DOSE:

300 ug

oral

AL-LAD

(liquid)

BODY WEIGHT:

135 lb

I arranged to have my first trip on AL-LAD in an apartment environment with a playlist of music prepared and two sitters I know well.

At 8:30 PM (UTC-4), I dosed 300µg of AL-LAD in solution. First alerts were noted at about 0:10, similar to LSD. Immediately, however, something subtle tipped me off and I realized this experience would be less like LSD than expected. The come up was very gradual, but it was also filled with insight and anxiety. With LSD, very little happens for an hour, and then over about 30 minutes I have a rocketship-like ramp up culminating in the peak. With AL-LAD, it was a slow and gradual ascent, but still carried its own challenges. I became very sensitive to the environment much earlier than expected. I immediately began coming to realizations about my life. The direction of my thoughts were completely outside of my control, which was significantly different from my experiences with LSD at comparable doses. My mind would naturally drift from one issue in my life to another, punctuated with breaks to have fun in between. This character of the flow of thought reminded me most of my experiences with 4-AcO-MET, and of descriptions I'd heard of mushroom trips. Interestingly, I found my ability to articulate myself was not impaired much at all, and I was easily able to explain to my sitters when and why something was upsetting me. There was a certain clarity to the headspace, which allowed for speech and communication, which also felt much more like 4-AcO-MET than LSD. Stomach discomfort was present but manageable.

The peak happened after about 1:30 from dose and plateaued for about 1:15, which is the same as my LSD trips. The intensity was comparable to 275µg of LSD (which for me is significantly different from 300µg of LSD). During the peak, I was very emotional and expressive, much more than on LSD. There was none of the LSD-like stimulation or hyper-attention and focus. The constant zooming, fractalization, and deepening in complexity that is so characteristic of LSD was also absent. Instead, I found myself going through dramatic waves of intensity and content, as though I were some system of streams which were now surging with water, demolishing any blockages which had built up over time. I would become ecstatically joyful and filled with humor. These waves would often carry the same ironic humor LSD has. The periods of joy and laughter were sandwiched between periods of deep, painful work. I was brought to realize and witness all the suffering I’ve felt during my life, and it was sheerly overwhelming, but there was also a recognition that “I” did not cause it, because there was no I to have caused these things. I was simply witnessing suffering, and the witnessing of suffering could not itself be suffering, nor can suffering be caused by the mere fact that it was witnessed.

During the most intense part of the peak, the album “Timeline” by Mild High Club was playing. My body became a large corkscrew, each color of the rainbow slowly cycling through, from top to bottom, in a fluid-like motion. Red would cycle, and it would be my chronic pain, and I would deeply feel it as it moved through me and was expelled through the bottom of the corkscrew. It would then cycle orange and I would feel all the shame and blame I put on myself, then yellow would be another source of my pain. It continued through many colors. This felt deeply cathartic, and in some way like I was working knots out of a tight muscle. A deep massage can be painful, but it’s painful in a way that feels constructive.

At one point I closed my eyes and noticed a woman lounging beside me. She has long black hair, thick-rimmed glasses, and was either wearing a dress or a suit. She was somewhat silhouetted, but her skin appeared radiant blue. I looked at her, and she seemed to notice I had noticed her. She gestured at me to proceed by waving her hand, almost as if she was simply there to oversee my experience. The entire trip, in retrospect, seems like there was a guiding presence, similar to that often reported on mushrooms. I wonder if it was her.

I should also note: I have had entity contact numerous times on DMT, and my DMT entities showed up for a moment once on an acid trip of mine. This woman did not feel like a DMT entity, but like her own thing. The AL-LAD Lady.

Later during the peak, there was an experience of a great spire with a spiraling ramp leading up it. Two beams of colored light went up the ramp, one chasing the other. The chasing one felt like it was “me” and the whole chase had a strongly flirtatious nature to it.

After the album ended, the next thing I had queued up was “The Sound of Sitar” by Ravi Shankar. This had been reliable trip music in the past, and I was excited to see how AL-LAD responded to it, but the result surprised me. Unlike the dramatic ups and downs of the previous music, this album has a more spacy, contemplative tone, where it’s always changing but never quite resolves. The trip suddenly began to feel extremely similar to LSD. The distinct waves of emotion and content stopped, and the trip began to feel more like an “everything all the time” experience, like LSD generally manifests for me. This may have been completely fine on another day, but I was working through a lot of wound up kinks in my psyche and didn’t quite feel up for or ready to handle the tone. The guiding aspect of the experience had vanished and I felt more left to my own.

I began coming down shortly after. Just as with the come up, the comedown was much more gradual than I typically experience on LSD. Also like the come up, it was riddled with anxiety and discomfort. I was still very sensitive to the tone of conversation and the environment, and easily unsettled. I watched a documentary about orangutans and found myself forgetting for long stretches that the orangutans were not human people, and found myself notably distressed whenever any of the orangutans were angry or mean to the others. My sitters were baking a cheese-stuffed butternut squash, and the smell in the room triggered the scenery to turn into an old nordic bar of sorts, where you would expect mead to be served in a tankard by a very muscly Scandinavian man 1000 years ago. I felt nostalgic, even though this was obviously not a memory. Unfortunately, the substance seemed to be very anorexic, and I was hardly able to eat all day.

Once I had mostly come down, I felt on edge but wasn’t tripping enough for it to be worth it, so I took some kratom and it settled me down.

Overall this substance is far less like LSD than expected, and more potent than expected as well. There was little body load, and while LSD often leaves my back, jaw, and legs sore, I felt fine at the end of the day with this one.

The sensory aspects and “artistic composition” of the trip were perhaps 85% similar to LSD, with punctuated moments of very African visuals reminiscent of the 4-position tryptamines. The visuals also had more of a visionary aspect than LSD, reminding me of mescaline. One memorable example was looking at incense ashes on a table-top becoming a cherry blossom tree grove.
The cognitive element, however, was perhaps 50% the same as LSD. The humor and irony were there, but there was no stimulation or hyper-focus to speak of. It was also significantly more gentle than LSD. AL-LAD is like a child’s swimming teacher who’s going to make sure you get in the water, even if you’re scared, but who will also get in with you and hold your hand while you learn. LSD, however, is more like the teacher who pushes you into the deep end when you’re not looking and instructs you to “swim.” Sure, you might learn to swim, but it won’t necessarily be a gentle or smooth process.

I also found the content to be much different from LSD. Whereas LSD always has a very cosmic character to it, AL-LAD was much more personal and autobiographical. On LSD I often feel like a baby, reverted to before my pathologies developed, temporarily free from them and more able to gain perspective. On this, I felt like an adult who now was being given a chance to charge my pathologies head-on. I was much more emotional than on LSD, and came close to tears multiple times, while I have never cried on LSD. I also suspect it converges in dose with LSD. 150µg of LSD may be much stronger than 150µg of AL-LAD, but I think as one increases the dose AL-LAD begins to catch up. This was also my first AL-LAD experience, and my observations may not apply to AL-LAD as a whole.

Exp Year: 2020	ExpID: 114863
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 27
Published: Oct 24, 2020	Views: 3,633
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AL-LAD (603) : General (1), First Times (2), Small Group (2-9) (17)