumed and dusted, shaved, and trimmed my fingernails. I bought myself some fruit snacks and a scone to have for breakfast. The following day was supposed to be moderately chilly, and I assumed I would want to go for a walk at some point, so I packed a bag with a hat, gloves, dry socks, a blanket, and some water. I told my roommate and a few trusted friends that I was intending to drop the following morning just so they were aware, and I tried to keep my mind calm despite my enormous excitement for the coming day.

I told my roommate and a few trusted friends that I was intending to drop the following morning just so they were aware, and I tried to keep my mind calm despite my enormous excitement for the coming day.

 Finally, I measured out my dose - a single tab of tested, average-strength acid - and got to bed early so I would not be tired in the morning.

T-0:30:

The morning of my trip was accompanied by a moderate level of anxiety that hadn’t been there in the previous days. Many people on the floor who knew me did not know that I was going to be tripping, and I was acutely aware that they could negatively impact my trip if I did not sufficiently avoid them. I also worried about the worst-case scenario of being discovered as intoxicated by an authority figure and facing repercussions because of it. However, I felt safe within my room and was not going to have any other drugs on my person throughout the day, so I was able to push past the anxiety and convince myself that I was indeed ready to trip alone. I used the bathroom, got some water, ate breakfast, and spent 15 minutes preparing myself mentally for the rest of the day.

T+0:00:

At approximately 9:45 AM, I placed the single tab of tasteless acid under my tongue and let it sit there for 15 minutes before swallowing it. I watched a YouTube video, then started playing Rocket League while waiting for the effects to kick in.

T+0:45:

At this point the trip was just beginning to start. The only visuals I saw so far were more defined edges around objects around the room and around each hair on my arm, as well as an extraordinary brightness throughout the room as indirect sunlight shone through a window.   Mentally, I felt as if I had just smoked a small amount of cannabis: I felt high, happy, and simultaneously relaxed and energized. I told myself I would wait for the tab to completely kick in before going on a walk, so I put on some music and continued to play Rocket League. My response time had begun to deteriorate, so I was playing against bots rather than online. I was still not playing very well, but I was having a blast nonetheless and my mind began to wander.

T+1:00:

As the trip continued and I had more time to sit with my thoughts. I was overcome with a new sense of love and gratitude for everything: the music which had become utterly incredible to listen to; my past self, who had put in the effort to enable this experience; my future self, who I felt a stronger sense of custodial duty and optimism towards; my new friends who I had met in college; my old friends who I met in high school and missed dearly; my oldest friends, who I have known since third grade and still hang out with when I get the opportunity. I paused here. I hadn’t seen these two friends for nearly a month at this point, as we all go to different colleges about an hour or two’s drive apart; I felt tears welling up in my eyes as I thought of them and how much I missed being with them. But I knew I would see them and the rest of my high school friends when winter break started in a few weeks, so I was able to calm myself down and resist the need to break down into tears in front of my roommate, who was still in the room at this time.

Around this time I also went to use the bathroom, which was quite the experience. I have a social anxiety condition called paruresis (aka shy bladder syndrome) which makes it difficult for me to urinate in public; I could feel my stool moving within me as I passed it, which I never noticed before; the light from the frosted glass window shone so bright I felt the need to squint; the speckled concrete floor beneath me began to move and contrast in the bulbous shape of a sprawling slime mold; and all the while I was still thinking about my friends and how much I missed them. Somehow I was able to juggle all of this and emerge from the bathroom victorious.

T+1:15:

After using the bathroom, I continued gaming at my computer and the trip continued to intensify. The hip-hop music I was listening to was saccharine, so much more beautiful and full of emotion and passion than I had experienced it before; if I closed my eyes I would have been consumed by the music entirely. My visual acuity increased to the point where I could see each pixel on my monitor, rather than the coherent shapes they were meant to represent. Other effects became more pronounced, such as the incredible feeling of a towel as I dried off my hands or the flowing nature of my desk’s wood grain; the wood appeared flat with a boiling texture, almost like a rheoscopic fluid being stirred up (look up a demo video online if you’re curious). Not much else of note happened here, I just sat and enjoyed the headspace.

T+2:30:

After another hour of just sitting around I grew restless. At this point I felt I had about peaked, so I was ready to go take a walk around campus. I grabbed my bag, but on my winter jacket and boots, told my roommate where I was going, and snuck outside through a side entrance so as not to have to interact with people I knew from my floor (there is a common area near the main floor stairwell and elevators where people like to congregate). I didn’t see anyone I knew on my way out, and by the time I made it outside I was home free. The air was dry and gusty, but a comfortable temperature for walking in just a sweatshirt once I got warmed up. I set out on my walk to a park about a mile and a half away which I had never been to but was near where my apartment for next year is.

T+3:15:

Soon the air was simultaneously too cold for my feet to be warm and too warm for my sweatshirt to be comfortable, the wind would gust into my face and blow my hair everywhere, and the sidewalks were often slick from freezing rain the night before. Nevertheless, I felt it was gorgeous outside and was happy to not be in my room. As I neared the park I became more tired, ready to find a bench to sit at and enjoy nature for a little while. Unfortunately, though, I neglected to keep my GPS running and ended up walking to the back side of the park where there is no entrance. I trekked about 45 minutes from my dorm through residential neighborhoods before finally giving up on the park and making my way back to my room. My back and legs were starting to hurt, and I didn’t feel like adding a mile to my walk to see the park proper.

T+4:00:

An hour and a half after leaving for my walk, I finally arrived back at my dorm. I sat on a bench outside at the lake’s edge (my building is about 300 feet from the water) to catch my breath. An older English man came down past me, tailed by two springer spaniels. One of the dogs came up to me and sniffed me, and the man told me that he (the dog) was blind. I said hello to the dog and told the man to have a nice day as he called the dogs to another section of the waterfront. I got up and started towards my building, having cooled off and not wanting to interact with any more strangers.

As I was walking, though, I thought to myself: “wait a minute, why am I avoiding strangers, anyways? I just had a normal enough interaction with that man where I don’t think he knew anything was off about me. But even if he did know, so what? Why should I deny my authentic self to others?” This thought was a kind of ego loss that I was not expecting; my sense of self was fully intact, but my sense of caring how others perceived me largely evaporated

my sense of self was fully intact, but my sense of caring how others perceived me largely evaporated

. Rather than reenter the building through the side entrance I had used to exit, I went in the main entrance, waving to the floormates I saw as if nothing was going on. For the rest of the night, I felt liberated from feeling the need to act a certain way to please others. I had someone talk my ear off about the music that they were passionate about but I didn’t ask or care about, and where I normally would have listened to them to be polite, I completely ignored the person and didn’t even acknowledge that they were talking to me. Maybe that makes me a dick, but in that moment I felt no need to give them the time of day when I was disinterested in what they were saying.

I returned to my room to rest a little after my walk, and I made myself some hot chocolate and ate some snack food since I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I went and used the bathroom again, and I was once again caught thinking about my old friends. Quietly crying to myself in the stall, I sent them a text to say that I cared for and missed them both. I finished up with that, dried my eyes, and returned to my room.

T+5:00:

After resting from my walk for a little while, I got in the shower to clean off. Everything others have said about getting lost in the shower on acid is true; I was staring at the water drops forming on and dripping down the shower wall, feeling the warm water cascading down my body, for about 20 minutes. I also feel like a hot shower after a day out in the cold is the best feeling ever, so needless to say I was thoroughly enjoying my shower. Eventually I got out, dried off, and got dressed.

T+5:30:

By this point I had cleaned up and the effects of the acid had substantially diminished. The visual effects were reduced, the sunlight no longer threatened to burn my retinas with its brightness, and I was left with a part of the acid headspace and a mild headache. I took some Advil and, not wanting to sit alone and play games anymore, went out to the common area on the floor to talk with people. Eventually most of the people there dissipated, so I went back to my room and watched some TV.

T+8:30:

Eventually I went and got some chicken wings for dinner. My roommate went out to his girlfriend’s place for the night, so I had the room to myself. I spent the rest of the night talking with friends on Discord and blowing cannabis dabs out the window, until finally I passed out at around 1:30 in the morning.

I don’t think there is any way to know whether or not one is ready for a solo trip. I knew there were risks associated with solo tripping on my fourth trip ever, as well as with being out in public near my peak. However, I feel this experience was almost entirely positive for me because of my set and setting. Never did I regret having no trip sitter present, nor did I feel like I was out of control of my situation. I am grateful to have been able to have this experience, and I can see myself working my way up to higher doses in the coming months and years.

Exp Year: 2021	ExpID: 115993

Gender: Male

Age at time of experience: 20

Published: Jan 18, 2022	Views: 4,938

[ View as PDF (for printing) ] [ View as LaTeX (for geeks) ]
[ Switch Colors ]

LSD (2) : Personal Preparation (45), General (1), Alone (16)


		 DOSE:

		 1 hit
		 oral
		 LSD
		 (blotter / tab)

           BODY WEIGHT:
	   65 kg

This story starts in my bedroom, a fairly cold, damp and small space. It wasn't the best room, but it was mine and I loved it. At the time I had been having a hard couple of weeks with my mental health, suffering from some fairly severe anxiety and stress issues. I have suffered with anxiety all of my grown life, but it gets more severe during times of high stress. At the time work was very stressful. In addition, my country was under strict social restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. All these factors combined make for a very bad situation to be taking psychedelics, but at the time I underestimated the power of LSD and did not respect it as I should have.

I decided in the morning to take some of the LSD I had bought online a few months ago, after a particularly difficult night. This was motivated by past positive experiences I have had with psychedelics (mostly psilocybin), which had really changed my world view and helped a lot with my longer term mental health issues. I was aiming to get some clarity on the causes for my anxieties

I was aiming to get some clarity on the causes for my anxieties

, and potentially to access some difficult truths that I was in denial about that I could use to improve my mental health.

I took the tab (unknown strength) in the late morning, as I knew LSD lasts a long time and I wanted it to be done at a reasonable time for sleeping. I stuck it on my tongue and let it sit for a while, then chewed it up and swallowed. At the time I didn't think much of it, I just watched some miscellaneous videos on my computer.

+1h00 I was starting to feel the effects. I felt a bit "wobbly" and strange, and the music I was listening to at the time started to really feel very intense and almost take over my mind. At this point I would describe the feeling as fairly positive. I put on some of my favourite music on my phone and went to lie down on my bed and listen to it. I was still alone in my room. I lived in a shared household at the time, and my plan was largely to keep to myself - I hadn't informed anyone else I was going to be tripping.

+3h00 I had been listening to the music for a long time, and had been really entranced by it. I was experiencing intense visuals which were very geometrical and consisted of thousands of infinitely tessellating fractals. It was really very beautiful but also incredibly intense. At this point I felt inspired to go and create some art, so I got out my sketchpad and a pen and started jotting down endless geometric patterns, combined with many many human eyes. I was just allowing my brain to take the wheel with the drawing, almost moving the pen on autopilot slowly. At some point I went to the toilet as I had been drinking a lot of water and it was making its way through me. I remember feeling a bit anxious about this as I didn't want my housemates to notice my state, and the bathroom felt very creepy to be in. I think I was stuck in the bathroom for about 15 minutes as I was struggling to function properly. I continued with the drawing for around half an hour and then headed back to bed to listen to some relaxing music as I felt a little overwhelmed.

+4h00 I don't remember much of what happened between the drawing and now, but I remember this very vividly. I sat on the corner of my bed, and suddenly out of nowhere I just "knew" that I was dead. I was suddenly, 100%, unequivocally convinced that I had died in my bed and I was now experiencing some sort of afterlife. At this point I was still experiencing strong visuals but they were almost in the background of my mind as a feeling of sheer panic set in. My perception of time slowed down to a sheer standstill and I was completely overwhelmed by anxiety. I was shaking and sweating. I looked at myself in the mirror in my room, and it felt like I was looking at someone else. I kind of knew logically that it was me, but it didn't feel like me - it's hard to explain. I felt completely dissociated from my body, and my physical form felt more like a curiosity. At this point I was completely and utterly out of my depth.

+4h15 From now on I was just in a state of complete living nightmare. I went and sat in a spot in my room where the heating unit was, leaning against it and covering myself in a blanket. The physically sensation of heat was giving me a very faint kind of grounding, but I still was 100% convinced that I was not alive and that this was me forever now.

The physically sensation of heat was giving me a very faint kind of grounding, but I still was 100% convinced that I was not alive and that this was me forever now.

+5h30 At this point I had just been sitting against the heater for around 1h (these times are vague estimates as my perception of time was very warped, everything was incredibly slow). I was trying to calm myself down by watching random calming videos on YouTube and eating some snacks. However I was still in a state of complete fear and panic. I cannot even describe this feeling, it is completely incomparable to any level of fear I have ever experienced in my life. I did not fear death, I feared the infinity of potential suffering that could exist. I feared the feeling of experiencing this fear for an eternity, and being unable to ever escape it - I could not even kill myself to end it, as I was already dead. My poor brain had just completely melted into a soup of one pure, raw emotion - fear. My vision was completely tunneled, I was shaking and my legs were spasming. I would imagine my heart rate was high at this point but I did not check. I periodically checked myself in the mirror to check if my pupils were dilated and almost try convince myself that I was high, but I still could not shake the absolute certainty of the feeling that I was dead. In fact, at this point I had the feeling that I had died 1000 times over, and I'm not even sure what that means or where that came from.

+9h00 At this point I had been stuck in a cycle of lying in bed, leaning against my heater, and occasionally using my computer to access some relaxing/nature based videos to try and soothe myself. I was urinating very frequently as I had been drinking a very high amount of water as I for some reason felt like it would help me. In hindsight, I may have given myself some mild form of hyponatremia which would have only added to my negative experience. Every time I went to the toilet I was terrified, I found the room so so scary as it was very dark and dingy, and also it did not feel private from my housemates. I had severe anxiety about my housemates finding out about everything when they came into my room and found my body. I think this situation of being alone and feeling worried about others finding out about the trip was a major cause of all the anxiety I experienced during this trip.

The visuals were largely over at this point, with just some residual minor disturbances to my vision. This however did not give me any mental relief. I still felt like I was dead and I had been sent to hell. This hell for me was experiencing this feeling of completely overwhelming anxiety forever. The anxiety fed anxiety about being anxious, and formed a vicious cycle that I did not have the mental fortitude to break.

+18h Not much changed over the 9hours from the last paragraph. I felt completely overwhelmed by fear and was stuck in a constant loop of the bathroom, my bed, the heater, and trying to sooth myself with various online resources. At this point I had not had any human contact in around 24hours or more and I felt completely insane. I did not feel like this experience would ever end. I researched the duration of LSD (I had done this beforehand too, I was at least always fairly responsible with research) and saw that I was well over the expected duration for intense effects. In hindsight, I was no longer really tripping (except for some minor after effects), but I was in fact trapped in what was at this point essentially a ~14h nonstop panic attack.

I was in fact trapped in what was at this point essentially a ~14h nonstop panic attack.

 I was completely exhausted but completely unable to sleep, my mind was running at 10000km/h and only focused on these things: I was dead, I was insane, I was terrified. Time was passing incredibly slowly as I was in a constant state of fight or flight.

It was now very early morning of the next day and I needed to urinate again. This time I decided I simply could not face going into the bathroom so I grabbed a blanket and rolled it up and left the house. It was raining outside, and I walked ~2km to a park (not the nearest park at all, just one I remembered from a few years back). I had intended to sit in the park with the blanket, but when I got there I realised this made no sense. I climbed up a muddy slope into some trees in the park (nearly slipping many times as the ground was wet) and urinated in the bushes. I stood there for maybe 15 more minutes and then headed back home. It took me a while to get back home, and when I did I went straight back to my bedroom. The experience of being outside was a bit nicer as the cold rain was a bit grounding, but at this point I felt so completely disconnected from my body that I felt like I was playing a 3rd person video game. When back in my room, I started to get more worried about how I was feeling and started to think about options.

+20h At this point I felt like I had three options:

1) Jump out of my bedroom window and see what happened. It was high enough to kill me, but I was convinced I was already dead, so I wasn't sure what would happen.

2) Go outside and call and ambulance. This was terrifying to me though as I was worried that if I was alive they would strap me down in a mental asylum and I would be trapped in this state of mind forever as I would never have the opportunity to end my life, which was far preferable to feeling like this until I died of old age.

3) Ask my friends or parents for help.

I knew at this point that I was not in a mental place or strong enough to do anything on my own. I had some points where I felt a little more connected with reality, and some less. Pervasive throughout this whole experience was the continuing pure terror.

+20h30 I decided that I did not want to jump out of my window as something very primal inside me (I guess my survival instinct) was against this, even though it felt logical at the time to do it. I then decided to throw out all of my illegal substances and go outside and call an ambulance. However when I got outside to call the ambulance, the fear of being imprisoned in an insane asylum forever was too overwhelming and after thinking about it for around half an hour I returned to my bedroom.

+21h30 At this point after thinking some more I decided that I had to speak to my housemate. I went out and found him and explained what was happening to him. At the time I had a very strong feeling that he did not really exist, and was just a figment of my imagination, but I figured there was no harm in speaking to him. He was helpful and comforted me but did not really know how to handle the situation. We watched some stuff on TV but I had trouble concentrating due to my mind being consumed by anxiety. I repeatedly asked my housemate to reassure me that he was real, and he did (and reassured me I would be fine), but I still assumed that this is just what the version of him that existed in my own personal hell would say to trick me. I was feeling slightly more relaxed having had some human contact, but still a solid 9/10 on the scale of fear.

+24h After sitting my with housemate for a few hours I realised that this was not going to cut it. He tried to convince me to go to hospital, but I was strongly against it due to the aforementioned fears. I instead opted to call my parents, however I had to get him to explain what happened on the phone as I was sobbing too much and felt completely paralyzed and unable to speak. My parents were very concerned and agreed to come and get me and take me home with them.

+28h At this point I had survived the journey home with my parents, who were mostly just worried about me at this point. I was finally starting to calm down as I was able to notice more that my trip was coming to an end and that as the anxiety started to fade I started to feel more normal. I eventually finally managed to sleep for a bit.

I will end the time based prompts here and talk a bit more about the aftermath. For a few days after this experience, I struggled getting to sleep at all. Any slight thought about the nature of reality would trigger these feelings of me being dead and everything being not real and part of my personal hell again. I felt very dissociated from my body for this period. I had little appetite, and did not have that many bodily sensations in general. These were I guess just the aftermath of the extremely long panic attacks and traumatic experience. Over the course of the next few days, the recurrent panic attacks became less frequent and severe. At first I had to sleep in the same bed as someone else, but after around 3 days I started being able to sleep alone.

For the first week or so afterwards I had to have someone in the same building as me at all times or I would immediately have a panic attack (for the first 3-4 days they had to be in the same room). Over the course of the next few weeks I built up confidence being alone in a room and/or building for longer periods of time, until I could spend large portions of the day alone. I went to the doctor's and was prescribed medication to help me sleep and help with anxiety. I also started therapy after a couple of weeks.

The trauma of the experience caused me to develop some agoraphobia. As previously mentioned, this started off being a matter of being unable to be alone in any capacity. After a few weeks, it was more just a case of struggling to go outside. After a month I was able to go outside on my own for some period of time, but still struggled with public and busy places. Over the course of the next few months I gained confidence with being able to live more independently.

Over the course of the next year, I gradually conquered the agoraphobia and panic attacks. After around 6 months I was capable of living independently and was able to move out. I still had a few lapses where I had to travel back to my parents for a few weeks, but these became less frequent and severe until they stopped occurring about a year after the initial experience.

To this day I still suffer with a very mild form of agoraphobia to do with being in places which are very far away from home, or civilisation, but I am confident I will conquer this too with time.

I am confident I will conquer this too with time.

This experience completely changed my life. It was traumatic and I would never wish it on anyone. I would urge everyone to respect the power of these drugs and make sure they take them only in a safe and good space, and make sure they have a plan for if the trip heads south. In hindsight I have gained some positive things from it - my capacity for handling traumatic experiences is much much higher now, and it forced me to come clean to my parents about my lifelong mental health issues and seek traditional treatment for these.

I still have occasionally moments of panic and writing this was very difficult as it caused me to relive some of these memories. The feeling of being alive and reality "existing" gradually came back, but took a long time to be something that didn't bother me. I still have no proof that I am alive, or that anything exists - but I have the philosophy that it does not matter, as I am capable of enjoying whatever my existence may be. If I am stuck in a personal hell, it's not so bad! I have quite a lot of fun and my life is pretty enjoyable these days. For anyone who has experienced anything like this, it does get better - and please be open with those who care about you and let them help you heal. Life can be great, even if this takes a year or so from you.

Exp Year: 2021	ExpID: 116144

Gender: Male

Age at time of experience: 21

Published: Mar 9, 2022	Views: 5,953

[ View as PDF (for printing) ] [ View as LaTeX (for geeks) ]
[ Switch Colors ]

LSD (2) : Alone (16), Therapeutic Intent or Outcome (49), Post Trip Problems (8), Bad Trips (6)


		 DOSE:
 T+ 0:00
		 1 hit
		 oral
		 LSD
		 (blotter / tab)

		   T+ 0:30
		 1½ hit
		 oral
		 LSD
		 (blotter / tab)

           BODY WEIGHT:
	   190 lb

I have been dying to try LSD for as long as I could remember. I've smoked Pot for years, I've done Salvia Divinorum, and I've done Molly once. I that felt I was prepared to embark on the 'mystical journey' that I had researched on for hours on end. I had everything planned in my head.

I decided to do it with my friend, who I’ll call G. We both met up with my MDMA connect that also dealt LSD. We bought 5 1cm-2 tabs. I was confused, since I ordered and paid for 10 tabs. He told me that these tabs needed to be cut in 2, and that they were twice as potent because they were “double dipped”. I thought it was all gimmicky bull and I carried the mindset that I had just been ripped off, but I decided to keep that to myself.  I told him it was our first time, and he warned us to be careful, and to start out with 1/2 tab, and do 1 max, since it was our first time and all. “It’s better to do too little than too much”.

+10:30pm – G, his brother, X, and I departed from their house in order to go to an empty field around 40 minutes away.  X was to be our sitter if anything went wrong, even though he had strong anti drug beliefs. I took 1 whole tab out of the 5 we had and my friend took 1/2. He was determined to stay on that 1/2, for fear of a bad trip.

+10:50pm – I noticed subtle changes in my perception. Was it all just a placebo? Colors were becoming more lush and vibrant. I started to feel a warm, tingling sensation spreading from my belly. It could have just been a sort of cramp, for I ate dinner before we left the house, and we have been walking for 20 minutes. I kept thinking that it was a placebo, but fuck it, it was a good one.

+11:00pm – My philosophy regarding substances was that if one’s going to take a substance, one might as well go all the way. I took 2 pills of MDMA my first time and I was rapturously overjoyed that I didn’t take the recommended ½ pill for “first timers”. I thought I could handle it. The sensations that I was getting from the LSD, I thought were all just placebos, so I decided to do more. I ate 1 ½ tabs. G reacted violently. He vehemently berated me for “taking his half”. I told him that I thought he said that he was determined to only take ½. He said that he had changed his mind, and proceeded to insult me. My emotions instantly spiraled downwards. We still had 2 tabs left so I didn’t know what the big deal was. I teared up and felt depressed, which was extremely weird. G tried to console me. I still felt depressed.  He took 1 tab.

+11:20pm – As we were walking up the block to the entrance of the open field, we were within the full beam of glaring headlights from a parked car. Those lights were the brightest things I’ve seen in my life. To me they were brighter than the sun, and the lights flushed and warmed my skin despite being so far away. It also elevated my mood a little.

+11:30pm - G and I walked to the center of the field and laid down on the grass while X wandered off to take a walk. After talking for a bit, we decided to get out our mp3 players and listen to some music. Unlike pot, which makes music have a lot more depth for me, and MDMA, which makes music infinitely more beautiful, music was extremely annoying. I got up and went to urinate behind the bushes at the edge of the field. Walking proved to be a little more challenging, but I could manage. I walked back to the center of the field, but G was already gone. He was at the opposite end of the field. I repeatedly called out to him but he ignored me. This became extremely annoying. The warm tingly feeling that had persisted within me from the onset intensified and became an emotion. This new emotion was anxiety with a tinge of fear.

[At this point I stopped taking time]

G, X, and I all met up near the edge of the field. G was hugging his brother, X, tightly. After a while of pointless wandering around the dark and spooky field, we decided to go back to G’s house. On the street, the LSD really started to kick in. My emotions spiraled downwards seemingly without end. I felt extreme fear, anxiety, and above all else, loneliness.

My emotions spiraled downwards seemingly without end. I felt extreme fear, anxiety, and above all else, loneliness.

 I felt that I was in a foreign land, with foreign people who were hostile to me. I’ve never felt so alone and desolate in my life. I felt completely empty inside. I wanted…. I wanted… something, but I didn’t know what. For now, I just wanted to get the hell out of this hostile environment. We all walked faster towards G’s house.

Visually the world started to swirl around me. It was very subtle, and since it was dark I couldn’t see too much. I looked at G and was petrified. His face was contorted into a horrible grimace of pain. I asked him how he felt. “I FEEL AMAZING. I FEEL WONDERFUL. I’M ON AN AWESOME TRIP” he seethed. I could tell that he was having a horrible trip.  G ran over to his brother X and hugged him tightly. “Help me X, help me” he kept whimpering.

By now everything was going by in a blur. I was extremely hot and flushed, and I was perspiring loudly. The emotions only seemed to be intensifying. The world, the ground, everything, was swirling. We kept on walking towards the house, but every single turn was a dead end. A car drove by with people laughing inside. Never have I heard something more menacing and evil. The laughs were cruel and haunting and demonic. I wanted all this to end. I’ve never felt this magnitude of desolation and fear. I didn’t even know such depths of emotional hell existed. The whole world was distorted and bent. Everything seemed two dimensional, and everything was in the most evil shades of purple that have ever existed. I checked my watch. It was 12:11. Apparently, only 10 minutes had passed.

I was starting to lose my grip on reality. My legs were following G and X, but I didn’t know what was going on. Apparently I was saying muttering ludicrous things, for G kept telling me to shut up. He kept telling me that I was making no sense and that I was saying the stupidest things. I caught myself questioning myself if I really existed at that point. I kept questioning myself if I wasn’t already dead. I felt dead. I wanted to die. I wanted to end this torment. G’s brother, X, kept berating us about how stupid we both were and how he was so glad that he didn’t do LSD. I wanted all this to end.

+12:40~ - To my relief (if you can call if that), we reached G’s house. We definitely couldn’t go inside in our state, and G’s parents were home and asleep. G and I went to his backyard to try and sleep it off while his brother went inside to bring us some water. I laid down on his wicker sofa and took off my shirt. The shirt made absolutely no sense. I kept wishing for it to end. X brought us some water but it did nothing. I kept wanting something with the deepest longing, but I didn’t know what. My thought processes were no longer functional. Logic, existence, race, gender, sexuality, identity. Everything made no sense and nothing existed.

My thoughts were lost in a cataclysmic infinity that I couldn’t escape out of. My thoughts kept spiraling into themselves. They were thinking about themselves thinking about themselves thinking about themselves thinking about… It was horrible. Life became meaningless. The concept of life, with work, possessions, knowledge, made absolutely no sense.

 Life became meaningless. The concept of life, with work, possessions, knowledge, made absolutely no sense.

 I heard G conversing with X. G was worried that he had overdosed, because he too had never felt so horrible. “Fucking H (me). Damn it before H my life was good. He ruined my life. I’m going to be like this forever. Is this ever going to end? Damn you H why did you give this to me?!” G and X proceeded to talk in this manner as if I wasn’t there. At this point I didn’t care. I was preoccupied with the fear of the menacing world that was out to get me. Acid had robbed me of the memory of happiness. Everywhere I saw spikes and pain.

+3:30am – I checked the watch. Time… Time? Time happened? Time never happened. Apparently  ~3 hours passed since we got back to G’s house. Time is absolutely meaningless. However, the flow of time is slowly returning to normal. I noticed that I could see again. My sight had been gone? I didn’t even notice. At this point however, I was sure that I was insane. My thoughts were no longer spiraling into infinity, but they were still radically altered. I couldn’t concentrate on anything, and I couldn’t retain my attention on a single thought, for all my thoughts go off on ridiculous tangents. I thought that I would remain like this forever. All of a sudden G comes out of the house (he’d gone inside?) and sits next to me in a merry mood. In turn, I became happy. We go back inside the house and have conversations about things that made absolutely no sense. I was sure that the police were coming to lock us away forever in a mental asylum, but I didn’t care, for I was comfortable, happy, and at peace.

+7:00am – Everything had returned to normal. Surfaces were all twisting and rippling. I had minor difficulty concentrating, and I felt physically drained (probably from the lack of food and sleep). Otherwise, all was well. G and I went outside, and aside from the ripples, the world was surprisingly dull.

Exp Year: 2010	ExpID: 86160

Gender: Male

Age at time of experience: 17

Published: Sep 7, 2022	Views: 3,149

[ View as PDF (for printing) ] [ View as LaTeX (for geeks) ]
[ Switch Colors ]

LSD (2) : General (1), First Times (2), Train Wrecks &amp; Trip Disasters (7), Guides / Sitters (39), Relationships (44), Small Group (2-9) (17)


		 DOSE:

		 3 hits
		 sublingual
		 LSD
		 (blotter / tab)

           BODY WEIGHT:
	   280 lb

At this time in my life, I had a trustworthy and steady supply of all the basic necessities an up and coming psychonaut would ever need. All it took was a small chunk of change and a quick phone call to my plug, and I was the proud owner of some of the most mind altering substances known to man. Obtaining the acid was easy enough, however, this time it came with a warning. My dealer told me that this was some of the strongest acid he had ever tried. He then told me that the blotters were double dosed. Being somewhat experienced, or so I thought, I thanked him for his time and shrugged off his suggestion for taking a smaller dose to start off with.

After I made the purchase I made my way over to my friend's apartment. I'll call him C for anonymity and simplicity’s sake. Once I arrived at C’s apartment, I greeted my other friend D and sat on the couch. The plan was to wait for C to get off of work so that the three of us could trip together. Other players that night included C’s sister A as well as her boyfriend B and D’s brother E, as well as E’s girlfriend J, however, D and I were the only ones at the apartment at the time. After about an hour of playing video games, E and J arrived at the apartment and informed us that C wouldn’t be getting home until late in the evening because he had to stay late at work, so D and I decided to dose early.

We both dropped 3 blotters each under our tongues and sat back to wait for the effects to kick in. While I had tripped several times on acid prior to this, D had only done it twice at this point. The most I had ever done up until this point was 2 tabs, so I remember being slightly nervous, but overall, not extremely worried for what the night would hold for us. While the four of us were sitting in C’s room, we decided to turn on his color changing LED’s as well as some chill music to ease us into our come up.

The first thing that I noticed was the tapestry on the wall. This tapestry was something that I never paid much attention to prior to this experience. It was an extremely vivid psychedelic artwork containing multiple tie dye colors, fractal geometric shapes, and symbols. While I was staring at the tapestry I noticed that the symbols began to breathe with the music, almost as if they were floating on the sound waves like a boat bobbing up and down in the middle of the ocean. The fractal shapes were popping out at me like I was in an IMAX theater wearing 3D glasses. The thing that bothered me at the time was that it had only been ten minutes since we dropped.

I knew one thing at that very moment, and it was that the acid we had just taken was stronger than anything I had ever taken before. Usually, it takes around 45 minutes for the come up to start, however, this time it was happening much faster, and stronger. I repeated to myself the age old mantra that I had been told the very first time I had ever tripped, “ride the dragon man” and that's what I did.

Everything was going fine, I was slowly getting higher, more confused, and more visuals, and that was to be expected. However, shortly after I had acclimated myself to the initial phase of the come up, our dynamic, and as a result, the atmosphere changed. E and J looked at me and D and told us that they had to leave. It had only been 30 minutes since we had dropped, E and J had an emergency, so they had to leave us behind to go take care of their situation. I instantly felt a pit in my stomach. I had been told only a few minutes prior to this that C and A would not be off of work till 10 o’clock that evening, which meant that D and I would have to be by ourselves for the next 4 hours until they got home.

The time it took for E and J to pack their belongings and leave took around 2 minutes, however to me, it felt like an hour had passed. Then, they were gone, and it felt like it had happened instantaneously. I remember thinking to myself that time was already starting to become irrelevant and it had only been 35 minutes since we had put the blotters under our tongues. My anxiety continued to increase, even after E and J had left, meanwhile D was sitting playing on his phone, or so I thought. I found out later that he was attempting to snapchat his girlfriend at the time with little success.

I asked D if I could change the music, since he was playing it on his phone. He obliged and handed me the phone so that I could change the song. My visuals were so intense at this point that nothing in the room looked familiar. It looked like I had just traveled through a wormhole to an alternate dimension where everything was a weird shape or color. My open eye visuals consisted of millions of spirals and buzzsaw fractals, as well as the constant morphing of everything in my vision. I quickly realized that I had no way of deciphering the alien piece of technology that I was holding and I could only press random buttons on the screen, not knowing what I was doing.

I went through a thought loop of trying to change the song, where I would turn the phone on, attempt to unlock it even though I didn’t know the password (not that it would have mattered) and then turning it back off after becoming frustrated. This went on for several minutes until I finally gave up and accepted defeat. At this point I couldn’t even remember what I was trying to do in the first place. While the simple task did help alleviate my anxiety for a short amount of time, it all came rushing back once I found myself with nothing to do. I looked over to my friend and realized that he had been watching me frantically typing away at his phone's lock screen for several minutes, never attempting to ask him what the password was. I can only imagine what was going through his head at the time. I didn’t care though, to me he just looked like an alien, or an NPC in a video game. Nothing about him looked familiar to me, it was almost like I was looking at a new creature never before seen by the human eye. Deep down though, some part of me knew that he was still my friend even though he looked nothing like the D I once knew.

Barely remembering how to speak English, I asked him how he was doing. Then he replied with, to this day, the most terrifying thing that anyone has ever said to me in my entire life. He replied, “This is fine.”

The next couple of hours are blurry, and I am still struggling to piece together my memory of the events that took place during this time. However, I do remember one thing. I remember my friend repeating the phrase, “this is fine” over and over again, for what seemed like an infinite amount of time. At first it was an annoyance, but then it developed into anxiety, and then a full blown panic attack. I was so high that the words held no meaning to me, however, just the sound of his voice and the utterance of that phrase were driving me to insanity. My visuals were so overwhelmingly intense that I couldn’t even see what was right in front of me. However, they were moving in sink to his voice, and his repetition of the phrase, “this is fine.”

I attempted to escape, and fled to the living room. Somehow I remembered that TV existed and I turned on the TV in the living room to drown out the noise of my friend, however, it was short lived as he entered the living room to be near me. I think that he was just as freaked out, if not more, than I was at the time, but I could not handle what he was saying to me. I turned the volume on the TV to the max, and tried to focus on what was going on, but everything on the TV looked just as foreign and alien as the world around me. Still, through the blaring sound of the TV I could hear my friend screaming at the top of his lungs, “THIS IS FINE.”

This went on for a few minutes, until I finally snapped and ran to the bathroom for some respite. After getting lost in my own eyes and thoughts in the mirror, I decided to take a shower. For my entire life, hot showers have always calmed me down when I’m having an anxiety attack, and the feeling of the warm water over my face helped a little bit, but I could still faintly hear my friend in the background repeating the same phrase. At this point I couldn’t understand english, so he could have been saying anything, but deep down I knew that he was still repeating the same thing over and over again. I remember looking at the falling droplets of water and being able to control and predict their paths of movement with my mind. My memory is fuzzy but I believed that I could control the temperature of the water with my mind as well, almost as if I had some slight form of telekinesis. I dried off and re-entered the living room after my shower, only to find D in the same spot I had left him. He was still repeating the same phrase, however, this time his mouth wasn’t moving. He was staring at me with cold dead eyes, and in my head I heard the phrase “this is fine” over and over still.

This truly has to be the most existential dread I have ever experienced in my entire life. Since this experience I have had conversations with DMT jesters and aliens, met the mushroom gods on multiple occasions, however seeing my friend communicate to me with his mind while staring into my soul was truly more terrifying than anything else I have ever experienced.

I have had conversations with DMT jesters and aliens, met the mushroom gods on multiple occasions, however seeing my friend communicate to me with his mind while staring into my soul was truly more terrifying than anything else I have ever experienced.

I collapsed to the floor and accepted my eternal fate. In my mind, I was in hell, and this was my punishment for all the sins I had committed throughout my life. Then, with my eyes closed on the floor I began my descent into my first true ego death. The light of my life began to fade away, and was replaced by the singularity of a black hole. A fourth dimensional geometric mass moving in tandem to the rhythm of the phrase “this is fine.” I did not know the meaning, I just understood the vibrations of what was being shown to me. It looked like a truly unrecognizable shape. Something that no human could ever hope to comprehend. It moved in ways I could never describe with words, and then suddenly it vanished. After it left I was alone. I was nothing and everything at the same time.

I understood somehow, that I was truly alone, and that everything in my life, even though I couldn’t remember what life was, was a lie. It was all a facade that I had created for myself. It was all a hallucination, and I was god. I knew at that moment that I was god, I was alone in the universe, and all of the things that had ever happened to me and everyone else, good and bad, were because of me. I experienced the most truly, utterly, terrifyingly horrible dread any human being could never hope to experience in their entire lives. An infinity of aloneness, and infinity of nothingness. There was no one else, only me. I was all and everything, and nothing at the same time.

Then, I decided. Because I was god I decided that I did not want to be god. So then it was, and I was no longer god. Slowly, I reversed my way through the black hole, and out of the infinite geometries of the other dimension and progressed back into the reality of our universe.I made my way through our galaxy, then to our solar system, then onto planet Earth, and arrived back into the C’s apartment, writhing on the ground balling my eyes out.

It was only then that I looked up and realized that D, A, B, and C were all standing over me looking like they had just seen a ghost. To me they looked like aliens so the feeling was mutual. My visuals were just as intense as they were before but, I was at least back on planet Earth, so I was thankful for that. I wasn’t out of the woods yet though, not by a long shot.

C and B asked me how I was doing, but I had no idea what they were saying. It sounded to me like they were speaking another language made up of strange robotic noises. I remember barely understanding them when they had asked me if I wanted one of the trip killers that I had brought with me that evening. At the time I was prescribed Trazodone, and while I had never taken it while tripping, I knew that it would be successful in bringing me back to reality. This, unfortunately, would never come to fruition.

I was right at the beginning of my peak, and I was in an extreme state of mental distress. When B handed me the pill, I put it in my mouth with a sip of gatorade. The first thing I remember is a tingling sensation in my mouth. In my altered state of confusion I mistook this feeling for impending death. I was under the impression at the time that the medicine that they had just given me was poison, so I spat it out and realized the truth. I was the only living being in the entire universe, all of my friends and family were just NPC’s in the giant simulation. Now that I had become self aware they were trying to kill me to reset the timeline. This is what I truly believed at the time. Instantly my fight or flight response kicked in.

I’d like to believe that this is where the true trip really began. Not with the ego death I had experienced prior to this, but with the sense of dread in knowing that everyone in the world was coming after me with the sole intention of killing me. I looked at the faces of my friends, and I saw their evil demonic expressions, almost as if they had realized that I had found out the truth and were now no longer trying to hide it.

I ran out of the house, pushing past everyone around me, and took off into the cold dark night wearing nothing but my basketball shorts. I was 6’3 and 280 pounds at the time, so there was no way that any of them would have been able to stop me. I ran into the parking lot screaming at the top of my lungs, but deep down I knew that my screams would fall on deaf ears. I yelled, “they’re trying to kill me!” over and over. I felt no pain from my feet even though I was running over shards of glass and sharp rocks on the ground.

They chased me all the way across the parking lot, and I felt like I was truly in a survival horror movie. I had never run so fast in my entire life. I was tackled in the middle of the road by B, the only other man in the group of comparable size to me. He was begging me to return to the house, but I would not accept my fate so easily. I scratched and clawed at his face until he let go of me, and I began to run into the middle of oncoming traffic. The cars all looked like alien spacecraft orbiting around a galactic highway. My friends, still in my pursuit, waved down the traffic so that they would not hit me. Many people got out of their cars and asked what was going on, but I was writhing on the ground in the middle of the road. I assume many people called the police and paramedics, but I didn’t stick around long enough to find out. I did, however, find out later that my friends maintained their story to anyone that asked, that I was schizophrenic and was suffering from a severe mental outburst.

I ran out of the road and back into the apartment complex, where I was met with A, C’s sister. I fell to the ground and assumed the meditative position that I see most buddha statues in. In my head I was the one true entity, I was god, and my powers were returning to me. I began speaking in tongues, and channeling the power that I had long forgotten so that I could evade those who were pursuing me. A approached me slowly, trying to calm me down, but as soon as she got close enough to touch me, I sprang out like a stray cat and ran in the other direction. I knew that I was the fastest being in the universe and I ran into the forest surrounding C’s apartment.

This was the last time that any of my friends would see me for many hours. I had, at this point, grown accustomed to my visuals, and was now in acceptance of my new reality. I stumbled through the forest, having profound realizations of reality and nature. I met with myself from previous lives, and talked with the most profound scholars in history. I met with Jesus himself and he only maintained that I was Jesus in another life. I met with Shakespeare, who told me that love was the meaning to everything in existence, and then I met with Dylan Thomas, who told me not to go gentle into that good night.

I was in an enchanted forest surrounded by dead prophets and mystics, and I begged them to stop giving me profound knowledge about the universe. I bargained with whoever was listening, that I might return to my life as a normal human being, unaware of the existentialism of ego death. I did not want this information, even though I knew that it was the ultimate truth. I knew then, there was only one way to make this terrible evening end. I saw a ledge in front of me. The forest I was in was, thankfully, surrounded by civilization, but I was still in the most precarious situation I had ever been in.

A wall had been built to separate the dirt from entering the parking lot, however the wall did not go any higher than the ground level on the side of the forest. I walked towards the wall, listening to all the voices in my head telling me not to go any further, however I ignored them all and I plummeted face first into the pavement. I woke up, surrounded by a pool of crimson red liquid, and felt the most excruciating pain I had ever felt in my life. I have no memory of the fall, but I do remember waking up on the pavement. It was now around midnight, so there was no one else in the parking lot.

I writhed on the ground, and experienced what I can only describe as hell. I went through every life I have ever lived. However, the only thing I experienced was the death that I had gone through for that life. I died a billion different ways. Even though it was only a hallucination, I felt the pain of being burned alive, and crucified on a cross. I felt the pain of starving to death, and being shot in the back or stabbed. This went on for an eternity, and it felt more real than reality itself. I’m not sure how long I was on that pavement, but I remember seeing Jesus standing over me. I asked him why I was going through all of this, and he replied, “You already went through this. You’re just remembering your past lives. In order to truly appreciate the life you’re living now, you have to understand the suffering of those who came before you.”

After he spoke to me I realized that he was me, and I was him. I was everyone, and the pain and suffering I inflicted on others was ultimately just reflected back onto myself. I then had a complete change in my mental state. I felt the pure love of all my past lives. I experienced all of the relationships I had developed with myself over the millions of years, and the pure love of the universe.

I felt the pure love of all my past lives. I experienced all of the relationships I had developed with myself over the millions of years, and the pure love of the universe.

 I realized that in order for love to have any meaning, I would need something to compare it to. The reason for suffering is so that love holds much more value.

I stood, and realized that I had only suffered bruises to my arms and legs as well as a broken nose where the blood was coming from. I was lucky to have survived, or at least not broken anything on my fall. I was beginning, at this point, to sober up. I stared at the stars and I could control them with my mind. I could wave my hands in the sky and entire galaxies would flow like the ingredients in a galactic pot of soup. I was happier than I had ever been, realizing that I had created something as beautiful as the universe. I then met with complex entities that I could only describe as stereotypical gray aliens. I believe this was another hallucination, but who knows, I was sitting alone in the middle of a parking lot at midnight, so maybe I really was abducted by aliens. They brought me aboard their ship and told me they were going to fix my wounds. They told me that they had been watching me and they didn’t want me to have any permanent injuries because of this experience. I thanked them after they did their operations, and they returned me to the same parking lot where they had found me.

After this, I stood on my feet and, somehow, I walked back to my friend's apartment complex. I found his apartment and I climbed in through the back sliding glass door. This is something that I would do on a regular basis as I basically lived with him, but I did not have a key to his apartment. I realized that all of his furniture and decorations were missing, but I didn’t think anything of it, and I went to his bathroom to take a shower. In the shower I washed the blood and dirt off of every part of my body. I felt much better than I had only a few hours prior to this, however, I was still tripping extremely hard. I played with the water droplets again, and I found that I could control them with my mind even more than I could earlier in the evening. I then fell back into another hallucination, although it felt more like a daydream. This time it was of a man and I was just a child. He would beat me and I would come to the shower to cry, and I realized it was a repressed memory from my childhood. The horrible man was my father. I had forgotten all the times he had beaten me growing up, and the experience of being in the shower had unlocked those memories.

It was right then that the sun started to come up. I had been in the shower for god knows how long, when I remembered that cell phones existed, and I had somehow not lost mine in all the commotion the night prior. I looked and saw at least a hundred missed calls from my brother, friends, and some restricted numbers which I can only assume were the police or emergency services. I was confused why they were all calling me when I was clearly safe in my friend's apartment, when I realized that I was not in fact in his apartment, and in a random apartment that just happened to be unlocked. I freaked out and got dressed, still sopping wet because I didn’t have a towel, and ran out of the apartment. Luckily, it was an empty apartment, probably one that had a showing the next day considering the brochure sitting on the kitchen counter.

I ran all the way back to my friend's apartment and knocked on the door. He opened and nearly cried when he saw me. My friends at the time were closer to me than my actual family, with the exclusion of my brother, so they were all extremely relieved to see me. I went inside and gave all of them hugs and apologized profusely. I was still tripping but the effects were extremely mellow compared to before. I had been tripping now for 15 hours, and I was ready to sleep so C let me change into an extra set of clothes he had, and let me sleep in his bed for the next 8 hours.

When I woke up, my memories from the night before were extremely cloudy, but my friends filled me in on some of the details. I found out that emergency services and police were called, and they were all out looking for me for hours, however, none of my friends gave the police my real name or contact information so I was extremely thankful for that. I was debating whether or not to go to the hospital but in reality my only injuries were a broken nose, cut up feet, knees, and wrists, so I decided against it.

When my friends asked me to recount what had happened, I truly could not. Every time I tried to tell them my words would not work and I would become extremely anxious. I had PTSD from this experience for many years after, however, in the past year I have been able to work through what I had learned, and I now view it as having a positive impact on my life.

Exp Year: 2019	ExpID: 116259

Gender: Male

Age at time of experience: 18

Published: Sep 5, 2022	Views: 4,412

[ View as PDF (for printing) ] [ View as LaTeX (for geeks) ]
[ Switch Colors ]

LSD (2) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Post Trip Problems (8), Entities / Beings (37), Mystical Experiences (9), Difficult Experiences (5), General (1)


		 DOSE:

		 1.5 hits
		 sublingual
		 LSD
		 (blotter / tab)

           BODY WEIGHT:
	   160 lb

During the snowy beginnings of a long northeast winter, three friends and I ventured out to a seasonably available lake-house for a group Acid experience.  Our small sheet of blotter featured Ganesha riding an improbably tiny mouse, an image almost identical to the one inked on S‘s left shoulder.

Through the randomness of voluntary choice, the dosages panned out into a sublingual golden mean, D : 2 hits, Me : 1.5, S : 1, G : .5.  While anxiously waiting for the come-up, we sat in a circle and talked the jagged pointless talk of children too nervous to converse with any conviction and too excited to focus on anything else.  Soon stomachs began to express disquiet as pre-trip anxiety set in.  I fretted deeply over my inability to find an appropriate music choice for this point in the evening.

+0:40 All four of us now began to feel the first deep-seated stirrings of the experience as seldom used elements of our minds began to rev.  Energy started seeping from my body and my surroundings came more sharply into focus.  S calmly let us know that her shins  were slowly undulating as the almost inevitable body load began to say hello.  As more energy radiated from me, I felt chilled and channeled my inner Linus by grabbing a nearby blanket and wrapping tightly it around me.

+1:00 The room’s dimensions began to shift with an oh so slight House of Mirrors effect.  The ceiling tiles were beginning to resemble the end result of a massive game of Tic Tac Toe and the carpeting, Risk.  My heart rate crawled skyward while steady breathing become more difficult.  I started pacing intently and became more deeply absorbed with each step.  The music gained intrepid depth and each instrument’s part became more and more defined.  D and S were on the couch laughing hysterically at jokes I wasn’t hearing.  Their laughter was contagious but I refused to let it distract me from my extremely important primary objective: continuing to pace.  I lost track of G in my deep focus on putting one foot in front of the other, nimbly dodging furniture and backpacks that deigned to impede my path.

+1:20 My restlessness intensified and I wandered upstairs with the blanket wrapped around my shoulders, a physical embodiment of the music that my ears pulled with it,  trailing me like a like an ambient cloak, a cloth walkman that needed no earphones.

Upstairs I ventured into the master bedroom and paused to consider the usual inhabitants, D’s parents, in a general, absent, lacking any definite path or conclusion sort of way.  Inside, I was surprised to find something I had never noticed there before, a 4 foot long panoramic color photograph of what appeared to be the Alaskan wilderness.  The photo was taken from the shore of a remote, icy lake with ethereal wisps of snow white fog floating above it and a dense coniferous forest encircling.  There were massive, powerful snow-capped peaks hovering in the distance.  As I stared at the raw, unspoiled scene, the image began to shift and change.  The brightness of the landscape shifted from darker to lighter and the color of the sky vacillated between light and dark blue, going from dawn to dusk and back to dawn again, completely skipping the blackness of night.  Then the fog began to roll in and out, billowing in to completely white out the image, and then out again, completely disappearing into the trees on the far side of the lake, only to be exhaled out again a few moments later by some massive, unseen, sleeping forest beast.  This signified the time that occurs so often in my stronger trips, the moment when I stop for a second to call timeout and assess the situation and realize that I'm in for quite an evening.  For a few seconds I strongly consider the possibility that I’m an LSD lightweight.

But the “movie” I was watching soon recaptured my attention and I suddenly felt a strong desire to call the rest of my companions up to experience it.  But I was enjoying it too much to leave and made a hopelessly doomed yet nevertheless valiantly conceived, mental note to show them later, waiting until what I lazily rationalized to be ‘the right time.’

Instead I sat down on the floor in a half-lotus position and continued to watch my movie.  But instead of being able to focus on the “movie,” some motion coming from below it arrested my attention.  I looked down and below the picture I saw a large, unstained wooden dresser and its grain was swaying to the same song (whose source still appeared to be my magical cotton music cape) as the fog above.  I had never seen the dresser before, but I highly doubted that the neon greens and pinks that intermingled with the dancing grain were actually a part of the “natural” color scheme of the piece.

Feeling like I had stumbled upon a holy shrine (or more accurately, had a holy shrine materialize around me), I gave in to the urge to attempt a meditation.  I pulled the blanket over my head and was blown backward as, in the sudden deep darkness, abstract visuals exploded for the first time into my astonished field of view.  Geometric shapes of red and yellow, often in repeating patterns, danced before my eyes with strong motifs of right angles and not a curve in sight. It fleetingly occurred to me that I had just been knocked backward by light waves (did my brain just attack me with lasers?!??!).  I tried to empty my mind, relax, and concentrate on my breathing, but the visuals were overwhelming and I burst out laughing with joy, for once not disappointed at my inability to meditate.  And yet, looking back, perhaps it was my most successful meditation.  The thoughts were flying through my mind at breakneck speed, which at the time felt overwhelmingly anti-meditative.  But because of the intensity of the new thoughts rushing in every other millisecond, the earlier thoughts flowed right over me like water and disappeared.  I dwelt on nothing and questioned nothing.  I simply observed.

Soon my earlier restlessness returned and I threw off the blanket, ready to take in the power of my found personal shrine once again, but no longer was the swaying motion restricted to only the dresser and the photo.  Now the walls had joined the tribal dance.

+1:40 I heard D out in the hall breathing heavily and making boisterous exclamations, declamations and proclamations.  I strode out regally with my royal cloak to investigate the courtly disturbance and found him taking off his sweatshirt and sweating heavily.  Through labored breathes he informed me that he had been outside sprinting around in the snow and his breath was mischievously eluding him.  And despite the physical consequences, his electrified eyes and stunted laughter told me it was worth every wheeze.  Subtly my empathy brainwaves engaged as I experienced flashbacks to the difficulties in breathe mastery I’d experienced during previous chemical vacations.  But quickly I became distracted by an arrestingly colored flower vase and forgot all about it.

Taken by some trifle, we soon wandered back into his parent’s room and D flopped on the bed with audible enjoyment, completely spreading out in one of the purest examples of total comfort I‘d seen this side of the Y2K scare.

I enthusiastically re-lotused in the glow of my movie shrine until D suddenly sat up and directed my attention to an impressionistic painting hanging in the corner of the gently breathing room (the painting somehow was exempted from the breathing [whose exemption at the time in no-way contradicted my rudimentary understanding of physics]).  It was a huge Van Gogh-like impressionist sunflower painted with deep, thick, globbed on brilliant yellows, oranges and blues.  D offered that he loved that particular work of art because it perfectly summed up his father.  This made rip-roaring sense, and for a split second I saw his Dad’s face appear in the head of the sunflower and then softly fade (‘Our eyes are projectors, Yeah! Projecting our lives…’).

+2:00 D and I decided to head downstairs and rejoin the group.  As soon as we made it downstairs, G came over and asked if it was time to start the massage.  As I couldn’t think of a single solitary reason why not, off we went.  As we headed to an adjoining room, I lost my focus and stopped a moment to just let the constant waves of sensory input wash over me.  Sound (music/laughter/banging/jokes/exultations) was coming from everywhere and nowhere at once.  The source of none of it could be pinpointed with anything resembling verifiable certainty.  Everything looked profoundly…different… and I was clearly noticing certain aesthetic liberties being taken with this particular room’s aquatic themed wallpaper.  Occasional blinking yielded a flash of geometric patterns that would spyrographically expand outwards and then dissolve into wherever it is visual hallucinations retire to.  The smallest hint of impending humor threatened to send me off on giggling sprees of painful proportions.

To begin the massage, we selected Ulrich Schnauss’s A Strangely Isolated Place which proved to be an outstanding choice for any tripping related activity (I've since verified this using the tripper’s scientific method [once is a strong theoretical possibility, twice is mathematically inalienable certainty]).  Next G switched out the lamp’s normal light bulb with a green one.  Turning all other illumination off, it cast a pale, almost natural (almost…) green pallor on us and the room.  G had heard it suggested by certain shifty-eyed types given to suggesting, that green light is supposed to be associated with the heart Chakra and be helpful in circulatory therapy.  In this room there was a gently humming heating duct in the center of the ceiling and it streamed audible whistling and rushing air that imbued the atmosphere with the desolately beautiful aesthetics of an expansive desert, wind rushing over the dunes.  I detected the wafting scent of incense creeping slowly in from the other room.

By now I was approaching the final ascent to the “peak” of this experience.    I had the partially alarming realization that it was taking considerable mental effort to focus long enough to accomplish just lying down on the bed.  At the first touch from G it became (unsurprisingly, in hind-sight) apparent that this was going to be just a bit more than a couple of notches on the intensity scale higher than the first time G gave me a massage a couple days ago at his apartment.  Any small touch would shoot off a cascade of sensations which would evolve into others which would devolve into still others.  Explosions of the visual, physical, auditory and even seemingly new ones I had no names for, forged in the constantly bombarding fire of missile-grade sensory intensity.   The closed eye visuals adopted an Aztec and Egyptian sensibility with stepped pyramids and circular calendars taking center stage.  One Mayan-stepped tetris-piece design constantly took center stage and a subsequent hastily drawn recreation (Untitled, colored pencil on lined notebook paper, 2010), produced post-trip signs of recognition in my fellow psychic adventurers.

When I decided to check in with reality (and reality IS a choice, don't let no fancy talkin headshrinkers tell me different!) I could tell G was searching deep within my lower quad looking for little knots of muscular fury.  And then he found one.  And pushed down.  And something inside of my leg exploded with waves of energy, and like a child whacked out on sour patch kids and seizure inducing cartoonage, I began my best Vishnu impression, all arms and legs in constant motion.  And as G somehow moved up to my elbow region, I saw the veins and muscles lighting up inside my arm as my blood rushed to G‘s fingertips.  Unable to contain my vocal self, I belted improvised exclamations and expressions of wonderment.  This prompted D and S to stick their heads in and ask, without needing an answer, how we were doing.  I believe I detected more than a sliver of jealousy in what probably were their voices.  All in all I was thoroughly enjoying myself as the electronically natural and ambient sounds of Ulrich Schnauss crashed and swirled around me to a pulsating beat.

Because sensory input had now completely arrested what remained of my voluntary focus  (crack-aided ADD eat your heart out), I had a hard time keeping still long enough to allow G to accomplish much in the ways of massage therapy.  He kept attempting to coax me into staying in the same position, but after 10 seconds (margin of error: + - 11.2 sec) I would give in to the mind‘s de-tethered racings and flail about subconsciously.  G, searching for a new tactic, kept repeating the suggestion of striving to feel heavy, heavy, heavy.  The concept was intoxicating.  I began chanting my new mantra quietly, “heaviness, heaviness, heaviness” over and over, and something in the mind calming repetition allowed renewed control of focus toward staying relaxed and under control.  And I was quickly rewarded as G found another hidden ball of clenching tightness down near my tibia’s base and my auditory and corporeal senses hit critical mass.

While hurtling through this scene of sound and sensation, traveling through the multi-dimensional ether, G attempted a deep hamstring stretch and implored me to move “up” a bit so he could get a better position.  “Up!??!?  Up?!??!?  That could be anywhere!” I cried as my mind exploded with the possibilities.  I was beginning to alternate between the room and the cosmic elsewhere at an increasing frequency.  When he finally had the angle he needed, G gently pushed my leg back into a deep stretch and suddenly I was no longer in the room.  G was still with me, giving me a deep hamstring stretch, but our surroundings were different.  And yet, the new location was in no way cosmic like the other “places” I had been frequenting over the last few minutes.  No, this one was earthly and familiar.  In fact, it was more than familiar.  I could easily place it.  It was G’s apartment!  And we both were wearing different clothes.  I recognized the clothing as well.  They were the clothes we were wearing two days ago when G first gave me a massage in his room.  I cautiously looked around and to my right I spotted an image of a cloud formation with deep purples and reds, my favorite picture hung on G‘s wall.  I could make it out in excellent detail looking deep into the terrestrial nebula.

I looked behind me and saw G’s door shut loosely against the frame.  The half full glass of water I had started that particular massage with sat untouched beside me.  It suddenly occurred to me that looking at the digital display on a watch can alert the dreamer to the presence of the dream-state and I looked down at my wrist.  After disappointedly discovering that I had taken my watch off for the massage, I quickly looked back up for G’s alarm clock and saw that I was back in the present with the whistling heating duct gazing knowingly down at me.

+3:30 The glowing humanoid form that was in all likelihood G then hovered over to my left side.  He clasped my left leg and left arm and pulled me firmly but gently towards him in a complicated motion.  This subtly shifted my center of gravity to a foot below me and suddenly I felt myself seeping through the bed down into an unknown void.  At first I found the sensation unnerving and resisted, pulling myself up towards G and away from the gravitational sinkhole that had opened up beneath me.  But G got me to restart my mantra of “heaviness, heaviness, heaviness,” and chanted along with me with in a calming tone of voice.  I gently and slowly leaned backward, like dipping a toe into an expectantly frigid body of water.  But as I allowed myself to relax into it, I found it to be an incredibly warm, comforting sensation.  Instead of careening down into a cold desolate pit, I excitedly at first and then euphorically melted and dripped into the physical cosmic consciousness, the amalgamated entirety of corporeal energy in the universe.

At some point G returned my limbs to me and I resurfaced up into the room.  Soon I felt fingers working softly on my cheek and jaw line.  As soon as they reached the area just outside my rear molars, a cascade of long buried, decade old memories fluttered into my field of vision.  They starred my childhood orthodontist, a kindly, elderly man, but soon this present incarnation began jumping around the room brandishing pointy instruments and cackling loudly in the manner of a certain Toe Jam and Earl villain.  A deep seated, primal fear caused me to psychically recoil from the frightening and increasingly cartoonish visage.  And yet I surprised myself by not pulling away from G’s fingers.  Instead I looked deeply into the vision and the aesthetics began to shift and change.  From a hysterical villain, he soon became a fool-hardy Doug nemesis, then a harmless Rugrats adult until the image finally faded away, replaced with a feeling of calmness and exorcism.

G then migrated down to my IT band and another rush of memories sprung forth hailing from my middle school cross-country days where I had first learned the seated-foot-resting-on-knee IT band stretch.  Soon I smelled an early fall meet held deep inside a rustic state-park: decaying leaves mixed with freshly cut dewy grass and the smoky embers of recently extinguished fires at nearby campsites.  Early morning fog permeated the memory melding with the sleepiness of a sub 4AM wake up call and then infused with adrenaline from the anticipation of the starting gun, muscles taut, ready to go.  G’s voice suddenly cut in from nowhere, imploring me to relax.

As the massage progressed I found it easier and easier to maintain calm stillness.  My body, acting independently, relaxed into the massage while my mind wandered through irretrievable revelries.  At some point G informed me he had finished, instructed me to take my time and go slow when I decided to arise, and left the room.  I lay there gathering my exceedingly scattered thoughts, picking them up one at a time, trying to assess the situation and piece together what just happened.

+4:45 Wits tentatively corralled, I wandered unsteadily outside and down to the edge of the dock, drinking in the cool night air and getting calmed by the soft arrhythmic crashing of the waves against the wood.  I stood there, outside for the first time that night, and drank in the wide open expanse of land, sea and sky with eyes impossibly accustomed to the dark.  My muscles calmed and relaxed while at the same time also felt toned and sore from an intense cardio workout.  I pondered whether weakly stretching or melting into a jellied pool of tissue and cells would be a more prudent course of action.

+5:00 Seated on the side of the dock, I heard the rustling of the sliding glass door open and booted footsteps slowly sound signaling an approach somewhere behind me.  It occurred to me that I could find out who it was with the trivial motion of a swiveled head.  And yet, feeling the most Zen I had felt in many moons, I opted for patience and remained staring down into the inky water.  The footsteps ceased a pace behind me and were replaced with the slow creaking of boards as the person silently shifted their weight.  Then a comparably sudden creak and from the corner of my eye I saw S sit down beside me.  She pulled a cigarette from behind her ear and placed it softly between her lips.  A lighter materialized and sparked giving off the olfactory hint of flint and char.

Taking advantage of our chemically bestowed night-vision, we gazed out into the light black expanse of watery valley, silently taking in the dully glowing nocturnal scenescape.  The source of the glow was everywhere and nowhere and I looked down the shore at the little boatdocks and gazeebos extended out into the water, calmly sitting below  undulating, grey weeping willows, and I was transported to a Japanese water garden (Serenity, darkly inked woodcut, 1129).  S took a slow drag of her cigarette and held it for an impossible expanse of time before exhaling the smoke dreamily starward.  Some inconsequential part of my brain wondered, without a trace of anxiety, what G and D were up to.  The waves kicked up and then calmed for no verifiable reason.  Another deep cigarette inhalation from my right.  I turned slowly to look at her and smiled.  “Pure beauty,” I said gesturing languidly down the shore.  “It looks just like a Japanese water gar…”

“YES!!!,” S screamed, jumping up with wild eyed gestures,  ash raining down.  “Oh my god, you read my thoughts!  I was thinking the exact same thing!”  Her startled but exuberant words rushed through and past my face to ride out with the night waves.  The echoing in my ears slowly subsided as we looked wide-eyed at each other until the feeling gradually passed and our attention was once again arrested by the Sea of Japan.

+6:00 S and I jumped to our feet with an irrepressible urge to play Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds and A Day in the Life.  It was one of those music choice urges that was irrepressible until satisfied.  We were either going to listen to those two songs or sit there bemoaning the impossibility of that fulfillment.  Those were our only options.  After momentarily weighing the feasibility, we ran excitedly up the deck into the house and I dove into the chair sitting before of my laptop.  Seizing my mouse, I turned and looked deep into the soul of my operating system and realized that simply changing the song on I-Tunes was going to be easier said than done.  After waiting with saintly patience for the words to reassemble themselves into something resembling a language I might hope to understand, I chose to forgo the improbably placed search bar (3 inches outside the northernmost border of my laptop screen) in favor of the always helpful alphabetic ordering system which led me straight to the Beatles post-haste.  With the first deliciously reverbed harpsichord(?) notes sounding in my ears, I assembled the portable speakers, wire connected tweeters over subwoofer, in a sound oozing pyramid on the ground below the table.  I arranged myself in a comfortable position 2 feet in front of the speakers, closed my eyes, and let John Lennon describe the backs of my eyelids.

Thanks to my heroic and song-worthy mastering of the I-Tunes play-list feature, the last crashing of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (reprise) abruptly began and faded away to the simple opening acoustic guitar riff of A Day in the Life.  I let the first crescendo scramble my brains into smithereens only to have them re-arranged by Paul’s oh so charming tale of morning routine only to be betrayed into a second dream culminating in a orchestral mass of entropy even more mind scrambling than the first, this time heralded with missiles of light emanating from the speaker pyramid.  And finally we came to the merciful eye of the storm before the impossibly conceived 15 seconds of an unidentifiable Beatle (or 3) speaking in tongues with improbable repetition and what shreds of my mind that were left instantly shattered.  Stadium-concert appropriate cheering from S ensued.

+7:30 Soon G emerged from the next room and D staggered out a few moments later as I was hit with massage flashbacks from memories that have yet to dry, only a few hours old.  D followed in my previous flight path and ambled outside while G decided it’s the appropriate junction to pick up a musical instrument.  He carefully hooked up his guitar to my laptop and began enthusiastically adding and removing effects, delays, reverbs, flangers, phasers, tremolos, pitch shift, chorus, like a mad musical scientist.  When he finally comes to rest on a combination that makes a solitary plucked guitar note echo with an entire cosmic orchestra’s worth of auditory power, he strums an deep powerful chord and I feel my ears physically vibrate with joy.

Up from the depths of my mind comes Mucho Maas’s description of the joys of listening to music on acid.  “You’ll think I’m crazy Oed.  But I can listen to anything and take it apart again.  Spectrum analysis, in my head.  I can break down chords, and timbres, and words too into all the basic frequencies and harmonics, with all their different loudnesses, and listen to them, each pure tone, but all at once.  It’s like I have a separate channel for each one and if I need more I just expand…”  I think it’s safe to say ol’  Thomas Pynchon indulged once or twice in his time.

At some point G thrust the guitar into my hands, still attached with life-enhancing medical tubes to the computer and its tone crafting software, and walks off to start S’s massage.  I hesitate at the burden of crafting the auditory background for S’s massage experience remembering how integral  Ulrich was to mine.  For a moment I contemplated turning on an album. But after feeling the incredible power and possibility after plucking just one note, I cannot contain myself and begin picking along a simple (and then all too soon, driving) melody, diving in and out of openings left by the delay, dodging reverb responses and leaning hard into the tremolo with feelings bordering on euphoria.  Suddenly remembering the task at hand, I shift down a few gears and begin to strum lightly between softly picked melodies, weaving a web of softly pulsated ambient threads while D lays on the couch staring incredulously up at the ceiling.

+8:15 My energy level completely crashes.  Ignoring all else in the blissful act of music creation, my waning strength didn’t register until my strumming became gradually sparser and sparser until my final melody sounded at a crawling 10 beats per minutes.  I gently placed the guitar on the ground and became one with the pile of blankets next to the couch, spending the remaining 4 hours of the trip in lazily light-hearted conversation and activities, bobbing in and out of sleepy, closed eye revelries.

Exp Year: 2010	ExpID: 91899

Gender: Male

Age at time of experience: 25

Published: Aug 5, 2011	Views: 39,749

[ View as PDF (for printing) ] [ View as LaTeX (for geeks) ]
[ Switch Colors ]

LSD (2), Yoga / Bodywork (202) : Music Discussion (22), Combinations (3), Small Group (2-9) (17)