DOSE: T+ 0:00		oral	2C-E	(powder / crystals)
T+ 0:30	150 ug	oral	LSD	(blotter / tab)
T+ 0:00		smoked	Unknown

BODY WEIGHT:

67 kg

A multi-faceted evening

(aprox) 10mg 2ce 7.00pm
One 150ug tab of lsd 7.30pm

What follows was generally a very pleasant trip. Nothing exactly life-changing, but pretty intense, and certainly thought-provoking for me.

Some background:

I’m a twenty-year-old student in the UK, and having been steadily building up my experiences with psychedelics over the past year. On the evening of this trip – about a fortnight ago - I had two tickets to go and see the London Philharmonic Orchestra (not a typical evening evening in my life, but I thought why not?) play an evening of work by the composer Sibelius (who I really enjoy). I had previously planned to go with this girl I’d really like to get to know better, but in the end she decided she was too hungover, and so I invited my old friend L – also making the decision to go along and see what live classical music was like whilst fried out of your head.

[Erowid Note: Two samples of powder (even of the same chemical) with equivalent volumes won't necessarily weigh the same. For this reason, eyeballing is an inaccurate and potentially dangerous method of measuring, particularly for substances that are active in very small amounts. See this article on The Importance of Measured Doses.]
As is often the case in my life, I wasn’t properly organised that evening, although I was in a good mood that day, and generally in my life at the moment. I ended up in a rush to eyeball (bad, I know…) and dropping an indeterminate amount of 2ce (somewhere in the region of 10mg) at about 7.00pm, on a pretty empty stomach, before hurrying into town and treating myself to a tab of decent lsd at about 7.30. L had some acid as well.

The concert started at 7.30, and we arrived just after the orchestra had taken their places. Our seats were… not great. Front row of the stalls, literally underneath the orchestra, with the wall of the stage right in our eyeline.

The music started, and it was predictably fantastic. However, I started coming up on the 2ce pretty quickly as well, and my memory of the LPO is pretty limited. The lead violin stands out, I remember him standing literally right above me, playing so superbly, transcendently, he was obviously enough to distract me from the drugs – which needless to say were occupying most of my attention. I remember feeling moderately concerned, as one might expect, at what the people around us thought of our late arrival and general characters… I also became moderately agitated by the stillness of the audience (entertaining the typical thoughts of ‘what if I just jumped up and shouted! What would happen?’) and increasingly, as the chemicals picked up, by the ceaseless energy and desperate passion of the music; I began to long for a little stillness. I was also having problems working out exactly where to put my right leg, and vaguely worrying about it starting to shake uncontrollably, which it seemed to want to do. My concluding thoughts on the subject of classical music live on drugs are: it’s probably better sober. I didn’t experience synaesthesia, or any ecstatic engagement with the music, as I’d vaguely hoped. That said, our seats, and our rushed arrival were not particularly conducive to a really great time either.

Regarding the drugs, the dark wall of the stage in front of me started to do very interesting things – vine-like patterning appearing all over it, and behind the viney stuff, distinct sentences! I could clearly tell that my mind was seeing words on the blank wall in front of me, but try as I might (and I spent quite a lot of time trying) I couldn’t read what they were. Pretty though.

We left at the interval – went outside for a smoke – and then I decided that actually, I’d probably be happier outside than in, which possibly annoyed L a bit, as lacking the 2ce, he wasn’t feeling much yet, and felt that we were missing out. We went down to the beach, always lovely, although bitterly cold in the dark of early February. The scene was beautiful, filled with dark colours, the shingle seeming to ripple in rivulets down to the sea. I also remember observing (which I’ve noticed before on 2ce) how the colours of the scene in front of me seem to merge into each other, for example when I lit a cigarette, the warm red-orange of the cigarette end somehow gets caught up in other things. Good fun. We talked – L and I do well when it comes to being able to easily talk about interesting subjects – although on this occasion I was doing most of the talking I think, as I was more drugged up, and having escaped the confines of the auditorium I was feeling a need to exuberantly express myself. My general theme was language, and words, and communication I think. L’s general theme, the cold. Words were obviously very much on mind (following my first 2ce trip, and my first solo trip two weeks before – where I’d wandered around on the hills in the snow, and then sat the roof of my house trying, and generally failing, to write poetry) and again they popped out of my brain! After I while I noticed that the white surf of the incoming waves was spelling out words, as each wave rolled in. Again, I couldn’t read what they were! I then remember looking up to the sky, and observing that the starlight was somehow numbers! How or why, I don’t know.

After a while of freezing around the sea-front, L was coming up on the acid, and getting moderately agitated (to be expected, he’s had less experience with psychadelics than I, and had made the decision to join me tonight at very short notice.) Walking places was interesting, we were both experiencing a distorted sense of time. I was striding around, feeling particularly confident and intelligent, enjoying playing with words and making new ones. Would have been great to have a sound recorder of some kind with me, as I’d love to know quite how much of a dick I was sounding.

We eventually decided to go back to my house and chill (and perhaps start some incredible arty, creative project which would surely be amazing - but neither of us quite knew what it was yet… Embarrassing, I know). My acid was coming on as well, taking me down the usual paths of deconstructing and debating as many aspects of the world and human civilisation as I could think of, but over time leaving me with the vague feeling (as acid always does) that I was somehow never quite getting it. Getting what, I don’t know – its just a general feeling that lsd always seems to bring with it - that I’m on the right track, but I never quite completely express, completely capture, all that I have to. This also perhaps has something to do with the fact that also, when taking lsd, my ability to communicate with others tends to steadily break down – and indeed, as we walked home, the silences grew longer and longer. This feeling was the only thing that I thought was more lsd-y, other than that I think the 2ce was more dominant, although it was hardly to really put my finger on any definite synergy taking place.

L was having a moderately intense time, he described his whole memory of the walk home as being like watching one giant rolling tv screen, and we weren’t as connected as we could have been. (Theres also a lesson here I think about staying on the same trip, perhaps I shouldn’t have done the 2ce, but I wanted to push my boundaries a little and I’m not sorry I did.) The one interesting take-home thought that I managed to salvage from the walk (that at least I find useful) was the realisation that you can’t treat other people entirely as entities entirely distinct from you. You’re constantly shaping all your friends and they shape you.

Arriving home, most of my housemates were going out to a party, and tried to encourage me to go a party. I flounced ridiculously round the kitchen at them, brandishing an avocado, and kind of wanted to go to the party, but equally knew it was probably more sensible to stay in. I would also have felt very guilty about L, who’s evening I had interrupted, and who was now trying to chill in my room. Eventually everyone left, and I had the very physical experience of trying to eat an avocado with just a knife over the sink in my room. Felt quite brutal to cut the soft, beautifully patterned fruit, although it tasted great. We stayed in for the next few hours, listening and discussing music, which sounded great, and generally chatting and having a good time. L did some writing and drawing I think, and I just enjoyed the music, and patterns in the floor, and seeing some of the posters and things I have in my room in a new way. Needless to say, no great creative work emerged. Naïve, we were!

One less than pleasant aspect of the evening was that at one point I became very concerned with mine and L’s sexuality. Basically I started worrying we might be gay, which is pretty ridiculous because neither of us are, but nonetheless I couldn’t get it out of my head! I think L had picked up on this vibe as well, but we weren’t really able to talk about it, although I tried once. It just seemed annoyingly inevitable that we would sleep together, which was aggravating as at the time I knew I definitely didn’t want to. It added this unwelcome sexual overtone to much of the evening, but we were eventually able to get past it. Not sure why this happened, but I guess cos neither of us are stereotypically masculine guys, and we have a close friendship, and first he’d kind of taken care of me that evening as we left the concert, and then I’d had to look after him a little as we walked home. Also perhaps I was feeling a little insecure, as I’d left the attractive girl in the kitchen who’d been trying to get me to go to the party, and because the girl I’d initially meant to be going to the concert with had cancelled. All rather immature anyway, although certainly interesting!

We ended up watching Dr Strangelove and smoking a scraped-together joint, as the intensity of the drugs slackened off (although it is a good film to watch on drugs, you can find an awful lot of layers in it, and its serious enough to be very interesting, but light-hearted enough it shouldn’t get you down.) I had one last very impressive open-eye visual, the whole of the wardrobe in my room seemed to turn into a large, blue, and divinely perfect female face. Prompted in part I imagine by the concern over my sexuality earlier in the evening. She was calm and beautiful, and I thoroughly enjoyed her being there.

Exp Year: 2013	ExpID: 99280
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 20
Published: Sep 8, 2018	Views: 2,192
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
2C-E (137), LSD (2) : General (1), Combinations (3), Music Discussion (22), Relationships (44), Various (28)