DOSE:

1 hit

oral

LSD

(blotter / tab)

BODY WEIGHT:

115 lb

It’s the last day of our honeymoon. We’d scrambled to find a camping spot for our acid trip, and the place we found is perfect and serene. It’s part of a larger, established campground, which we’re not used to since we usually stay off of logging roads. But it’s a Tuesday night, it’s fairly secluded, and we don’t have to worry about bears or wild animals while we’re tripping.

Our campsite is right on the edge of a lake, and Ryan has set our tent and hammock up off to the side, nestled in the fir and aspen trees. There’s a mountain on the other side of the water. It’s a large enough lake that there are waves lapping up against our shore.

We each take one tab at 5:30pm, as soon as I get back from paying for the campsite. It’s our first time tripping with just us alone, and the third altogether. We’ve had a short honeymoon, just a road trip down to the Redwoods and Crater Lake. It’s been a long summer with the preparations for our wedding. Small as it was, only forty-five people, it was quite an ordeal. Over the last few days, I’ve loved our time to relax together, and now I’m totally ready to explore acid with just us.

After we eat our tabs, we eat a small dinner, salad and chicken hot dogs. We lay in our hammock for a little bit, but one of the trees is too flimsy and we’re basically on the ground. Aspen leaves are sprinkling down on us as we adjust and try to get comfortable.

I start to feel the effects of the acid in the hammock: my body feels light and airy, and the colors are becoming more vibrant. Ryan’s feeling it, too, and we decide to sit and watch the sun set over the water. There are various logs up against the shore, so we sit on one as the water laps up against rocks. Over the next hour or two, we watch the sun go down behind the mountain. As the light fades, everything takes on a purple hue. We see lights across the water twinkling at us. Bats come out and catch bugs on the water, swooping back and forth in front of us. Stars appear in the dark sky. Ryan and I talk about how beautiful the earth is and how much we can hear and see. Once it gets dark enough, I lay on one of the logs and stare up at the stars.

It starts to get cold though, and we retreat to our tent about 8:30pm. We try to get comfortable, knowing we’ll be here for a while. Finding our beanies, our extra layers, all the blankets we brought. On acid, I’m constantly reminded of how much stuff I have. It seems any time I’m on acid, I get caught up looking for something. I have no memory of where I put it last, and I have to sort through all the unnecessary clothes and food and shoes I’ve accumulated.

All bundled up, we sit around, feeling the effects of the acid and talking about it. We talk about our honeymoon so far. I feel connected to everything around us. The critters we hear outside, Ryan, the trees, the wind. We consider taking a walk, but we refrain, too cold and afraid of running into people.

It’s maybe 10:00pm. It’s very dark in the tent, but the visuals from the acid are making everything rainbow. I don’t know what triggers it, but I leave my body and enter some kind of void. I feel like I’m in the space between light and dark. I can finally breathe, and I understand that I’m not Emily anymore, I’ve become something else. This void feels like space because everything is so dark, but I’m surrounded by twinkling lights. It all makes sense, and it’s very familiar.

“What do you call it?” I ask, wondering how to describe what I’m feeling.

Ryan says language can’t describe it. I’m struggling with what I’m experiencing and I want to talk about it, but my words are a jumble and Ryan is a jumble, too. Everything he says, I question. I question his memories (I have none at this point), I question how we got here, I question what any of this is. When he uses my name, I bristle. I call him Ryan, but at one point ask, “Am I Ryan?”

He feels like he made it weird by mentioning his dad, but I have no idea who that even is. He reaches for me, but I move away. A few minutes later when I reach for him, he moves away. I feel like we’re in a struggle where we’re never going to come together. Like the sun and the moon, always chasing each other. We bounce from one corner of the tent to the next.

I think we’ll always be in this tent, trying to meet in the middle. We aren’t Ryan and Emily anymore; we’re also my sisters and my brother and all the other people we’ve tripped with before, and also some kind of gods. I feel like we’ve been here before. I keep telling him that: “We’ve been here before. Haven’t we been here before?”

Ryan says something about Diamond Lake and camping, but I don’t understand that, either.

I somehow end up sitting on top of him. I do something that makes him say, “Ow!” and I come back to my body, just a little bit. I fall to the side and Ryan holds me. He is talking about God and love and warmth and light. I listen and try to talk. I feel like some of the wildness has left me, but I’m still not sure what this body is or who Emily is. We talk about the spirit and the soul and I try to describe the feeling of being outside of the physical world, but then I get thirsty or cold or have to pee. I keep saying, “But I have this body, I have to keep coming back to this body.” I am full of disdain for it, the thing that is keeping me from the void from before, where I felt like I belonged.

Ryan, though, is grounding me with words that actually make sense. “You just have to keep yourself warm and eat and we have to remember God and love and family. And we’re going to go home and start a new life and make a new family together.”

I ease back into reality, slowly. I let him talk about us and the mythological meaning of marriage. I feel like our souls have known each other before, and our wedding was a link in our eternal story together. I start to understand that I’m an eternal being, just like Ryan. I have always been, I am, and I will always be, and in this life, I get to experience time and death. This night is a bridge between the two worlds, where I am fully aware of both sides of my coin.

I think of my brother and how he described God on our last acid trip, with a group of a dozen people, most of them strangers to me. He said the Hebrew word for God -- Yahweh -- could be a play on how to say “I was, I am, and I will be” all at once, a way to describe something timeless and eternal. I feel outside of time, like the past, present, and future are stretched out before me. I don’t see the past or the future or understand them, I simply feel it. It’s as though I have one foot in the river of time and one anchored on the solid ground.

I can hear everything around us, and there’s a soft hum from the world. We hum the “Om” sound and it feels like our spirits emanate from us with the sound. We recite “Hare Krishna” and talk about how God is for us, with us, and ahead of us.

My entire body is humming with energy. We keep using the word “dance” to describe it. I have an autoimmune disease that leaves me sore and stiff, but on acid, I am light and free and painless. When I move, colors wave through my body. When Ryan speaks, rainbows ripple through my mind. I’ve tapped into some kind of synesthesia so that everything is connected and one thing always emphasizes something else.

Throughout the night, we listen to the waves of the lake, we stare at the moon’s reflection on the water, we watch the stars, we visit the horrific bathroom trying to poop (we don’t), and we are constantly trying to get warm under our insufficient blankets and sleeping bags. Ryan smokes a cigarette, and he says it will be his last one. He started again a few weeks ago, amidst the wedding stress, but now he’s facing the facts about what they really do to his body.

We smoke some weed, talking about the goddess Kali and how smoking cannabis has been a spiritual rite for many cultures. I haven’t smoked weed on acid before since I was already enjoying myself so much, but since Ryan is smoking, I want to, so we can be on the same level.

Ryan tells me I scared him earlier, that he was worried I wasn’t going to come back to him. We talk about wild feminine energy and about yin and yang. Throughout the night, he keeps talking about darkness and the devil and good and evil, but I have trouble feeling the same urgency and doom when thinking of evil. I know there is light and good and love and there is also dark and hate and anger, but I don’t know if they’re adversaries. I don’t even know if you must avoid one and only seek out the other. How can there be a sun without a shadow? They are both necessary to life.

But I recognize that I grew up in the light, loved by my family and blessed to be able to feel safe and travel, and now I can flirt with darkness because my foundation is in love. Some people have struggled with darkness since childhood, when it was cast on them unwillingly, and they fight to find the light when they don’t have role models who have shown them how to live in it.

I’m talking about human mythology and how the world is made up of two planes, the visible and the invisible. And for thousands of years, people have been talking about the invisible world through myths and spirituality and religion. I tell him I understand that we’re eternal beings and we will die but our souls will live on, somehow. In another life, in another dimension, I’m not sure.

I realize Ryan has fallen asleep on me. It’s 6:30am but I feel so awake and like I’m still tripping. I sleep for an hour or two, but my body is uncomfortable and still buzzing with energy so I journal, trying to capture some of my emotions. I unzip the tent’s door and watch everything outside. The fog rolls out as the sun rises, and the birds are waking up, searching for food. I feel like this is my first glimpse of the world, and everything is so beautiful. I take off a sweatshirt and realize I stink, so I decide to walk to the showers to clean myself off. I can hear every bird flying away as I walk by and see every bright leaf fluttering in the wind. The place feels like a magical wonderland. I’m sore from the long night, but my body also feels fresh and new.

The whole day, as we ease back into ourselves, is surreal. I wake Ryan up around noon, and even though I enjoyed the alone time, I’m so glad he’s awake again. We talk about our experience, and at times, it seems like we’re talking about what it means to be mortal and trapped in bodies.

I just want to be home, but as Ryan says, “There’s still work to do.” We have a three hour drive ahead of us and we have to eat breakfast (we forgot olive oil for the eggs we brought) and we have to pack up our things. When I was younger, I would play a game in my mind. I pretended I was Emily’s identical twin and I had to act just like her or people would find out I wasn’t really Emily. I would take in everything about her life as though it were brand new and I would go through all the motions, just as Emily would. I feel like that now as we fold up the tent, search the car for my phone, and give Ryan directions. This entire life is odd and new, but familiar and comfortable at the same time. I know I’m Emily, but I also know that everything I’ve created for myself is temporary and so much of what I focus on pulls me from the real magic of the universe. I get caught up in stress and plans for the future and idealizing who I am when I could be watching the sunset or enjoying music or laughing with Ryan.

On the drive home, we talk about God and we listen to mewithoutYou. The scenery is beautiful, the colors still so vibrant. I doze off here and there, but the energy is still humming in my body. When we get home, I read William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell out loud as Ryan cleans up some pocket knives he bought from an antique store. I’m struck by some of the images, so close to how I felt on the trip. One stuck with me, a proverb from hell: “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”

Exp Year: 2018	ExpID: 112422
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: 30
Published: Oct 7, 2018	Views: 2,943
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
LSD (2) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Relationships (44), Nature / Outdoors (23), General (1)