		 DOSE:

		 1 hit
		 sublingual
		 LSD
		 (blotter / tab)

		 smoked
		 Cannabis

           BODY WEIGHT:
	   66 kg

An Unexpectedly Engaging First Trip

I’ll start off by saying that my reasons for initially taking this trip, I think, are important to understanding why it so greatly influenced me. I was fresh out of high school and attending university, and for most of my life felt much like many other disillusioned teens that life was rather empty and depressing, a feeling that I had pushed further to the back of my mind as I left the main source of those feelings at high school. I had always, since a very young age, been fascinated with the idea of entering altered states on substances and had started to dabble with cannabis in my later high school years and, at the time of this story, enjoyed its effects immensely. All that said, my interest in mind altering drugs was purely for entertainment purposes, as I said before I had a rather pessimistic outlook on life and thought that the best I could get out of it was getting some wacky kicks.

The story begins with me being invited over to a friend’s house while his parents were away to spend a few days smoking pot and hanging out with some of his friends of which only one I was familiar with. We will call the friend that invited me Ab and the other Ba, the others are miscellaneous. Ab and me had wanted to try LSD for some time now, and decided, since Ba knew where to get good quality tabs, to trip on this occasion. I already had reason to be nervous about the whole thing, as in the time spent smoking pot the day before with Ab and Ba’s group of friends who I didn’t know well at all, I, a rather paranoid person in general, thought more and more about how little I fit into this crowd, and how if I was uncomfortable while smoking weed with them then maybe doing a psychedelic would be a bit of a step in the wrong direction. Nevertheless, I was determined to finally experience my childhood aspiration that I thought may never come of seeing what these drugs were all about, and I didn’t want to let this opportunity slip past me.

Me, Ab and Ba drove and picked up two little multicoloured blotter tabs for me and Ab, while I should have tested mine I trusted Ba’s lengthy record of taking acid, and found the little piece of paper with “WHAT DOES THIS TRIP MEAN?” written in coloured markers inside the baggie with the tabs a comforting sign of Australia’s hippies looking over me.

We got back in the early evening, and me and Ab took our tabs. Ba had said that they were each around 150 to 175 ug each, which was a notch up from the 100ug I had wanted to dip my toes into, but beggars can’t be choosers.

My first thought on putting that little bit of paper on my tongue was loud and clear, “I think I may have just made a huge mistake”, and the gravity of the situation hit me all at once. I realized that I was as of this moment, about to slowly be removed from the driver’s seat in an environment where I really wanted my wits about me, and thought that maybe I was about to be in for a rough experience. I think I felt a slight numbness in my mouth but no taste, I sat down and waited for the thing to kick in, and slowly calmed myself chatting and playing Tetris on my phone, I actually relaxed so much that I just about forgot that I still had an acid tab under my tongue.

After about 15 minutes I swallowed my tab and continued to wait, and after 30 minutes of waiting I started to feel definite changes in my mood. I was getting gigglier, and feeling loose and uncoordinated, almost as if I was getting tipsy, this slowly progressed over about 15 to the point where I think I was slurring my words. Ba called my attention and asked if this looked weird, and stated opening and closing his hand in front of my face quickly, which I laughed at and shrugged him off, not knowing if it did look weird or not. As I looked away from him doing that I noticed a rainbow towel that was hanging up away from the group, while it was still and unnoticed a short while ago, it now looked almost like it was reflective, which was enhanced by the way it seemed to slowly be blowing in a breeze, which I wasn’t sure was real or the effects of the LSD. I decided not to tell anyone and see how this would progress, and knew that things were about to start getting strange.

Suddenly, I felt like I snapped back to attention, I was sure that time had passed since I was pondering the waving towel, but I couldn’t remember. I felt like I had just been lost in thought for some time, and the moments between the towel and my next lucid memory feel very patchy and muddles around, which is not only how I am remembering it now, but how it felt as it was happening, almost as if I had blacked out repeatedly and was wondering what just happened. The next thing I knew, I was looking at and wondering about something in front of me, but I had a very hard time trying to remember what it was that I was thinking about, or what I was thinking about it. I think I wracked my brain for a short while trying to grab my bearings here, and eventually I pulled myself back into the moment and realized what I was looking at.

I was sitting in a different spot then what I had noticed earlier, and was placed right in front of a medium sized potted tree. The environment around the tree that I was sitting in for starters, felt lit up, although I had been sitting in a dark covered area before it now looked brightly lit by greenish and orange lights, and the air had a kind of muffled, crawly dreamy texture to it. The tree itself, I couldn’t take my eyes off. Every little curve on all of the leaves spiralled endlessly into themselves, and every leaf spiralled into itself, as did every bunch of leaves, and every clump, and it all came together to make the whole tree look like an infinitely spiralling spiral of spirals, all glowing with bright green and orange and gold. As I looked and thought more at this hallucination in front of me, which completely awestruck me in its vividness, I couldn’t stop thinking that what I was looking at wasn’t just incredible, but impossible. Everywhere and every angle that I looked a this thing I saw a manipulation of space, that even if only mental and imagined, I couldn’t wrap my head around, it didn’t seem with the rules that waking life had over the properties of geometry and space, that something like this could exist

it didn’t seem with the rules that waking life had over the properties of geometry and space, that something like this could exist

 in even my wildest dreams. It seemed to me to be defying the laws of existence.

From this point on in the trip, things accelerated and decelerated in ways, both spatial and temporal, that made the whole trip feel like I was remembering it even as it was happening, punctuated by moments of coming back to reality and suddenly becoming lost again in racing thoughts and hiccups in time. The individual moments that I can remember all existed in a headspace that I quickly came into after seeing the spiral tree, of “I am not ready for this intensity”. This paired with the fact that I was still surrounded by a small group of people, who while I was poor at communicating with before I now found it impossible, as everything they said now sounded like gibberish they spoke minutes before. My friends Ab, also on LSD, and Ba suddenly leaving in a car with another person to pick someone up and leaving me alone, and the way I seemed to be losing my mind, made for a tone of anxiety that I felt could at any moment snap to complete panic.

Since I was split between the world of people, trying to seem like I was holding it together, and one that was tearing the fabric of that world to shreds, I spent the entirety of the trip getting up from one position to another, either sitting with the group staring ahead, or going and sitting alone in the loungeroom where a tv was playing nature documentaries to try and get a hold of myself. In this repeated action I got a hold of my thoughts long enough to say to myself, “well bud, you’ve done it this time, but we’re well in it now, so since you’ve bought the ticket you may as well take the ride and ride this shit out”, so that’s what I did. I wandering between the group and the lounge for the entire come up and most of the trip because it helped me keep a kind of ‘pace’ to the flow of time and space that was unravelling faster and faster. And in this action with the steel of taking the ride, I held myself together enough to experience the following moments in no particular order because I’m not sure if there was any:

Important to note, at some point in the trip I had two hits of cannabis from a bong, I had been having intense hallucinations before this but it also kicked things up a notch. I should probably be thankful to smoking the cannabis because it probably helped me get somewhat out of the anxious headspace I had been in very strongly from the start of the trip, and make the later experiences more tolerable even if they were more intense.

•	A person outside became animated entirely in what looked like oil painting, I thought it looked like a trailer I had recently seen of a movie about Vincent van Gogh done in his style of painting in stop motion. The person then started to go through many of Gogh’s styles in his animation, from brilliant bright exaggerated starry night to incredibly detailed and fanning sun flowers.

•	Every surface crawled with moving patterns and motions, and if I looked at any edge of an object for longer than a few moments it started to form tentacle-like fractals, the unceasing visual information overwhelmed me very strongly.

•	Another person looked at me and I saw his eye slowly slither down his face and go in place of his cheek, and another I could see his skeleton flickering in light through his skin. Another, who I think was asleep, I thought was staring at me from the corner of my eye, when I peeked at him I saw that his legs were covered in staring eyeballs.

•	The light outside changed from what looked like flashing green and purple lights that came from nowhere, to brightly lit green and orange similar to what I saw with the spiral tree. Someone turned on multicoloured Christmas lights that flashed above our heads, I found out the next day that the lights were there but they were all solid white.

•	The space outside was dreamy, and sometimes seemed as if we were sitting in a smoke-filled room.

•	I at one point, recalling the hallucination related to Van Gogh, felt like a painter or poet in France in the ranks of Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec drinking absinth, and looked to Ab who looked like a stoned wizard with a great bushy beard (he had no beard in reality), sat cross legged in a robe with a fire burning behind his head in a smoke-filled room.

•	I looked at Ab another time and saw neon blue lines crossing his head and face like a Rubics cube, as soon as I made the mental connection to a Rubics cube some of his head behind him started to shift in cubes like one, which was rather shocking. I decided it was best not to try and tell him what I was seeing.

•	A pouch of tobacco on a table seemed to be a wriggling mass of insects, and after I heard snippets of people talking about that had been crawling around I looked down to see many cockroaches and bugs scuttling about the ground, I was surprised even as I was seeing this how little it seemed to unnerve me.

•	Since my perception of time was shattered, I at one point thought I had been sitting here for 2 days, and that in those days we at some point had gone to the beach, I don’t know why.

•	A blanket that had printed drawings of elephants on it shifted and swirled, the elephants seeming animated.

•	The tv playing nature shows, I think Planet Earth, at points had many hallucinations going on within it. At one-point ants in their nest seemed to be rapidly mutating and forming rustling masses of feelers. At another particularly intense instance, I saw footage of a cave bat flying in the dark, and the bat was a bright blue neon skeleton that left behind it a barred double-helix neon blue trail, that’s width matched the two points of the bat’s wings as it flew creating the double-helix. At seeing this I had to cover my eyes because of just how overwhelming it seemed to me to process. Later as I was coming down I saw some rock jutting from deep jungle as reflecting shifting melted rainbows in their texture.

•	At a point that I know was earlier on in the trip, I got lost looking at people’s reflections in a glass window, they looked like they were made out of pure yellow electricity, and that there was a whole world of humanoid electric figures going on in the reflection. When I snapped out of staring at this reflective world I felt shaken.

•	I at a point felt like there was a giant roaring monster standing right behind me, that was visualized somehow as the black mass outside of my vision, I saw it mentally as a giant shadow man in a big hat that I’ve heard of in stories, and it somehow represented death and my dark side. I laughed this off because of how normal it was compared to the other space and time dilations that were occurring, and it went away.

•	When I was trying to steel myself, and was being overwhelmed by the intensity of all the visual activity, I covered my eyes and saw a dim purple light being passed over a metallic purple carving of Mayan style, which I thought was strange, and a little unfortunate at the time because I saw that I couldn’t escape the drug.

•	And many, many strange strings of thoughts that went of for hours in single seconds that I can’t remember.

All of these experiences were fascinating, intense, beautiful, and a little scary, but the real meat of the trip was what I experienced in the changes of perception in the passage of time

the real meat of the trip was what I experienced in the changes of perception in the passage of time

. I checked my phone constantly in the trip to see how much longer I needed to endure, and was made all the more anxious, and fascinated, in what I read the time as each time. Sometimes I would think hours had passed, but it had only been a couple of minutes, and sometimes I thought it had been seconds and suddenly an hour had passed. Sometimes I even thought that time had skipped forwards and backwards, making for this hard to pace recollection of things. This way that I am describing the trip is not only as I remember it, trying to piece together what I can recall, but as it was happening it felt like a slideshow of events jumping back and forth. Sometimes I would link that an experience I was having, as it happened, must have happened before an experience I could recall from earlier, and other mix ups of memory that didn’t make sense. It was mainly this destruction of time that made the trip so hard to endure, but also what would make it so important as I will expand on.

Space was also distorted, in my walking to and fro positions, I didn’t feel like I was moving but that space was moving around me, my body was very heavy and I felt like only my head was real in a way. This paired with the impossible geometry I saw in the spiral tree, and the complete breakdown of time, all culminated in the climax hallucination/experience of the trip, and made up the meaning that I found in the trip.

Some point, right at the tail end of the overwhelming ordeal, I was sitting in the group, and trying to follow what people were saying as a way of grounding myself, because I felt that I was nearing breaking point. And while I tried hard to focus on anything that could ground me, I started to suspect that the moment of me trying to focus on the conversation, was looping. As I thought more about whether it was looping, and how I had heard of this looping moments from internet descriptions, the more apparent it became that the moment was looping. The loop itself was becoming faster, and more constricted, and while my thoughts had been caught in it before for I don’t know how long, they were now separate from it. While time was repeating, I was outside of it looking in, and watching it do so, like the loop was playing on a screen in front of me. The repletion was becoming so fast, and so constrained, that it was now just a single nanosecond, looping in a way that was visual, something that I don’t think I can accurately describe. It was as if the loop, the moment in reality, as it repeated, was moving lopsided, and I was being pushed along with it. I was feeling the G-force of it as it moved in this way, to the left and upwards, and I realised that it was moving in a spiral. The moment in reality, was somehow repeating in a spiral motion endlessly, it was like I was in a spiral set of loop-d-loops on a roller-coaster, and I just had to hang on and ride this dragon out.

And right where it didn’t seem like it could get any more intense, I felt like I was floating, like gravity was gone. The moment was still moving in a spiral, yet still in one place, in front of me, and I looked around, and saw the next nanoseconds in time, fracturing off as fractal spirals in every direction, I can only compare the ‘place’ that it seemed to be to the 4th dimension scene from Interstellar, but that’s a poor description of just how bizarre it was. Just as my thoughts had been racing and analysing for the whole trip in strings and trains that went nowhere or I couldn’t remember, I was piecing together in my head what it was that I was seeing, or where I was. And I felt, in that moment, that the single moment of time that I had seen repeating, was actually the only moment, that right now is the only moment in time that exists, and that time itself is an illusion, and that space is an illusion in turn that time helps facilitate, and that all these other moments I saw going off into infinity, where every single no matter how miniscule possibility of the future.

I don’t know how long this experience went on from beginning to end, it felt like it was both 10 minutes, 10 hours,  and all of time together, but at this point of eternity I felt like I was right where I was meant to be, and that I was the only thing there was, and it was just so peaceful. And just as strangely and suddenly as it had come on, this thing just unravelled in front of me back to normal reality, at the exact moment that it had left off from, with the conversation picking up right from the split moment it had started repeating from. I felt like I had just gotten off a rocket going into orbit, so I just got up and went and sat by myself again without trying to explain anything to anyone.

After that, the trip died down, and about an hour later at 2 or 3 in the morning I went to sleep and slept like I was half awake. The next morning, feeling like I had just been hit by a train, I got a bus home and went to a local park and sat on a bench in the cold morning for a good hour trying to figure out just what the fuck that was the night before and why it felt like something so important had happened to me. In later conversations with Ab, he said while intense he barely saw or got anything out of the experience.

After that trip, to put a long story short, my world view was forever changed by the new perception that time and space, things that I had previously seen as fundamental and permanent staples of existence, were just illusions to put it in a way. I found a new imaginative spark in what was just recreational cannabis use from before the trip, and got heavily into philosophical thought to try and describe what had happened to me, thinking I had just had some kind of experience that no one had had before. I eventually found out about Alan Watts, found that what he was saying was like finding the right peg for the shape, and the story tells itself from there.

I haven’t taken psyches since, and while maybe I will at some point in the future in the form of a different substance, I don’t think I really ever need to, they’ve done more for me then I ever bargained for.

Exp Year: 2016	ExpID: 112018

Gender: Male

Age at time of experience: 18

Published: Jun 21, 2018	Views: 2,098

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


		 DOSE:

		 1 hit
		 sublingual
		 LSD
		 (blotter / tab)

           BODY WEIGHT:
	   65 kg

This is my first LSD experience at an age of 20. No psychedelic experience before. The trip lasted 19 hours. The experience was more of a fun time than inspiring so the report will mostly be about the observed effects. I had no tripsitter as I was worried that I would have to entertain that person during my trip but I also prefer to be alone.

BACKGROUND:

This year I decided to try some drugs which, I believed, should be experienced at least once in a lifetime. First one was MDMA which was rather disappointing. The idea of trying psychedelics was already there when I was 17. I decided that I should try salvia maybe if I ever get the chance. This chance never came.

Only recently I came to the idea of trying LSD when I randomly landed at a video of someone describing his experience which seemed to be really intense. I believed LSD was a party drug (which it can be) and that it wouldn't be interesting but then I got curious and decided to try some. The main reason for taking it was curiosity and fun.

PREPARATION:

The preparation phase went for 1 - 2 weeks. It consisted of reading countless FAQs, information and experiences. I especially researched the potential negative effects. I ordered some L-theanine before the trip because of its promised calming effects against anxiety. I chose a day for the trip where I had no obligations for the following 2 days. I decided that I should take it in nature and had an idea for a location but didn't visit it before. I had a perfect sleep of 9 hours in the night before the trip. No food was eaten before taking the tab.

MINDSET &amp; SETTING:

I had no big expectation from the trip. I didn't primarily seek enlightenment or life lessons. I am a really introspective person and tend to think alot about life in general. I was also heavily depressed during the last year and I believe I still am but not as bad as before.

On the day of the trip I was in a neutral state. I decided not to think about the problems in life and simply enjoy the good weather and nature. I had mixed feelings of excitement but also a little anxiety because it was the first time. I arrived at an empty spot in a park at afternoon and couldn't stay there. I have a phobia of flying insects and there were alot of them. I spent an hour trying to find a new spot without people but also without many insects. I remembered a good spot at a lake in a forest which had no flowers at all meaning no bees or wasps.

The lake had some swimmers but I managed to find a comfortable spot with no people and a beautiful view. I sat there for 20 minutes and took the 220ug tab around 1 PM. I held it under my tongue for 10 minutes and swallowed it. The tab tasted like nothing.

THE COMEUP:

I had some anxiety during the first 30 minutes. I was constantly asking myself what will happen now but then I just decided to think about nothing at all and listen to music. After 1 hour I started feeling strange, like my head was becoming really slow and heavy. 30 minutes later I started seeing some visuals. Everything looked like it had a wave effect and the colors started mildly changing every second. I felt great, more euphoric because it simply looked funny and beautiful at the same time. The music became even better. Not long after the visuals became very intense. I noticed my hands shaking intensely. I needed to stare 2 seconds at anything and it would get really strong black outlines. When I looked on my arm it would look like I had black veins because my hair would get strong outlines. What surprised me was that I had no strong hallucinations like seeing something that isn't there.

THE PEAK:

The sad part about the peak is that I actively kept thinking about not going insane. I lost the sense of time and reality, I still saw the wavy, color changing visuals and my phone screen looked like it was melting. I felt like I am the tree which I was leaning against and my field of view widened. Time felt very slow.

I started to slightly panic because I still thought about the potential negative effects. I believed that my brain could trick me into thinking that I still sit at the same place but in reality I would already be doing something harmful. It felt like I was entering a fake dimension created by my mind. The trip still felt great but sometimes I would be scared when the music had repetitive parts which made me think that time would repeat itself over and over endlessly. I skipped such music parts to confirm that I wasn't going insane. I also did what I called reality checks where I would look left and right, touch a few objects and check if I was still leaning against a tree.

After an hour I was surprised by some swimmers and people who passed by or just wanted to take a swim. I honestly didn't expect to see anyone because it was the worst place to take a swim. My trip became worse because I thought that these people would know I'm tripping but at the same time they were an indicator that everything is still real and happening. I realized that I was not a tree. I had some really weird stare moments and at one moment a person waved at me for no reason and I just waved back. At that point it became all too confusing and I decided to go home.

GETTING BACK HOME AND THE REST OF THE TRIP:

I felt like I was capable of going back home and I had to take public transport. I focused as much as possible on being careful but luckily there was no potentially dangerous traffic. It felt like the train would never arrive though. I didn't feel anxious around people and made it home safely. For 10 hours I would sit on my couch and listen to music. It was the best part of my trip.

I felt happy and comfortable. The music was amazing. I liked to imagine some juicy fruits and splashing colors or fresh juice when I listened to a certain type of positive energetic music and I couldn't stop listening to that type. It felt amazing. At the same time the colors would change perfectly to my mood. Seriously I would've wanted to take a screenshot because the colors worked like a perfect photo filter. The wall had interesting patterns. Sometimes I would see cartoon figures, not really with my eye but with my mind.

Eating was weird. I had ordered a pizza and only ate half of it. I felt bad afterwards and forced myself to eat it when it was cold already. I kept feeling sorry for my body. I saw the part of the brain responsible for survival instincts as an individual which had to struggle throughout the trip while my other part of the brain would be a childish individual trying to have fun and not knowing the consequences and I kept apologizing to the survival brain.

Bathroom visits were also weird. When taking a piss I would see a mild hallucination of a big ocean wave and when looking into the mirror I would see myself as another person sometimes and judge accordingly. My face was slightly changing the shape and my pupils were pulsating. It all wasn't too bad though.

I had a few moments during the trip where I would see a figure repetitively every few minutes or think about a word that doesn't exist. I believed that the figure had some kind of meaning and that I would find out later in the trip with a big life lesson. Sadly that wasn't the case.

I had a repetitive thought, I kept asking myself: What if this all isn't real? What if I'm still sitting at that lake and it's already night time while my brain creates this illusion of me being in my safe place. It was a scary thought. I asked myself if I would wake up from my trip after death in the fake realm. I refused to believe it and found the thought way too crazy.

THE COMEDOWN:

Around 2am I felt the effects getting weaker. I believed this was the time to go to sleep but I just couldn't. I decided to watch the 5th element movie which was funny as hell. I became heavily frustrated at 4am because I still couldn't sleep. So I just sat there for 4 hours, reading more experiences, trying to fall asleep a few more times, watching videos and thinking about the trip. It was the worst but probably most inspiring part of the trip. At 8am I tried to sleep and managed to fall asleep at 9am for 3 hours. It didn't feel like sleep but I also didn't feel tired after.

THE DAY AFTER:

I felt wonderful, like I had found energy for life again. I relaxed a little bit. I was invited to a party for that day. We had some weed and I wasn't sure if I should take it. I decided to take a few hits and it felt much stronger to the point where I became anxious. I saw some light visuals again. I wasn't drunk at all, only had 2 beers. I left earlier because I was falling asleep at the party.

CONCLUSION:

I must say, I probably had the best feeling of my life during the trip. Even if the comedown was unpleasant it will be an experience I will never forget. Sadly I haven't had many inspiring thoughts and I believe it was because I worried about having a bad trip too much during the peak. I believe that I may have to wait a few years before actually being able to think about life properly during a trip but I sure can't wait for it.

Exp Year: 2018	ExpID: 112021

Gender: Male

Age at time of experience: 20

Published: Jun 22, 2018	Views: 1,726

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LSD (2) : Personal Preparation (45), Depression (15), Music Discussion (22), First Times (2), General (1), Public Space (Museum, Park, etc) (53)


		 DOSE:

		 200 ug
		 oral
		 LSD

           BODY WEIGHT:
	   194 lb

Started ceremonially with a prayer and benediction, 11:16a.

Earliest sensation was of things appearing vaguely masked, with an almost plasticine or clay-like quality. According to K (my sitter)'s notes, this happens at about 11:44a. From this point on my memories become less linear. I moved from reading chair to meditation pillow noting clammy feeling of my hands.

From K's notes: 'Nothing in my life has ever happened before, it could be the real deal.'

12:08p - Odd physical sensations are beginning to capture my attention, not quite an altered state, but definite onset. I'm aware of carrying - something, an appendage or a growth - working its way up my back from my ankles. It advances with each step I take around the apartment.

In this time frame perceptual shifts are happening with increasing rapidity. The world is recognizable, but it's altered - as though another, almost identical world is sliding in alongside it. Of course, spacial references like 'alongside' are not quite apropos, but that's as close as I can get to describing it.

At about 12:25p I said 'This is a beautiful molecule. It's fire (through). It's burning the edges of the forest.' I also report 'This is familiar. I've been here before.'

This world behind the world has an at-once evolving, complete and decaying quality. The worlds envelope my world, displaying the present moment, of which I am conscious, against a numinous shuffling of all possible permutations and histories.

Each alternate history touches my reality at the precise moment in its own timeline that I am experiencing in mine. Each of the alternate moments is faintly different, slightly off, not so much that I could ever qualify what it is or was, nor was the distinction's passing ever more than evanescent, such that its contribution to my perception was in the form of an overlay, a suggestion, a constant flux of different nows where all that I could anticipate, or that comported with what I thought was or would be true, was constantly shuffling through other probabilities.

The edges of particular quanta were as kaleidoscopic event horizons, shimmering with the moment of change and transformation. This is a key characteristic; the stack of phenomena related in time were perceptually shifted to one side and another, above and below, such that I could see them lined up, like cards or dominoes ordered over the horizons of eternity, touching my present in the moment of my perception and then shuffling away.

Sometime before 1p - From this point forward I lost my sense of linear time, other than as I would check in with K and anchor (in some loose sense) in her present for whatever vague sense of comfort this afforded me.

'Every breath is the 10,000 fatherings.' As my own present became increasingly unmoored and dilute, perceptions yielded to impressions of the parallel reality or timeline. Things assembled, lived, died and decayed, all in the span of a single breath. I think I was now beginning to get a feeling for what this was going to be about, what was in store on this trip. I could already see that it would not be pleasant, but in touching in with K I could take a measure of faith that the egoic 'I' would not become completely adrift.

K, for her part was serenely untroubled by however it was that I was showing up

K, for her part was serenely untroubled by however it was that I was showing up

, which was, to me, momently reassuring, but also troubling in that I was not quite willing to loosen my ego into what lay beyond normal perception. I needed the life line, and K assured me that I was OK, meaning my integrated, a priori sense of my self was intact. In this I know the dissolution of ego was started, but incomplete.

For its part, the multiverse did not care one way of the other. It was just revealed and was neither welcoming nor barriered. I was free to dip in to the extent I willed.

What K recorded in this span:

'Now that I've endowed it with the power, it's asking me if I want to join it.'

'I've given it the power to ask that question.'

'It's very... sweet.'

I must have been seeing K returning already many times, because I said 'You are its emissary in my life.' I now think this may be referring to love.

'It's very careful with me.' As terrifying and uncertain as the early premonitions were, somewhere I realized that this would all turn out for the best, or at least in some 'evolved' way. I did not feel safe, exactly, but I did feel recognized and understood.

Also in this vein, 'We would do well to remember that we are held.'

At my request, K played some Beethoven, the Emperor Concerto. This proved completely overwhelming. I was not hearing the music so much as living inside the crushing sense Beethoven himself must have had when he first received it, as it rained down on him like an assault, demanding that he assemble the notes and chords and relations coming to him into sounds. Each passage pulled at me, dragged me from pleasure into acute pain. Individual notes were forces of condensation, wherein vaporous, unformed and notional plumes crashed together to change state, forming liquid and discharging massive energies as in a thunderhead. It was the sound of the cycles of life, at least on this world and in this reality, where water, strongly bonded hydrogen and oxygen, courses in all directions effecting and marking everything in time.

At my bidding (possibly while I was on my knees in supplication to the forces revealed in the Emperor, and before the Pathétique could get started), K switched to Brian Eno's Music for Airports. This was no less moving, but less revelatory somehow, and so allowed me more movement in other aspects of the larger experience. Beethoven had been the storm, requiring all my powers of determination to merely stay aboard the vessel. Eno was the becalmed lake, deep and dark, but quietly buoyant.

During Beethoven, at about 1:15p, I noted to K that the music 'just opens the doors again and again. Always the same motif.' again, suggesting the cycle, the eternal return.

I also flashed on a father speaking to his little girl about how to listen to the world, about what sounds signal safety that what signal danger. And that she is safe. I think this had to do with K and her father, but I was speaking to K.

I also passed my own deceased father in this stretch as he shuffled through, alighting in the sense that he could feel music this way as well, that his worldview was 'in this music' and that it had him in its sway.

I think in this stretch, K and I also settled down around the boy child we never brought into this world. He was with me strongly, and expressive of how when he opted into our world he believed it would be an easy entry, and that he was very surprised when we sent him back. 'Didn't see that coming!' he said. In the shuffling of parallels he emerged less visible to my awareness than he was a felt articulation. What I could sense was that he was fine, and that he did instantiate in many another reality, and that the Great Soul had prospered by his being.

To the extent I was able I spoke this to K and I know she wept. Although she says she shed but a few tears, I felt a great stampede of sadness and regret for our not meeting our boy in this time, and I could see her in distinct parallel realities inconsolable, completely destroyed by the loss of her child. Even now, I can sense that swelling of remorse in myself. I found and held the card shuffling in underneath the present, the one where I have a 17 year old son today, and he's robust and intelligent and beautiful. I also held the card that lead down the path of really wanting him to come through and losing him, where he opted to instantiate in another reality, rather than the one in which we made the choice.

This is a regret, a heavy one. I could cry now thinking about it.

I have reached 55 years and now know that the path to this time, being what it has been, was made for my reading and forming ideas that I may impart somehow - a legacy (a word in my intentions for this trip). That I did not choose to endow the collected wisdom of my nexus in time/space to a soul of my own devising is a sadness perhaps rooted in the fear that I will not endow anything at all, and therefore not seize upon my knowledge of the built-in flaw in all creation.

The Great Soul blinked into being and in an instant became aware of all infinite possible realities. All befores, durings and afters having in this instant occurred, the Great Soul disinstantiated and reinstantiated an infinitude of non-discrete 'times' before once, for no reason other than a sense of play, introducing a faint flaw in the solid block of timeless reality, precipitating the slight shaving of difference in the primary reality and propagating the multiverse. Each possible reality is distinguished by the inflection off the primordial flaw, which begets (creates) a new and different reality - another whole universe.

The flaw is not a mistake, it is the genius of the great, one soul to introduce friction and difference and all the colors and moods, much as the flaw in a diamond refracts light and endows character to what is otherwise simple, undifferentiated carbon. The flaw is the gift of the Great Soul of intelligence to itself, and from the multitude of inflections and refractions among the primary energies emerged difference and all the worlds in unbounded proliferation, with new universes calving from each inspiration. This could be the meaning 'Every breath is the 10,000 fatherings.'

There is much to think about with regard to quantum superposition here, but that's for another time. Trip space seems like an overcoming of quantum decoherence, allowing a quantum system to be observed directly without the collapse of the wave (superposition) function in to a classical state.

Approximately as I was drowning in Beethoven I must have entered what Hofmann referred to in his bicycle trip report as the 'crisis' phase. Nothing in the middle reaches of my trip has clear position relative to anything else. There is no anchor.

Nothing in the middle reaches of my trip has clear position relative to anything else. There is no anchor.

 I was at once terrorized by the cascading of all realities into one, with its great hordes of monstrous apparitions and loss, while being compelled in equal measure by the poignancy of my awareness of the same. A profound feeling of disembodiment was constant here, such that any sensation that erupted in my actual body occurred to me almost as an obliterating force. All ideas hung suspended in a vast, amorphous protoplasmic medium, never forming as more than kitsch or ugly half-made ephemera. Nothing could move. I was not me, but was an idea of me bogged in a wasteland of disconnection and dissipation. I now see that my struggle here was my attachment to individuated ego and a belief that I should be able to get ahold of myself - a self, any self. There was none. Just an artless, friction-free zone of ooze and corrupted ideation. I felt the press of non-existence, of oblivion, collapsing in from all sides, but not with rancor or hostility. The feeling was 'This is how it is. This is the start and the end. I have to lose existence to have existence.' Maybe I let go, maybe not, but the moment itself was profoundly confrontational and I think as I'm writing this that, much as with existence itself, the ego has to have its useful frictions. If that's the case, maybe in being let go it is made again anew - new in the sense that it is recognizably itself, but evolved for having emerged through the flaw.

In this state of despair I felt all the losses I have to look forward to, because I know them already. I've experienced them all before, as I will again.

Most poignant was my constant return to K as the touchstone. I watched and mourned as she came to me a young woman, growing, changing, withering and dying eternally. Even as she would decay in death, she would speak to me as her flesh and bones faded to dust. She would disappear and then in the next instant return as she was. I noted to her that I could see each wrinkle forming, know where all of them would be and always were, where each cell of her being would pass into another state. My soul wept each time, with every return. I spoke to her of the great sadness, that all awareness included loss, but that all returns as the next card shuffling in and out, the next reality in which all life and death is played out, down through eternity, but all at the same time, in parallel, all cards touching the same instant out of time and in connection.

The connection through K, the connection of love, is the portal to all realities. It is in the specter of loss that we bend toward the devised and ingenious flaw and thereby make the new reality. It is through love that we create and assume the mantle of the Great Soul of which we are the insight and the reward. It is my great soul's perception that always sensed the flaw and knows I had the playfulness to make myself intelligent so that I could parse the multitude and evolve.

The flaw also entails oblivion. Each subtle change among parallel realities and their endless propagation means every return and every moment evolves. As I saw it, creation develops a list and eventually capsizes. This is no more or less than the oscillation of time and space from Big Bang to collapse. The universe came and went an infinitude of instances out of time before the Great Soul playfully tossed in the flaw by which to disport in time and space. Bang, the extensional universe I know and all of the others in their parallel multitude were born and born again.

In the moment of our parting, in death, we realize the access to any and all of the parallels in which we will be reinstantiated. The life in that new time and space we have will be substantially similar to the one from which we last parted, but for the flaw. The flaw is a universal flaw, it is manifest in all perception and awareness of it occurs to us as beauty. Beauty, because we are transfixed by it, and the ground of our unreasoning seduction is a latent knowledge of having passed this way innumerable times. We sense that the moment of beauty's perceiving is the gateway to all other realities, or at least the intimation of them. The quality of the conscious experience of beauty is similar if not identical, no matter its quanta, so it's fair to suppose that what underlies our perception is something common to each discrete experience of beauty. Love and beauty are the signifiers of eternity and our movement through it.

Love and beauty also signify loss. That we will loose this world and all others eventually. Sadness and mourning attend us all our days, yet without them we would not have any bearing on the shuffling of all possible realities that are in play or ever will be in play.

I noted to K that 'We are death. Death is us with our eyes on each other.' That we are love is also to be loss. Love and beauty are the portals through to the multitude that death ultimately facilitates whether we've realized in life the enfolded and holographic nature of all reality or not.

The last bit that K noted I'd noted while I was coming back from my journey is: 'At any point in time you can reach for another deck and pull other cards. You can play another hand because all the possibilities are available to us all the time.' Love, beauty and death are the portals through which we pick inflections into new realities.

Postscript: my provider's gear is much more potent than my reading led me to expect, and 200µg may have been a bit intense for a first experience.

200µg may have been a bit intense for a first experience.

Micro-dosing in no way prepared me for what was in store, no more than feeling pond ripples would prepare me to surf Escondido. Even so, it was what the medicine negotiated with me, and the experience was not merely survived, but fully embraced. For the sake of comparison, if nothing else, next time I'll work at 150µg.

Exp Year: 2017	ExpID: 111915

Gender: Male

Age at time of experience: 55

Published: Jul 29, 2018	Views: 1,973

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LSD (2) : Music Discussion (22), Guides / Sitters (39), First Times (2), Small Group (2-9) (17)


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

		   T+ 3:00
		 1 hit
		 oral
		 LSD
		 (blotter / tab)

           BODY WEIGHT:
	   130 lb

Nearing the end of a sunny late spring day in the Pacific Northwest, I decided 'now is the right time'. I had been doing research on LSD off an on for the past decade, determined to someday try it, but only when the time was right. While I have experience with a handful of drugs, I am by no means a stoner. I hardly even drink. I'm not against it I just prefer to do things in moderation and under relatively specific circumstances. I had acquired a couple tabs from a trusted friend 2 months earlier, and was just waiting for the opportune moment. This was it.

I had previously asked my friend D to tripsit me when the time came. He was available and down to hang out with me all night, so he came over. I was actually house sitting at the time, in a really nice, big house owned by a retired University professor. It was filled with many types of houseplants, exotic art, and also contained (when he felt like being inside) a very talkative and extremely large cat. I felt like it was just the perfect setting to trip.

I took my first tab as soon as D told me he was leaving his house (he lived about 10 minutes away) and started to keep a journal. I set a bunch of alarms on my phone, one every 30 minutes for 10 hours, to remind me to take note of what I was experiencing.

I set a bunch of alarms on my phone, one every 30 minutes for 10 hours, to remind me to take note of what I was experiencing.

 This trip report will consist of my typed up journal entries, transcribed voice recordings that I made, and some things I wrote immediately after coming down, along with some further reflections and other details that may explain things, give context, or other wise be of interest.

T: 0hr

This tastes odd. It takes longer to dissolve than I had expected. I feel like an idiot for eating paper. I make a pitcher of pink lemonade, and repeatedly almost choke.

T: 0hr30m

I feel a little light. I'm probably imagining it. I'm drinking some lemonade. I should probably turn off the answering machine beeping before it drives me mad.

T: 0hr:44m

Not imagining it. Real. I like it.

T: 1hr

I failed to skip a line [in the notebook, as I have previously between entries], FUCK! It'll be okay. I feel soooooo good! Like happy! And tickled! I just want to flex all my muscles until they POP. Oh, my handwriting sucks. I hope I can effectively keep this journal [for the duration of the trip]. Pink lemonade was a risky choice. Ugh. Mucus. Oh, so we're in past tense now? Or were. I've always been shit at that.

T: 1hr15m

OK I just feel like saying something. I'm really enjoying silence right now. I'm a very visual person, and I'm not like, hallucinating or anything. I just feel like my visual input is really important. It's like 90% of what I care about.

T: 1hr30m

Oh, just kidding, I'm hallucinating as fuck. It's beautiful! I can't stop smiling. How bad is my writing? I'm under drops of water. I feel like its physically happening to my eyeball.

T: 2hr

I already hate the fact that I need to write and can't just instantly communicate. Focusing on writing intensifies visual hallucinations. So much vibrating and squirming but its so pleasant. I find it odd that it's pleasant as if I should be repulsed. I'm giggling at my writing. It's very poor.

T: 2hr30m

I have to focusintenselytowriteanditsveryunpleasantsoI'mgoingto stop I JUST

FOCUS

VERY IMPORTANT the beautiful sunset more colors than I thought were possible I had never felt so HAPPY I'm going back.

T: 3hr

Just took the 2nd tab. I feel intensely compelled to document, but not in a medium I can understand. I'm sorry!! I'm worried I won't remember. How about 'yellow'?

At this point I was feeling quite loopy and wanted to lie down. I told D that I was going to go chill in bed with some blankets for a bit because I just needed to. In between writing my journal entries, my interactions with D were fairly limited. When he showed up he proclaimed 'I just took a shitload of shrooms before I left.' Since we had previously (on a different day) agreed that he would be sober while I tripped, I was disappointed in him and slightly concerned. Ultimately, we got really giggly about nothing in particular and each wandered around the house looking at things, and I mostly forgot about it.

He seemed content with hanging out in the living room so I went and snuggled into the bed. I probably laid down in the bed for about 2 hours, I was very relaxed and slightly overstimulated by all the visuals which were increasing in intensity every passing moment. I really did not want to move. I decided to continue my documentation of my trip via voice memos on my phone. I have transcribed them here.

Important note: The AJ that I refer to is my boyfriend. I have to provide a little backstory here about why so much of this trip became centered around him. At the time of this trip, we had been seeing each other for about 5 months. He was in college in a different city a couple hours away, so we saw each other about every other weekend. Things had gotten really serious a couple months earlier when I casually mentioned that I was going up to [city] to buy LSD from a friend. This led to an all night conversation (via text) during which he expressed extreme distrust of the drug, and did not want me to use it. I tried to explain that it was very low risk and was important to me. I know that he had dated a drug addict before and was sensitive about these things. Ultimately the conversation led to me saying I would gladly delay my taking it if it made him uncomfortable, that I placed a greater importance on our relationship, and we told each other that it was love for the first time that night.

Eventually AJ said he had loosened up his feelings about it, that he trusted me much more than anyone else he knew in his life who he associated with drug use, and I took that as more or less a go ahead, but I certainly wasn't going to be in his face about it. It was ALWAYS meant to be a personal journey for me. I had decided on this occasion that I would tell him after I had done it, so that he wouldn't worry about me from afar, nor would I worry about him worrying about me.

Our relationship was (and is still) one of immense passion and I have always had very strong feelings about him. I did not want to lose him but I also very much wanted this for myself.

Well..on to the recordings. The headings above the recordings are the filenames as they were in my phone, some of them were changed.

Recording 1

I’ve been making it a goal to document my experiences, on the half hour, every half hour, at the very least. I am free to do it more frequently should the urge arise. [sighing and giggling noises] Hang on.

Recording 2

Ok. I am having a hard time talking into this because I just want to laugh. The reason that I’m making this recording is that i don’t think I’m going to be able to write. Every time I try to focus on writing, the visual hallucinations get really intense, and its really hard to….[giggling]…I don’t want to sound like a crazy person.

Recording 3

Its fair to say that I am definitely going to sound a little bit like a crazy person. [sigh] Part of the issue is that I’m trying to be kinda restrained. I’d like to not feel that way, but I’m not alone in the house…so I can’t be free. Not truly.

Recording 4

I have decided, firmly, that: Fuck Cats.

Recording 5

[giggling] Jesus Christ, um, ok. [way more giggling] I am now on recording number 5. And I swear I am sticking to the original plan [uncontrollable laughter] of why I am fucking making this recording. Oh my god. [laughing] Nope! Not happening.

Recording 6

This is a very serious subject matter. It’s greatly profound, and it’s of grave importance that I communicate this clearly, eloquently, and with proper levity.

Recording 7

Except I keep trying and giggling and stuff so yeah, clearly this is just the pinnacle of human existence.

Recording 8

AJ, I forgot to use your name in all the other recordings, cause…the underlying feeling is I’m not telepathic, and that’s really frustrating. Like I feel like I should just be able to instantly impart emotion and sensation into somebody else, and that was what I wanted to do. Why I started making these recordings and then I started getting giggly cause its supposed to be serious. I just wanted you to know that I was having what I perceived to be a profound experience, and I was thinking about you, and like that experiencing it without you is kind of a deficit in my experience. But that’s ok. It was just like the realization that you couldn’t just feel what I felt, filled me with a real sadness. i’m just experiencing emotions like purely. [laughs] It’s definitely extremely pleasant. I’m actually just trying to stay really calm right now so that I can talk. Probably a lot of what I’m saying sounds completely insane. I just realized that. I don’t really know when I’m speaking out loud versus when I’m just thinking. This like line between consciousness….that part all makes sense. It’s all very blurred. Like I get why that’s always brought up. It’s just like you feel like you should be able to know and feel everything at the same time, and you kind of do, and it’s really awesome. Hey this recording went like a full fucking ten times longer than all the other ones. Good job, go me, I’m gonna stop it now.

The Most Important One (allegedly)

Holy fuck, okay. Hopefully I remember to rename this accordingly. Just, disregard all the other ones. This is what’s important. I was having a profound experience, or what I thought was one, whatever, doesn’t matter. And I missed you during it. That’s the sweetest thing that I can give you. Also I’ve been talking about this for fully a half hour now, fuck.

((SIDE NOTE: The 'profound experience' I am referring to here was essentially me watching a particularly beautiful sunset. I'm sure that sober it would have been quite spectacular, one of those really dramatic sunsets with sweeping clouds and varying shades of purple, orange, and magenta. I was experiencing some distinct time dilation, as I know logically a sunset only lasts a matter of minutes, but it felt like hours that I was staring at the sky in pure awe. I have never seen Aurora Borealis in person, but the way the clouds shimmered and waved reminded me of it. The entire time I was watching this I felt utter joy, the likes of which I cannot remember experiencing before.))

Recording 9

Ok, I’m letting myself off the hook for abandoning the document stuff every half hour thing. Mostly because I am documenting it, just in a different way. But I also just have to accept that if I want to enjoy myself I can’t force myself to write. It just…its….unpleasant. So, I do want to document whats happening, so that I can remember, and for I dunno, informational purposes I guess. I just have to do it in ways that feel natural, I guess.

Recording 10

What could be more natural than curled up in bed with an iPhone. I can’t imagine anything. It’s beautiful [laughs]

Self Awareness

This is cliche as fuck. I think I’m gonna title this one “self awareness” and…it’s not funny.

Recording 11

Oh I keep being super not scientific about this. Like the whole reason why I wanna document things…I just keep ignoring the things that I would want to write down, like what the actual visual effects are, and what I’m avoiding when I’m not writing. All the colors. Just, every color. Especially the like, uh, the acid ones. [laughs] derp. You know the neon, whatever. All that. Is just happening. But when I focus really hard, like on writing for example, cause like right now I’m just letting my eyes do whatever the fuck they want. Which is…I don’t even wanna know…what it’ll look like. Just, its all over the place. Ohhhh no….the creature is up. It’s fine. He just goes…..you know…nature is calling…I can assume [crashing noises] Fucking christ, some things never change. Ok. The colors. That’s what I’m avoiding. It sounds really nice. That’s the thing…all the physical sensations, all the visual sensations, are things that should not be pleasant but are. Thats the crazy thing. And the only thing that’s unpleasant is resisting it. Let the vibrations happen and it just feels really good. But like you try to hold still so you can sense them, and everything starts to go all like, putrid, and the colors, instead of being this like harmonious rainbow fractal awesomeness is like bruises and sickness and like vomit. It’s really gross and you want it to just not be happening anymore and it’s super easy to make it not be happening anymore. All you have to do is relax and stop resisting. Time is a little bit different, which is what I expected, which is why I set alarms for myself so that I could document properly. I’m just a step ahead of myself the whole time. Anyways, feels like it’s been like 3 hours and it’s been 3 minutes and that’s just the nature of this, I suppose. I’ll stop.

Recording 12

This is a….mad props to myself for my restraint and not sending these.

((SIDE NOTE: I wanted very desperately to share with my boyfriend, as I was feeling a profound amount of love for him, but it was the middle of the night and he had class in the morning, and in the back of my mind I was worried he would become upset and not understand if I told him that I was tripping.))

Recording 13

Oh god! Not sending them until some time that I will send them, and that I’ll just have arbitrarily decided is the OK time, so that I can continue to congratulate myself. Ohhhh I get it, this is fun, this is a fun game. I’m really sad that you’re not doing this game with me.

((This made complete sense to me at the time, and I do know what I was driving at. Basically I was becoming increasingly aware of myself, my attitudes towards myself, and the way I justify my behavior.

Basically I was becoming increasingly aware of myself, my attitudes towards myself, and the way I justify my behavior.

 I was pleased with the objective level of insight I was feeling.))

Recording 14

This is me being sad again at my failure to commit to writing in the notebook. I wanted to have that artifact. And now I’m not gonna have that artifact. I’m just gonna have like, part of one. That annoys me.

Recording 15

This is also important. I feel like I am just completely objectively evaluating everything. Like I…ff…I’m just going off an an—whoooo, I dunno what that’s gonna look like in the finished recording, but I just got like my….it’s 11 o clock alarm, in the middle of trying to say a sentence, and uh, yeah. I have no fucking idea what I was talking about. Probably something super important and you know about consciousness and all that bullshit—ooh spiders!

Recording 16

Yeah I keep thinking I’m seeing spiders like really creepy big daddy long leg ones, and they’re trying to cuddle me, [laughs] and its great. I want them to cuddle me.

Recording 17

I still don’t have fucking wifi on this phone right now. I’m using….data…in the middle of I’m laying in bed. Comfortably, I could fall asleep at any time, just happily with my phone trying to internet, as kids do….just not on wifi. [laughing] why does this enrage me so much?

I went to excruciating effort to rename this

D’s in the living room, and I don’t know who he’s talking to, and I really really wanna know, but I also really don’t wanna get up or care about anything other than how comfy I am.

Recording 18

I really like the liquid part. The part where I feel like I’m just…in liquid. That is very appealing. I just wish I was more warm. I’m gonna complain about being cold constantly. And the way my glasses feel on my head. No, those things aren’t worth complaining about actually, those things are fine.

Recording 19

I’m gonna take a break from making the recordings for a while. I realized that I’m safe from having to display them, cause, I’m in the other room of my laptop. And thats where I recorded the initial greeting, the introduction, so to speak. And uh, I just could not in good….good conscience, introduce something so poorly. There is already an introduction. I will leave it until I can comfortably access it. So…all of these recordings will follow that. I’m gonna just try to get warm now. I feel like this sounds really way more sad than it is. It should not sound sad cause I’m smiling and I’ve been smiling the whole time.

((Right after taking the first tab I recorded a video, about a minute long, which I intended to send to AJ in the morning along with all my other data collected.))

Love

[sigh] There’s always like 2 degrees of separation from my intention and the finished product, so this is going to be, I guess the finished product. AJ. Hello. I’m making it for you. I fucking love you. That’s all. That’s literally all. oh…

Recording 20

I don’t know if I made note of it earlier. I know that I remarked it aloud to myself, and the universe, and anyone who was listening…[sigh] no. Uh…[sigh] man, talking is just…not easy. Ok. [laughing] Oh my god. I’m actually fucking full on deleting this one. This….this uh, this marks a milestone. No. I won’t delete it, cause then I’ll never know that I said I was gonna delete it. But know this: I felt at some point that it needed to be deleted. Ok. I’m, I’m finished.

Recording 21

What I meant to say is that it’s just literally impossible to have a bad time doing this. Whoever said you could have a bad trip is fucking retarded, and a liar, its…not possible. Everything is fantastic.

((Famous last words anyone?))

Recording 22

With the exception of the fact that I am still really fucking cold and….just…be warmer!

Recording 23

I am going to enjoy listening to these later. This is a fact.

Recording 24

I was way more deeply affected by the jarring nature of the alarms than I thought…oh my god it’s really…I should not have made them. I have like….four more?!

Recording 25

All I wanted to say is that the physical effects are much stronger than anticipated.

And this....this was the final recording I made before shit got weird. The next section of this report is what I wrote up the following day after coming down and reflecting. I never finished the story intially because I grew frustrated with my inability to properly convey what I experienced. I do remember it relatively well, and will try to summarize it now, 6 months after the fact.

I have to say that my ultimate conclusion from the waking nightmare that was “my trip” was not surprising. Well, it was somewhat surprising in that I was incredibly impressed by the immense creative power of my brain. That is astonishing. What I mean is that if I was seeking an answer, the answer I got was that I understand myself and the things that are important to me.

The world around me became immensely beautiful. It filled me with such astounding joy. I wanted so badly to tell AJ that I love him, that I really love him from the deepest and truest part of me. I remember saying that I wanted him to be there, but I really didn’t, not physically. I wanted us to be one, and I have no other way of explaining that. Perhaps the resistance to telling him, and the anxiety underlying the keeping of my secret was part of what led my happy dream to becoming a nightmare. I believe it was a combination of things, though.

Once physical sensation became something completely foreign and alien, I started to inspect my body. I remember resisting thinking negative thoughts about it, but I couldn’t help it. I was advised to stay very hydrated (I understood why, later, because drinking water was fucking impossible) and my belly swelled painfully with the liquid inside it. I curled up under the covers because I was cold, and held myself. Because the nerve endings in my skin were not firing in a familiar manner, my body felt strange and different. When my fingertips ran over my buttocks and thighs, parts of my body that I know to be strong and lovely, the skin felt soft and melting, and my muscles fell away, atrophied and wilted.

I thought about looking at them to confirm that they were still there, but I was afraid of what I’d find. I was afraid I’d see myself for who I really am, ugly, withered, sagging. This thought became reality and I could see myself without looking and it was truly horrible. I knew that I was merely dreaming, and allowed even the bad thoughts to come, because I was curious. I fell into a black hole in the bed, my body parts swelling and swirling into a spiral/pretzel type object. I was inside and outside at the same time. I saw my skin stretched and puffy, just a mass of fatty limbs, a completely inhuman form. I relaxed and thought “of course this is how you see yourself. Don’t be afraid, you knew all along.”

When I relaxed more my body became pure color, shards of black, white, green, and blue, continually breaking and reforming into extremely intricate patterns. It was sort of beautiful, but in a different way from the happy colors from earlier in the evening. These shards were painful, and menacing in their speed. They did not ebb and flow, like the happy colors. They whipped and swirled like a storm.

At this point I still was not truly scared. I was an observer. I knew what I was seeing and feeling was the pure representation of the negative feelings I have about my physical self. It was interesting. At some point the swirling storm settled, I returned to my bed, and I knew that I needed to get up. Mostly because I needed to pee, but also I felt that I should change my environment. I felt that I had been lying there for a few days.

I remember turning over in bed, feeling the blanket slide over my skin, the mattress give way beneath me. It all felt so strange and different. There were holes everywhere, and everything that moved fluttered and skittered about. I had to move very slowly because sudden movement was guaranteed sensory overload. Pulling the blankets back was a true exercise in bravery. The gaps in sensation on my skin meant that the feeling of fabric dragging over flesh felt like the stabbing legs of giant insects walking over me. The erratic manner in which the blankets appeared to move added to this illusion. I felt extremely uncomfortable, and though I didn’t feel intensely bad, I felt that the time of happiness had ended.

I walked across the floor, my bare feet on the wood felt like they were made of a shifting sort of swiss cheese. It occasionally gave way and my foot fell into nothingness, like when you think you’ve descended the last step on a staircase, but there is really one more. Somehow I did not lose my balance because of this, but I was very hesitant to touch anything. My phone was still in my hand, and I felt it so firmly and heavily in my fingers, as if it were fused to me. I went into the living room to tell D, and my phone recordings, one final message before descending into hell. “The physical effects are much stronger than anticipated”.

I tried to record a new message. I wanted to say that I was starting to become afraid, that I was having a bad time, that I was unhappy. I couldn’t speak. I said “it won’t let me say bad things about it”. D asked what it was. In my head I answered “my trip”, but I couldn’t say it aloud. I dropped my phone onto the red leather chair, it sunk deeply into it, impossibly deeply, and became immersed in the leather, which more resembled a very thick paint. “I guess I’ll leave that there,” I thought to myself, somewhat amused.

When I turned my attention to the restroom, a terror so absolute gripped me, I was completely immobilized. At this point I realized that my trip had personified itself, and he did not want me to communicate anything negative. He also wanted me to do certain things, and did so by making anything else impossible. I stared at the door to the bathroom. Tears welled up in my eyes. “D,” I said, “I need you to help me.”

“Help you with what?”

“I need to go to the bathroom.”

“Ok, you need me to walk you there?”

“I mean I need to pee, but not in there, it won’t let me,” I laughed at the absurdity of this statement. I tried to will myself to walk to the bathroom but my body just would not move. Forcing it caused immense feelings of fear and anxiety. I took a step in a different direction, which was fine. Fascinating, I thought to myself. At that point I knew what my trip wanted me to do, but I still denied it. I started to laugh hysterically.

((SIDE NOTE: as a child I was extremely phobic of bathrooms because of some traumatic experiences at a very young age. Bathrooms and urination have been a strange fixation in many ways throughout my entire life for probably a whole host of weird psychological reasons that I wont get into here, just know that they exist and I am aware of them)).

“I can’t believe this,” I said. “I figured out the rules to this game a while ago. Lose yourself to the trip and everything is fine. Resist and face consequences.” I started to shake and bounce a lot because I had to pee so badly. I didn’t really want to do what I needed to do, but I couldn’t wait any longer. I asked D to come with me, and he accompanied me as I very easily walked to the front door.

When I was outside, I knew that it was cold, but I couldn’t really feel it. Everything was covered in ice. “That frost isn’t really there, right?” I asked. D merely told me that it was, indeed, quite cold. I squatted on the front porch and pissed, hard, over the stairs. The relief was overwhelming. I felt mildly ridiculous but at the same time part of me knew why I needed to do that. It felt very meaningful.

When I returned to inside, I grabbed my phone from the liquid chair, and laid on the couch. My body felt better, and I felt better. My skin was still falling away in pieces, and it was very hard to move without a lot of discomfort. My arm against the back of the couch felt like it was made of hornets nest. Pieces of reality fell away, leaving a honeycomb type pattern. A fly buzzed around my head. I felt repulsed yet fascinated. What is my brain doing? I wondered to myself.

My nightmare only became truly scary when D decided to go to the store. I was already somewhat uncomfortable with his presence, but I also did not want to be alone. He said he would be right back. Once alone I remembered the rules. Give in to the trip and he will take you for a ride. Don’t resist. I buried myself in blankets and closed my eyes to enter a world of Gigeresque horror. My world was a liquid gray and green, melting into black void. The black void took the shape of holes, which stretched the gray and green goo into thin lines between them. A vast network as far as my eyes could see, if it was my eyes that were seeing.

This network zoomed away from me and I realized I was looking closely at the eyes of an enormous insect, the size of a universe. It’s face was incredibly detailed, and slightly glowing, as if it were an image on an old computer screen. My skin was the insect, and the insect was me. Bright green lasers crisscrossed the void, forming patterns. I was so cold. I was under piles pf blankets but I could not feel them. “How can I warm my flesh when my flesh is not real?” I thought. I battled with succumbing to the feeling, the imagery, I wanted out. It had been years and D was still gone. Maybe he was not coming back. The silence of the house felt oppressive, rather than peaceful. I felt deep loneliness.

I turned and picked up my phone. It stretched and contorted in my hand. I struggled to read it, or even hold it. The lock screen displayed a notification. “AJ replayed your snap”. Suddenly struggling to swim back into reality, my mind raced for a memory. What had I sent? I don’t remember talking to him. I opened the app, the snap was replayed 19 minutes ago. What have I done? Let me apologize, I pleaded with my trip. Let me make it okay. I don’t want him to be scared, he can’t know that I am scared. I am strong and I am fine.

I tapped his name but nothing happened. The letters were just pushed out of the way. No! I thought, why won’t you let me? I fiddled with the other functions of my phone, which was now trapezoidal in shape and a foot long. The screen was all gray and would not display color. I returned to snapchat. It was frozen. My trip won’t let me talk to AJ. But maybe I had? My eyes bored into the text that read “19m ago”. Hadn’t minutes passed? What was happening?

D returned. His presence in the house was overwhelming. I silently sat with my anxiety. He laid on the floor eating chocolate. I didn’t want to look at him. I wanted him to leave, I wanted someone else there. Someone who was safer. I was not sure that the person who had come into the house was really D at all.

I checked my phone again. “AJ replayed your snap 26m ago”. So time was really passing, apparently. I tapped his name and nothing happened. I tapped another name and a chat window opened. I don’t want to talk to T, I thought, I don’t want to bother him. Returning to the home screen I tapped AJs name, and still nothing happened. His name swelled to a much larger size on the screen. I was frustrated. I knew I wasn’t going to send him anything, I just wanted my phone to work. My phone working means things are real, this was not real, and I became extremely afraid.

I suddenly realized that D had been chewing on food for an incredibly long time. I could see him, hunched over, out of the corner of my eye. Just constantly eating, so fast, so viciously. I was disgusted.

“I want M,” I said. “Help me call M.”

“Why would I help you?” D asked accusingly. I looked at him, and his face was that of a demon. His eyes hollow holes of glowing white. Black ink flowed from the sockets. I looked away. That’s not real. Fuck that can’t be real.

“please, I can’t make my phone work, call M for me.”

He took my phone and said “Is this person EXPECTING you to call them?”. I felt very personally attacked and wracked with guilt after this question.

I hesitantly said yes, even though that was not exactly true. I found M's contact page and he helped me put it on speaker. I listened to it ring for an incredible time, and then it went to voicemail.

“Call again,” I pleaded, feeling panic.

“Are you sure you’re not bothering them?” D asked, in a very mocking tone.

Yes…I thought…I am bothering her….but I need something to be real…and we called again. No answer.

I thought of who else I could call, but my phone was frozen on her contact info. My trip wants me to contact M, and no one else. But she was not there. I struggled to operate my phone. I got to my contacts list and scrolled through it. None of the names would work except for M's. Fuck.

I opened snapchat again. “AJ replayed your snap 34m ago”. Fuck.

I opened my contacts. Scrolling, scrolling, frozen, M. Open. Send text message. Fuck I can’t type. Go back. Scrolling. M. Go back. Scrolling. Frozen. This went on for almost an hour. Finally something clicked and I remembered how to make technology work. “Siri, tell M: ‘I need you.’” Message sent.

Snapchat. “AJ replayed your snap 34m ago”. No...almost an hour has gone by. At least half an hour, but not even a minute has passed?

This is a nightmare, I told myself, and I will wake up. I just have to watch it play out. Yes.

And what a nightmare it was. Here is where I am picking up the retelling 6 months later. Eventually D asked if I wanted him to leave. Maybe he picked up on the fact that I was extremely distrusting of him. I told him that was fine, that I was just going to ride this out by myself, maybe I'd get a hold of someone else. I was honestly terrified of being alone, but I was MORE scared with him there. I probably looked relatively fine, I'd just been bundled up on the couch not doing much but messing with my phone and internally panicking for quite a while.

At this point D had not ever done acid before, so I don't think he really knew how to take care of me at all, not to mention he was tripping on shrooms as well.

D had not ever done acid before, so I don't think he really knew how to take care of me at all, not to mention he was tripping on shrooms as well.

 When he left I felt a sense of relief but I also felt utterly incredibly alone and scared.

I knew that I was just on a drug, and that it would wear off and everything would be fine. I knew that everything I was thinking and feeling and fearing were my thoughts and maybe I had the power to turn it around. I came to the conclusion rather quickly that I lacked the fortitude to turn it around, and began to really feel pure dread.

I didn't want to talk to AJ. I don't even know what I was thinking about that. I kept trying to come up with some reason that he'd replayed a snapchat when I didn't think I'd sent him one for hours. I was very afraid that I had sent him something recently without remembering it, and that it would clue him in to the fact that I was tripping. Time was passing so slowly that even the idea of waiting out the trip seemed agonizing and impossible.

I wanted to cry. I ended up calling a lot of people, but no one answered, probably because it was 1am on a Tuesday. Finally I got a hold of someone, a fellow psychonaut, the friend who had sold me the drug. He was awake. He lived about an hour away, but I convinced him I was wigging out bad and needed company.

He agreed to come but a deep paranoia had gripped me. Everything he said carried a similar mocking tone, the one I perceived D as speaking to me in earlier. I realized that I must be imagining it, but this led me to wonder what else I was imagining. Maybe I was imagining this phone call. I got up from the couch. Moving around was still difficult but I was desperate to get a grip on reality. Still on the phone with my friend, trying to make casual conversation and seem like my normal self again, I paced around the house.

I insisted that my friend stay on the phone with me, consumed with the idea that if I hung up the phone, it would be revealed that it was all in my head, that I never called anyone, that I was alone and fucked up forever. I kept obsessively asking him where he was. Very familiar with the route between his town and mine, I checked his information against the time. I was suspicious that he was still at home, in his bed, just laughing at me.

He suggested that I drink some water. There was a glass sitting on the table that I had poured for myself hours ago. I sat down in front of it and stared at it the way a chess grandmaster stares at his chessboard, contemplating his next move. Drinking water seemed like a monumental and impossible task. For some reason the idea of drinking water frightened me. I reached out and touched the glass, but I never got farther than that, choosing to get up and walk away instead.

I still find it odd how I continued to be afraid of drinking the water. I kept going back and forth between determination to do 'normal' things, and exercising willpower, and wanting to just stop giving a fuck. But I was worried that I was brain damaged somehow, that I'd done something very wrong, that my relationship with AJ would be ruined and he would be devastated. A part of me was very aware that these were somewhat valid emotions and I couldn't help feeling them as intensely real because of the drug. After all, earlier in the evening I had experienced pure joy in a similar manner. This was of course, much less tolerable.

My friend had apparently gotten lost on the way, taken a wrong highway exit, and wanted to get off the phone so he could use his GPS. I was utterly convinced that this was some kind of trick. I still was not sure I hadn't dreamed up this entire phone conversation. I 'knew' that if I hung up I would wake up from some stupor having not called anyone at all, still alone, still psychotic. I begged with him, practically crying, to stay on the line.

Thankfully blessed with a very good sense of direction and knowledge of local geography, I was able to navigate him to the house. I had opened the front door at some point, to get some fresh air. The door opened to a semi closed off porch, so I couldn't really see the street from inside the house. He told me that he had arrived and was parking. I could hear the sound of an engine running outside, and then a car door opening and closing. A sense of relief like no other washed over me. The room seemed brighter, I was smiling.

'See you in a second,' I said, and hung up the phone.

Black.

Silent.

Grey clouds filled my vision, and everything looked like a typical haunted house. 'No! No! No!' I screamed inside my head. How could I be so stupid as to hang up the phone? But no, hanging up the phone did not suddenly cause him to blip out of existence. He was never there. My consciousness had given me hope, built up over the course of an hour (which felt like eternity on Acid Time), just to take it away. To punish me. I needed to be punished because I am a bad person who lies and and is lazy and hypocritical.

Some part of me still knew that everything that was happening was just being created by my own mind, and that I clearly had some fucking issues with self esteem I needed to sort out. I just needed to wait for the drug to wear off. This didn't really calm me much though, because minutes felt like hours, and I had, by my estimation, at least 4 more hours of this to endure completely alone.

I started to cry. And then...I heard something. Footsteps.

J had arrived after all. Only seconds had passed, my mind slowed them down to an eternity of agony. But there he was, his usual goofy self. We sat on the couch together and I tried to explain everything that had been happening. Quite poorly, I imagine. I still felt as if everything he said was dripping with sarcasm, derision, and disgust. This actually comforted me somewhat because I figured this was me projecting my insecurities in a very extreme way because of how the drug was making me feel emotions. I just kept telling myself he was talking normally and I was reading this tone into it.

What ended up saving me, because I was still paranoid that none of this was actually happening, but that I was making up my own personal hell because I felt like I deserved it, was watching a youtube video. J and I are both fans of this one movie review channel, where they do reviews that are about an hour long. One had just been released the day before and I watched it then. At least, I started watching it, but got distracted and did other things while it played in the background.

Seeing the familiar first 15 minutes of that video, followed by snippets of of the vaguely familiar and snippets of the unknown, was immensely reassuring to me. I felt that there was no way I could keep up hallucinating this entire video with such accuracy. It had to be real. J was really there, I was really fine, I wasn't eternally in my own personal hell.

When the sun came up about an hour and a half later, J decided to go home, because he had other obligations. I was coming down, and watching the sunrise was like being fucking reborn. Alone in the house as it filled with light, I settled into a chair and felt extremely satisfied with myself, like I had just exorcised a demon from me. I took a selfie. My hair was disheveled and my pupils were dilated. I sent it to my best friend with the caption 'Dragon Slayer'.

And I really felt that way. I reflected on everything that I had felt and thought over the past several hours, and it all made profound sense to me. I vowed to love myself a little more, doubt myself a little less, and to appreciate the people I care about. None of the paranoia or bad feelings persisted.

I vowed to love myself a little more, doubt myself a little less, and to appreciate the people I care about. None of the paranoia or bad feelings persisted.

 They were part of me that were always there, and I looked at them in a microscope for a while, and accepted them.

I ended up talking to my dad that morning. We have a very special bond, but we are not very affectionate. I went disc golfing with him, and it was honestly one of the most beautiful things ever. It was still early morning, everything was covered in dew. It being late spring there was maximum green and flowers everywhere. I was definitely still a little high at that point, feeling familiar feelings of contendedness and a strange good energy. After our game I told my dad I loved him for the first time in probably 20 years. I told him that he was a good father and I hoped he understood how much I appreciate him.

He seemed surprised but happy. I was too. It wasn't until around T+20h that I was confident all the effects of the drug had ended. I did continue to find myself in a somewhat different mindset for the next week or so, though. Very positive, reflective, and accepting.

((SIDE NOTE: When I told AJ about what I had done he FLIPPED HIS SHIT. We almost broke up over it. Apparently my anxieties were somewhat well-founded. He came around eventually and has since tripped himself, afterwards apologizing to me profusely for not trusting my judgement and for being so judgmental himself of a beautiful experience.))

((ADDITIONAL SIDE NOTE: I am assuming that my dosage was around 200ug, not exactly an advisable beginner dose, though not exactly a hero dose either. From my conversations with friends and reading various trip reports online I've found that by and large the level of visuals and dissociation I experienced were more on par with 350+ doses. Like I said in my opening, I don't use drugs of any sort very often. I was raised atheist but have always had a spiritual side to me from a very young age and would wander off into the woods by myself and meditate, often achieving a state of waking dream which I found very enjoyable.

I also suffer from some moderate mental illness (Bi-Polar Disorder, Body Dysmorphic Disorder), as well as a type of migraine known as kaleidoscopic vision. A lot of the visuals I saw in my trip were actually things I have seen before, completely sober, since long before I ever touched or heard of psychedelics.

It is my suspicion that because of the way my brain works, I was already very 'primed' for a psychedelic experience. 4 friends of mine have taken similar or higher doses from the same batch and got nowhere near the level I did.))

Exp Year: 2017	ExpID: 111357

Gender: Female

Age at time of experience: 29

Published: Aug 16, 2018	Views: 2,160

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LSD (2) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Guides / Sitters (39), Bad Trips (6), First Times (2), General (1)