DOSE: T+ 0:00	2 hits	oral	LSD	(blotter / tab)
T+ 1:00	1 hit	oral	LSD	(blotter / tab)

BODY WEIGHT:

130 lb

Setting: The apartment of a pair of my friends, whom I'll call Sing (a woman) and Song (a man, her boyfriend). They were both experienced with LSD, Song especially taking very much an active interest in entheogens. The apartment was pretty nicely kept, not cluttered or anything like that. Your average college kid apartment. I arrived at about 10.30am, and didn't leave for 12 hours.

Mindset: Pretty relaxed, but excited as this would be my first time on any hallucinogen. My previous experience was limited to THC, alcohol, and ephedrine. However, as I discovered, anything you've been thinking hard about in the past week or so will have a chance of making an appearance. Additionally, I had only smoked weed in the past week; no other substances besides maybe -- but I doubt it -- alcohol were in my system. However, I have a history of mild mental illness, mainly dysphoric depression, for which I'd been prescribed the antidepressant Celexa about two years previous.

Preparations: I showed up, and we had some breakfast -- some pretty shitty biscuits that Song made with too much salt, which we ate drenched in honey to try and disguise that fact. We had drums at the ready, and paints and paper. The paints play a pretty significant part in this, actually. We ate, and then after clearing the table covered it with an expendable cloth in case we got wild with the washable paints: watercolours and this bizarre glitter stuff in numerous pastel shades. I also brought over some headphones at Sing's request, and some music I enjoy -- 'Dead Inside' by the Golden Palominos. I carried with me as well a small notebook and a pen, as I intended to do my best to transcribe the experience.

Dosage: Imprecise. I suspect we each had 2-3 hits of indeterminate potency at first and then about an hour later we took 1-2 more as a booster. We dropped by simply swallowing the tabs with orange juice.

After we dropped and were waiting for the effects to begin, I felt giggly, but I think that was only due to being excited. Song put on some music -- Radiohead's 'Kid A' -- and got online, looking for things to entertain us. We found various pieces of pattern software and eventually settled on WinAmp's visual interpretation of the music, which I think would have been pretty mesmerising in the best of times, but then, I am by nature easily visually distractable.

So we sat around staring at this, and looking for other craziness online, we then took the booster, and got the paints out.

It was then that things started to get funny. I discovered the joy of tracers, waving a paintbrush handle through the air, and then my hand, I was enthralled. I painted with the watercolours then, idly smearing colour across the page to no especial end. Song had gotten an old furniture magazine out and was amusing himself to grand heights by painting all the curtains and furniture and such in the interior design photos red or yellow or green. Sing was very quiet, intent on her painting of some interminable blob, cast in hues of pastel glitter-flecked yellow.

I didn't realise it at the time, but the trip proper was beginning. I percieved things as strangely kindergartenish, as 'little-kid' in a distinctly unholy way. I dismissed it as a perceptual flashback to times past, when sitting at a table painting actually was a small child's activity. But this was not the extent of it.

Song put on a new CD -- he had since changed Radiohead to REM, which he now changed to Tripping Daisy's 'Jesus Hits Like the Atom Bomb.' The trips were arriving in force now, and we were sprawled around. Song was glued to the CD player, Sing was lolling in a chair, and I was scribbling furiously in my notebook.

So what was happening to me? I was regressing. I found myself entangled in strings of pink bubblegum, which gave the impression of being too sweet to be really that sweet -- like a corrupted, poisoned candy our parents used to warn us the Satanists would hand out at Hallowe'en. Entwined in that bubblegum was a creature, a thing whose name I could hear in my mind and which I desperately tried to spell, but was impronouncable by human tongues, as was the concept that some things would have to remain in this trip and never come to light while lucid. Now, I call the thing the Mouse-King.

It was rotting amid the sea of gum and candy, corruption and decay falling off of it like bark from a dead tree in a swamp. It had a mouse's half-rotten head on which perched a crown, but it would also change into a massive tongue studded with eyeballs and festooned with gaping, tooth-filled mouths. It presided over a playground on which children cavorted, but the playground was false, a cover -- beneath the sugar-coated surface lurked something hellish, dark. The overwhelming sense was that nothing is as good and innocent as it appears.

This gave way to a tormented sense of loss and regret, that my own innocence had been tainted this way, that it was happening to children all over and I was powerless to protect them. I then sort of... devolved, into a protohuman state of consciousness, in which the ego has yet to develop and the id reigns... and yet, I was still in control, and indeed, quite self-conscious. Dust from the floor seemed to soil me incomparably and I was terrified I'd say something out loud that would betray my state and ruin the trips of my friends. But it was like being granted a look through the mists of evolution, both macrobiological evolution and the moral development of individual human beings. I knew what it was to be a child, to be unfettered by social mores -- now that I think of it, that may also be what it's like to be a sociopath.

I went to the bathroom, which was an ordeal -- trying to make sure I had not already wet myself while going is not easy on this stuff. Looking in the mirror was unbearable.

I came out and talked to Song, who was on about music -- he is a musician, and so is very exicted about music when he trips -- when I caught sight of the back of the Tripping Daisy CD. It features a circus parade where all the animals and people have cuts of meat superimposed over their faces. This was terrifying and confusing. The music was not helping, either -- heard lucid, it's very happy stuff, but in my state all I could percieve was the darkness of it. The whistling, chanting children on some of the songs became a demon choir heralding the loss of all goodness to a world that eats its young.

Then the doorbell rang.

Poor Song... he had to go and sign for a package, which contained some miscellaneous amplifier cord or some such. He was traumatised. ;)

This continued... we went back to the paints and I painted in tortured blobs of pink. The word 'help' is scratched into the layers of it in one of them.

We began to come down. The tracers continued but we were lucid again, although unable to communicate very well -- Sing and Song had been reading Sartre, so the inability to get one's point across was fresh on their minds, and mine as well -- the impronouncable words and concepts were recurring every minute. We ate pasta, and it was the best goddamn pasta I ever had.

Hours later, I drove home. I was so tired I collapsed immediately, and my mind refused to dream.

Exp Year: 2001	ExpID: 5199
Gender: Not Specified
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jan 11, 2002	Views: 42,232
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