DOSE: T+ 0:00		oral	Pharms - Citalopram	(daily)
T+ 0:00	1 hit	oral	LSD
T+ 0:00	1 tablet	oral	Pharms - Propranolol
T+ 24:00		oral	Alcohol - Beer/Wine

BODY WEIGHT:

138 lb

I had my first acid trip a few days ago and wanted to document and share the experience. A bit of background: I’m a 20 year old male with depression and anxiety issues which have lessened over the past month due to medication and other positive life experiences. I was nervous that these issues would give me a bad trip, but I decided to go for it anyway as I felt like I was making good progress and was mostly happy with my current life situation. I’m a university student living with friends, one of which had the fairly spontaneous decision to try acid, as we had all been curious about it for a while. None of us had ever taken proper psychedelics before, the closest we had come was cannabis and MDMA.

We got the tabs from someone we knew and trusted who had tripped on that same batch before and reported positively. We were told that it would last about 13 hours from start to finish, which should give me enough time to have a few hours of sleep and get to a morning class the next day, before taking an afternoon train back to my parents’ house to stay for a week.

We cleaned up my friend’s loft bedroom and decided to trip there. We had smoked weed there many times and found it a very relaxing, hippy-ish environment with a good music system, lava lamps, and nice patterned rugs and wall hangings. There were four of us present, although one friend decided at the last minute not to take any acid and smoke weed instead. This turned out to be the right decision for all of us. We all ate a meal and then dropped the tabs at 3:30pm.

After almost an hour, I looked out of the window and noticed that the streetlights were a little brighter and sharper than normal, and everything looked a little prettier but not noticeably different, similar to an MDMA comeup. I started to feel quite happy and positive and was starting to think I would really enjoy this drug. I went to the toilet, and while I was in there I thought that I heard voices in the next room and felt a little paranoid, but nothing more intense than a weed high. I also found the dirtiness of the bathroom (it’s a house full of college students, so not the cleanest environment) more unpleasant than normal, but nothing I couldn’t deal with.

I went back to the others and lay down. We listened to an Alt-J album which was enjoyable but not hugely different from normal. My body felt heavy and I found it hard to move. I closed my eyes and saw vivid visuals of all of my friends at college dancing in a club, and as I saw it I described it to them.

I can’t quite remember the exact order of the next part of the trip. I felt incredibly spaced out and at one point had to ask my sober friend what drug we had taken because I had forgotten a lot of things. I also asked if what was happening was real. I was almost certain that it was, but I felt like I needed confirmation. I felt very spaced out, nauseous, and was starting to feel uncomfortable. I picked up a bowl and put my face in it as I thought I might throw up. I don’t know how long my face was in the bowl but it felt like I was in another world before I remembered I was in the house and I came back to reality. My grip on my sense of identity was slipping away, and when I had a moment of clarity, I asked my friend for a prescription anti-anxiety tablet as I had heard that these can stop the trip (I later found out that it wasn’t the right tablet, and only a benzo would have worked). The trip didn’t stop, but I moved into a more relaxed state and accepted the sense of confusion. I felt incredibly hot, sweaty and clammy, and kept asking my friends if I was sweating a lot, to which they replied that I wasn’t. My mouth was also very dry and had an unpleasant metallic taste for the entire trip. I lay down on a rug, which was cold, but I mistook it for being wet. I felt like I could hear rain, and then felt raindrops on my skin but was told that it wasn’t raining.

My sober friend and one of my other friends left the room for a while to go out in the garden, but I felt too heavy to move so me and another tripping friend stayed. I felt paranoid while they were gone as I felt like my sober friend was our only connection to reality and without her being there I might lose sense of where and who I was. I called her on the phone and they came back shortly.

I felt uncomfortable in my clothes so I changed into pajamas in my bedroom. This was a really difficult task and seemed to take ages and take a lot of mental concentration for me to stay on the task of getting changed. Afterwards I went back upstairs and lay down on the bed with my friends. At this point the anxiety and confusion faded and the trip started to get good. I think this was maybe 2 or 3 hours in.

I noticed that the lights from the lamps was reflecting on the walls and ceiling, but instead of reflecting solidly, it was in moving geometric patterns, which was amazingly entertaining to look at. We put on MGMT’s Oracular Spectacular album, which sounded perfect for the occasion. There was a sense of catharsis and connection to everything and each other, and the senses of sound and visuals seemed interlinked rather than separate. It’s hard to remember the specifics of each song, but throughout the album I felt really happy to be with my friends, and that I was part of a life affirming-experience. I could imagine that moment as a scene from a teen coming-of-age film, and I reflected how it had been worth it to make it through the struggles of my life to reach this point.

Another sober housemate came home at this point after a few days away, and the two sober friends drank wine and smoked a joint as the three acid-trippers lay on the bed and watched. The smoke looked beautiful and the air seemed slightly fuzzy and shimmering, but the lights were sharp. The whole scene felt dreamlike, and as Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” came on I felt like we were in a perfect moment and I had everything I needed in life: good friends and good music. I felt like we were all really cool people and we were really succeeding in life.

For the next couple of hours we listened to music and watched the patterns on the ceilings. I loved listening to all of the others (including my tripping friends) talk to each other, but I found it hard to join in as I was struggling to form words. I felt like I was having lots of very important and profound thoughts but every time I tried to put them into words it was impossible and the thoughts slipped away. I realised how limiting words are, and how they are only our best approximation of how to explain concepts.

Every time something changed in the room, such as a person leaving or entering, a light switching on or off, or a song changing, it felt like the entire room changed. By the end of the trip I felt like I had been in a million different rooms rather than one. Whenever I left the room to get a drink or use the toilet, I felt uncomfortable and wanted to get back with my friends as soon as I could.

Towards the end of the trip, my sober friends had to go to bed as they had things to do in the morning. When they left I felt very sad that we were being separated, but I assumed there would only be a couple more hours of the trip and then I could go to sleep.

When I started to feel very tired (but still tripping), I went to my own bed to sleep, but the entire room felt wrong in an indescribable way. The fact that the new day was starting soon was incredibly distressing to me, and I felt like the world was going to carry on without us and we would be left stranded in trip-land. I got frustrated that after over 12 hours the trip was showing no signs of stopping. I felt so physically and mentally uncomfortable after only a few minutes in my bedroom that I had to go back to my friend’s room and join them.

I told them how awful I was feeling and how the trip was lasting too long, and they said they agreed, but we decided to ride it out and carry on listening to music. At this point I started to feel very detached from them and from the entire world. In hindsight, I imagine this was because I had spent an entire day in one room with the same people, but the acid was intensifying these feelings to the point where they were unbearable. I questioned whether or not the trip would ever end.

At 7:30am the trip was still ongoing. My sober friend woke up at this point and came back upstairs. I told her the trip wasn’t over and she couldn’t believe this. She kept leaving the room to get ready to leave to catch her train, and returning intermittently to check on us. I felt like we needed her as a sober person to help steer us through the trip and worried we might go insane if we were left alone. I asked her if she could be present as much as possible and she said that she would try, but had a lot of chores to do elsewhere so couldn’t stay with us for too long. This terrified me, and I felt so frustrated that I couldn’t get across how vital it was for us all to stay together as a group.

I felt the strong urge to leave the room as I had spent close to 17 hours in it and was starting to feel trapped. I did this and sat downstairs with one of my friends and we started to feel the trip fade away, but far too slowly for our liking. We felt very spaced out and tired, not tripping any more but far from sober and normal. Our sober friend brought us a carton of orange juice which we drank, and I ate a small breakfast, both of which helped me feel more comfortable. She left to catch her train at 11am, and my other friend had started to feel more sober than us other two trippers. He caught his train at 1pm. I had a shower, which helped, and got dressed. I had now lost all visuals but still felt spaced out and a little lost in my head, and found it hard to do simple tasks. I had a morning class scheduled, which I didn’t go to for obvious reasons.

My other friend was still higher than I was and at this point was freaking out and very upset. He said that he just wanted the trip to go away, and I reassured him that it would as the rest of us were already coming down. This was almost 24 hours after we had taken the tab, which amazed and distressed us as we had expected 12-13 hours approximately. He was very upset that everyone was going home and said that he wished that we had all stayed an extra day. I also felt the same and had been very distressed about this a few hours previously, but had accepted it by this point. I persuaded him to catch a train home as it would be better than staying in the house alone with no company. We walked to the station at 4pm and caught separate trains home. While I was on the train, I started to feel a little high and uncomfortable again. I wondered if people could tell that I wasn’t yet sober, and felt paranoid, but held it together. My friend called me from his train and said that he was having a panic attack, but I managed to calm him down and reassured him that his train journey was short and he would be at his girlfriend’s house soon. Once he arrived there he texted me to say that he was fine.

On the train, I started to notice people’s faces and it looked to me like they were also tripping as their eyes were wide and they looked a little manic. This frustrated me as my perceptions were still definitely altered. I was being picked up from the train station by my father, and I felt paranoid that he would see me in my spaced-out, sleep-deprived, tail-end-of-an-acid-trip state. When I got in the car I lied and told him that I had a fever and felt dizzy because of this.

That evening, the trip had faded to the point where I could function, but I still felt spaced out, and when I watched TV with my parents the colours looked a little brighter and the music seemed a little more interesting than normal. I drank a couple of beers (which tasted disgusting on acid) and then went to bed and slept for 12 hours. In the morning I was sober, but feeling an afterglow where music still sounded better and I felt very introspective.

Looking back on the trip with hindsight, I’m not sure I was ready for the intense experience of LSD. I was certainly confronted with some very distressing emotions and thoughts, but also had moments of euphoria which I’m glad to have experienced. I still can’t believe just how long the trip lasted, or how mentally unforgiving it was. I realised during the trip just how bad some of my insecurities are, and how much I need to work on them. I realised how uncomfortable I am in my physical body and how limited I feel by it, but that the only thing I can do about this is treat it with care and live a more healthy lifestyle (I need to lay off smoking weed, heavy drinking and junk food for a while, and take MDMA less often). I also realised just how much I appreciate my friends, but how terrified I am of being abandoned by those who are close to me. I also felt uncomfortable with my belief that the world has no deeper meaning, and I wished that I believed in a god or afterlife, or even just a sense of spirituality to give life a sense of meaning. Before and after the trip, I was/am content with my atheism and mortality, but during the trip I felt saddened by these beliefs.

One of the main things that occupied my mind throughout the entire trip was the concept of positive and negative energy. I don’t believe in anything metaphysical (for example, I don’t believe in the soul, and I believe that every emotion can be explained as a balance of chemicals in the brain), but I felt very attuned to the moods of others around me. I felt sad and distressed when I detected or suspected sadness or discomfort in others, and I felt euphoric when I detected happiness and comfort. I wanted so badly for everyone around me to be happy all of the time, and I felt like their emotions were tangible things that effected the positivity/negativity of the “energy” in the room. However, as I struggled to form sentences and talk to people, and was only able to lie down and observe the people and world around me, I felt powerless to contribute or “give out” any energy myself. I could only receive positive or negative energy from others.

The whole trip, we all agreed, was incredibly emotionally draining and intense. I felt like my brain had run a marathon, and I had experienced an entire lifetime, including the highest highs and lowest lows, over the course of a single day. As often as I regretted taking acid during the trip, with hindsight I wouldn’t take it back. Although my problems and insecurities were intensified by a hundred times, I now feel two days later like they have been put into perspective. I feel like my past doesn’t have to define or limit me any more, and I can now choose the direction of my life, even if it isn’t easy. I appreciate life more since I dropped acid, and I’m hopeful that this will be a turning point.

Exp Year: 2016	ExpID: 107911
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 20
Published: Mar 4, 2021	Views: 1,147
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