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

BODY WEIGHT:

155 lb

I had tripped before. Mushrooms a handful of times, and acid a couple. I had a good grip on how psychedelics affect me. At least, I thought I did. Even though LSD had blown my mind before, I was in no way prepared for the trip I am about to tell you about.

I was a freshman at a very liberal liberal arts college in a rural area. Three months into my first year, I had what I would definitely consider to be a best friend. We will call him N. His brother was two years ahead of us (we will call him P) and had gotten his hands on some very clean and very powerful acid. We decided earlier in the week that we would put aside any other plans for Saturday and use the day to enjoy a nice trip. P and his friends had tripped successfully off of 2/3 of a tab, so we decided that a single tab per person would suffice.

Saturday arrived, and although it was a chilly November day, the skies were pretty clear and the weather was agreeable. We arrived at P's house and promptly put the tabs under our tongues. We put on a TV show and just hung around the house waiting for the effects to come on. I started feeling sped up and anxious, and we decided that it was time to leave the house and explore. Even though N and I were the only ones tripping, another sitting friend, as well as P and his girlfriend came along with us for a long walk back to campus from their house. We stopped at a pizza joint to get a bite to eat, even though I was not at all hungry. Instead, I just purchased a small Sunny D, in a tiny bottle like the ones I drank during my childhood. The nostalgia was just as delicious as the citrusy juice itself. I remember how strange things felt in that pizza parlor. I looked at a very basic painting that depicted some people eating pizza in the shop, but the colors were so vivid that it did not matter how simple it was. I marveled at the strokes of paint that were put into making the painting what it was. It was truly beautiful.

We left the restaurant, and I cannot begin to tell you how great it felt to be outside in the open air. N and I were in such a good mood; we could not stop smiling. We embarked on the long walk back to school and we kept telling each other how great certain colors were looking. We were so full of energy that it did not even feel like we were actually walking. I told N that it felt like my feet were full of very tiny people that were carrying me along. With the guidance of P and sober friends, we entered the woods. The colors of the fallen leaves were unbelievable. We had such a new found appreciation for all of the colors we were seeing. The visual effects were becoming more and more intense. The ground started to look like it was an ocean, constantly rippling and moving with the wind. Even though the temperature was chilly and worthy of a jacket, I felt so warm that I took mine off. We got to this very large abandoned building in the woods that probably once served some sort of farming purpose. It was full of graffiti and we spent a good while appreciating all of it. Abandoned buildings have this feeling about them that cannot really be matched by anything else. I started thinking about all of the building’s history and how it had become a place for anyone to visit and spend time in. Our friend who was not tripping had his field recorder with him, since he had intended on recording sound bits from our trip. He wound up recording a very cool sound in that building, along with other bits of our speech, and he eventually turned them into a song that he dubbed the 'LSD Song'. Witty of him, I know.

We finally left the building, and N and I realized that our sense of time was so completely skewed. It felt like a whole day had passed since we dosed, even though only less than two hours had passed. As we continued onwards to school, we discussed hallucinations. N asked me what it really means to hallucinate, since we were experiencing severe visual distortions but we were aware that this was a result of the LSD. We decided that there are different types of hallucinations: ones you know are not real and ones you are convinced are real. LSD does not make the mind delirious enough to believe that the hallucinations being witnessed are real. In fact, it makes me so conscious of what I am seeing that I earn a new appreciation for how things normally look. As we continued talking along our walk, I felt my state of mind coming slightly disconnected from N's. I remember thinking that he was focusing too much on the novelty of our visuals, as he kept on saying how amazing everything looked. I, on the other hand, just wanted to appreciate them for what they were. I did not feel the need to talk about them. I told this to N and he seemed to understand, which made me feel very comfortable. It felt as though we were entering a new phase in our trip, where the visuals were becoming irrelevant and superficial. What really mattered now was the complexity of what was going on inside of our minds on a much deeper level.

We got back to our dorm, and we decided that showers were definitely in order. I remember peeking into the individual bathrooms, thinking every time that someone was hiding behind the shower curtain. After being outside in the cold for so long, the warm water coming out of the shower head was unbelievably pleasant. Even still, being alone in a bathroom with no one but my naked body was nothing but weird. I looked at myself in the mirror, and then down at my body, and it I felt as though I did not even recognize it. I felt so primitive being naked. I even felt as though the in-and-out movement of my belly was not corresponding with my actual breath. When I got out of the shower, I ran into a good friend in the hallway and gave her a humongous hug. She had such warm and positive vibes. Needless to say, it was so great to see her. Being on acid felt so childlike in that I only wanted to be with people that made me feel 100% comfortable. If anything felt a little off, my intensified emotions forced me to move myself into another, more comfortable setting.

After taking a hit of a spliff with P and his girlfriend, they went off to go do some school work. N and I were suddenly put in an unfamiliar position; 'what do we do now?' This was when I forgot how interactions with people normally are. We ran into N's roommate, who is a great guy, but hanging out with him is always a little awkward. All of the sudden I felt so stupid for the relationship I had with him. Why do I say hello to people that I do not even really give a chance to get to really know? I started feeling like the life I had been living at college was somewhat fake. I like to present myself as a friendly person, so I say hi to people that live near me. I started wondering why I make no effort to deepen these relationships.

Running into these sorts of people really made me look at my social life from a new perspective. Specifically, there is a group of people that N and I often hang out with even though we do not feel really close to them whatsoever. We ran into all of them, and coincidentally they were tripping acid as well. But for some reason, it did not seem like they were experiencing anything close to what N and I were experiencing. It felt impossible to communicate with them, and then I realized that it is normally this way regardless of what substance we are on. I started wondering why we even bother putting ourselves around them. I plopped myself in a beanbag chair in the midst of them, and just watched them. I tried to talk, but I was literally unable to utter a word. At that moment, my ego died. I thought I had experienced ego death before, but nothing could ever compare to this. I abandoned the personality that I put on around other people, and I became nothing but a simple and pure human being, fresh out of the womb. I realized all of the bullshit that is behind my social life. Because we are social beings, we often put ourselves in social situations just to be perceived in a certain way. Ever since this realization, I have been more focused on being with people that I genuinely care about, rather than being with people for superficial purposes. I accepted that it is better to be alone and happy than to be with people that make you unhappy. With my fairly outgoing personality, this was hard for me to accept, but I did.

N and I went outside again to meet up with a girl that I had recently become intimately involved with and her friend. She had not been crazy about the idea of me taking LSD, so being around her while tripping was not the easiest thing in the world. But for obvious reasons, I did not abandon her and the four of us took a walk to the art studio on campus. We visited a friend who was working on his paintings in his studio. His work is always great to look at, whether inebriated or sober, but observing his art on acid was phenomenal. It was not just the visual intricacies that blew me away, but also more powerfully the level of passion he had put into his paintings. Seeing someone care so much about something as beautiful as painting really affected me. He was such a happy person doing what he loved to do. It was pretty life changing to witness the pure happiness that comes with doing what feels natural.

The four of us let our friend continue with his painting, and we went to the school cafeteria since the girls were hungry. Being in any sort of institutionalized place is not exactly the best idea on acid. It is very hard to follow routine when on the drug. We swiped our cards, grabbed our plates, and explored the food choices. I really could not tell whether I wanted anything to eat, so N put some food on a plate that we would both share. Being around so many people who were not tripping made me paranoid, to say the very least. I thought for sure that people would notice that something strange was going on with me. But sure enough, no one said a thing. Sitting down in the crowded cafeteria certainly did not help ease my anxiety. Even worse, our female companions were not making us feel any more comfortable. My girl's friend was continuously asking us questions about what we were feeling and we felt like specimens under her microscope. We constantly felt like we were being judged by the two of them. After what felt like hours, the two of them sort of got the hint and went off on their own. As soon as they were gone, it felt as though an enormous weight had been lifted off of my shoulders. I felt as though I could finally relax and bond with N. For whatever reason, we did not leave the cafeteria and joined some close friends at another table. I tried all sorts of different foods, but only to experience their textures rather than their nutritional properties. Even though the drug was distorting our perception of time, we definitely spent at least an hour and a half in the hectic cafeteria.

Finally, we left and walked back to our dorm. N and I spent some quality time with the same friend I had hugged when I got out of the shower (we will call her Z). She put on such kind and soft music, like The Microphones and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. I specifically remember how overjoyed I became when she put on 'Our House' by the latter band. She was so comforting in her ways; she felt like a mother to me. Some other friends joined us in the room, which was great, because they had very positive vibes in them. Even though approximately seven hours had passed since we dropped, I still felt like I was tripping heavily even though it was not as intense as before. I grabbed a piece of paper and a pen and I started to draw. I did not put one thought into my drawing; instead, I just let my hand carry the pen wherever it wanted to go. I drew this very abstract drawing of a face, connecting to a crescent shaped figure that looked like a moon with facial features. My friends said it looked like a fetus, which makes sense since the drug made me feel like I was back in the womb, if I could remember what that felt like. Obviously it is very hard to put into words what I drew, but it felt amazing to draw , since I was communicating the complex thoughts inside my head that could not be transformed into words. Words and languages are so limiting. Although essential to inter-human communication, languages force groups of people to think and speak in similar ways, even though we are all so different from one another. That's why we have art, so we can speak in whatever way we choose.

We spent a great deal of time in Z's room discussing the problems surrounding our social lives at college. N, Z, and I talked about how we value each other because we can really see each other as genuine people, and not shallow figures in a sea of many. It felt so great to have such a grounded conversation with just the three of us. Even though I had already felt very close to these two people, they now felt like siblings to me. We got comfy in bed and turned on a movie. 'Get Him to the Greek' was the perfect flick for the time; it was humorous and lighthearted, and it involved several adorable relationships between the main characters. After a while, the effects of the drugs were becoming severely diminished. N and Z wanted to go out and listen to live music, but I was unsure as to what I wanted to do. It took me a while to realize that all I really wanted to do was spend time alone. So I went back to my dorm room and turned on some music and chatted with a few friends from back home online. I doodled for a while as I listened to the album ‘Sung Tongs’ by Animal Collective. The song ‘Winter’s Love’ moved me tremendously. It evoked such a warm and comfortable inside of me and made me remember how great life can be. It’s pretty ridiculous how something like a song or a piece of art can do that to you; make you forget about the negative aspects of life and just focus on the good parts.

I definitely consider myself to be a ‘big picture’ kind of guy. All day long, I had been slightly troubled because I felt as though I was unable to put all of my incredible psychedelic thoughts towards greater use. However, I came to realize that the way that acid had made me so present in the moment was a good reflection of what my general life should be like. I realized that the little things that bother me, like my interactions with people that I really cannot relate to, will not matter to me at all further along in life. Not only did this trip help me realize that I should live my life the way I want to, regardless of what other people might think, but it also made me realize the importance of looking at the big picture when things might be bothering me. As clichéd as it might seem, I realized that in the end, everything ends up working out the way it should. Instead of getting all worked up about the bullshit behind being a social being, I should just embrace it for what it is, and if I am not happy with the situation I am in, I always have the power to change it. I always have the ability to make myself comfortable. Life is great.

Exp Year: 2010	ExpID: 88875
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 18
Published: Nov 12, 2019	Views: 1,371
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