Ltd Ed 'Solve et Elucido' Art Giclee
This reverberating psychedelic giclee print is a gift for a
$500 donation to Erowid. 12" x 12", stretched on canvas, the
image wraps around the sides of the 1" thick piece. Signed
by artist Vibrata, and Erowid founders Earth & Fire.
The Sunrise and Sunset of My Life
LSD
Citation:   Timmy. "The Sunrise and Sunset of My Life: An Experience with LSD (exp82394)". Erowid.org. Mar 23, 2020. erowid.org/exp/82394

 
DOSE:
2 drops oral LSD
      Tobacco - Cigarettes
BODY WEIGHT: 170 lb
I have since, and almost immediately did, come to understand what went wrong, and that I am, and was, OK.

Hippie music festival, Labor Day 2009. After not getting much sleep the night before due to travel, my friends and I decide to take some liquid LSD. It was tried previously by the man that brought it, a close friend, and we knew it was good. I have also been taking LSD for some years and no novice to the grip that it can have. I decided to have 2 hits, administered to my palm and then licked.

The crescendo to the peak was more intense than any peak I’ve ever had. Two female friends of mine who both took one hit and I were very laughy about the melting feeling we were experiencing. That is until the melting became too much to handle. I literally felt as if I was growing roots and was becoming part of the ground. Melting right into the ground.

That is when I began to fight it. The act on stage was a few well known rappers and the negativity of their set combined with the audio being off ( as I was to discover later ) made things all the worse. Things began to fade. I began to assume that the rooting to the ground feeling was what it felt like to die. Soon enough a friend of mine helped me off the ground and pulled me back for a moment. I felt as if she was ripping my roots from the soil itself. I had enough time for me to tell her, “I’m hanging on by a thread here Michelle.” That is the last thing I remember saying for sure, for the next hour or so.

I was told that I began to shed my clothes and stripped down to a wife beater and jeans in central NY September night time weather. Then I left my friends.

What I saw was not what I was doing. What I saw was what my mind wanted to show me. At first all I heard people saying was, “these are just words, nothing we are saying right now matters.” (exact quotes) There was a serious sense that nothing mattered.
There was a serious sense that nothing mattered.
Soon, that is all that I heard. I remember making it back to the rappers hoping that my favorite band was on and would get me leveled. But they were just rapping, “words, yeah, words.” That is literally what they were saying into their microphones, just the word “words”.

Soon enough I had convinced myself that I had died, or was dying and that I needed to fight to stay alive. I saw myself on a gurney, being rushed to an ambulance hearing someone say, “That’s what happens when you do drugs.”

Then I found myself at an intersection of a car accident some time later. My friends were all there and I did not have any idea what was going on. Then I figured out that I was in denial and shock after my girlfriend had been killed in a car accident. I dropped to my knees and began to weep ( which I’m sure I did for real in front of a whole mass of people ). Only to snap out of that and feel as if I might be in hell. Total despair is the only feeling I can sadly associate to this short time.

Once that vision passed I began to accept that I was dead, and that it was time to return my soul to where ever it goes. The strangest feeling of death and rebirth began to play out in my mind. The sun set, then it rose. Set, rose. Over and over again this went on. Much like the scene from HG Wells’ Time Machine toward the end of the book. With every sunrise, I seemed to gain strength, warmth. And then the sun would not come, and the people began to speak negatively once again. In a sudden fit of sanity, I asked a man for a cigarette. I clearly remember him asking for 5$. I said “no”. Then he asked for 10$, I said “no” again. I got the cigarette. They must have taken some pity on me, fore they lit the smoke for me. By doing this my body screamed to my brain that I was freezing. It must have been the warmth of the lighter.

Through pure willpower I made it back to my tent and my jacket and tried to get a close friend to level me out. He was very drunk and no help. I even remember telling him that I really needed him. I needed him to level me out. But I just put my sweater on and followed a friend of a friend I had met that night back to the show. At least now warm.

The band was on, drum solos from the drummers. I began to gain a bit of my senses back and figured out that I had to pee. I made it back to the stage just in time for Buster to save me from my own awful thoughts.

By pure chance a close friend saw me and grabbed me and took me to the rest of the group. They were obviously worried but I needed them to do nothing but hug me.

I was to later discover, part by flashes of what happened and part by talking to a security guard that was watching me THE WHOLE TIME, that I spent that time walking from the center of the festival camping area where a large light was, through the VIP area to the side gate mumbling to myself. I saw him later after I leveled out and he asked me to “get out of the VIP area, please, for god’s sake” I said to him, “you have said this to me before haven’t you”. He said, “Yes, all night you have been walking from that light to the gate mumbling to yourself, please stay out of VIP”. I thanked him for not kicking my ass to which he said, “You were obviously in bad shape earlier. I would never hurt someone as lost as you seemed. But you were OK, you just walked from there to there mumbling, nothing else.”

I don’t remember ANY of that! But that made me feel a lot better.

The rest of the night ended up being a great time. Other than finding my cousin crying and nearly shitting himself (he took 3). Getting him back to camp and to a bathroom was in my capacity at this point.

I do not blame the drug for all of this. It was irresponsible for me to ingest psychoactives as tired as I was.
It was irresponsible for me to ingest psychoactives as tired as I was.
Especially a very potent one. I was worried, of course. But I also knew that this happens. It almost goes with the territory. 15 years and this is the 1st time I’ve had a bad trip. I learned a lesson about moderation, and that the older you get the more careful you must be.

Did I do the same stuff the rest of the weekend, yes. Call me dumb, but I was much more careful and made sure to get sleep and drink lots of water. And I also made sure to stay warm. It’s funny how the vision of the sunrise sparked the need for warmth. Which started the slow process of my sanity returning.

Exp Year: 2009ExpID: 82394
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: 29
Published: Mar 23, 2020Views: 922
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LSD (2) : Bad Trips (6), Festival / Lg. Crowd (24)

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