DOSE:	20 mg	oral	4-AcO-DMT	(powder / crystals)
	repeated	smoked	Cannabis	(plant material)

BODY WEIGHT:

187 lb

I had my doubts about the night; it was a bad way to start off for sure. I was nervous. Nervous because I’d done 2ci the night before and had to spend the last few hours of that trip sweating and terrified, stuck in my tent, listening to a group of people having an equally terrifying trip in the tent next to mine. It wasn’t my fault really, I was doing really well until it got dark and I went for a walk. Someone came screaming out of the camp ground bushes, jumping tent lines and launching fireworks into the air without breaking stride. I tried to collect myself at the nearest building – a 1930’s style library, but it was occupied by a strange white-gowned girl playing piano by candlelight. I stumbled back to my tent, lay down and had to wait out the rest of the trip.

I yawned as I tried to push those thoughts out of my mind. The yawning was getting bad now, worse than when I was on shrooms. I was getting lightheaded, colors were getting a little brighter. My friend Dave* who had provided us with the capsules was yawning too. I asked him how he felt, but all I got back was a quiet “I dunno.”

I checked my watch. It had been an hour since we dropped, and there was another hour to go before the show. So we sat at the edge of the main stage, in the dying sun, looking at the throngs of people walking every which way across the festival grounds. I couldn’t focus, and neither could Dave. We tried talking, about the people, the things around us, the music. It was hard to focus, hard to keep anything in mind. Distances were becoming blurred, it was getting harder to keep track of time. I kept yawning, every yawn would send a ripple through my body, send vibrations across the world outside.

The grass started breathing, waving; the trees started growing more complex. Their branches became prominent, I started thinking about math and recursive equations and how it’s crazy that trees are made of repeated patterns, simple when isolated, taken apart, but growing to enormous complexity when they worked as a whole.
I stared at the people, they didn’t seem to notice me. I wondered where they were going, what they did, why they were here. Maybe they were on something too? I wouldn’t know until later, but this feeling of distance, of being almost see-through would only get stronger throughout the night. We sat there watching the crowd move as a whole until we somehow, through half-thoughts and broken sentences, we decided to make our way to the back of the camp, check out some of the art exhibits, and maybe change our thoughts for a bit. I got up but had trouble standing. I didn’t feel drunk, but my body felt weightless. It was hard throwing my weight around, each step was a challenge. I felt lightheaded, nervous, and there was a stone in my gut. I fumbled in my bag for a bottle of pepto bismol, and only with exceeding difficulty did I pry it open and down one of the pink pills. Dave said he was fine.

We made our way across the field, the colors getting brighter and brighter, the setting sun casting orange-yellow glows across the dusty air, suspending its rays for split seconds, before casting long wavy shadows across the blowing tallgrass. I hoped the visuals would be comparable to 2ci, I hoped I had enough chemicals left in my brain to appreciate them, I really hoped I’d be able to keep my shit together.

The outlines of things were getting harder to focus on, the edges of things became darker, like God dragging a thick-tipped sharpie around everything and smudging it at the edges. Yellow and green became more prominent, the trees and the grass seemed more alive, the buildings and music tents seemed to be more real. We walked further, to the farthest stage, the one where you can check out the festival from a distance. It was dead. We were yawning. I asked Dave how he was feeling again, I got only a bit of half-mumbled answer in response. We yawned, mine turned into a burp, and Dave suggested we find a bathroom. I agreed, and we made our stumbling, weaving way towards the line of porta-potties.

I waited for my turn, staring out past the toilets, the fence, and into the field beyond it. Those hard edges that I talked about were turning into roiling fractals. The visuals weren’t like mush or 2ci, they were more subtle, they lit up whatever I was looking at, made it move in its own way. When I focused on a point, any point, the hard dark outlines would cover everything and the edges would turn into fractals, exploding out from the traces like those pictures of solar flares. They’d flare up and out, living outlines, spurred on by the slowly changing colours of the world. It was my turn finally.

I can’t explain my thought processes here, I don’t recall having any sort of thoughts, or anything coherent at this point. I remember just thinking about the world around me, looking at the details in everything. The marks from the mould that birthed the porta-potty, the cigarette butts on the ground, the way my shoes felt when they hit the uneven dirt beneath them. I couldn’t stop staring at the trees and the sky.

I stood outside waiting for my friend after I was done. I wasn’t sure where he’d gone, I couldn’t judge distances or time. Maybe he’d left? Maybe I’d just been imagining the whole thing, and he was still sitting down by the crowd? Didn’t people smoke ghost cigarettes and talk to imaginary beings on drugs? I noticed my friend John at that moment, drunk and trying to light a smoke. I called out to him, he walked over, not noticing my eyes and (I assume , at least) my uncertain posture. I told him about Dave, and we decided to wait.

The nervousness was gone now, along with most feeling in general. I didn’t feel sick anymore. I didn’t really feel happy, or sad or nervous. I couldn’t feel my body, I felt at one with the world. The sky was starting to darken and the visuals were starting to get more intense. Everything outside the dark plastic frames of my glasses was moving and changing color, slowly, like I could see the Earth’s heartbeat. Dave eventually came out of the row of toilets, found us, and we headed to where John had his blanket. Dave said his high had plateau’d, he had no visuals and didn’t really feel much of anything. I believed him, he didn’t look very high.

I went and lay down on the slightly damp earth, beside the blanket. The rest of our group was there, and it made me feel good to see them. Not happy, but just at peace with everything. Tegan & Sara were just about to start their set. I stared at the stage, with its bright lights and white canopy. The lights seemed to paint the trees, which would in turn move and turn translucent. I could see faint fractal outlines behind everything, like someone turning down the opacity on the universe and letting me see the fine mesh that made everything run. It was behind everything except for people.

I sat up for a few songs, feeling completely unreal. I didn’t really feel like I had a sense of self anymore, but it wasn’t the terrifying, gut-wrenching ego-loss I had experience years earlier. I felt really zen-like, really calm, and really lucky. The warmth of my friend’s bodies made me feel really secure, like I was supposed to be there. I felt really thankful, and infinitesimally small.

I lay back and stared at the sky. It was cloudless. We were outside the city. The night sky was a dark blue, almost black and completely filled with stars. The music washed through me, barely touching my consciousness and heading right for the soul. I stared at the sky, the stars started moving, slightly. They darted back and forth, dimmed, vibrated, changed colors but didn’t leave their spots, as though they were anchored in place. The blue-black sky was only half there, delicate fractal spiderwebs were hidden behind it, always shifting and changing. It was the most delicate, subtle hallucination I had ever had. It wasn’t quite an OEV and wasn’t quite a CEV. My CEV’s at this point were nothing special, they were intense, but no different than what I would get on mush and ecstasy.

The outward visual experience was mindblowing. It felt spiritual almost, I felt at one with the earth. It was good to lie there, not feeling my body, and be supported by the damp ground, now warmed by my own body heat. I felt somehow that I belonged to a giant universal machine, that everything would pass and that the nothingness would be warm and inviting. It felt as though consciousness was just one big dream sewn together from vibrating energies and chemical reactions.

I was lost in the music. No thoughts entered my mind, at least none tied to myself as a person, or anyone else. All I could think and feel was stuck in the external world, tied to the universal scale. It was the closest I’ve ever come to transcendental experience. My friends decided to get closer to the stage. I tried to explain that I wasn’t sure I could walk, but my voice and my thoughts were so far away. I got up as best I could, grabbed my bag and followed them through the crowd. The world was moving way too fast, I felt lightheaded. I almost fell a few times. It was hard to focus, the outlines of everything all blurring together. My jaw was tight.

Then I peaked.

On the way to the stage everything stopped. The world became a series of cell-shaded stills, the only way I could describe it is like experiencing a visual echo. It was like the tracers, those ghostly neon dragonfly shadows from the night before, but this time they enveloped all of my reality. I heard my name called from nowhere, and heard it fade into the distance, a crystal clear echo over the roaring crowd. I kept moving in this fractal-lined stop motion, and the roar of the crowd faded, replaced by the sound of an angry ocean crashing into a beach.

We made our way to an open patch of ground not far from the stage, and I lay down as soon as I could. I spent the rest of the concert in a totally serene, peaceful and satisfied state. I watched the stars and fractals, watched the lights from the stage and lost myself completely in the sounds coming from every direction. Every now and again one of my friends would nudge me on the shoulder or ask how I was doing. I didn’t blame them, it probably looked like I was passing out. My voice was too far away and too disconnected from my thoughts to explain anything, so I just smiled.

I started coming down a few songs from the end, and was pretty much done tripping by the time the final note sounded. I can’t explain the overwhelming feeling of spiritual well being, the oneness with everything that came over me. The crowd around me was starting to thin out. I got up and felt the dampness of the ground on my hoodie, but I didn’t feel cold. Everyone around me was shivering, but I felt perfectly warm. I touched my face, a slight sheen of sweat covered it, the same kind you get when you trip balls on e for way too long. I started applauding with the rest of the crowd. I saw the girls pack up their guitars and start walking off the stage. The yelling got louder. Tegan turned, scanned the crowd. When her eyes got low, right to where we were standing I threw my hand in the air reaching for the fractal-patterened sky and yelled. We locked eyes, she smiled, I grinned wider than I can ever remember.

Lame, I know, but they’d furnished so many of my trips with great vibes that I couldn’t help myself. I don’t know what it is, but psychedelics and their music just goddamn do it for me, y’know? Anyway, I got what I wanted, so I put my hands in the pockets of my hoodie, the same soft, machine-beaten cotton that I wear on most of my trips and started walking back to camp.

There was a fire going, my friends were talking about their night, about their friends and about things in general. No one else really seemed to like the show, but then again no one had been in my head. My friend Jeff did a capsule too, but he had wandered off with someone who was having a bad trip and wasn’t able to get his own trip off the ground. He said it was strange, but it hadn’t affected him significantly. Dave, with whom I had taken the drugs earlier, was well on his way to getting drunk. He figured that he had taken a pill that wasn’t weighed out properly, the scraps left over from portioning. It was unfortunate.

As I stared into the crackling fire and heard the frenzied beating of the African hand drums, I realized I had to go explore the rest of the festival camp site. Yeah, I definitely needed to check out the campsite. I wanted to connect with someone, to talk about something, to share the positive energy I felt. The feeling that it was good to be alive and here, and human. So human. I asked if anyone wanted to come, but my friends were either tired, had made alternate plans or were simply not feeling my wavelengths. It was understandable, so I rolled a few joints and headed to the hill at the periphery of the camp.

I could see it as it came closer, the whole hillside illuminated with living color. Neon blues, greens, yellows and reds all moving as the wearers of the lights shifted and danced. As I got closer and the drumming got louder, I could make out the individual drums. I started walking up the hill, unable to take my eyes off the orange glow at its base – the fire dancers. I got to the top, found a dude clutching his guitar close to his knees, alone, sitting on an open patch of grass amidst the nucleated groups of people. I sat down beside him and offered him a j. He seemed surprised, but no one turns down a j. We got to talking, about drugs and the festival, and watched the fire dancers finish their show. We parted ways, he had some friends to meet, and me, well… I felt as good as I did before. I don’t really believe in positive energy or karma, but sometimes the shit just works, y’know?

So I made my way to the center of the festival grounds where two giant wood-mesh, glowing half-spheres were set up. I climbed inside one through the tiny opening at its base and found some people, also tripping, staring at the lights. I sat down next to a quiet dude in the center of the tent, hitting a bubbler. I offered him a j, he offered me the bubbler and we shot the shit for a while. Slowly, people started filtering in and joining the circle. Before long we had a few more j’s sparked, some food and drink going around, and a conversation between perfect strangers that spanned everything from drugs to childhood toys to the world outside the festival. All of this beneath the shifting and changing luminescence of the domes.

I don’t remember when I went to sleep that night, or when I woke up. All I know is I felt a deep calm the next day, and for the days afterward. It’s still there, that feeling of zen, but it gets harder and harder to keep the worries of daily life from eating into it. If I could have anything, it would be to have the peace of mind, tranquility and love for fellow living beings I felt that night.

Exp Year: 2011	ExpID: 91921
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 23
Published: Apr 11, 2012	Views: 20,607
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4-AcO-DMT (387) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Hangover / Days After (46), Music Discussion (22), Nature / Outdoors (23), Combinations (3), General (1)