DOSE:	2 hits	oral	LSD	(edible / food)
	1 cig.	smoked	Cannabis
	1 cig.	smoked	Cannabis

BODY WEIGHT:

215 lb

Time and Patterns 1st Acid Trip

This was my first experience with LSD.

I had been considering using for a long time. My friend, H, is an experienced psychonaut and one of his preferred pastimes is prescribing, based on his friends’ personality types, the ideal drug for each of his friends. For me, H recommended a cocktail of LSD and Ecstasy. I have no interest whatsoever in e but the acid recommendation really piqued my interest. My dad was a hippy back in the day and I know that psychedelics and acid were a large part of his experience.

I was fairly late coming into any kind of substance use. As a teenager I avoided caffeine although of course under special circumstances I have used high doses (study sessions etc). I did not consume any nicotine until age 19, when I began an occasional cigar and pipe habit that continues to the present day. I had my first drink several months AFTER my 21st birthday and did not try cannabis until I was almost 22.

In all of the above cases, I did not try the drugs randomly, haphazardly or without research. In the case of both my first cigar and my first drink, I made a special occasion and tried to have as positive a first experience as possible. I took the same approach with LSD. I told H I had decided to partake, and he arranged to acquire some from his dealer at college. In the interim, I took to reading everything I could about LSD and psychedelics in general. I read trip reports, I read the entirety of Albert Hoffman’s book, and I read lots of other essays and writings on the LSD experience. For better or for worse, I knew what to expect, and I was excited.

H had informed me that the best trips resulted from a natural setting, and I knew well that privacy was also a key ingredient, so I arranged to rent a cabin on a semi-remote lake. The weekend was chosen (Labor Day) and we drove out to the cabin. Timothy Leary recommends three days for any psychedelic experience, and we therefore rented the cabin for two nights/three days. We arrived around midday on Friday. (The cabin was amazing—other users had left lots of food and other neat stuff). We made the place comfortable, had dinner, and went to bed.

The next day we planned to drop in the morning. I made us a breakfast of pancakes with fresh-picked high-bush cranberries, cooked on a camp stove. It was yummy. Then it was time to drop. I was excited to say the least.

H did a wonderful job of guiding me through the experience calmly, and making it not-a-big-deal. The LSD was soaked onto SweetTart candies, so it was even yummy to dose! As soon as I swallowed the dose (2 candies), I thought “Oh shit…well, no turning back now!”. Right after dropping, we smoked a small joint (to take the nerves out and ensure a good mindset).

We sat around in the cabin, chatting about varied topics like the history of LSD, waiting for the acid to take effect. After about 30 or 45 minutes, H got up abruptly and started stretching, hanging from rafters in the cabin. When I asked what he was doing, he said, “Acid stretch.”

“What?” I asked

“The body high on acid when you’re coming up is weird. Just need an acid stretch.” Said H.

I had not yet begun to feel anything aside from the marijuana stoning, but I became concerned for the first time. The idea of the acid stretch being a necessity for some reason seemed intimidating, and I worried (only very briefly) that the experience I was about to have might be more than I bargained for. I took a deep breath and this passed.

I was laying on my back on my bed, and as H’s and my conversation continued, I began to become totally engrossed in the ceiling patterns in the log cabin. I saw the overlapping patterns as a metaphor for the constitution of my personality.

I told H, “You know, my personality is layers and textures.”

Since I was beginning to trip (though I hadn’t realized it yet), I assumed H would know exactly what I meant by this.

Instead, he said “What? That doesn’t make sense.”

I stopped for a second and realized what had just come out of my mouth, and this was my first realization that the acid was beginning to do its work.

I had brought a discman, and a series of mix CDs with music I thought would be interesting to listen to while tripping, and since I knew the acid was beginning to take effect, I decided to put on my headphones and go into my head. As the trip progressed, H and I called this “Going into The Shell.” I went inside The Shell and told H I wanted to see what the inside of my head was like for a while. He decided to go outside and trip on nature. I, the less experienced psychonaut, was finding the experience too novel and didn’t feel inclined to move much at all. H didn’t come back in again until near the end of the first CD, so I must estimate we were separated slightly longer than an hour, but it seemed like about a day to me. Extreme time dilation was a predominating characteristic of the trip and I began to notice it right away.

I would not say that I had any particular body high except for an odd feeling about the relationship between my consciousness and my body. I began to perceive my consciousness as inhabiting a tiny portion within my head, and began to feel that my body was a huge landscape over which I could send my awareness. This gave me the feeling that I myself was quite small, looking down at my body as if it were huge in comparison to my “Self.” I also had a sensation of looking out from within my head, as if my eyes were windows I was looking out of.

“We are led to believe a lie/ when we see with, and not through, the eye.” – William Blake

From where I lay, I could look out the windows of the cabin and see the spruce forest outside. It was fascinating to notice patterns in the forest. For instance, I noticed that the negative space between two spruce trees looked much like an upside-down spruce tree. The recognition of patterns like this would be the second predominating characteristic of the trip. I found I could shift my focus between background and foreground with unbelievable ease, and see patterns and reflections that I would otherwise never have noticed. I briefly saw some spiral patterns overlaid on the tree branches in the forest, but visual hallucinations of that kind were not a major ingredient in this trip.

The events of the next few hours are hazy, and trying to put them in the correct order is even more difficult. I will recount what I can recall.

At one point early in the trip, I noticed I was able to hold still and balance much longer than I could when sober. I had brought along a small Buddha statue and I was able to balance it on the tip of my thumb for minutes at a time. I was completely unable to recreate this feat when sober.

The first intense peak of the experience came when I put on the second CD I had brought to listen to, which was a mix of Prog Rock odysseys. The YES song “Close to the Edge” seemed intensely meaningful and resonated with me on all kinds of levels. The ridiculously poetic lyrics, which usually seem like nothing more than verbal nonsense, suddenly aligned and made perfect sense to me. And, what’s more, they seemed to have been written specifically about my life situation at the time. This was not merely an intellectual understanding, but resonated experientially and emotionally as well. It was truly an aesthetic peak experience.

At some point, H came in for a more extended visit into the cabin, and the social chapter of the trip began. It is very difficult to verbalize the way in which acid altered our social interaction. There was a great tendency to draw connections, for conversations to loop around on themselves in unexpected ways, and especially for otherwise very mundane things to seem very significant, and very, VERY funny. We spent a lot of time smiling and laughing at silly things in the cabin and in the wider world. Initially after the intensity of the first peak I found it difficult, and even slightly trite, to converse. But it soon became easy and I enjoyed the closeness that the shared chemical experience wrought in us.

Eventually, I became established enough in the acid experience that I felt I could go outside and experience the beautiful nature around the lake. Before venturing out, we smoked another little joint and this proved providential, as the combination of weed and nature injected a second peak into the acid experience.

The world of nature was unbelievably tremendous while tripping. Patterns were in everything. I was able to shift perspective at will, for instance to imagine that the lake surface was actually oriented vertically instead of horizontally. It was very easy to believe anything I imagined was true. I decided that the path on the lakeshore was the Road to Jerusalem, and even though I knew in reality that was not the case, it was still true “in some sense.”

The most fulfilling part of the trip came near the end when we sat on a bench on a hill overlooking the lake. We were able to look at the plants growing on the lake surface and mutually recognize patterns. The most intense realization to me was that ever system exhibits sinewave-like change over time, but the time frames of the waves and crests is different for every system. In this way, nature is like a symphony of different overlapping rhythms. I knew this intellectually already, but while tripping I knew it experientially and it was deeply True.

We made our way back into the cabin and H fell asleep. I was still coming down, and decided to sit down and write a list of themes and ideas from the trip.

Overall the experience was overwhelmingly interesting and quite positive. The biggest thing I will note about LSD is that it doesn’t seem to cause any inebriation or “cloudiness” of the sort I associate with weed or alcohol, and it is also NOT a euphoriant. It does NOT make everything “feel great” or “seem awesome.” But it does open the mind.

Exp Year: 2010	ExpID: 93297
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 22
Published: Nov 19, 2024	Views: 38
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
LSD (2) : General (1), Glowing Experiences (4), First Times (2), Small Group (2-9) (17)