DOSE:

oral

LSD

(blotter / tab)

BODY WEIGHT:

185 lb

After reading many of the LSD trip reports, I thought I'd add mine, which I feel illustrates pretty clearly the effects of a VERY large, unintentionally severe dose of acid. Take it as a warning, or an enticement, or just entertainment if you choose.

Summer of 1999, Highgate, Vermont...It was one of the last Grateful Dead shows before Jerry ate that fatal pint of Heroin Garcia. Two friends and I made the journey in my bedraggled hatchback. Now, we were not fans of the Dead, nor did we have tickets...what we DID have was a few paycheck's worth of cash and a powerful hunger for some good old-fashioned visceral experience after a summer of hard work. We hadn't been there ten minutes, having parked the beater back in a field which was rapidly filling up with freaks of all shapes and sizes, when we encountered a pale little hippie who asked if we'd been 'hooked up' with acid yet. Is it good? we naively asked. (Like he was gonna say no.) We gave him some money and he ripped us off a huge chunk of plain white, unperforated blotter- maybe half a sheet. In minutes the first couple were in our mouths as we wandered down the highway, watching this tiny town rapidly becoming the biggest city in the state.

Half an hour or so later, J was expressing skepticism about our purchase...It was too cheap, it didn't taste like anything, we didn't feel any tingle in our mouths or stomachs yet...'I think it's fake,' he said, 'or really weak. We should just eat it all.' What the hell, I thought, he knows more about this stuff than me. We offered some more to B, but he was more interested in finding some mushrooms. So, down the hatch it went; ragged chunks the size of postage stamps or matchbooks.

It was probably only fifteen minutes or so later that I noticed a fly buzzing around J's head. A fly which grew to the size of a ping-pong ball, turned red, then, blue, then multiplied into a cloud of giant flashing flies which sounded like a chainsaw. 'I don't think it was fake...' I said to him, and he turned to me with pupils already swelling towards dinner-plate proportions, and grinned like a dog eatin' bumblebees.

Well, what followed was a full THIRTY-SIX HOURS of madness. There are two things I am eternally grateful for; the acid was not only strong as hell, it was clean as a whistle and I never experienced more than a twinge or two of physical discomfort. Second, we were in possibly the one environment where, screwed up as we were, we were practically blending into the wallpaper amid 150,000 or so other bits of human flotsam and jetsam. There's no way I could describe all the outlandish, incomprehensible things I felt, saw, heard and experienced there, but a few deserve mention.

At one point, probably six hours into the trip, I decided that I just needed to leave for a while. Just go away, into the woods, AWAY from this seething mass of lunacy swirling around me. I walked into the edge of the forest, into a little sunlit glade filled with white flowers here and there. Ohh the relief I felt! here was a perfect spot to lie down and grab ahold of the fraying edges of my sanity and...wait...that's not a flower!! I had stumbled into a shithole. The white flowers were wads of toilet paper that had recently wiped some dirty hippie's ass. THERE WAS NO ESCAPE. The crushing blow struck me between the lobes and i was paralyzed, stark still for several minutes. Then I pulled myself together and plunged back into the howling, gibbering carnival of humanoid creatures which now spread out for miles and miles. I knew I had no choice but to surrender myself to it.

Later, I reconnected with J and B (who had indeed found a gigantic bag of mushrooms) and we locked ourselves in my car for a while. We turned on Nine Inch Nails and rolled up the windows in a desperate bid to block out our surroundings for a bit. J and I had a full on conversation about our situation without opening our mouths; this is not a myth, folks, it IS possible. I later saw him hackysack in complete darkness for thirty minutes without dropping the ball. B was throwing handfuls of caps and stems around the car and drooling. He was not able to participate in the conversation. The trees outside, tossed by the wind, were a wriggling electric frieze which screamed and vibrated at an impossible pitch.

It was about this time that I realized, as I looked in the rearview mirror, that I did not know my name or anything at all about myself. I literally had no idea who was staring back at me. Ego death, i believe they call it...It should have been terrifying. Instead it felt wonderfully liberating. It gave me the freedom to concentrate on other, more important things. Things like the sentence I was hearing over and over in my head, drowning out even the buzzing screams of the trees, a sentence not in English or any other earthly tongue but in some older, more primal language. I could never attempt to transcribe it but to this day, if I concentrate, I can hear a faint memory of it. This sentence goes around and around in a vast wheel, a carousel or Ferris Wheel of light, sound and knowledge. This sentence contains every bit of information that has ever been and will ever be known to man and to God. I realized that if I could just figure out where to put the PERIOD, where to make it stop, I could read it out clearly and thus would become the most knowledgeable, powerful being in the universe.

I have no idea for how long I rode this wheel, listening to the sentence repeat and blend and swirl around me, desperately focusing on finding its beginning and end. At some point I realized that if I did not stop, I might never be able to get off of the wheel. Some blessed part of me recognized a potential future life at the Shady Acres Home for the Incurably Psychotic, and forced me to jump off. When I landed it was dark and J and B were gone. There were huge fires raging out in the human wilderness and electric snakes shooting through the sky. I set out again into the chaos, with my name and identity now recovered, and had a blast.

Two days later when we finally woke up from a few hours of cracked and broken sleep, at four a.m., we fled the vast metropolis of Highgate, where two hundred thousand residents had loved, fought, fucked, died, and created a complex society complete with its own economy. The car was strewn with camping gear, spilled beer and coffee, and littered with mushrooms which we did our best to collect before getting on the highway. When I got home that day and emptied my pockets, I had about eight packs of cigarettes, a big ball of opium, a chunk of hash, some microdot pills I couldn't identify, some mysterious feathers, and a scrap of paper with a scribbled circle on it. The 'wheel' didn't look quite so amazing anymore...I laughed and we went swimming naked on the microdots in the glorious August sun.

I've taken acid a couple times since then, but never has it done much for me...I just kinda get a 'been there, done that' feeling; like it has nothing left to offer. I'm certainly not suggesting that anyone go out and gobble twenty or more hits of Fluff. I'm actually very thankful that I emerged from this as an intact, sane entity. So, I guess the lesson is that even if your smart-ass friend tells you to eat it all...give it a few more minutes, O.K.?

Exp Year: 1999	ExpID: 52084
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Oct 31, 2007	Views: 137,089
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LSD (2) : Multi-Day Experience (13), General (1), Festival / Lg. Crowd (24)