DOSE:

3 hits

oral

LSD

(blotter / tab)

BODY WEIGHT:

140 lb

It feels necessary to write this, given that I intend to trip again tonight and I have yet to put the story all in one place without omissions so I can process it. Just thinking of clearly of it still makes my heart pound and my stomach clench and heave with nausea.

I was at a music festival in the summer, and on Saturday night, my boyfriend and I decided to do ~3 tabs of acid. Our friends did one or two a piece, and his younger brother did half a tab. We all dosed, and wandered down to the creek on the campgrounds for a bit to get into the water while we awaited the come up.

I was excited. I had grown for myself a perception of hallucinogens as a sort of medicine for my continually fraught mental health. Indeed, they had helped me in many cases, giving me more hope for life and helping me deal with trauma. This was my first music festival, and due to a sort of culture shock and the sheer difficulty of continually fulfilling my bodily needs (eating, drinking, urinating, defecating and sleeping were all hindered by camping in a place where the porta-potties are never cleaned and the woods are so filled with rosebushes that you can't hide to go do your business), I had not been enjoying myself overmuch. My boyfriend is really into music festivals, and I really, really, wanted to understand. So I hoped that being on acid would help: it was what everyone else was doing, and had made my life more enjoyable in the past.

So, dipping under the water with one of my friends, D, I meditated on this, on the long night that was ahead of me and how it would undoubtedly bleed into the morning. I was excited and very trusting in the idea that this would 'fix' me.

We went back to the camp as the come-up began. I got dressed and we all sat there mostly in silence as we waited it out. It was more intense than usual: I had only ever done two tabs before, but I'd expected it to be worse. There was that familiar dizziness, the turbulence in my stomach, the constriction of my breath, the difficulty of breathing, the pounding of my heart.

After about an hour of this, we all got ready to go. I had a little purse which I packed with rolls of extra toilet paper in one pocket, and a rain parka and these stickers I'd been giving out to people for fun. I had a water bottle, a cute outfit and a pretty little fan to keep myself cool while I danced. I was proud of my own preparedness, feeling like I was so competent and ready to handle what was coming. With all the preparations made, we went off to see the music. The day was ending, so the sky was beautifully growing darker. A haze hung over the stage and crowd, and there was something very majestic about it. I don't really know how I went from not tripping much to tripping as much as I was. In retrospect, it's as if I was catapulted into that state abruptly. There's lots of gaps in memory like this.

The short description is: I was tripping very hard, and out of touch with reality, but I was happy about it.

Visual-wise: I could see everything clearly, just as it was, but everything seemed infinitely beautiful and curious. I'd see detailed rainbow patterns overlaid on certain things. I especially remember looking at my boyfriend's glasses and seeing the word 'TWERK' in rainbow flipped and tiled all over the glass. When I looked at people, their faces seemed as they always do when I'm on acid: outlined with light and grotesquely, beautifully idiosyncratic. I especially remembered looking at my friend, L, and seeing that she was sort of rat-like in a wonderful way, with her wide dark eyes and the way her teeth showed between her parted lips.

This was really the most mild effect, however. The next thing to address was my state of euphoria. The music was great, the band was fantastic, and the lightshow was beautiful. I was so happy to be at this music festival, I loved it more than anything. I loved my boyfriend so much for taking me there, I loved him for opening my world up to this new thing. I reflected on his dreams of hosting a music festival and was overjoyed to be a part of that, to create something with him. I danced with an incredible vigour, feeling beautiful in my get up, feeling cool because I felt suited to the world of music festivals all of a sudden, fanning myself ad part of my dance.

The music touched me, and I became things. I would become the muddy pathway from the campsite to the main stage: I would see an image of it, not know what I saw, and somehow this was a feeling in my body, as if it was a part of me, or I was that vision. The music drenched me in shimmering rainbow liquid, which I called to myself and to my boyfriend (without any explanation) 'liquid love.' Most memorable was this feeling of my body, but particularly my arms, becoming cold, smooth glass and spiralling away. Eyes closed or not, that feeling was an image: the glass was clear with purple and white in it, not unlike a cat's-eye marble, and it would morph into spiralling, twining shapes. This was incredibly pleasant-feeling.

And what did all this make me do?

My boyfriend and I danced and made out fervently. I stared him in the face, in the peculiar light, and told him I loved him. Feeling more sane than I had in my entire life, I told him that I felt as if I was being reborn, that I had needed this, that this was healing experience, that I had great hopes for the future. But why was I being reborn, why did I need healing? I had been traumatised once, by a man whose name I remembered, and though I could not remember what he had done (namely, that he had raped me), I forgave him. I thought about the troubles I had with various people in my life – this distance between me and my parents, the odd situation with my ex, the strained living situation with my roommate – and felt that it was all healed, that I could love them infinitely. I thought with a sort of euphoric solemnity of telling my parents of this most pivotal experience in my life: of going to the music festival, of doing acid and of being changed forever. My struggle with depression was surely over, and finally I'd be able to do the sorts of things I wanted to do with my life, because surely my failures of motivation would be over too.

I danced with my boyfriend and felt my body becoming all those peculiar things. I felt that we were wet and sweaty, and there was something intensely erotic and beautiful about this element of human grossness, about my soaking underwear. It felt as if he and I were making love right there, but without actually doing it, and it seemed to me that everyone else was doing roughly the same thing. How could they not at such a euphoric concert? How could they not, when, at that moment, I felt ready to live, have children and die with him all at once, at any moment. Yes, I thought, I could die now and it would be fine.

'Thoughts' streamed through my head, and I told him that I was thinking of them, even they were so vague and they meant nothing. I 'thought' of Alcibiades and of Harry Potter in particular, but I can't recall now what these thoughts were about, other than that I at times felt like I was them.

It was is if my mind had been turned into a soup. Things cropped up randomly, and as time went on, it became increasingly hard to remember why all this was happening. I had to keep repeating my boyfriend's name, then mine, as I pointed to him and myself. My birthday was on April 12th, I insisted, because the colour of that date seemed somehow right to me (I have a synesthetic way of thinking even while sober: April 12th is a sort of dull pink colour that was attractive at the time). I had to remind myself again I was on three hits of acid, that I went to college, that I was at a music festival though I couldn't remember how I had really gotten there. It didn't worry me: I'd figure it out later.

There were things that happened that I find hard to confess even to myself. Namely, that I bounced away from my boyfriend and, with utter ease, slipped into the arms of my friend, L, and began to kiss her. It felt utterly right and logical, but at the same time I was hardly aware of what I was doing because those kisses made me morph into shimmering rainbow shapes. And I hate to think of it, but I can remember, in a mortifying flash, falling into his brother's arms too, and kissing him as if it was a sensible, a natural thing to do. I wasn't really in control of this, because I wasn't thinking about what I was doing. Even as it was happening, I think, I comprehended it as being a sort of incoherent dream. One moment I was kissing him, then someone else, then someone else, and their faces were so beautiful.

There was a set change in there somewhere, and I remember talking about how much I liked this new band that we hadn't heard of with a sort of bravado. I felt as if I was witnessing some great change in the world, as if this was the next great step in the development of music and the course of human history. It all felt utterly monumental, and it felt as if I was a part of it and I would be a part of its future.

I don't really know why we left after the next band. It just seemed that all of a sudden we were moving away from the stage and I was clutching my boyfriend's brother's canteen, opening it, trying to drink from it and finding it empty. We needed water. It was very important. I kept saying that I didn't know how we'd gotten here, because it seemed to me that we had all abruptly come into existence in this place and we had to figure out why for ourselves. Everything happened in a sort of stuttering, disconnected way, like the slight flashing of an old film. I felt that I was dreaming, and so I behaved as if I was dreaming, as if the act of figuring out what was happening and taking care of the sudden pressing of my physical needs was a sort of dream-game.

But oh, those physical needs. When I didn't think I was dreaming, I thought I was about to die. I flickered between the two for a while as we wandered around, and was not able to put together those two modes of thought until later. And those physical needs – to eat, to drink, to defecate, to urinate, to vomit – were so pressing that I became convinced that if they were not addressed, I'd die. Everyone else was on the edge of death too.

In utter confusion, we wandered around, while I started freaking out, explaining again and again 'I need to shit, I need to boot. I'm trying to not die, I'm scared of dying,' and 'As far as I can tell, we just appeared here. I don't know who I am and how I got here but I want to die.' All the while, my boyfriend was trying to talk to me about something, and he was clearly going through some emotional turmoil, but I could not understand it and I didn't care to deal with it: couldn't he see that I was about to die?

There was, for a while, a gap in my memory about how I wound up in the port-a-potty. It took me a long while to recall that there was a link between one state and the other, which involved my boyfriend trying to hold open the door to desperately say something to me, and me expressing somehow that he needed to go away. The door closed, and I was in a different place.

So, it felt that I was abruptly in this tiny room. I had just peed, I couldn't defecate because I was constipated, and I needed the toilet paper I'd stowed in my bag. Not remembering where they were, I pulled out the parka and stickers from the main pocket. I had no idea what they were, and I fumbled with them continually, occasionally remembering that I was about to die and saying to myself, 'COME ON, COME ON, YOU DON'T WANT TO DIE IN HERE' and crying because I didn't want to die this way. I would become distracted by something, I think by the visuals coursing through the darkness, through the door, by the pounding of the music, and then I would begin fumbling and crying and chastising myself again. I was so, so scared.

Then the vomit came, and instinctually I leaned over to the side and vomited into the little sink thing. I have had a fear of vomit for most of my life, and there was something incredibly traumatising about this, even though every time I do vomit, my mind deals with it pragmatically. So, I was occupied with the task of getting it out, of bringing on the gagging with the force of my mind. It felt that it had to be done, but it was so painful, and I was so scared at the same time that now, remembering it so clearly for the first time since it happened, I am crying.

I was such a pathetic and wretched creature, from the moment I began to lose myself in joy. It fills me with shame and revulsion and severe pity, because I was so unlike myself that it felt like I experienced it as another person, and I have an easier time feeling pity for another person than myself. When remembering this incident in passing, I shudder and feel sorry for her, the girl trapped in a filthy porta-potty with no assurance that her life wasn't about to end at any moment, that girl who stumbled out with her wet underwear half on, her crotch un-wiped, in a horrible, disgusting state that she could do nothing to correct.

Somehow I got out, but I don't remember it. I really don't remember a lot of what happened next, or whether some of these details came before. I remember my boyfriend saying 'We don't think you're going to have a seizure but we don't know what's wrong with you.' I remember wanting it to just end, thinking that I could just wake up in a hospital, in white sheets just as Frodo wakes up in Rivendell at the end of the Lord of the Rings. I wanted someone to take care of me. I was Harry Potter, I was Frodo, I was someone else. Somehow we got back to the camp, apparently, but I didn't recognise it because the person there was someone I didn't recognise (funnily enough, someone I did know in my right mind, and the very person who had sold us this acid). My boyfriend and my friend, N, were holding my hands on either side, while I panicked, and said things like 'I'm freaking out, man!' with a sort of horribly ironic self-awareness as to how stereotypical and troublesome I'd become.

I remember winding up in front of the med tent and simply wailing in response to whatever was being asked of me. Then my next memory is of 'waking up' on a cot in the med tent. My boyfriend was there, L was there, sometimes other people were there. I felt that I was on my deathbed, and asked to know if anyone was doing as badly as me, assuming that all my friends too were on the edge of death. I deduced that I was doing the worst, and felt justified in having this congregation of people by my side. I felt like Liza from War and Peace, which I had been reading. I thought of Harry Potter. I thought of Frodo.

I was alternately hot and cold, covering myself up with a towel and then throwing it off. I shivered violently, my teeth chattering, I felt nauseated and tried to vomit into some strange bag-like thing that was offered me, but I don't remember if I succeeded. It was the end, I thought. I would die, and my boyfriend would be without me. How could he live with it? If he died, I would have to die too, because I could not live without it. I'd had a nice run, I thought. That time I'd been listening to the music and getting reborn and transformed had been a good time, and now it was about to be over.

People were trying to help me. Someone wanted to give me some essential oil, but I cursed at them and fought them off, because they were interfering with my ability to focus on staying alive. Then a man came up to me and asked me how I was doing. I didn't recognise him, and I think I told him to fuck off. He was sort of amused, and said something about having just renewed his wedding vows, and I groaned that I didn't care. He, too, was interfering with the incredibly difficult task of staying alive.

I didn't find out until later that he was the one responsible for hosting the music festival.

Slowly I began to comprehend that I wasn't going to die. This happened because I began to have those same feelings again: I was the muddy pathway, or the cot I laid upon was the muddy pathway, and my limbs became glass and rolled and spiralled outwards. It was that last feeling that meant that I wasn't going to die: things were returning to 'normal.'

Still, I felt that I had to die a little to be able to have the energy to get back to camp, which was what the others wanted to do. I asked if it was okay if I 'let go' a little, and told them to pull me back if I went to far. They said it was okay, and I did, and I closed my eyes and 'let go', though I don't know what this was like.

Somehow or another, I was brought back onto my feet, and as I left the med-tent, I was suddenly aware that I had never been in danger of dying . I chattered to N as we headed back, describing the trip in the same retrospective feeling with which one might approach any regular trip, explaining the feeling of turning into glass and whatnot.

We got back to the camp, and it was just my boyfriend and me. That was when the full impact of what had happened began to settle on me. The camping light cast a blue glow over everything. I was hungry, I was sore, I was exhausted and wet and just wanted to sleep. I began to put together the last few hours slowly, and what I remembered horrified me. I was still tripping, still having visuals but what was I to do? Going back to the music was out of the question. My boyfriend and I talked about things, and made some food to eat, but the process of eating was incredibly unpleasant and difficult because my stomach was tight. It felt like vomiting in reverse.

I just wanted to sleep. We talked about what had happened, and I said that I just wanted it to be over because I felt like a 'wet rag.' He cared for me, after everything, and we spent the last hours of the night in various positions of trying to sleep. I tried listening to audiobooks, but everything in them seemed inane. My body was rigid; it felt as if my muscles were made of tightly coiled steel. Lying down, being wrapped up in blankets, could not be comfortable, because my skin would erupt with feelings and elaborate visuals whenever I closed my eyes. The feeling on my skin when this happened was always cold, but processed into visuals. When my eyes were open, I'd see patterns in most surfaces. Then, to make things worse, there was this set-up nearby that kept doing fireballs. The bursts of flame would scare the shit out of us, making us jump, destroying any chance of serenity.

We tried smoking to calm down. I remember lying there, looking at his eyes, which were owl-like from the dilation of his pupils, and loving him and all his kindness, but being also horribly aware of how I was acting. It seemed that what I was doing – speaking in a low murmur in the disconsolate but adorable way I did, placing the pipe between us, touching him and loving him – was a sort of affected character. My mind had leapt to the conclusion that this was the part where we deepened our relationship, and I was acting accordingly. But it was somehow impossible to not act like this odd little character.

What I wound up doing was lying there observing all the things that the acid was doing to my body, aware that this would continue for many hours, that I was unlikely to sleep, and that I would have to suffer through it. It felt like a punishment, and one that I probably deserved given that I'd been the one to do this to myself in the first place.

I noticed the tension in my body, which, as I was trying to fall asleep, caused me to unconsciously curl up. This made my stomach hurt, and I would become nauseated, and I would have to wake up a little to uncurl so I didn't vomit. This seemed to occur as I followed some line of thought to become stuck on it, worrying it like a sore in my mouth, causing myself anxiety. This happened continually, especially as I began to think about vomit. I really didn't help that someone decided to stumble into the trees behind our tent and vomit. The sound haunted me.

When the fireball place nearby turned up the music really loud in the wee hours of the morning, I observed the music touching and affecting my body, making it explode into unwanted visuals. I observed the energy, manifesting as complex patterns, pulsing in my legs, my hips, my arms, telling me to go, go, go, to do something. I observed the way I thought: how I would come to some conclusion, and only then would I go through some line of thought to justify it as true. These conclusions and the logic made to support them would seem right, but then I would just as easily to be able to refute them.

I questioned the sorts of epiphanies I'd had on acid before. Had I not just gone down some line of thought and decide 'do this in the future' or 'don't do this in the future,' thinking that it would help? Had I more often than not just told myself to not do something? This had never really helped me with anything, I realised. Acid had simply manufactured a state of happiness for me that felt profound; it convinced me that things would be better. But I wasn't changed. It was all just hype.

The loud music continued as dawn came up. My boyfriend and I mostly just looked at each other. I needed to pee, and we went up to the porta-potties together. My legs felt stiff and every step hurt me to my bones. I couldn't breathe through my nose because my airways felt so rigidly constricted by this drug. As we were walking up, with the early morning light and the silence away from that loud music, I felt a sort of beautiful sadness about it all, and this continued for quite a while, but was continually mingled with shame and guilt. As we were walking back, someone walked by and said something: I could hear their voice adopting that strange, metallic, zig-zagging sound that voices get when I'm on acid. It exploded with visuals. It was so stupid: why couldn't the acid stop trying to hype every little thing I came into contact with? I also noticed that I was yawning and felt ready to fall asleep. But once we came close to the music again, there was no falling asleep again because there was just too much happening.

Tried to sleep some more. Failed. The music stopped, and I still couldn't sleep. I sat up with some others and tried to get stoned to make things chill out a little but it took a lot of smoking to accomplish much of anything. I watched how my friends interacted while still under the influence of acid, how they made the strangest jokes that were based off absurd generalisations of each other's personality, how one became the performer, fooling around with making things on the camp stove and pumping out small punchlines and plotlines for some end that felt unknowable and sinister to me.

At some point I wanted to go back to the water, so I got into my swimsuit and made moves in that direction. The others came with me and floated on a huge inner tube thingy while I picked around the rocky island in the middle of the creek, trying to balance rocks on top of each other (as the festival-goers were wont to do – there were lots of these). This was mildly soothing, but only a little. I was still tripping a little, and continued to be tripping a little for most of the day. I was solemn, quiet, and a little ashamed to be around anyone but my boyfriend. I was constipated because my body was still so tense, I could hardly eat. I thought and thought about myself, what the previous night said about me. I only had a moment's peace when, later in the day, I went up the creek and listened to War and Peace on my iPod, ate an apple, managed to shit in the tall grass by the bank, stacked rocks and occasionally cried. I smoked enough that I felt tired, wandered back to camp, and slept through the biggest rainstorm of that weekend. I slept through the night, and only then could the healing process really begin.

It's been about two months since this event as I write this. For about a month afterwards I struggled with depression and self-loathing, and only realised how bad it was on a mild shrooms trip at a beach. It was interesting because I felt, in a milder, more sensible way, those feelings I'd had when the trip had been good. I was floating in the water with my boyfriend, and I felt, just as I had then, how good it was that we were together, how prepared I was to spend years with him, to watch him grow and to grow beside him. On that day I felt more human than I had for all the preceding weeks: I finally didn't hate myself for what had happened (which continued though I decided early on that it was not my fault that I was out of mind, except that I had taken too much acid without a good attitude towards it), and I felt freed from it.

Of course, it was more difficult than that, and sometimes the weight of this event, which I honestly consider to be a traumatising one, comes upon me very heavily, as it did today . That is why I needed to write about it and to put it somewhere so that it would be read. I used to have vivid recollections of it all the time, just flashes of unpleasant memory, which is how my mind normally approaches unsettling events in my life.

What is remarkable is the actual flashbacks I have had. When I listened to Pink Floyd's Echoes some weeks later, I could feel the music touching me in that same sensual way even though I was sober. This is not an unpleasant experience, but only mildly upsetting because of all the associations I have with it. The other night, I was stoned and some friends were talking of hallucinogens, and I felt my heart pounding, I felt a rising nausea in my body and I again experienced that peculiar feeling of my body becoming purple-clear-and-white glass and spiralling away. It was incredibly unpleasant, and I wanted them to talk about something else. That flashback put me in an emotional funk for the next day or so.

I want to reconcile with this substance. After much thought and a little playing around with other substances, I think there is something to it. I've diminished my feeling of mysticism about drugs and am recognising that, at times, they should just be for fun. No drug, prescribed or no, is going to reliably help you with your problems. It may help, it may be fun but unhelpful, or it might just really mess you up.

But I'm sort of glad the bad trip happened. It's a thematically dense event which has given me much material to pick apart as I search to understand myself better. It's forced me to approach my flaws and to talk about them with my boyfriend and other people, something I've never been able to do before. It's inspired my writing, because now I know something more that the human mind can do. It's led to a bunch of small changes that have made my life more pleasant, and, while I doubt I can ever be entirely clean of it, I have started to accept it into my life. It happened, it can't be changed, and the only question is what I do with it now.

Exp Year: 2014	ExpID: 106933
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: 22
Published: Mar 6, 2026	Views: Not Supported
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LSD (2) : Post Trip Problems (8), Bad Trips (6), Festival / Lg. Crowd (24)