DOSE:

1 hit

sublingual

LSD

(blotter / tab)

BODY WEIGHT:

117 lb

BACKGROUND:
In terms of my drug background, I had my first cigarette and drink at 15, started drinking fairly heavily from 17-19, tried weed at 17 (I am not a big marijuana smoker given my development of migraines around 19-20) including edibles once in my early twenties. There was one experience with weed in my late teens where my friend ended up hospitalized and the paramedics informed me that we likely had ingested weed traced with something, most likely angel dust. That was accidental, not purposeful, and was a horrible night altogether. But in other words, I’m not a heavy drug user. I also had a slight dependency on sleeping aids when I was 17, and also went through a pretty significant depressive period around that time. I would say that at my current age (24), I have (or had) a significant amount of anxiety from a very high-pressure job and work environment, as well as a somewhat toxic social circle. I’m currently in a different country studying abroad, and the opportunity came up to try LSD. I’ve always wanted to try acid (bucket list) but figured that I’d never have the opportunity in my lifetime, as it’s not a common drug back home.

SETTING:
I took the drug with one of my flatmates here, who also was trying it for the first time. We wildly underestimated what we were getting into. Our dealer had told us that it was very light, and for him, he could function and walk around while tripping for between 4-6 hours, with the peak lasting 1 or 2. For me, the total trip lasted 17 hours (dropped the tab at 4:15 p.m., took it out of my mouth at 4:45 p.m., slept at around 9 or 10 a.m.), while my flatmate tripped for about 15 before passing out. I cannot emphasize enough how much I did not know how my own body would react to a drug. We got VERY lucky being in a mostly positive environment when tripping. If we had made the decision to drop the tabs at a nightclub or party this could have been an entirely different experience. For most of the experience I was relatively comatose, and while my flatmate could talk and was somewhat better at walking around, we couldn’t have functioned outside of the contained environment we were in.

For me, there were three different stages of the drug: the come up, the peak, and the come down. The come up lasted maybe 3-4 hours, the peak was maybe about 2, and the come down was the rest of the trip. That being said, acid makes it hard to track time. For reference, I’m writing this 2 sleeps after my trip (my sleep cycle now is pretty much fucked), and my brain still feels somewhat fuzzy and after-glow-y. I can describe that part after this. Again, I cannot emphasize enough how I could not predict how my body would react to a hard drug like acid. My flatmate was completely fine and went out partying again last night, whereas I needed to stay in and pretty much decompress. I am also a fairly low-weight, shorter (5”4/5”5) female, and alcohol also hits me faster than other people. I suspect that if one knows that drugs like alcohol/weed hit quickly, one may also be strongly affected by acid.

Here’s a break-down of my experience:

COME UP:
We dropped the tabs expecting for this to be a MAX nine-hour experience, and so we took them in the late afternoon. We used tweezers to hold the LSD, and placed it underneath our tongues. We were sitting in our common area (thank god we had a space to chill in) with another friend who was watching over us as much as possible, although she would come in and out to attend classes – we definitely tried to have a non-judgmental and chill babysitter during this process.

I felt nothing when I took out the tab for about half an hour, and then I started to feel something come on over me, akin to a headache. My friend felt pretty nauseous, although I wasn’t affected in that way. It almost felt like my brain was experiencing waves of ‘buzzing’. The experience was INCREDIBLY SIMILAR to sleep paralysis or lucid dreaming.

The first thing that I noticed was that I started to not be able to stop laughing because the chairs were suddenly floating. It was ridiculous, because the rest of the room was still pretty much normal, but the chairs were floating. The drug hit me very quickly compared to my friend – at this point, she was still completely normal. I would say it was almost as if she was 2 hours behind everything that was happening to me.

Next thing I know, I’m barely able to move and I realize that holy fuck, this is a drug. Not a drug like alcohol or weed – LSD is a DRUG, and this is why our high school teachers warned us against them. I’m lying on the floor laughing hysterically and touching the carpet, because suddenly there are rainbows and refractory patterns EVERYWHERE and the carpet isn’t a carpet but a sea of little rainbow antenna dudes carrying me up in waves, and the room is spinning, and I can’t stand up. And the rest of the world is still ‘in place’ and normal, and I can see my two friends staring at me with concern asking if I’ve gone insane, but I’m just looking at the carpet with disbelief.

My body is wracked with hot sweats and then cold tremors, and my hands are shaking, and I start tripping balls. The little rainbow antenna dude lead my eyes towards a shadow under the chair which is now a raven sweeping over a giant field of rainbow crystal tiny buildings.

Time is at once years long and seconds short.

At some point our babysitter brings our dealer into the room, who is pretty much astounded at how much my friend and I are tripping (my friend started by this point). I can’t tell whether he is himself or another guy that I know, and I also can’t tell if he’s in the room. Auditory loops start happening. Nothing really makes sense in terms of time.

My friend and I also, at one point, when our babysitter had to go to class, grab lights in her room and drag ourselves from her room back to the common room linked together by the cord. Darkness and glowing lights are incredible. It’s like seeing a thousand tiny beautiful glass snowflakes. I’m intimately aware that I am on a drug. Outlines around objects turn into pulsing and spiraling rainbows. Everything is spinning. Gravity no longer works right.

At another point, I find myself standing in the hallway on a metal grate thousands of miles above a rainbow swirling universe with space-ships shooting rainbow coloured fire at me. The walls around are spinning and melting.

At even another point (time makes no sense), I am lying on the floor in the common room, on a raft surrounded by dead people (blankets). I’m not concerned by this, because I remember from other trips that I read years ago that it’s important to not be bothered or turn things into a dark trip. I’m actually having a great time on the raft.

The important thing to note about LSD, which I did not know before I took it, is that it is a HARD DRUG. Hallucinogens are NOT BULLSHIT, which is what I kind of expected before taking it. The best way to describe it is being drunk inside of a lucid dream. Keeping my shit together required immense focus. This is not a drug that should be used lightly.

PEAK:
I’m lying with my friend in the common room, and am completely incapable of walking. There’s a metallic taste in my mouth. The buzzing swelling over my body has gotten as extreme as I’ve ever experienced. Everything is a swirl of rainbows and patterns, and if my mind latches onto an idea it plasters it everywhere. The radiator spins off of the wall, revealing a world of rainbows behind it, while barely hanging on. The dirty basement window, which looks pretty ordinary normally, is suddenly an aquarium, and trees and plants in the darkness start glowing and shifting light. I keep thinking that it’s December because everywhere is ‘snowing’ beautiful rainbow colours. Alternately the trees start growing beautiful luminescent tentacle arms and then screaming faces and then flowers and birds, etc. It was gorgeous.

I stare up and everything is spinning and whirling. I am pretty sure I am dripping snot, sweat, and drooling at this point, lying on my back. The ceiling starts to come off more and more, and I’m intimately aware of my brain pushing it up. I keep hearing auditory loops – I think that something bad is happening to my other friend, so I keep hearing her yelling (almost in a parallelogram fashion – I can’t quite explain it) for our other friend, and I figure that they are in the hallway. (In reality, at this point, our babysitter was rollerblading outside the common room because she got bored since I was just staring at a wall and our other friend was with a fourth friend in a different corridor.) I’m playing the song LSD by Travis Scott for maybe five hours straight, and it’s the best song I’ve heard in my life (also the music video is the most accurate LSD experience that a sober person could understand). I can’t handle any type of sensory stimulation like movies or music videos, just quiet music in the background.

There’s a whirling dark hole above my head, and I don’t remember much of this part, but it was definitely the peak. I thought I was going to die. My heart beat was racing and time made no sense. I just remember talking myself through it – that this is a drug, that I am having a good trip, that I am fine. At different points I feel myself dripping down into a ‘bad trip’ but I ‘pull myself out’, for lack of a better word. When hallucinations become ‘scary’ or bad, I simply accept them as they are, don’t freak out, and move forward. I truly believe this thought pattern, at different points, saved my experience.

At one point I (or I hallucinate that I) am trying to kill myself, and put my hand over my face to try to stop the breathing with my rainbow coloured hand. I’m still not sure if I did this in reality or just in my trip. Something tells me to stop (maybe my sober mind), and I put my ‘hand’ down, and keep focusing on breathing and keeping myself alive.

When the ceiling comes off of the room, revealing a dark rainbow spinning galaxy around the edges, something screams ‘get out’ or ‘get back’ or ‘grab her down’ – I’m not quite sure. I shudder pretty much back into my own body and stop trying to do that. If this makes any sense, I’m pretty certain I was close to the max amount of LSD that my body could handle. At another point during the peak, I rise out of my body and look at the others in the room. I keep trying to get out of my body but that’s the furthest that I can get after that moment.

At various points I keep thinking that our babysitter is gone from the room. She keeps being replaced mentally by hallucinations that she’s a different human being. She tells me after that I kept poking my head out of the enclave and asking her if she was still there. Also at different points I was apparently talking without making any noise, which scared her. At this point she’s with me for most of the night, and LSD amplifies your emotions, so I’m super grateful towards her (although concerned that she isn’t focusing as much on our other friend, who is more explorative and running around). I have strong negative feelings associated with our fourth friend, who promised to babysit but in reality kind of ditches us. It gives me a lot of clarity, afterwards, that she (the fourth friend) isn’t mentally capable of being the type of person that I was hoping she would be as a friend.

COME DOWN:
My friend, our babysitter and the fourth friend come back into the room. I’m still completely tripping balls, and we have a conversation for about two hours that makes no sense. Our fourth friend is a pretty terrible babysitter and keeps laughing at my friend and I, which pisses me off immensely and is a horrible idea during a first trip. My friend who is tripping is also much more vocal than me and keeps trying to explain the experience, whereas I want to just be in a corner by myself and enjoy it. Again, different trips for different people. I’m getting super annoyed by how much she is talking and how much our fourth friend (and occasionally our babysitter, who is quieter but joins in on the laughter occasionally) is being selfish and just wants to know about the experience for herself, rather than letting us enjoy it.

Music is still incredible. I manage at one point to, once our fourth friend FINALLY leaves and my other friend shuts up, convince our babysitter to give me back my phone (she took it from me, which was a good idea at first), and I listen to the same ‘LSD’ song by Travis Scott on repeat for pretty much two or three hours while staring at the wall. For me at least, music is absolutely incredible. My brain gets stuck over and over on the song and it’s unbelievably awesome. By far, this was the best (and most fun) part of the experience for me. During the come up I also listened to Debussy, and it was AMAZING. The hallucinations begin to match the song, and I could delve deeper and deeper into the dream while mellowing out. At one point during the come down birds started chirping outside, and it was also absolutely gorgeous.

My friend (the tripping one) is still super vocal, and after a while I get tired of listening to the song. My babysitter was lying beside me because she was pretty much certain I was going to die curled up into a ball clutching my phone, drooling and staring at the wall, but our tripping friend comes back and sits down with us and continues to talk, as she’s more vocal than I am.

I recognize at this point (she’s younger than me) that this trip shouldn’t be about me just selfishly enjoying it, but also trying to talk through her issues. We get into a pretty deep conversation while still tripping about her own life, and I keep feeling pretty deep guilt about letting her do hard drugs with me when she’s younger (still an adult, but with less life experience). I mention this repeatedly to our babysitter. Our tripping friend starts crying and going through her own life experiences and what she needs to improve in her life, and at this point I feel like there is a rainbow of white light bathing underneath my body connecting me to her. It was pretty powerful. We talk about how we need to stop being kids just staring in a corner doing LSD, which is a pretty powerful metaphor for the rest of my life – it’s important to also turn away from the corner and bathe in the rest of the sober, real world. At one point while crying (I’m crying as well because the emotions are overwhelming and I’m also still tripping – she is bathed in gold, rainbows, and is alternately a cat or balding, which is completely normal in the trip) she turns to me and asks me “but ______, you always look out for me and help me analyze my problems, but who is looking out for you? What are your problems? Why are you doing this trip? I know you think that I am a younger version of you which is why you always worry for me, but who is worrying for you?” and I start pretty much bawling my face off for a good five minutes. I’m not as vocal as she is, but it was still a pretty deep conversation and one that I will take with me for hopefully years to come – especially the metaphor of a young boy staring into the corner instead of turning around and seeing the rest of the world.

The next (what feels like a hundred or so hours) is just spent with our babysitter eventually going to bed because the trip is largely over, but we’re still hyper stimulated, tripping, but exhausted. At various points I end up walking around the table for about two hours, trying to make myself tired enough to go to sleep. Eventually we drink milk, and that makes me feel nauseous and the trip finally starts to come down. By 6:45 a.m., my friend has a short nap and I grab my stuff and take a shower while still tripping. To explain, the floor is still moving, there are rainbows everywhere, I am hyper stimulated, but for the most part I am SOBER within the hallucinations, which hadn’t happened before. I return back to the room and my friend is gone to her room, so I knock on her door and check on her before going back to my room. I pass out sometime around 9 or 10 a.m.

CONCLUSION:
The first stage, for me, was tripping on certain visuals while being still aware of the rest of the world. The peak was physically a bit of a nightmare to get through, and I’m pretty certain that I took close to my maximum dose possible, as most of this trip was me comatose on the floor staring at the ceiling drooling and shaking, which I did not expect when I dropped it. The come down was brutally long. I wish I had on hand some sleeping pills so that I could fall asleep and get out of the trip faster than the 17 hours that it lasted.

The closest metaphor I can give to an understanding of what LSD is like is being drunk inside of a lucid dream. A lot of art makes a lot more sense to me now. Every Windows Movie Maker filter is one hundred percent real. At one point I thought I was inside a literal bubble. Peoples faces shift and change. I stared in the mirror and saw a spiral of rainbow light going around one of my pupils, while my face aged and became normal again. All of this happened not while I was LUCID, but I was INTIMATELY aware of the fact that I was ‘high’.

I took LSD because it was a bucket list item for me, and because I was curious if I could gain a spiritual understanding of the world or ‘see God’. I realized during the trip that I can’t hack my own brain (LSD is functionally ‘hacking’ the brain for pleasure and hallucinations) to understand the world – my brain only understands what I understand. However, LSD was an effective tool in sorting out a lot of emotional questions that I thought were complicated (but really weren’t). That being said, it also is EVIDENTLY a party drug. I don’t think I’ll have the opportunity again in my life to take it (which is probably a blessing), but if I did, I would take a quarter or half of a tab and go enjoy music or art. I would never recommend that anybody take LSD, though. This was a HARD drug. Weed and alcohol are a joke compared to acid. A complete, and utter joke. a friend exaggerating while drunk and pretending to go swimming while in the bathtub, or saying that they’re the prime minister of the world before sleeping in their own vomit? That is nothing, and practically a lie.

I don’t think I knew what I expected before taking LSD, but it blew away my expectations. It was a fantastic, and powerful, but at the same time, completely horrific experience. I look back on it with intense positivity but also way more fear than what I had expected, going into it. For me, this was more of a tool of self-reflection – my friend, on the other hand, went out partying again last night, while I’m still emotionally a bit depleted. I keep feeling alternately completely fine and beyond positive, and having moments of really wanting to take the drug again psychologically, and then going a bit down and thinking that I nearly killed myself (and how stupid it was to just put a tab in my mouth without really planning anything out). I’m still pretty faded, but I feel OVERALL pretty positive, just drained.

Takeaways:
I got really lucky in relying on my past knowledge when tripping, which I completely had forgotten that I should have done. I’d suggest being prepared before taking it, but I know that sometimes that isn’t possible. The first question one needs to ask oneself is why you are taking the drug, and what you want to get out of it. For me, the self-reflection has been the BEST part of the trip by far. I would not have had this much emotional benefit if I had not taken the drug. At the same time, it is INCREDIBLY powerful, and I did not know how my body would react. I'm an adult, I made an adult decision. But I would only do the drug if I one hundred percent wanted to do it. Anybody who recommends that another person take LSD is an idiot, and probably doesn’t care much about their mental state. Be careful of these assholes.

1. Having a babysitter. For me, I would have enjoyed the trip more if people had been less verbal and vocal, and simply chilled with me or beside me. I also wish that our babysitter was someone who took the drug before, but beggars can't be choosers. I didn't know what I wanted until I tripped myself. But it was very important to have a non-judgmental person with me who could at least get authorities if I started not breathing or freaking out. Someone to talk me down, at least. If I had had negative feelings towards my babysitter, those would just have been amplified during the trip and made things bad. I made sure to choose positively.

2. Recognizing that the effects of the drug on my dealer or on others could be very different on me. Guys who bought from the same dealer as us had literally no hallucinations or just mild visual patterns, while I was stuck in a 17 hour JOURNEY.

3. Being in a safe place. I would not trip around parents or judgmental people. I made sure there was somewhere I could go to if I started feeling overwhelmed, like a nook or cranny to lie in and think about things. I wouldn’t recommend being around sober people. Dropping acid and then walking around during the day for my first experience would have probably been a bad idea, because I didn't know how I would react to the drug.

4. If I had an underlying mental illness (not situational anxiety or depression, but a significant history of schizophrenia in my family, etc.), this would not be the drug for me. I would not take LSD if I was taking medicine for mental illnesses or suspected that I likely suffer from one. I think that the acid has really helped me reflect on my situation back home (as I’m currently abroad) and how I can fix my own situational problems, so it can be positive for minor spurts of sadness/anxiety, but I would not do it if I were dealing with something more significant. If I were running away from issues in my own life, I would not have been able to run away from the trip.

5. Keeping sleeping pills on hand or milk to abort the trip early: I’ve heard it’s a placebo, but I swear that milk worked well for my friend and I (better for me – she thinks it’s a placebo but I don’t). Once I hit the 13-14 hour mark, I was exhausted and wanted to get out, even if it was a positive experience. If I ever did the drug again (five or ten years in the future at a music festival at a lower dose), I’d definitely bring sleeping pills.

6. Asking myself why I'm taking the drug. Even now when I sit and reflect on the drug, I keep having weird moments of wanting to take more of it, and combine it with other mood-altering drugs for a party experience. I think this drug has a powerful capacity for spiritual and self-awareness purposes, but also can easily be abused by fucked-up kids looking to kill their minds. I’m personally very satisfied with the self-reflection, but I can feel the pull towards going deeper and deeper into the dream.

7. Taking the drug on a day when for at least 24-48 hours afterwards, I didn't have to do a ton of mental thinking, go back to work or have exams/tests in university/school. I was pretty wiped out after the trip (alternating headaches, exhaustion, feeling really great – the afterglow, and then feeling back to very tired), although my friend wasn’t.

Overall, I look back at this with a WOW, I can’t believe that I had the opportunity to do this awe-inspiring drug, and I’m so glad that I did. That being said, I am way more wary of drugs that I ever was in the past. I had no idea. LSD, as I said before, is a HARD drug. I took the steps away from mood-altering substances into a serious hallucinogen. I was hacking my brain. It is the one drug that I think is completely not over-hyped. What a once-in-a-lifetime experience, though. This trip report only reflects on brief moments during the trip itself - there are still moments of tripping that I remember but am too exhausted to type out. It's a long, difficult and arduous (but fun, beautiful and INCREDIBLE) JOURNEY. If you choose to do it, please be careful. Know yourself (love yourself) and what you want.

Exp Year: 2017	ExpID: 111305
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: 24
Published: Apr 29, 2018	Views: 2,447
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LSD (2) : Personal Preparation (45), Hangover / Days After (46), Guides / Sitters (39), First Times (2), Small Group (2-9) (17)