DOSE:	900 mg	oral	Pharms - Lithium	(daily)
	3 hits	oral	LSD	(blotter / tab)

BODY WEIGHT:

240 lb

Never Mix Lithium and LSD

On this day I went to see Tool perform at the Gorge Amphitheater in Washington State. I had seen Tool at the Gorge at my first time experiencing the band. I still remember the details of that performance, however this experience was not one that would remain in my memory. This day was also the 8th year anniversary of my first psychedelic experience on LSD. I put this together after the fact, it wasn't intentional. I believe after this experience that I do not want to use psychedelic drugs again.

I have been taking 900 mg of lithium carbonate every day for four years , since 2013. I take it for bipolar disorder. The last time I used psychedelic drugs was in 2012 in Portland, OR. Prior to that, I've used mescaline, psilocybin, LSD, 2-CE, salvia, DXM, amphetamines, and other drugs which couldn't relate to the scope of this experience. In case you didn't know, never mix LSD and lithium. This combination induced a seizure. I became psychotic, delusional, violent. Since this trip I have suffered symptoms that literally describe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I will describe the effects as they progress and interject some commentary as indicated by (parentheses.)

I took three hits of blotter paper at 5:00. For a moment I hesitated: (first clue.) I was unaware about the effects of lithium and LSD. My state of mind has been fairly unstable up until this time, and for some reason I rationalize that a psychedelic experience would benefit me and help me process some of my life, as well as augment the visuals of the band which I've been waiting eagerly to see.

We walk over carrying blankets. I'm wearing this vivid blue shirt with salmon pink shorts. I have an Aquasox minor league ball cap. At some point I must have rationalized wearing something easy to see. (Just my luck.) As we walk and go to stand in line, I'm hit by the threshold effects of LSD. I feel the energy building in my body, sounds start to sound foggy, distant, colliding with each other around me. So much noise. It gets louder as time goes on. My vision appears that there are frames being dropped from the film as I look around at people. Things start to stutter. I feel a little anxious. I know I don't have a back-up plan. (It didn't occur to me to bring any benzodiazapines in case things got scary.) I'm able to maintain a normal posture while the line moves but it's becoming a more labored effort as the effects intensify. It's about an hour in at this point and I'm aware that the effects will become more powerful soon.

I ask my friend to play some music to help take my mind of the intensity building inside me. I decide to go get some merchandise from the stand. It's a short walk but I feel as if I'm going through some Alice in Wonderland style scenery. I get to the stand and ask for a poster. At this point I forget how to count money. I give her some but my quantitative reasoning skills are failing me and I can't tell how much I've given her. I just keep handing it to her until she stops. My self awareness is a becoming a challenge to maintain.

The security checkpoint was an act-as-normal-as-you-can balancing act past a lot of staff and uniformed security as well as police. I started feeling tingles of paranoia. I waited with my friend behind the line of cops watching the gate. I was dying of anticipation, the energy moving through my body was quite strong at this point. I become more animated, I gesticulate a lot. I started getting impatient and I damn near threw myself on the ground making this begging gesture because I wanted to go find a good spot on the lawn.

Our other friend gets through and my relief is very real. Every emotion I'm experiencing is intense and irrationally exuberant. I run to the part where the amphitheater opens up into the canyon and I'm just bursting with excitement. I jaunt down the hill and plant myself on a spot in the grass. I'm relieved that I can sit and have some time to myself. This is where things start to get weird. At this point I'm a little more than an hour into the trip. I don't last 30 more minutes until I'm on the ground convulsing with my eyes rolling back in my head.

I decide to perceive the things going on around me. There's a lot of music (coming from no apparent direction.) It's loud. The surrounding chatter is getting louder. I nod my head and shoulders with the beat as I look around. My self awareness starts to dwindle. The things I saw were of the psychedelic experience. It reminded me of Grateful Dead art. The land and the sky distorted itself and turned different colors. All of the people were moving. I started to feel the interconnectedness of the universe. I decide to do some energy work, I place my hands out and imagine that I'm moving energy between my palms. I move this around and will my entire being to glow with energy. I start to become lost in the psychedelic experience. I forget that I'm sitting around a lot of people. I'm imagining that the amphitheater itself was a giant bowl with all of these people sitting on the grass. I forget that other people are not perceiving this as I am.

It feels like I'm in tune with all of these people's thoughts. That I'm hearing everyone's thoughts, and the ones who I am particularly psychically connected to would cut through the dissonance. Everyone is connected to this telepathic force. I speak out into the void to those that could hear me. I am not aware that I start yelling. I notice that when I speak everyone around me stops talking, but my rational mind just isn't aware that I'm yelling and wildly gesticulating and that lots of people were looking at me. I would pop in at certain moments and become aware that I was doing these things, but after a point I couldn't stop. My friends have moved a few more yards away from me. (At certain points of the trip, I would ask my friends to talk to me, or just stay close to me when things were getting strong. I knew in case something bad happened that I needed to be close to them.) I felt scared. As I've been sitting on the hillside, I've developed some hellish tremors. My entire body is shaking, and that made the auditory hallucinations I was having even worse.

I got caught in a time loop. It sounded like I was hearing the same thing over and over, the same words. During this period I struggled with this concept of just letting go and feeling relief that I understood what it was all about. As soon as I realized this, I felt that there was something I didn't have that was necessary to get there. But then I would realize that I am that force, and I would feel happy. But as soon as that happened, the idea dissolved, and I struggled again. I don't know how long I kept up this thought pattern. The movements I went through repeatedly where that of Aha.... and confusion. As I made this movement over and over, there would be music that played but would change in time with whatever emotion I was feeling.

I knew that a lot of people were watching me. I knew that I was saying things that weren't normal. I was trying to act cool. I started imagining that there was a gang of police behind me asking everyone to move so they could easily surround me. I believed that someone might have just decided to call the cops on me because they knew I was high. I could see this event unfolding on the giant screen TV on the stage. I could see me, wearing the clothes, the exaggerated body language, with a spotlight over the top of my head. I was a spectacle. They were just waiting to see how long I would notice. My friends yell at me at this point. I don't know how long they had been yelling, but when my head shot in their direction I realized that I was surrounded by cops, they were warning me! I get up from my seat, turn around and start jumping up and down, yelling obscenities and telling the officers to get away from me, telling them to get out of here. There weren't any cops. I was just scaring people. I feel embarrassment and I sit down again. The spectacle was getting bigger. I was on TV. I was breaking news with the ticker tape rolling underneath. I was as big as Columbine. The trip was turning into a disaster. They were after me. My friends are yelling at me again, so I get up and go to where they are.

I'm going, going, going, gone. Goodbye, humanity. I feel that this runaway spectacle cannot be stopped. There wasn't any way for me to leave this experience. As I scrambled towards my friends I knew that I wasn't normal. I tell them to stay close. It's hard to form thoughts, and words are becoming difficult. I cannot use my phone. Technology becomes a distant concept. (Luckily I didn't break my phone or glasses or anything.) The effects of the drug seem to exponentiate. I knew in my rational mind that I was gone. I started confusing reality and the experience. I assumed that everyone was on acid. The overall theme that I felt transcends every psychedelic experience. I had reached the point of no return. I wasn't at the Gorge anymore. I wasn't on Earth, I wasn't even in the same dimension. My body was dissolving into this living network of primordial energy. All was one. There was one consciousness. Everyone that was there could feel it, and they were out of my minds as I was. The effects of the drug were deafening. It overshadowed everything. It's getting harder to see.

The last part of the trip I remember is everything in the physical realm dissolve away. I had become nothing. My ego had become nothing in this vast torrent of energy. I was experiencing life in all forms. Technology couldn't recreate the things I saw. It was Universal. I felt like I was in purgatory. Everything around me became clear. It was as if the curtain of real life had been pulled away and all I could see was every person in the Gorge wide eyed, gaping jaws, trembling bodies, being studied in some experiment by creatures that weren't of this world. I felt that I was staring at a blank concrete canvas, and that my whole life was a simulation. I didn't care about the show anymore, it wasn't even a concept. I just wanted to survive. I felt the sense of an overwhelmingly powerful truth. It was bigger than anything I have ever experienced. I believe that I have PTSD because I do not remember the most traumatic visual aspects. I shifted my position to laying down. The last thing I remember was a voice of concern as I went down.

I woke up violently. I sat up and was horrified by what I saw. People bleeding, other people yelling, people being rushed in. Where was I? Did I wake up in jail or is this hell? (I was in the infirmary. I was able to be located and carried by a stretcher to the Gorge Infirmary. I don't know what I did after the seizure, but if I know me, I was probably screaming for my life. I was most likely terrified, and in agony of the brutal truths that psychedelics are capable of presenting to you. All your flaws, all your nightmares put in front of your eyes and assaulting you until you are nothing. That is terror and to me it was really happening. I felt that life in other galaxies, forces out there that are infinitely more powerful than me.)

I couldn't make out reality, faces were distorted, I was terrified at the force I'd witnessed. Everything was disorienting. I go in and out of consciousness as I'm given dose after dose of Ativan. The nurses probably gave me Haldol, too. By the end of it I had been given at least 4 injections. I didn't know where I was, and I felt incriminated. This is a recurring theme. I thought I was in jail and refused to answer questions because my lawyer wasn't present. At one point I ripped out my IV. I punched my friend and screamed at the staff. Another time I woke up violently and stood up to find my wrist cuffed to the cot I was laying on. I got back down and a nurse immediately comes to give me another bolus of whatever drug she was injecting. I felt the prick on my skin and reacted violently, trying to get away from her. I didn't want to get hurt. I passed out again and woke up with an almost-empty IV bag. My friend was there but I must have passed out again because I remember waking up alone. The doctor asked if I felt better. I said yes. He said he didn't want to see me again. He was sincere... I made his job a living hell.

I mixed LSD and lithium and experienced a fugue state and had a seizure. I experienced extremely horrifying visual and auditory hallucinations. This was truly a psychotic episode. I completely lost my sense of self. I made a scene around lots of people. I gave myself PTSD and forever scarred the relationships between my two friends who missed out on over half the show that we went to see together. I don't ever want to do psychedelics again, I get the message. That trip just brought my worst thoughts to life, don't ever mix these drugs.

Exp Year: 2017	ExpID: 110780
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 27
Published: May 18, 2020	Views: 1,623
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LSD (2), Pharms - Lithium (91) : Difficult Experiences (5), Health Problems (27), Post Trip Problems (8), Combinations (3), Festival / Lg. Crowd (24)