DOSE:

1 hit

oral

LSD

(blotter / tab)

BODY WEIGHT:

65 kg

It's been a short few days since I've had this experience. I'd like to get it down now while it's fresh on my mind, and also now that I finally have the clarity to put it into words somewhat.

I've had a pretty deep fear of tripping for well over a year, up until this point. My other trip report outlines what I've gone through on my first psilocybin experience, but it definitely left its mark on me to keep it short. At the time, I was fundamentally lost, depressed, hopeless and generally on a very negative path in life.

Since I've had that experience (and, after a long period of confusion) I've managed to pick myself up from the gutter. I took up a profession I'm endlessly happy with and make good money with after only doing it for about 9 months, I've cured a lot of anxiety I had, my depression has almost completely left me. So many things have changed for me in the past year and everything has been abundantly positive. I won't get into too much detail, but my life then vs. now are like total opposites. I still do struggle with anxiety here and there, but it's gone down a ton. My leftover anxiety was one of the few reasons I had for this LSD trip.

After cutting contact with one of my most toxic friends, I made a decision to have another trip and re-test the waters. I had some LSD left in my fridge, given to me by my brother a while back. I had always been too scared to take a full hit, but I felt a strong calling to do it at this point. It seemed like a perfect substance to take in a perfect moment of stillness in my life (first weekend I'd had off in about 4-5 months) where I could ruminate on how things have been going. In the week after this decision I've dedicated my free time to researching and preparing as best as I could. The day before dropping, I made sure to completely clean my apartment, and I set up a little tripping zone in my bedroom which was completely safe and would have everything I could need. I was planning on doing it completely alone, away from any uncertain factors.

Boiling down my intentions, it was essentially about this: for one, I wished to conquer my fear of tripping. Both my medical history and my traumatic psilocybin experience have pushed me into a direction of fearing the altered state of mind/body that a tripping experience brings. Next, I wanted to have an honest conversation with myself about the anxiety I could still feel in myself about life. Things were going well but all the positive developments brought with them some situations and interactions I wasn't used to, and I wanted to see if I could figure out what the source of it was. And lastly, I wanted to take this weekend completely to myself and treat myself to something novel. And I wanted to sit down with myself and inquire about how my life has been going and how I feel about the direction I'm heading in. With these intentions in mind, I went into my trip.

(Sorry for the long intro, getting into it now)

Finally, the day had come. I woke up quite late as I had gone to bed a lot later than planned (I stayed up talking to a girl I was interested in at the time). My original plan was to wake up at 9AM, and to drop at noon at the very latest. However, I crawled out of bed no earlier than 10:30 AM and took a while to finalize my apartment for tripping. Around about 1PM I was finally ready to drop. I had agreed with a friend to voice chat after I dropped so I could ease my nerves, but she didn't seem to be coming online. After anxiously badgering her with no response for about an hour, I decided to go ahead and do it. I did two rounds of the Wim Hof method, which helped me clear my brain, and walked over to the fridge, grabbed a tab out of the little case, and put it under my tongue. My apprehension began to grow, but I felt determined to see it through. I felt so strongly that I had to have this experience no matter what would happen. I sat back down on my bed, and put some Chrome Sparks on my speaker to take my mind off the come-up. The day before dropping, I had gone to the local book store and got myself a notepad and a pen. I quickly jotted down some thoughts about my come-up and cast the paper aside.

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T+0:00
"Coming up now. feel a bit anxious, but otherwise okay. I hope to have a nice experience. I'm gonna take a nice long warm shower in a bit.

I wonder how the visuals will be"

After about 20 minutes I decided to hop in the shower, as was suggested to me by another tripper. I put some Brian Eno on my speakers, turned it up loud, and walked in. I'm usually the type of guy to jump in an ice-cold shower, but for this occasion I felt it was right to make an exception. The warm water hugged me and kept me comfortable through my journey upwards. I quickly became too nervous to stay standing up, and decided to sit down on the floor with the showerhead in my hands. By this point I definitely felt a change in my tactile sensation, although I wrote it off to nervousness at first. I got out of the shower after about 30 minutes of quiet introspection, and laid down in my bed.

Back in bed, I grabbed my notepad again and wrote down some more thoughts. My writing at this point looked very very cramped and a bit jittery, as the nerves were definitely seizing me.

T+0:50
"How nice that i get to do this!
im a little tense still but i hope to loosen up soon
Writing is hard"

I noticed some slight stomach discomfort and decided to lay down on my side, grabbing my blanket and holding it close to me. I quickly got back up to change the music to Bonobo, as the slow piano music was somehow making me uncomfortable. The change in music twisted my experience almost upside down, and I started feeling really amazing. At this point the good feelings seemed to travel down into my crotch, to my surprise. I'll skip on detailing what happened next here, but let's say it was one of the most intense solo sessions I've had in my life. ;)

T+1:10
An ecstatic 20 minutes later, I grabbed my notepad once more. I felt very loosened up, and jabbed my pen at the paper, making a bunch of scribbles. Underneath it reads:

"W O W !
T 1:10 right now"

followed by another wavy scribble, starting small but expanding outward more and more.

I decided to change the music again, back to Brian Eno. The heavenly piano music was filling up my room while I did my best to surrender to the experience. I still have a very vivid image in my head of a beautiful blue sky with fluffy white clouds, and a notepad and pen. At this point that notepad along with the Brian Eno music was encompassing my entire universe. I found it almost impossible to even get up from bed. My thoughts were incredibly drawn out and tough to manage, and every time I looked up it seemed only a minute had passed when it felt more like 10. Now I knew: I'm in the middle of it. Surprisingly though, I did not feel any negativity this time around, which had been the case last time around this point. I kept my eyes closed for the most part and got some very faint visuals (I'd venture to say they were more like silhouettes of visuals, comparing them to all the fantastical descriptions I've read of other trippers' visuals).

T+2:00
By now I had nearly finished my upward journey, and pulled myself up to try and ruminate on some of the questions I wanted to answer in my newfound psychedelic state. My remaining anxiety was one of the biggest reasons for me to take this trip (both for psychedelics and for novel experiences in general in my life). I wrote down:

"Why do I get so anxious"

in the most loose writing in the notepad yet. I instantly felt myself come to the heart of the question, and my thoughts on it immediately boiled down into this - no good reason. I get afraid of new experiences because I don't trust my gut over my brain in most cases, but they seem to always turn out okay, hence, I should not give so much thought to these feelings. I wrote down

"no good reason!!!!!"

And that was pretty much it. That stupid little answer gave me so much relief. I gave little more thought to my mental issues for the rest of the trip, as I felt increasingly thankful for my new job and my upwards trajectory in life. The rest of the notepad is mainly filled with realizations of amazement, including a line that reads "im whelmed to say the least" which still makes me crack up reading it back now.

T+2:20
At this point I rose up from my bed, slowly turned down the music I had on, and felt myself filling up with gratitude. It was like finally reaching the peak of a big mountain (how poetic) and now I could stand here, admiring my progress and basking in it's positive effects on my life. I'd been so involved with working on improving myself that I'd hardly taken the time to really admire what I've done so far, but now I had the perfect state of mind to do it, and it felt absolutely liberating.

Slowly coming out of the confused state, I began to leave my bed and walk around a bit. I decided not to look in the mirror yet, as I'd been told by a few people that it can drastically sway a trip. I soon sat down on my bed again, in front of my computer, and chatted up a lot of friends who I wanted to call with. I first ended up calling the girl I had spoken with the night before, which ended up strangely awkward but it did not bother me one bit. It seemed like an inconvenient time however as she seemed to be cleaning her room and was quite unresponsive, so I hung up and called somebody else. Next up I decided to say 'fuck it' and call the girl I had broken up with prior to my mushroom experience. We had a really fun conversation and she seemed to not mind at all that I was tripping absolute balls. It was so hard to formulate sentences and I kept having laughter fits but it was an amazing conversation nonetheless. I made a really stupid sketch of a picture she sent me and it still makes me smile looking back at it.

Afterwards, I called a friend from England. He picked up the phone and I opened with 'I'm tripping balls dude' to which I got a response of 'Uhhh... Okay? Why would you do that?" and the shock in his voice made me burst out in laughter and fall back onto my bed. I had been a bit scared of other people messing with my trip but I had absolutely no shame for myself which was a very liberating feeling. I sat back down while saying 'Okay, let me explain.' I took about 5 seconds to think about it and then responded 'Why am I explaining myself?' and burst out in more laughter. Right after I calmed down I learned that he was at work, so I offered to call him back later and hung up.

I sat around for about 10 minutes after this just thinking to myself how absolutely amazing it felt to be alive. It hadn't ever hit me like this before where I felt this amount of gratitude for being able to experience life and all of it's rich ups and downs. Suddenly, I saw a message pop up. It was the girl I had agreed to call before dropping, and she seemed to be in a panicked haze worrying about what had happened while she was asleep. I quickly called her up and explained everything that happened. Again, very tough to formulate sentences, but she seemed quite happy it had turned out so positive for me. My memory after this bit is a bit foggy but I believe I had gone back to listening to music for the most part after this conversation.

T+4:00
By now, I sort of felt like I had 'outgrown' the altar I had set up for myself (my tripping space), so I began with moving all my stuff back to where it belonged. However, as I was still nicely tripping, I kept forgetting what I was doing, and mid-move started making coffee, planned to go out for a walk, and call some more people. All of these kept getting cut off by each other, so I barely accomplished anything for about an hour. One of my friends from Michigan came online and seemed to want to call, so I rang him up and explained my experience to him so far. He is a guy who has quite some knowledge of the solo LSD experience as well so it felt really great to be able to get up to speed with him about it, as he seemed to completely understand everything I'd experienced. Having that affirmation felt very good.

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T+4 is quite a short point to cut off an LSD trip report with, but not much happened afterwards. I basically just put my stuff back where it used to be (after dozens of random interjections) and ordered a big bunch of sushi. By this point I kind of regretted not doing the experience with somebody else, as I imagine it would be very nice to share this feeling with someone. I also wished I had made some plans for my night afterwards, as I was really in the mood to go dancing, but as I'm not really very into nightlife (and I also live in a moderately secluded town) I had no idea where to go, and no idea who to call up to get some suggestions. I spent most of my night afterwards chatting with friends and enjoying the positive impact it had on me, but I will definitely make sure that next time I have a plan for after the come up (either a club to go to or an area to walk around in and explore) and possibly a counterpart to do it with.

I think coming out of this trip a lot of stuff has changed, but on a very subtle level. I seem to now perceive my surroundings quite differently (people seemingly have changed their appearance, although I realise it's all perceptual) and I feel a lot more relaxed in social situations as well. Work is a lot more fun and exciting but it took me a while to really be able to focus on it again after I had the trip. Now that I can though, I feel like I'm a lot sharper than I used to be beforehand. I had a tendency to take Modafinil a bunch to really press on but I don't seem to need it anymore now.

I definitely feel a lot better about tripping and life as a whole. I think I finally closed off a depressive part of my life with this acid trip and really opened up a new chapter for myself which is completely open-ended. There's so many things I want to do and I'm gonna work really hard to make them happen. If you are thinking about having a solo LSD trip for similar reasons, please remember to take very good caution and care of yourself before, during and after. All the effort I put into cleaning my apartment, setting up my tripping space and doing all the mental work beforehand were huge factors in the positive result of this experience.

Thank you for reading my report, peace and love to you :)

Exp Year: 2018	ExpID: 112543
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 22
Published: Nov 12, 2018	Views: 1,878
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LSD (2) : Music Discussion (22), Therapeutic Intent or Outcome (49), General (1), Alone (16)