DOSE: T+ 0:00	1/4 hit	oral	LSD	(pill / tablet)
T+ 2:00	1/4 hit	oral	LSD	(pill / tablet)

BODY WEIGHT:

170 lb

An Ultimately Therapeutic Experience

Age: 24
Sex: MTF
Weight: ~170 lbs
Dose: 1 quarter tab + (two hours later) another quarter tab (unknown strength)

Since most experience reports tend to focus on the extreme, and also to be written by cis men, I wanted to write down an account focusing on a low dose trip, the safety precautions involved, and the effects that it had for me as a person who is not a cis man.

See bottom of account for a note from my experience on how LSD may interact with long COVID. (Note: this should not be taken as definitive medical advice!!!)

I started at 6:17pm on a warm Saturday evening with a quarter tablet of LSD. Some time before I had taken a sample from the supply to test through [mail-in drug checking service] and it had come through as pure, so after making preparations I was excited to celebrate by testing the subjective potency of the tablets, starting with small doses. The night before I did an allergy test, as recommended by The Drug User's Bible, with the smallest possible piece of a tablet under my tongue. That produced no discernible effects so the next step was to try a light dose the following day as an additional precaution in case the supply might prove to be unexpectedly strong.

In the event, results were remarkably mild at nearly two hours after taking the initial quarter tab, to the point where I would describe them as difficult if not impossible to distinguish from a placebo. Visuals were non-existent, time distortion may have been present, and my mood was upbeat and excited but not obviously altered. I could even read, which I have found hard to do on standard doses. From 6:17pm to 7:17pm I cleaned my room and listened to music, after which I decided to go on PsychonautWiki to check the threshold dose as it became clear that no overt visuals would be manifesting. Checking in with myself an hour later at 8:11pm after reading a few trip reports, I felt like I could do this dose again and have a more or less normal day. All it had done was maybe improve my mood and lighten my writer’s block. Five minutes later, I looked in the mirror and nothing struck me as unusual about my reflection. In past experience and on a full tab my reflection hasn’t necessarily seemed distorted so much as differently charged in significance.

At 8:21pm I took the next quarter tab, placing it on my tongue to make sure there was no bitterness, an unnecessary step in this case but one taken out of habitual safety practice. It had no flavor so I moved it under my tongue and waited, mentally debating whether I would order delivery or brave the grocery store and eventual necessity of cooking. At 8:29pm I noticed that the light from outside, which was finally fading at the end of a long summer day, was a noticeable light grey/purple color compared to the yellow/orange of my apartment. This may have marked the beginning of the trip in earnest as what followed was a much more powerful experience than I anticipated given that I had only taken a half tab total . After this point I stopped taking notes, so what follows is from memory and less precise about the time.

Shortly before 9:00pm my roommate and I decided to watch a movie together. At this point I was starting to notice the feeling of my facial muscles moving with speaking and making expressions so that each act felt exaggerated and overdramatic. This may have been my noticing the effect of the first dose more by virtue of thinking about my interaction with someone else and attempting to seem more or less normal even while acknowledging openly that I was taking LSD. That said, this had given enough time for the second dose to begin its onset. We ended up watching an arthouse horror film I had seen once before and enjoyed. In hindsight, this was a shockingly unproblematic choice. While the trip did become anxious during the latter half of the film, that had far more to do with my anxieties than the movie, which seemed if anything oddly unfrightening, as its meta commentary on the desire to watch horror became more apparent than the plot.

By what was probably 10pm visuals were firmly established. The lighting in the room became dramatic. Characters on screen sometimes appeared to move in a choppy way. The wall behind me, which is a uniform off white and barely textured, became remarkably textured as well as colored from the light from the television. The grain of wood and its growth rings became intensely vibrant wherever there was an unpainted wooden object. Around this time, I started getting sweaty and my feet got cold. My heartrate also elevated. These symptoms were very similar to those I experienced following a COVID infection that caused me to have tachycardia over several months. During that period I had bad anxiety over my heart rate and how it made me overheat easily. I would hypothesize that the way long COVID affected my cardiovascular system made these effects more likely to occur on LSD, although I have no way of proving this. Anyway, reliving that feeling brought me into a state of bad anxiety that had me wondering if I had accidentally poisoned myself with an unaccounted for contaminate in the dose. Consciously, I knew that was almost impossible given the steps I had taken to ensure the purity of the dose, and so, as that thought kept coming up I kept reminding myself that it was extremely unlikely to be true.

After the movie finished, I let my roommate know I was feeling anxious from the stronger than expected dose and that I needed to cool down. Turning on the AC helped, but what helped more was going into my room and listening on repeat to a song I had selected that I knew would relax my mood. At this point it was around midnight.

From midnight to 1:00am the anxiety remained intense with my thoughts on a loop concerning my anxiety, fears, and my attempts to reassure myself about them. At around 1:00am, the anxiety began to recede as I asked myself about why I had come to experience it. By this point certain objects still looked remarkably vibrant and three dimensional, although the intensification of textures was over. I increasingly felt an emotional clarity about myself. The experiences that led to my anxiety were brought before me and I had an opportunity to think about the narrative they formed and how I chose to relate to it. The omnipresence of my anxiety as having a driving effect on me even without drugs was made clear. I could see how this affected my relationships and my past actions that I regretted. (The effect was so powerful that the next morning I would seek out several people with whom to make amends.) The understanding that came with this experience more than made up for the intense anxiety I had suffered for two to three hours. Moreover, the newfound understanding that I had been suffering anxiety regardless of the drug made me feel that even the experience of the anxiety itself wasn’t terrible, as it had been what I was experiencing all along anyway. Knowing it was the key to making it better.

The therapeutic peak lasted from maybe 1:00am to shortly after 3:00am. By this time, I consciously wanted to sleep but realized that the drug’s stimulant effects made this impossible. So, I stayed up to at least 4:00am watching a YouTube streamer with a calming voice. Sometime after that I managed to sleep fitfully. Even by around four in the morning I was still experiencing some slight hallucinations as the darkness in my room would appear to have some slight strobe light effects, or else my vision was as if I were blinking my eyes rapidly even without doing so—but this was an infrequent effect usually experienced briefly after opening my eyes. When I closed them, I could occasionally see images like the faces of creatures in a dream. When these became slightly frightening, I reminded myself that I had control over the phenomena and they ceased.

Late the following morning I woke up, or else surrendered myself to the inevitability of sleepy wakefulness, after having mildly pleasant dreams during patchy sleep. The sense of emotional clarity remained and following some of the insights from the night before I made a few changes in my life.

Overall, this was one of the best drug experiences I have ever had in spite of the fear and unpleasant physical sensations.

For those experiencing long COVID related tachycardia, or else those like me who have experienced it, this experience made me relive the high heart rate and added sweating I experienced with long COVID, despite the small dose. It may be best to take precautions when using LSD if you have a history of tachycardia and/or other circulatory issues given the effects it can have on the cardiovascular system. I’m not a doctor and my experience here could only be called anecdotal, so this shouldn’t be treated as any sort of authoritative health advice but just as a consideration. I do not believe this experience had any long term negative health effects for me, but it did make me consider that LSD might have more body load for me than expected. This led to the decision to not further increase the dose in the future and to make sure to space out doses with plenty of time to recover in between.

Exp Year: 2023	ExpID: 117378
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: 24
Published: Oct 26, 2024	Views: 15
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LSD (2) : Difficult Experiences (5), Therapeutic Intent or Outcome (49), General (1), Small Group (2-9) (17)