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An Early Start on the Rest of My Life
LSD
Citation:   Psyghtseer. "An Early Start on the Rest of My Life: An Experience with LSD (exp113772)". Erowid.org. Nov 24, 2019. erowid.org/exp/113772

 
DOSE:
2 hits buccal LSD (blotter / tab)
BODY WEIGHT: 200 lb
Going in order of my most interesting to share... only makes sense to start off with my second most intense, and my most life-altering experience.

I was 16 [5 years ago], at the end of my sophomore year in high school at the time, and my only drug-related experience was a few months of moderate (once or twice week) cannabis use. This came from becoming friends with a dude I knew from hanging out with him in a mutual friend group at recess in 1st grade. 12 years later, we were the only people each other knew in gym class and it became the best friendship I have to this day. He is very important to this trip report and most of my others as he is almost always the one there accompanying me. He has always been the smartest, funniest and most aware person I know. Before knowing him, I didn't have any interest (read: any knowledge) in drugs. Even though my brother smoked, I didn't know a single thing about weed besides how it smelled and when he invited me to join him, I would decline. But, when I found out my best friend smoked and he invited me to join, I accepted. My newfound interest was born out of my admiration for my friend. These are the little steps that brought me to the experience. Like a seed going to an apple, it must go through a thousand small changes before becoming what it is.

Weed definitely was a gateway drug for me; a gateway to new people, activities, and mindsets. Before smoking, I mostly kept to myself. After school, I would go home and play video games, go on the computer, or play my instruments. Pretty soon, I was riding home with my friend everyday instead. And when he was invited to go smoke with some friends, I would come along, too. Over the summer, I became popular to a niche group of friends who all smoked and tripped (and subsequently the whole class, as these were the popular kids in my class). I enjoyed their stories and their novel ways of thinking because I identified with it more than the people I had been around. I was a band nerd, and in all honor classes, but at the same time I had always been sort of a weirdo, who besides academically didn't fit in with the people in my classes. Most people regarded me as a stoner/hippie years before I even smoked.
Most people regarded me as a stoner/hippie years before I even smoked.
I was even regularily suspected of being high at school by my class because apparently things I said were so non-linear...

I began researching psychedelics such as acid and shrooms with the sapling of excitement from hearing about my new friends' experiences. Don't get me wrong, though; they told me the good parts, but they also told me the bad, the ugly and the downright crazy. Nevertheless, I wasn't afraid of it one bit. Trip reports I read only fueled my desire to try them. I identified myself as someone with a strong mental resilience and also a very open mind. My main impulse to try was general curiosity, and second was to try and gain some more mental control, and diminish the effects that being on the spectrum has on me (having no mental control, lack of social awareness, low attention span, emotional blanket). Also, as I read in one report, to forget about my first heartbreak, which had come during the previous school year, sort of how people overcome addiction with psychedelics. But surely more curiosity than self-therapy going into it.

I told the main procuring friend in the group that I wanted to trip. He asked if I was sure and I said definitely, I even want 2 tabs. He said alright and that it might be a good idea to find some friends to do them with, on top of him, as he would be accompanying me since it was my first time. Of course, I chose my best friend, and another friend I'd had for a while but became way closer with thanks to weed (another really cool, smart, aware dude). Although they'd also never tripped, I believed I had assembled the acid dream team and a week later my friend had the stuff. We set up a date for that weekend and anxiously waited for the day to arrive, polishing off the rest of my research and getting my set and setting prepared. Everyone agreed my house was the best setting as my parents leave for the weekends and it was a comfy chill spot, with everything we'd need to have a successful trip.

The night arrived after what felt like a month although it was 3 days. We all got 2 tabs, though the appropriator friend and my other friend saved one of theirs. So just my best friend and I were gonna drop both our tabs. As soon as we were all together, we pulled out the stuff and inspected it. They were white tabs with jesus printed on them in black outline. We were instructed on how to ingest the acid from the tab and we all dropped at the same time.

The tabs had no taste whatsoever. I held mine in my mouth for probably 20 minutes, hoping to get as strong as an effect as I could. After this, we decided to go on a walk through my neighborhood during the come-up. It was around 8 pm, the last rays of the sun had just faded away, and the stars had come out. We walked for about 20 minutes before we all started giggling, and touching our own bodies as they had just started to feel so strange. What was coming over us?? I tilted my head back and looked up at the stars in complete and utter astonishment. I could feel every star like the light from it held some kind of power. My eyesight was changed, it was like I could tell how near or how far each star was. This was probably an illusion based on how bright they were in relation to each other, but it was something I'd never seen before. How sensitive my eyes became to light during this come-up has not changed to this day.

We headed back to my house and once we were inside, I could tell how much had already changed about my perception in just a half an hour. I could feel the walls, feel being inside them, the situation, feel the color they were, feel the design. I began seeing things in the corners of my eyes that were not there, like a vase full of flowers, or a clock on the wall, normal things that would be normal there but never existed. The body load was now incredible. Waves were pulsating throughout my entire body, my head and my chest were vibrating, my muscles were so sensitive I had to wiggle my arms around like they were tentacles. I look at my friends' eyes and everyone's pupils are giant.

An hour in, the body load is starting to subside, and I'm noticing that straight lines are no longer straight. The edges where the wall meets the ceiling are now melting and it looks as if the whole room is slightly transparent and we are floating in the ocean inside of it. We are all talking now, everybody feels really good, open, uninhibited and we all feel connected, like there was some kind of script to our conversation and we all had read it and knew our own and each others lines. It was very surreal. We were actually in the room I use as my home studio and I had a bunch of bongos in there and I suggested we have a drum circle. Not to be the band nerd but because I was teaching drums to the other friend I brought, and had previously taught piano to my best friend and the appropriator also played guitar. We were all very musical and as soon as we had our drums and I began to play a basic beat, the trip immediately hit a whole new level. The drums just sounded amazingly spiritual and musical, and we were also expressing ourselves through them in a way that for me at least, was even more symptomatic than our words. We were all soloing, it was truly fucking wild, and we laughed our asses off at it. It was by far the highlight of the trip for all of us and we played til the peak began to wear off. After this drum circle, we began to talk some more, and the guy our appropriator got the acid from called him. It got so quiet as we shut up to let him talk on the phone in front of us it was almost eerie. He began to laugh really hard and hung up the phone. We were like what happened?? And he said he wanted to know how our trip was going, and to let us know that the tabs we got were triple dosed! He mentioned at this point that it made sense because the acid seemed strong for one tab to him. He estimated the tabs were anywhere from 150 to 300 ug each. We rejoiced over this before turning our attention to our hunger and thirst. We departed this room to forage my house for food.

Luckily, I had one of those big, fat watermelons, so we cut it up and distributed slices to everyone. The concept of eating was so strange and unfamiliar but the colorful fresh watermelon did look appetizing, and it was very refreshing. We had a whole half of watermelon left when we got the idea to try to make a hookah like device we could all smoke out of. I scooped all the flesh out and into a tupperware and was left with the hollowed half a watermelon that looked like a helmet for a Rams fan. It was pretty damn near flat and I stuck it flat side down on the cutting board, and we stabbed these little rubber tubing into it to use as mouthpieces, as well as a down-stem in the middle and the others smoked a bowl, all being able to hit it at once. I didn't smoke because I wanted to find a job but it was pretty cool and I was just proud of the engineering and design. I went to the bathroom to pee and after I was finished I looked in the mirror.

Ho-lee-shit. I looked completely different now than what I thought I did. My friends had joined me and all of us were just standing in front of the mirror looking at ourselves, and I could tell the other first timers were also seeing what I was seeing. I also saw it in them. They looked much older than I was accustomed to, and I had just never been aware of so much detail in their faces. It was at this point I also began to see how ridiculous we all looked and I realized just how much of my ingrained preconceptions were flushed away by the acid. It was like clearing the cache to get a fresh start. A perception refresh.
It was like clearing the cache to get a fresh start. A perception refresh.
I had also noticed at this point that random insights were coming to me. I felt that I was completely over my heartbreak, like something just clicked, and after the trip, it stuck. I don't even know how to explain it, besides that I felt my eyes smile at whatever I was looking at the exact moment the insight came to me and I just knew I was over it. It was probably the most valuable short term effect of the trip.

Things began to die down with the others and we put on the movie 'Frank'. I had already seen it, yet about 30 minutes in I was the only one still awake. I tiptoed out of the room letting the movie continue and my friends sleep and continued on with my trip. I didn't feel like the effects had waned at all, plus I wanted to get my money's worth, a full 12 hours of tripping, and I was having a fantastic time. Its about 1:30 am. I went to my studio and turned on my electronic keyboard. I put on the headphones and just began to play. I didnt realize how hard I was tripping, I just closed my eyes and played. The word amazing doesn't do any justice to this experience. How good my keyboard sounded, how rich and vibrant the notes were being played directly into my mind, and the improvisation I was conjuring being like a steam of consciousness. I had always for any instrument had a goal to be able to play on it anything I could imagine, in real time. For piano, this was the closest I've ever got. I seemed to be thinking just the right thing and my hands were just able to match it, or vice-versa. I was also having very intense CEVS, they seemed to be stronger while I was playing and I ended up hallucinating that my eyes were open, although I noticed they weren't because there were a few almost undetectable changes to the room in my vision. The mind is incredibly powerful under the influence of acid. I was very close to not even noticing that my eyes were closed. I was awed. So awed that I got a lil spooked. But that was nothing. I guess I'd played for about an hour.

I decided to go on a walk again, as I only felt more energy coming, tip toeing past my sleeping friends and outside where I could look at the stars. I began walking and as I went down my driveway, it was very dark and the big trees along my driveways limbs began to grow. I remember thinking about bears and hoping I didn't see any. It was VERY dark and at the end of my driveway, coming into view, was a black bear. I was still walking full speed at it and as soon as I noticed, I froze fucking dead in my tracks, and we just stared at each other for a good 10 seconds. I did not at the time consider this possibly being a hallucination and I dont know to this day whether it was real or not. It seems the hypothetical bear and I reached a mutual agreement to go our separate ways, and I turned 180 degrees and walked back to my house, not even looking back. My heart was pumping so fast I thought I might faint. I returned to my keyboard to calm myself down.

I decided to postpone my walk until it got a little lighter outside, so in the meantime, I ended up listening to Mr. Bungle for hours. Let's just say, my mind was permanently blown forever. Holy fuck.

When I noticed the small amount of light starting to appear outside, I ran outside and started heading to a lake in my neighborhood. I planned to kayak during the sunrise. On the way to the lake, there was a herd of deer passing through (animals are a normal occurrence as my subdivision borders a state park) and I held out my hand to one of the deer and began talking to it. It seemed interested and began to inch toward me, but this was probably more due to people around here feeding them. It was still wonderful experience, as I got to see the animal up close, and I'd never seen it with such sharp, clear, detailed focus before. I made it to the lake and began kayaking around the lake, just as the entire sky started to turn red, purple, orange and yellow. I almost cried at how beautiful it was and thinking about how many sunrises just like it I missed in my lifetime just to sleep. As I returned to shore and began walking back to my house, I figured I had fully come down. I was just feeling very tired and emotional, but not unpleasantly. I said good morning to my friends and made sure they could all get home safely and went to bed, where I slept for the next 20 hours! As you can guess, it was the best sleep of my life.

So, basically, we tripped like in the 2nd month of my junior year of high school. I did not really notice this because for the first time ever, I had been hanging out with people from school all summer. That made it just not feel like the second month of that school year to me. But anyway, just imagine opening your head up like this and then having something as labyrinthine as high school to navigate immediately afterwards. Honestly though, it was very helpful in elucidating all of the effects of my experience.

During the trip, my ego was dissolving - (it dissolved completely and has yet to make a reappearance; I highly doubt it ever will) - and I was too distracted by the psychedelic high to even notice that it was permanently changing who I was. While I noticed that my awareness was very acute, and much better than ever before, I didn't know that this and other effects were things that I actually got to keep. I thought the trip was just showing me what it was like and then when I woke up, everything I felt would be gone and I would barely be even able to remember what it was like.

Through these changes, I was able to realize that my ego was actually what was responsible for my lack of awareness. My ego was comprised mainly of defense mechanisms that would deter me from noticing things like peoples reactions, tones of voice, and other et cetera related to social relation. Additionally, it affected my very own self-awareness in another huge personality changing aspect, and it even did so retroactively, as I reminisced about certain past events, situations and even mundane little interactions.

I also heard peoples words, tones and noises much differently. I began to notice how people would sniff, cough, clear their throat or make other sounds in an aggressive way, even if they are unaware of it. It just became indicative to an assertive ego to my mind. One of my biggest revelations of acid was that humans are really not to far from animals in their day to day bearing with each other. I saw how survival was the root of every single action I saw; if you traced it back far enough, every little thing anyone did was really just a primal instinct. We just operate in differing forms than animals, but does not mean we are not doing the same thing.

I experienced a change in my sense of humor that I believe was related to both of these conceptual perception shifts. I now noticed that people laughed almost to relieve themselves of tension. I saw the difference in genuine laughter and nervous tension-relieving laughter and that the latter was by far the most prevalent that I observed. I had to rediscover what I found funny because I could not even get through the average person's comedy sketch anymore after this. I really couldn't understand what I thought was funny about their jokes, they just seemed to build tension and then have some kind of conclusion at the end to relieve it. I can't even say punchline, because they really didn't seem like it anymore. Everything sounded so straightforward. I guess everyone has their own taste but I lost sight of the sense of humor I had built since being born and began to learn a new one.
I lost sight of the sense of humor I had built since being born and began to learn a new one.


Psychedelics don't give you anything. Rather, they clear a path for you to discover things yourself. I didn't gain any empathy from my trip, but since I was able to consider quite a bit which I hadn't prior to my experience, I discovered my own capacity for empathy. I began thinking before I spoke, and taking my time to think about people's feelings beforehand. I can tell you without a doubt this was not something I practiced prior to doing acid. I also wasn't given paranoia/anxiety by the trip, but with my ego gone and all the walls I'd built, all the things I'd had ingrained into me and everything I saw as normal was suddenly very much not so, I did get some. But it was mild and a necessary part of any kind of transition from one mindset to the next. It made me less anxious overall in the long run.

I guess this sums up what changed in me for the most part. Also note the sensitivity to light became apparent in more than just stargazing, MUCH more. Being in any kind of store whether it be a Costco or a Walmart, or anything with a high ceiling and artificial sunlight could never be seen the same way again. It's like I can now see the 'dark spots' in the room. I don't even know how to describe it really. But being in those types of places gives me a uneasiness now for some reason, the light is just uncomfortable.

Exp Year: 2014ExpID: 113772
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: 16
Published: Nov 24, 2019Views: 4,962
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LSD (2) : First Times (2), Music Discussion (22), Therapeutic Intent or Outcome (49), Glowing Experiences (4), Small Group (2-9) (17)

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