DOSE:	1 hit	oral	LSD	(blotter / tab)
		smoked	Cannabis

BODY WEIGHT:

180 lb

Acid is intriguing. If you would've told me 5 years prior to this experience that I would be having it, I would've laughed at you. It was, however, one of the most important experiences I've ever had, even if I would've never imagined myself having it.

I am a Christian, and have been ever since I was a boy. I have played piano/keyboard at dozens of churches as a part of a worship band that gained a lot of popularity in southern California. I still have a very strong faith, even though many Christians would tell me what I've done is wrong, and to write about it is even more wrong. I disagree with them, and it will become very evident as to why in the body of this report.

I'd experimented with various hallucinogens and drugs after a painful break up with a girl who I was sure was going to be my wife. I figured I should spend some time experiencing all the things I hadn't, because of all the time I imagined I had wasted spending with my ex. Cannabis was first, then Mushrooms, then LSD.

My first experience with LSD was my best to date. It was impromptu, and exciting. A friend of mine was dating someone who was able to get us each a tab of something called 'Obama.' We acquired the goods and went back to the place we had deigned to trip at. This being my first time with acid, I wanted to play it safe. My mushroom experience prior to this had left me with some unpleasant ego experiences, so I wanted to make sure not to overdo this first go with acid. Each of us dropped our dose. I had one tab, my friend had one tab, and my friend's girlfriend had two tabs.

It's worth mentioning here that we were FOOLISH to not have taken precautions, and ended up tripping without a sitter.

We smoked a single bowl, and sat back in the garage waiting for the acid to take effect. I prayed, like I always do when I engage in taking hallucinogens. I always ask God to show me something that I wouldn't be able to see or understand otherwise , and so far, I've always managed to see or understand something that I wouldn't have been able to otherwise :)

The cannabis was a very mellow indica with a sweet taste. We began to feel the onset of the acid amidst the body high of the cannabis after about 10 minutes. It was at this point that we decided we needed to be in the Jacuzzi. All of us put on our swim wear and made our way to the Jacuzzi. I began to notice that even though it was dark out (around 6:45 in the early Winter in So Cal), my eyes were phenomenally sharp. It was as if the sun had just begun to set after the afternoon, but it was in fact already done setting, and only the sunset's afterglow was visible in the horizon.

Once in the Jacuzzi, we began to talk, discussing the onset of the LSD. The experience of being in water has always helped me begin to understand the beginning of the trip. My muscles began to feel more alert and responsive. My body's high from the indica we had smoked earlier began to meld and intensify with some new sensation. I began to feel tremendous. it was as if any of the creakiness in my bones, or the soreness in my muscles had dissipated into nothing. It was as if I my body wasn't there at all.

I tried to explain to my friends what this was like. It was as if the part of my brain that normally sends signals to the extremities of my form had dispersed throughout my body, and no longer needed to send messages back and forth; it was simply a part of all of my being. If I wanted to move, I could do so without any effort or thought. My sense of muscular control had skyrocketed. This something that my friends had noticed about me, because I'm a tall guy (6'5'') and have a tendency to be clumsy from time to time.

In the midst of explaining this phenomenon, however, the bamboo grove near the jacuzzi began to move in a way that I've never seen before. The sets of leaves from the bamboo shoots were all dancing with one another in perfect harmony. They interwove, intermingled, and combined with one another in ways that defied logic. As one of the leaves would move, it would immediately reveal the next leaf, which would in turn follow the original leaf to reveal yet another leaf. The synchronized movements of the bamboo in the wind were so profound to me that I stopped talking completely, and simply stared at the bamboo in front of me. My silence signaled my friends to look at the leaves also. They did, and we shared a moment together, all realizing that the order within nature is apparent and beautiful. We realized that the intent of man to forge a more convenient order out of perversions of nature was evil. We realized that the world was beautiful.

Though the profundity of the leaves was not lost on me, I will admit that I was underwhelmed by the intensity of the visual effects. I assumed I had just not taken enough acid, and figured I should remember this for the next time. My friend's girlfriend said that we should go adventuring, which we all agreed upon. Being the only one of us with a vehicle, I had elected myself to be the one to drive.

Stop.

Take a moment to understand that what I just wrote was incredibly foolish. I drove my vehicle on roads with other people while I was under the effect of a hallucinogen. NEVER DO THIS. WHAT I DID NOT ONLY ENDANGERED MYSELF, BUT IT ENDANGERED OTHER PEOPLE AROUND ME WHO WERE COMPLETELY REMOVED FROM MY SET OF CIRCUMSTANCES. IT WAS SELFISH AND WRONG OF ME TO HAVE IRRESPONSIBLY ELECTED TO DRIVE. NEVER DRIVE UNDER THE EFFECTS OF A HALLUCINOGEN.

Thankfully, nobody was hurt from my driving, which was an adventure in and of itself.

I was foolish in thinking that the hot tub visual distortions were as intense as they would be that day. I had not even peaked yet. The only reason I believed I was okay to drive was because the acid didn't affect my brain in the way that mushrooms did, or even the way that alcohol had in the past. I was still incredibly lucid. I understood myself, who I was, my relation to my surroundings. My id, my ego, and my super-ego were all intact, and though I felt more sensitive to my surroundings, I didn't feel overwhelmed.

My friends and I got in my truck, which only has a single bench. We all cuddled up on the bench and squished in and began to drive. We decided we would go to Table Rock, a beach in Laguna which is characterized by a single rock formation in the middle of the beach which looks like a table. It is a beautiful, private, and peaceful place where nature hasn't been completely squelched out by buildings or smog or things of that nature.

To get to table rock, we needed to travel down the freeway. I had driven this freeway drunk (FOOLISHLY) several times in the past, so I figured that it wouldn't be so bad to drive it tripping. After all, I was perfectly aware that any visual effects were a result of the drug I had ingested. Everything was normal at first. All that indicated to me that I was under any influence was the lingering body high, at least until I began to accelerate.

People who take acid sometimes call the feeling of your brain while on acid 'frying.' This is because your brain can feel 'hot,' as if you were just using it as a muscle. The best way to describe it would be to say that my brain feels as my muscles do after I lift weights.

The feeling of my brain frying began to hit me on the freeway, and I began to peak. The lane dividers that were normally just white painted parallel lines on the freeway lifted themselves off of the freeway, and were racing next to my truck at eye level. I was impressed by this. But, I could tell that the hallucinations were beginning at a certain distance away from me in the foreground, and this helped me to retain my center while I drove. After the lane lines lifted off the ground, the freeway began to bend and twist. It turned into what looked like a roller coaster, but only in the distance ahead of me. About 30 yards in front of my truck, the road normalized and righted itself, appearing normal in a 30 yard bubble around my truck.

There was a moment during our drive in which my friend's girlfriend demanded we pull of to stop at a convenience store. This, to me, was a violent assault on our present course, but I wasn't sure why. I explained why we couldn't go to the convenience store as follows: 'We are on our way somewhere. If we leave this way, the way will be lost to us. If the way is lost to us, it can never be retrieved, only reforged. A reforged experience is perverted from its original intent, and can only ever offer to us a lesser wisdom than the original experience would've wished. It's important that we make it to our destination, and all other things can wait.' My friends were fascinated with my words, and stared at me as if I had dropped some kind of wisdom nuke on them.

Something else struck me then. I wasn't perceiving velocity as the same as it always had been. I felt myself in a variety of places at the same time. As I increased or decreased my speed, the area of this sense would increase or decrease respectively. I sensed all at once:

-where I was presently
-where I was previously
-where I was going to be in a relative amount of time to where I had been and where I then (presently) was.

In simpler terms, I felt like Dr. Manhattan from the Watchmen. Time had dissolved itself. Past melded with present melded with future, but only in the sense of velocity. I could guide this stream. If I changed lanes, I could feel my 'time-path' shifting, correcting the changing future before itself. I marveled at this, and felt incredibly safe. The position of every car around me was known to me, as long as it was in my bubble. Every lane change they attempted or executed was predictable to me, without a moments thought required.

My mind felt as if it was all working at once. Everything made sense. All things connected. All things interwove and danced in the same scene. There was no space between anything, simply invisible strings of time weaving all things together in a set of fluid moments that flowed like a river. It was clear to me that time didn't exist, and this revelation made everything appear in a new way to me. Depth of space seemed to dissipate. Whatever distance things were from me was irrelevant, an illusion. I could instantly be in any of these places, and the distance between myself and anywhere was a lie.

We finally arrived at Table Rock after traversing a freeway, a highway, some local streets, and another highway. The drive was overwhelming to me, but I knew better than to let that get to me. To lose your sense of the ability to cope and adapt to situations as they come is to invite a bad trip for yourself and for those around you.

At Table Rock, you must descend a staircase that is usually fairly dark. To my party and I, it might as well have been lit up by spotlights. Our eyes were so dilated at this point that everything was visible. Every crack in the cement, every splinter of the wood steps further toward the beach, every leaf of the creeping ivy along the sides. Not only were they visible, but in the darkness, their colors were easily identified and vivid. Once we stepped into the sand, the world changed for us.

Every little dune in the sandy beach was an eye socket making an expression at my friends and I. This may sound disturbing, but it was quite friendly. It was as if an artist used the sand to express every human emotion that can be communicated through the eyes/eyebrows. The rocks of the cliffs that enclose the beach were giant, old, stone faces. Each had a stern wisdom. The waves crashed, and reverberated through the cove in a way that was gorgeous. Sound cycled in and out. The tides didn't stop with the water, they echoed further into eternity with every foamy ebb and flow.

Early I mentioned that my muscles seemed more alert and responsive. Table Rock's rock isn't very hard to climb, or very big by any measure. Normally however, it took my friends and I about 45 seconds to 2-3 minutes to get up on top of the rock (considering it was usually dark, a little wet, and otherwise could be perceived as mildly treacherous to climb to the sober person). I made my way over to the rock, and within 5 seconds I was atop it. My friends watched me climb, and asked me quizzically how I had made it up there so fast. 'I don't know,' I replied, 'It almost seemed as if the face in the rock told me how to climb it.' And that's really the best I can describe it. Every hold was apparent to me. Every movement in my body responded immediately to my end desire. I knew I wanted to be on top of the rock, and my body complied with my desires to change these thoughts into the present reality.

My friend's girlfriend asked, 'Aren't you afraid to fall?'
'Not really.' I replied.
'Why not?'
'Because you can never really fall off of the Earth, only more onto it.'

My friends laughed at this, and we all just took that trueness of gravity to be reason enough not to fear falling anymore. 'It's like the earth is just trying to give you a hug,' my friend said.

The trip began to diminish at this point. It was about 3 hours in. There was a flag near a light that we all watched. The colors and the shadows danced together in a way that was surreal. All depth of field was gone, and we were with the flag as it danced. To this day, if I go to Table Rock and look at the flag, it still dances in the same way, and I'm able to remember what I learned that day.

We all reflected about our lives. We spoke little then, but thought about a lot. I realized that in taking LSD, my perceptions which were colored by lies and propaganda about LSD had been eliminated. I realized that my perception had changed about something which I had previously been sure about. I realized that not only had that perception changed, but many of the things I once perceived had shifted and transformed into new ideas, as a result of inputting new information into my mind.

This startled me.

My perceptions had changed. I could change my mind about something if I wanted to. I didn't have to believe or think in set patterns or modes, I could adapt and modify my mind as I saw fit. Just like the bamboo leaves near the jacuzzi all bent and swayed at the beckoning of the wind, I could change my mind at the beckoning of my soul. If I felt something was wrong, or something was untrue, I could set my mind to apply a new set of understandings to that topic.

To this day, that understanding of perception has been colored by my experience with LSD. I feel free. The evils and ills of this world can only affect one as much as one desires to be affected by them. Other than that, we are free. Our minds are our own. A great gift of freedom from God himself to question and enhance and enjoy.

Exp Year: 2008	ExpID: 88236
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 22
Published: Oct 26, 2022	Views: 331
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LSD (2), Cannabis (1) : Small Group (2-9) (17), First Times (2)