DOSE: T+ 0:00	1 hit	oral	LSD	(blotter / tab)
T+ 1:00		smoked	Cannabis	(plant material)

It was the end of the day, and my friend had just dropped off a colorful bag of drugs to my pocket. Most prominently among them for me at that time was a single hit of white, unperfed blotter LSD, folded neatly in an empty gum wrapper. The periods of the school day passed by in anxiety as I drew closer to the last period, the very time in which before I put the hit of acid on my tongue.

“One hit?” I said to myself. “This should be pretty good, but nothing too memorable.” Of course, I was completely wrong in all respects. I have experience with plenty of other drugs, and thought myself experienced enough to tame the LSD experience, but at points it stretched the foundation of my very being thin. Just a few minutes after I dropped the acid tab, the fire alarm ushered the sitting children out of the school, where I then met with my friend who had given me the acid in the first place. An old friend, but he seemed in a very spaced-out condition at that point, probably because the acid had shifted complete gears on the foundation of his brain the night before.
“It’ll probably hit you in forty-five minutes,” he told me. “You’ll be peaking around 4:30.”

The alarm ended, and we went back in our classrooms. The rising intensity of the LSD wound its way around my arms and neck like a snake searching for an empty piece of an apple to snatch from my grasping hands. And by the time the final bell for school rang, I was plenty glad the day had ended. But as I left the back school doors to walk home, the experience just begun.

A female friend of mine, Z, and I began twisting our way through the woods, and I told her I had just dropped a tab of acid. “You did not!” My permanent grin gave it away. Then she revealed to me that she, a virgin in the land of LSD though experienced with mushrooms, was also planning on trying acid this weekend. A friend of hers appeared ahead of us, and I called him over to smoke a bowl of medium-grade cannabis. By now the blotter was already beginning to make me feel permanently happy, but little else was happening. A grin etched itself into my face that simply begged to be filled at all times, and it took a lot of restraint and will power to keep me from smiling like an idiot after the cannabis was all turned into smoke and ashes. Pretty soon I bid X farewell, and restrained myself in order to walk through the middle of town to end up to where I needed to be.

Every depressing thought was used as leverage to keep my countenance firm, until a sort of nihilistic underlyings of a fatalistic trip began. LSD does not like to be imposed upon. It is not a kind and loving substance like marijuana, and you cannot choose when to laugh and when to breathe and when to think on LSD, because you are operating at levels where all of these functions blend into one. Music sounded beautiful as soon as I reached my house, and thoughts of four-dimensionality and the flesh of the gods both raced through my mind as hallucinations started to obscure reality.

By 3:00 it had begun to show itself in full swing, yet my parents were also home, so I did what anyone in a position of compromising authority would do and resigned myself to the woods. They were a mere five minute walk from my house, yet by the time I got there time was already ceasing to be meaningful. The LSD bloomed or exploded here, so that by the time I first set foot in the forest, an eternity would pass in a few moments.

My back was still open to the woods, the houses, all of civilization across the street, and no matter how fast I walked up into them, they were still there. Had I moved at all? Was I just going in circles? I pushed myself farther and farther back into the woods until the hallucinations began to become so overwhelming I couldn’t discern left from right or up from down. In fact, my only mark in this period of the journey after leaving the signs of civilization was the sun.

The sun had been facing me coming in. Now, I was hallucinating so badly all that all I could see where a series of trees, underbrush and plant merging into one single writhing entity with the sun as its own god in the sky. At times, the sun literally felt like an omnipresent, and oftentimes malevolent, deity. I tried to escape civilization at first, continuously walking farther and farther back into the rays of the sun in order to leave all the people I had known behind. But I couldn’t leave them behind. In fact, I lost all sense of time and space during some periods of this journey, yet I distinctintly remember that there behind my back during all the periods were rows of people from civilization, there to watch my intensely strange, possibly lethal first time on LSD.

A leaf on the ground in front of me blew in the wind, and I picked it up, holding it up with the trees, who were all bending in to face and bow to me, and seeing its rhythm.
The leaf lost all the dried plant material around the stems, gradually eroding into the vague outline of a dead series of stems. Then it magically regrew to blossom into a green sapling before turning back into the limp brown leaf sitting in my hand.

Ticks and spiders here became a massive paranoia of mine, albeit in reality the ticks and spiders were probably not so much the cause of the paranoia as the LSD shifting gears on me. During many times I sat down on the leaves, completely lost and seeing people appearing from behind the trees in the woods, alone there to write a few sentences on my experience. Here is a sample of those ramblings:

“This was a foolish use of any land as a proud native chief. How many damn waves of consciousness do I have to wait for? We’re there. Calm down. I can see the red of the blood in your veins. The LSD man, as far as you know him, is forever gone in an outrageous rage of being with the Lord. I can’t really communicate for the deep joy and compassion it will give my heart for this eternity to be fucking frozen over.”

In fact, it continues like that for pages, as I would sit down on the leaves and simply write whenever I was on the verge of giving up. I was completely lost. My senses were blown so out of proportion that, for all I knew, I could’ve been in my own backyard and I wouldn’t have been able to know. The hallucinations made everything appear to stretch endlessly, and the trees went off into the distance, waving and blurring together, surrounding me like an evil wall of consciousness.

Veins appeared to burst in my hands and arms as I peaked here, undoubtedly my blood pressure peaking due to the strenuous activity of the hike and the intense, sweat-drenched fear of the LSD. The sun stood on my shoulder as I tried now to get back to civilization, but I had gone too far. Which way was it back? Should I just wait here for the sober self to take us back?

Planes roared overhead, and I knew they were searching for me. “Man lost in LSD frenzy, found alone in woods, hallucinating while speaking about the sun standing on his shoulder and invisible spiderwebs wrapping around the trees.” Headlines like that only began the paranoia that would peak a lifetime later.

I saw a tick on my hand, and brushed it off, an intense fear and recognition now scarring the precious acid landscape. My physical body was in harm here, ticks and spiders. Maybe this acid wasn’t acid at all. Maybe I was having a heart attack.
I sat down on the leaves, trying to take a few deep breathes like the Buddha would. The forest blended into the Tao around me as I closed my eyes in a frenetic wave of rainbow colors, but the paranoia did not leave.

Was I actually dying? This would haunt me for the rest of the trip, but while peaking on LSD, I didn’t know if I was dying or not. The end of my life could be my next breath, and I realized this in all its full gory detail. This is the real part of the LSD experience that changed me. The intense fear, the knowledge of death, being chased by figures too dark to imagine, always blending into the woods behind me. And most of all, I had completely forgotten where I was going in these endless woods.

Put the sun at my back, I told myself. Just walk back the way I came. But nothing seemed familiar, every time I looked into the woods around me, there were fifty hallucinated branches for every real waving branch in the far-off regions of my eyes. If I got close, the hallucinations would stop and I would see the forest as it really was, but the ground and the forest around me would still remain the same. No matter how far back or forward I went, it seemed I would always be stuck in this reality, lost.
This seemed a very weird, eternal version of the salvia trips I had experienced in the past. LSD was much more spiritual and life-confirming than any salvia trips as I attempted to escape the woods, escape the imaginary spiders and ticks that clung to my skin as I fought my way out, and it seemed like it would never end. I knew I would die in the woods, alone, tripping on LSD, never having accomplished anything in my life.

Finally, roads appeared in front of me, and I grappled on the cliffs, undecided as to whether I should go down on the road and walk home or stay in the woods. Every time I tried to go back in the woods to find the way to my house, as this road was obviously not where I wanted to be, invisible spiderwebs would loom across my vision, and I would hesitate. I do not have an intense fear of spiders, but constantly walking through their webs, huge black venomous buttons of claws were not happy issues to deal with in this state of mind.

So I found my way to the roadway, and walked back along the streets of the town. Here, the hallucinations began to wear off, but the paranoia peaked like never before.
Synaesthesia, the experience of walking and the sounds around me combining into one entity in my ears. I couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t. Then, when I got close to home, I began hearing it.

We’ll call myself “Hofmann” here. “Hofmann! Hofmann!” The voices of my mother and father screaming in the park. I looked down into the park below me. Dogs, police cars, people. They were all looking for me. My time was up. Run back in the woods, quick! Hide out there like a leech infected with too many poisons… just don’t let them find you.

“What?” I yelled into the park.
“He’s here! He’s up there!” But did they know I was here?
“You’re surrounded!”
God, the LSD was a horrendously cruel beast. The people in the park were all cops screaming orders at me. “Get down! Turn yourself in!”
“Hofmann!”

A car drove past me, and for a moment I thought it had the long attenae of a disguised cop car. I was sure that a cop was going to pull right next to me, jump out of the car and arrest me. The United Police States of America.

Instead, I simply went home, only a couple dilated pupils and a ringing in the ears as a sacrifice for the journey. At times, I had surely thought myself dying, poisoned, stung by spiders, prodded by ticks, about to be arrested, completely surrounded with cops. Now I was home and free. The LSD began to dwindle down as the sun, at times throughout the journey my friend and my enemy, finally set into the horizon.

Exp Year: 2006	ExpID: 60811
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: May 31, 2007	Views: 5,677
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LSD (2) : Nature / Outdoors (23), Difficult Experiences (5), Alone (16)