DOSE:	200 ug	oral	LSD
	4 hits	smoked	Cannabis - Hash
	2 lines	insufflated	Ketamine	(powder / crystals)

BODY WEIGHT:

49 kg

Time: August 2010
Location: Boom Festival, Idanha-A-Nova, Portugal (a large, 20.000-person, psy trance festival at a lake in Portugal)

Substances taken: 4 hits of LSD, good for 200 ug, some ketamine (racemic) and Portugese hash (LSD was mine and had been previously tested at a lab and these hits were confirmed to contain 50 ug of LSD each, there are labs that test your drugs in the Netherlands and they test for substance, purity and dose, so I am 100% sure that I took 200 ug of actual LSD).

Who am I: a 20 year old female, this was my 37th experience on LSD, maybe 40th or so on ketamine.

My tripping companion: My boyfriend R, who also took 4 hits of LSD.

Boom trip 1, before the experience.

The day was august the 19th and we had arrived at the festival site the day before. The 19th marked the day that the dancefloors would open and it seemed like a good idea to open those festivities in a psychedelic way. We weren’t very familiar with the terrain yet, especially not what it looked like at night, and that contributed to the chaos. We did feel like a beautiful adventure the location seemed to call for it. We had decided on taking the LSD around half past 5 in the evening so that we could still sleep a few hours in the morning as sleeping in late wouldn’t be possible due to the heat. That day itself we had looked around at the terrain and tried to make ourselves comfortable with the surroundings, there was a lot on Boom that we didn’t even know about. Occasionally you have those adventures of which you may doubt ‘am I willing to share this with people’, but, yes, actually I want to write this down. This was probably was one of my most difficult trips, at least the first part, but it also had some of the most euphoric moments. The highs were very high, the deeps very deep where normally my trips are very calm and balanced, although I must add this was the first time I was dumped(!) during a psychedelic experience, so here is a unique memory I would like to share.

Come up:
At lack of a better idea we had taken our LSD in the chill out area, normally I don’t like chill out psy music, but there was shade and I had a good view to all sides, so my opinion mostly consisted of ‘good enough’. The chill out was made out of a ground of blue fabric on which people sat down without shoes, it had ashtrays and in the middle there was this kind of .. river with some beautiful decoration and the DJ was there. We were on the other side of the circle and I was just rolling a joint after taking the LSD. The atmosphere seemed mostly peaceful. The LSD came on rather fast, mountains in the distance started to move and shift and patterns made up out of detailed calm faces showed up on them and the clouds started moving around and changing shape and twisting and shifting into patterns, and not a lot later all of those intricate patterns formed bright rainbow-like colours. The same type of fractal like patterns began pressing in the blue carpet, and because I felt the LSD in every aspect I asked my boyfriend if the black in my eyes was big, and he responded in a surprised way saying he thought LSD made the black in your eyes smaller, which I found very odd since he had been doing LSD with me 17 times before and he knew perfectly well how LSD works on the body as I had told him often enough. So I told him some anecdotes in which eye-black becomes larger and he kept turning it around, then looked at me with a confused face and admitted to just being confused.

I was still staring at him as if my face were to say: ‘how can you be that confused?!’. He then told me he wanted to leave the chill out area, which I found ok as it certainly wasn’t the most beautiful place on the Boom site and the sun would be setting soon so walking around for a bit sounded like a fun idea too. We first walked from the chill out to some trees that were right next to it and sat down again in the shade. The view was much better. The trees were forming wonderful patterns and I told R how euphoric this place felt, how beautiful everything was and how I didn’t find the coming up part of the trip awkward at all in this location even though I had expected to. R nodded and pointed again to the trees that were really making some beautiful patterns; I saw faces that kept turning into different directions with their eyes closed and a smile on them, and then after that entire human shapes that would shift into the clouds of which the clouds formed new patterns also made up entirely out of fractalized faces. On the other side there was a beautiful warm golden evening sun, and everywhere I saw people walking, they all left very long tracers and trails in bright colours and everyone looked strange but it was all so lovely to look at. We decided to walk a bit further though, close to the water to enjoy the view there.

It was so indescribably and unreal beautiful there, I was looking and on the other side of the lake the mountains changed shape fast, and the golden evening light made beautiful long shadows from the few trees that were on the land and those shadows formed beautiful moving and reshaping colourful patterns as well. If I would look around and tried to focus on people I noticed that even though I was in daylight, because of the visuals, I couldn’t tell with the best attempts what people actually looked like, their outfit and hair would just change in front of my eyes and even the number of people would randomly switch, occasionally patterns turned into people and people into patterns and I had no clue how to ever know which they had been first. The tracers the walking people left would stretch for meters. R was rather silent and just staring, but I didn’t think too much of it because he is always silent during the come up. I asked him what to do now, since we had completed our goal of ‘walking to the water’. He told me he liked the idea of sitting right next to the lake for a bit, which was still in the bright burning Portugese august sun. I didn’t really like that idea since where we currently were in the long shadows with the golden light and the perfect view seemed like the best place to be at that time. I did want to give R his fun, and he seemed determined so I decided to give him his fun and walk with him. The light wasn’t golden yet there, just plain bright and white and I hid behind my hat. Around us were groups of people who were talking in every possible language about everything. It was interesting to listen, but also here due to the intensity of the trip it was hard to see where they were, with how many they were or what they looked like. The time a day was nearing 8 in the evening and the dancefloors would open soon for the first time at Boom.

R noticed masses of people walking to the dancefloor area direction and I asked him where he wanted to go next. He said something along the lines of that everyone was walking that way and that thus we should too. I had also liked the idea of finding a quiet spot to peak on the LSD, but I felt really good, really zen and I was just plain amazed by the beauty of everything so I found the dancefloor idea equally fun. At the world music dance floor Boom was being opened, there was some sort of odd ceremony with strange sound and fire dancers. It was very atmospheric during the sunset. We walked through the full and moving crowd of people and found a more quiet spot in the back. It was a bit uncomfortable in this busy setting and the ‘music’ was very strange, but it was also interesting, and I was curious so I was content with the situation.

Suddenly R looked at me with fixated eyes and said ‘I’m done’, so I asked ‘With what?” and he said ‘Well, everything’, so I asked ‘What does everything contain’ and he just looked straight ahead of him with fixated eyes for a while, turned to me, and then said very well articulated: ‘We’re through’, so I was like ‘What??!’ and he was like ‘We’re through, we’re no longer together’. To which I replied, very, very surprised, ‘Huh? What? Why??’ after which he said: ‘It has a reason’, so I asked ‘What kind of reason?’ and he didn’t reply, so I just asked ‘Can we be together again now?’ so he looked at me again with a strange serious expression, a bit wild, and said: ‘well what do you think’ so I asked: ‘Is this a joke?’ after which he first seemed to have a faint smile (could’ve been a visual) and then he said ‘Why do you have to be so stubborn’, so I asked him again ‘Well why then?!’ after which he replied: ‘It seemed like everything and everyone has come together here to make me a point...’ and then after a break: ‘And that is that we don’t fit together at all.” To which I replied: ‘But we fit together really well, we like the same music, films, series, think the same of life, we like LSD’ to which he said: ‘Now you’re just grasping to things’, to which I replied, just as surprised as earlier: ‘But why then?!’ and he looked at me with a very serious expression and said: ‘I just feel no love for you anymore’. Not long after that he dropped his bottle of water and walked straight into the dancing mass of people.

I then sat down on the ground, shaking with a very rapid heartbeat while I still heard with reverb going over the dancefloor: “We’re through’ and ‘I just don’t feel any love for you anymore’, while I still heard those sentences I saw everyone’s mouth, on the entire dancefloor, move to those words. I remained sitting on the melting and patterning and shifting floor, with my bottle of water and also R’s bottle, I sat there for about 10 minutes after which I realised R probably wouldn’t come back to that spot, something I had been waiting for earlier, so then I texted my friends V and Hat with the message that R had gone insane and had dumped me. Not a long time after that some people with garbage bags came cleaning the dancefloor and asked me in sign language if they could take the bottle, so I nodded and a few more people took a look at why I was sitting there on the floor, to which I just replied with making a subtle sad face at them, they replied with a subtle sad face back. Not a lot later Hat phoned me back as a response to the text message and I got a chance to talk to a normal sane person about what had just happened.

After getting some compassion and sympathy on the phone I decided to walk away from this place, as it has gotten dark and I had waited long enough for someone who indeed wasn’t coming back. All kinds of thoughts where running through my head, from random to practical, like what I’d do if I’d find R again, whether I should go look for him or not, how the rest of the week would be, whether I would let him in my tent after this and all kinds of things like that. Meanwhile I was all alone in the dark in the furthest corner of the Boom terrain, in an LSD trip that had just peaked, so I decided to just go wander around for a bit, something that always works well for me. I walked away from the stage sideways where women were doing a firedance on very atmospheric music. I stood under some trees looking at that from the side for a while. The water of the lake was bizarrely beautiful, the visuals had gotten to an eccentric peak and the trip was really rather strong. The whole situation had left me rather confused and I didn’t know what to do. I was all alone. The part of the lakeside where I was at the time was rather rocky, it had piles of large stones and the water had a very deep colour of blue. There was a dense layer of dust over the water disabling me from seeing the other side of the lake, and it was spectacular, even in my mindset, to walk through there.

The stones would switch place, and occasionally the stones would form patterns that looked so much like humans that I actually thought they were groups of people until I came closer and they were just strongly shifting and shape changing piles of rocks. The corner around by the trees the terrain became looser and more gravel then rocks. Now, I know where I was at the time, but back then I actually had no clue. I could just about see where the shining water's edge was and decided that I would follow the edge of the lake to walk back because that would make the chance of getting lost the smallest. Occasionally I’d sit down during the walking, my hands were tingling and looking back I assume I was hyperventilating, something I was not really aware of at the time. I walked on for a bit and was suddenly greeted by three running dogs, which startled me to such a degree I made this strange yell / scream / odd sound out of raw fear that also startled me as I had no clue I could make such a sound. By now the surrealistic atmosphere, while walking alone by the water at night, really started to set in. Occasionally I’d just forget what I was doing in the first place. I felt very primal, like I was going through some sort of primal human state and had been thrown back to my roots with brute force, to primal feelings, it wasn’t unpleasant, but strange.

I started thinking about things randomly, like my cats back home, and I had the feeling that if I would not think of them, they just like R would disappear and because I was walking there alone the association of home felt very warm and comfortable, and for some odd reason I started thinking of my dead kitten Lucy, I had the feeling that I had to do something to not loose Lucy even though she had been dead for a year and I think maybe I thought of her because only such a terrible memory was strong enough to not throw me with full consciousness to the fact I had just been dumped. I had gotten a bit further, but still had no clue where I actually was. In the distance I saw groups of people walking, very strongly covered with visuals, so they would switch in number, and I felt like some social contact with strangers could do me good, but I was much too shy to actually talk to people in that state, it seemed weird, so I didn’t, which led to me walking up to groups of people, stare at them and walk away again and then do the same thing with other groups of people.

What I wasn’t aware of at the time, but do know now, is that by then I had gotten to the main dancefloor in this dark walk, of which I passed by the back side, and it looked so strange. What I thought I was seeing was a deep misty hole in the ground, out of which thick crowds of people came, with very long, meters long sharp green neon spikes were sticking out of which I had to avoid walking into, so I walked around as if I were to avoid these 5-10 meter long green neon spikes, which must’ve looked really silly. In reality I was just looking at the backside of the dj booth of the dancefloor, which sober isn’t all that weird, but during that trip I didn’t find that out, and I was surprised for a full day by what that actually was that caused me such a bizarre visual. A while further I looked back at it and saw the other side of the dancefloor, which I recognized as one. The music was really good, but I really didn’t feel like dancing at the time so I walked back to the water. There I had sort of lost my breath since looking back I was hyperventilating and I was constantly startled by everything like dogs and cars, so I was completely loaded with my own adrenaline. By the lake it was calm. I sat down on a few rocks where no one else was sitting and eventually I even lay down there, the only thing I was still concentrating on was getting as comfortable as possible.

With my eyes closed the visuals weren’t any less than then the combination of LSD and nitrous oxide with patterns so complex and bright it was nearly shocking, while I had no nitrous oxide on all of Boom. If I looked one way I saw the moving mass of Boom which at the time seemed much like a dark psychedelic carnival and on the other side huge dense patterns in the mist with intensified colours and the dark water would glow up in the most insane patterns. The fog, which was actually dust, was very dense that night and the other side of the lake could not be seen.

It just felt as if I was staring into deep emptiness, the nothingness, with around it thick layers of complicated patterns, and closer by me the shapechanging shifting colour changing rocks that formed the coastal line. At some point I was really only focusing on making myself comfortable, so I lay back with my head into a sharp rock. As you may understand, that wasn’t comfortable, and I got the association that I was laying there dead, with a cracked open skull. This image wasn’t unpleasant or bad, just dead. Like I were dead, but it was fine that way. I would look around from the one to the other side of Boom doubting ‘will I go look for the tent to check on all the stuff’ which seemed like the safe and easy option, or to go look for R in that dark psychedelic carnival. I chose, because I had gotten this far anyway, to go find the tent. The Boom camping site was terribly confusing. It was pitch dark so I didn’t know where I was at all and must’ve walked the wrong way about 15 times. In some magical way I did manage to find the tent which I opened to check if R was there, but he wasn’t.

At that moment desperation kind of set in, I had gotten so far and I hadn’t found R yet, and I had no idea how he was doing (I later found out, a lot more weird and messed up than my story), I decided to walk back to the terrain, but it was very dusty so a lot of people were coughing or wearing caps over their mouth, now I have a history of phobia of contagious disease, so this really gave me a tuberculosis epidemic feeling. I rationally knew this was nonsense, but it felt like that. For about an hour I was just running around, searching in mild panic, I ran over the entire terrain looking for R, Hat phoned me again which felt like a moment of sanity, as soon as I talked to Hat I felt concrete and clear minded, and I was able to tell Hat that I had not found R yet, but that I was looking for him, but that with all the visuals it was already hard to tell which were actually people and which were just visuals of people, let alone which people were R. Having some phone support was nice though, because desperately searching for the person who just dumped you isn’t fun in any way.

After I was searching for longer and longer and walking faster and faster and still had no trail of R it got more annoying too. The visuals were still at peak so they made searching practically impossible, and trying to understand where I even was was quite a challenge on its own. I remember on awful moment walking through an area called the Drop which has workshops and things like that, and I was looking for R and I heard loudly through the speakers this woman giving a workshop saying: “You’ve now been paired up, now look your partner in the eyes, person B, and listen, just listen, then I want the A people to speak about .. what it.. etc.” and I was brutally reminded of the fact I was all by myself in a foreign country at a festival, I had no boyfriend and no tripping buddy.

After more then half an hour of panicked running around my phone finally rang, and it was R, who had another lack of sense when he baly chose the words ‘come to the tent, we need to talk’. Which was both a huge relief and also scary, because until two and a half hours ago I had no idea that there would even be anything to talk about. Oh well, I ran to the tent fast, which this time was difficult, but quicker found and I found R in front of the tent with no shirt and no cap on his head. The first thing he did was hug me, to which I responded with some quiet crying, nothing bad, just that ‘oh-shit-now-my-eyeliner-will-be-on-my-cheeks' teary eyes and R said ‘first of all, we’re not through’, and I had kind of seen that coming. I asked him if I could phone my mother because that idea had slowly creeped in when I was all alone. Luckily she picked up so I briefly told her what happened, and she said that I shouldn’t blame him too much which I experienced as very wise. She was right, being mad would not be useful, fixing things was a better idea. So I swallowed the pain, shock, suprise and frustration and started talking in on R, who had lay himself down on the ground rambling about absolute nonsense.

Over the course of about 20 minutes I explained to him how reality worked again, what made sense and what didn’t, where he was, how things were and he finally came back to earth, not that he had stopped tripping, just that he wasn’t completely delusional anymore. It turned out he had been extremely confused and had thought that he was going to be taken into a tribe of light, and that he had to drop normal life, and also that he had to choose between ending the world and going to the tribe of light, and later that everyone knew the answer except for him, and that he had never tripped that hard and apparently he had asked a lot of random people to decide for him, asked them what he had to do, and there were even a few people willing to send him to Kosmicare, a place at Boom for people who went insane / freaked out on psychedelics. I then explained to him what did not make sense about that, and tried to explain for him how it all happened. R had a very brainless job in daily life with no space for freedom or creative thought and a lot of confrontation with narrow-minded people, to such a degree that the freedom of Boom, combined with all the chaos caused by the large terrain, all strangers speaking all languages had caused his brain to overload.

I later also heard, that he had felt this coming for a few hours, that things were getting too much, but that he was ashamed to admit that even though I had actually suggested to him finding a calm spot to have the peak of the trip. I also in detail explained to him that his place in the universe and later, when he told me days after that he had been scared to admit he found things getting too much that he should just be able to trust me and that if he had listened to his gut and had been honest none of it might have happened. I also explained him that his thoughts were of a megalomanic egocentric and paranoid type and that thinking that you are the one to end the universe means you have gone temporarily bat shit insane.

R had calmed down a bit and I was still a bit aftershocked by all that chaos, so while R was focusing on his interesting hand outside, I crawled into a pitch dark tent to listen to a very strange dark psy track. Plan succeeded, because the track was actually capable of being weirder then everything that had just happened. Not a lot later after that I changed the stuff I was carrying and we went back onto the terrain. R first said he didn’t feel like going back on the terrain, but I talked him down and he started liking the idea. We walked through the water, where the visuals still had free play, back to the dancefloor. It was now around 3 am at night and there was a dj playing dark psy music to prepare the dancefloor for Penta. It was good dark, and the dancefloor wasn’t that full so not much longer then 10 minutes after the chaos we stood there, full of energy, dancing. I told R ‘the start may have been bad, but half of the trip is still to come, so let's enjoy it’, and that happened. After half an hour and 1.5 liters of water later and after dancing our blood hot we decided to sit down for a bit next to the dancefloor, waiting for Penta to start, who would play an hour long live set and I was looking forward to that. I like dark psy, and its rare on Dutch dancefloors.

There it was so peaceful again that I decided I wanted to compensate for the uncomfortable chaos of earlier so I took two good lines of ketamine in the dark, and just when they started to kick in Penta’s live set started, starting with a sample going ‘It begins’ followed by a fast dark beat. We ran back on the dancefloor, crawled in between the people and did not get off until one and a quarter hour later, which was when Penta’s live set ended. I felt occasionally turned sideways around 45 degrees, occasionally going up to switching to a nearly sideways vision and my concept of practical physics like distance and space had completely gone away, this was obviously from the ketamine. Dancing was overly comfortable because my muscles felt really, really loose and it was unimaginably comfortable. At the same time thanks to the LSD I was overflowing with energy so I yelled with enthusiasm to R that this dancefloor owned any dancefloor in my life ever.

The sound was wonderful, the BPM was high, Penta’s live set was soo good that it didn’t feel like I was dancing, but rather like the music was doing that for me. Completely wonderful. By the time Penta’s live set ended the ketamine had also worn off again and due to it getting late we slowly walked back to the tents. Full of feelings of wonder and perfection in our minds we slowly walked back over the terrain, R was normal now, and actually quite fun company, the slow walk back was very dreamy, we pointed out the still-going and beautiful visuals at times, the sky, the surroundings and the general feeling was that of mild euphoria and well being. When back at our tents we met the Israeli people at our tent camp who we briefly told about our experience, they apparantly had taken shrooms on the dancefloor and had ended up rather confused themselves. Not a lot later we got into the tent which was no light to quickly sleep for a few hours.

Looking back and conclusion:
I had never expected to deal that well with being dumped in a trip, but I’m glad I did. Four days after this we took LSD again together, a higher dose to compare for the tolerance but the effects were of similar intensity as this one, the second trip together at Boom was all that the first one was promising to be during the come up, it was beautiful, it was zen, it was fun, amazing visuals, feelings of deep, intense euphoria and wonder, as if Boom by simply being Boom amplified the mindset of LSD to a degree that was just simply wonderful, as if perfection isn’t a perfect enough word to describe it. R did not go insane his second trip at Boom and has done 7 trips on it with me since then and they have all gone fine.

There were no after effects to this experience, to what had happened in the early peak, I loved R less for a few months and I didn’t understand it well, I still don’t, but all the other good things since have made me nearly forget about it, we have talked it through and it's fine now, but I’m pretty sure that the next person who has the guys to dump me in a trip where there are no other friends around can expect a foot in his balls.

Exp Year: 2010	ExpID: 89493
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: 20
Published: Feb 8, 2011	Views: 14,033
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