DOSE:

2 hits

oral

LSD

(blotter / tab)

BODY WEIGHT:

240 lb

I had done acid before with a friend of mine, and she and I had experienced what one could call an average acid trip, if you can even suggest that such a thing can be average. We looked at patterns in blankets and had the same conversation over and over, etc. When it comes to my drug usage I like to think I'm a pretty sensible person when it comes to drug usage--except on very few occasions I haven't gone overboard smoking weed or drinking, and even then I try to stay sober. It was me and another friend, Amelie (a first timer), who were tripping, along with 2 other friends (Zach and Ann) who couldn't trip due to psychological and medical problems. Though they are close friends of mine, Amelie and I's proximity to the two during the trip affected it to a great degree, as we were dragged from one thing to the next by our sober friends who wanted to do crazy things with the trippy people or to fuck with the tripping people.

After the trip started (roughly an hour in), we were brought to a folk concert that our friends were holding because a large number of people were tripping on that day, so...I guess it seemed like a good plan. While I am sure that the people who were playing (who were not tripping) all felt like they were being polite and tolerant of our experiences or something, speaking to my friends later we felt like we were being condescended upon, an experience made worse for me because I'd never met the lead singer before, and the lead singer was acting as if he knew me, so I wasn't entirely sure if he was real, or a magician, or something.

Patterns are something that human beings create habitually--we pray, it rains, we thank the rain god. Psychadelics increase this behavior to a larger degree: I wrote in a notebook I brought with me that 'The acidhead tends to link things which no sober person would link. Sometimes this is a positive thing, in creating new realizations and new conceptions of things. However, a lot of the time I am simply connecting things that happened in ways that don't make OBJECTIVE (emphasis in text) sense.' I was partially aware of this when I was tripping on LSD for the first time, but this realization--that a lot of the things that I was experiencing were subjective and creations of my mind, rather than real, affected the trip to a very large degree.

Because of this knowledge, I didn't let my paranoia get out of hand. However, as time moved forward more and more people left the concert to do other things, and Amelie also left, and ended up spending the rest of the majority of her trip with Ann. This was pretty bad for me--I'd never tripped alone, and I wanted to do the trip primarily as a way go get to know Amelie better. I went to my college's coffee co op, and lay on the couch while I was peaking. Another friend of mine who was aware of my condition was volunteering at the time, and he had chosen to play extremely dark goth music. I stared at the grafitti and paintings in that co op for an hour while listening to Marylin Manson, frankly very overwhelmed. After a while someone asked me about the journalistic integrity of the Economist. This is an example of an objective experience--objectively someone asking you about the journalistic integrity of a magazine is a pretty normal thing. However to me it took me 5 minutes to say, basically 'yeah they're an ok paper'. I said something about Palestine that I don't remember and then the person attempted to turn my point back on me. I then said precisely this 'I cannot...right now', and promptly left to go to an abandoned part of the campus.

I lay in the corner of a lot (a more comfortable experience than one might expect), during the rest of my peak, though during the walk to the lot I had managed to get some sort of control over myself (It's God's day, after all, I said in my head, though I'm not religious). The next hour went as so--I would writhe in the sun, eating air as I called it, then when I had a poignant thought I would stop, take a bite of the apple I had with me (which was delicious), and write the thought down. I had the strong feeling of 'Why are you doing this silly, silly thing?'

It was a trip that reaffirmed my liking of normality, which is very odd when I think about it. During my trip, during the whole section of the trip after I left the coffee co op for the first time, I was thinking that though acid gives me new perspectives, said perspectives generally do not have a great deal of relevance to my day to day life. Perhaps it is different for some people, and now that I think about it I wasn't being entirely fair, but that's how I felt at the time. I was, at this point, thinking of tripping as a ridiculous thing I paid MONEY for so that I could just lie in the sun. I could lie in the sun without tripping, and then I'd be able to do work! While I'm tripping I can't do that, man, what a gyp.

I've always felt that psychadelic experiences go on a little bit longer than they need to. Like, by 6 hours of shrooms I'm ready to 'get off', as it were, but I'm in for 2 more hours of feeling odd. With acid this is stronger, since the trip is so much longer and I’m so much more exhausted by the end of it. By this point, I'd tripped for 5 or 6 hours, and I wanted to stop. Normally, I would have acquiesced to the substance that was in me and continued to go along with the acid trip. But not this time--this time I tried, thoroughly, to join what I called the world of the Normal. I quickly walked back to my room, cleaned it, took my clothing and put it in the laundry. I then tried to think of something else to do, so I walked to my friends place, where they were playing Magic the Gathering. I watched the two guys--both were beginners--play, and listened to their talk about how epic what they were doing was. I was staring at an Island card, trying to give sound tactical and strategic advice. While I was trying as hard as I could to keep normal, the weird kept on poking out at me, like the spring of an old mattress.

I then went to the laundry and put my clothes in the dryer. I went to the library and started to write a paper (which, upon later inspection, was uninspired--which is the last thing one might expect from a political scientist on an acid trip). I was suddenly confronted by a sense of lonelyness. I looked for Amelie--she'd left the world, and was in her bed, trying to sleep. I tried to not state that she was 8 hours into an acid trip so there were few things in the world that would allow her to sleep, and beyond that I have not heard of a positive dream one has had during an acid trip, but she told me that she'd see me tomorrow morning, and since her roomates were there, I decided it'd be best to leave.

I was then struck with a sense of boringness. It was a Sunday night, so everyone was writing papers, or at home, so I wandered for a while, continually asking 'Is this what I'm supposed to do?' I ended up going back to my room and taking a shower (I thought that a shower was a supremely normal thing to do) while I was still angry at my boring contemporance. I wondered 'What is it that I normally do to make time move faster?' And then I realized. I picked up my zune and played Merriwether Post Pavilion 3 times. I think I then listened to Brothersport for a full half hour, while 'air-synthing', which meant moving my pointer fingers around frantically.

Amelie texted me, and I went to the quad to see that she had taken her blankets and computer and put them out on the lawn, which everyone walking by knew as an acid head thing to do, but hell, I was on acid, I thought, no need to condescend. I stayed with her for the rest of the hour, with us doing what we called 'acid sex' which meant we ruffled each other's hair. I then went back to my room and went to bed.

I don't think I'm going to do acid again--while I avoided having a bad trip, there was definitely the undertone of not knowing why I was doing this ridiculous thing, and I think that doing it again would be to invite a bad trip.

Exp Year: 2010	ExpID: 85133
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 19
Published: Sep 24, 2010	Views: 5,379
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