DOSE:	4 hits	oral	LSD	(blotter / tab)
	repeated	smoked	Cannabis	(plant material)

BODY WEIGHT:

155 lb

Before I get into this, I just want to note that the following is my perception of the night's events. Therefore the order of events, and how much time elapsed during and between said events, will probably become more and more inaccurate as the story progresses.

It all started on a Monday night. I was playing video games with my dealer and my roommate over at my dealer's dorm room. He had just gotten in 100 hits of acid, and throughout the night people were shuffling in and out of the room buying their entertainment for the weekend.

Originally, I hadn't planned on taking any drugs at all that night, aside from my habitual 'bed-time bowl'. I had been up for over 48 hours on Aderall trying to finish my final for my drawing course, and wasn't in any physical state for psychoactive drugs. I had, however, made previous arrangements to get six hits of the stuff by ordering a copy of Call of Duty: Black Ops for my dealer the week before.

After contemplating it for a few hours I figured: 'What the hell. I'm done with exams, why not?' So I asked my dealer to give me the six hits. He dimmed the lights, and tore off three rectangles from a very colorful, perforated sheet of blotter paper, and wrapped them up in some computer paper for me. I hadn't watched him do it because it was my turn to play Modern Warfare. After the match, I walked down the hall to my own room, shut off the lights (My dealer had told me earlier that acid can't be exposed to direct light), and unwrapped the piece of paper on my desk. I then ingested two rectangles.

To my horror, I realized that there was only one rectangle left in the computer paper. I frantically searched the room for the remaining four rectangles, but to no avail. I even backtracked down the hallway, and searched my dealers room. At first he thought maybe I had already begun tripping, but eventually he asked me what the hell I was doing. Nervously, I asked him, 'Were those hits rectangles, or squares?' He laughed and told me they were squares. I had just unintentionally taken four hits of acid.

By now I was a little freaked out. I didn't know what to expect. I'd taken mushrooms before, but never any more than a half-eighth, but as Hunter S. Thomson once said (and I'm paraphrasing a bit), 'People don't find acid. acid finds you when 'it' thinks you're ready.' I was in for a wild ride, to say the least.

I'd say the on-set took about 30-40 minutes. I played video games during that time, and toward the end I decided that I felt like smoking a cigarette. After I was done, I came back in, and went to my own room to sit for awhile, and maybe play a little guitar. I guess it really sunk in when I tried to play guitar. I hadn't gotten any further than a couple chords when I looked at a drawing I had done that day of a mandolin. The mandolin started to become more and more vibrant and detailed, and eventually the lines started to move rapidly, hopping all over the page, but somehow still holding the shape of a mandolin. That's when the realization that I was tripping came. I'm sure anyone who's taken a psychoactive drug knows the feeling, when you look around you and you say to yourself, 'Wow, I'm tripping.'

I spent the next 20 or 30 minutes looking around the room, curious as a chimp. I wanted to know what everything looked like, not because I didn't know what things looked like, but because things looked so different on acid. Much different than things ever looked on mushrooms. Everything seemed to be moving at a rapid pace. It was pretty crazy, or so I had thought.

So after a while, my roommate and dealer came by to check on me. I had said I'd be back after my cigarette, so they were just making sure I hadn't done anything stupid. I wanted to somehow explain to them how everything looked, and felt, but there really were no words to express it. The best I could come up with was 'This is crazy.'

After that, we went back to my dealer's dorm to pack a bowl. The Bengals were playing that night, which is kind of a big deal for my roommate and my dealer. We went to the bottom of our building and started to smoke. I knew smoking would kick the shit out of me, but I didn't care. I knew it'd make things better, and it did.

It was almost instantaneous, as soon as I exhaled the smoke, the whole world changed. Before, everything was morphing and changing, yes, but I still acknowledged the existence of the world. After, the whole world was a different place. It was as if my entire existence was confined to my dorm building. There was no world beyond it, but strangely, I was OK with that. I felt secure in knowing that my entire world was right there. No more. No less.

After we finished the bowl, the whole world began to suddenly pulsate, as if we were in one of the underwater levels in the original Super Mario Bros. The whole world felt like it was moving to some sort of rhythm. Everything didn't necessarily move in the same ways, but they all seemed to be a part of each other. I think the best way to describe it is to imagine that each different object (the lights, the catwalk, the trees, the grass) was a different instrument, and that they were all playing one silent song. I say silent, because at this stage of the trip, I couldn't hear the music yet, but more on that later.

Eventually the pulsating was starting to get to me, and I decided that maybe it was time for a cigarette. When I took one out of the pack, though, I realized I only had two left. Now I knew damn well I was going to need more than two cigarettes that night, so I asked my roommate if he would take me downtown to get more cigarettes. He said yeah, and we begun the mile or so uphill trek into town.

Now this is the part of the trip that got a little scary for me at times. Let me explain the route we had to travel so you can better understand this. When you come out of my dorm, you walk through a parking garage to get to the front of that part of campus. Then you travel up a very steep hill for about a quarter mile, then you plateau, and have to travel up another hill into a large park with lots of trees and limited visibility of oncoming passerby. After that, you just cross the road into town.

So we started off having to go around to the front of my building, and when you get to the front, there are a few picnic tables and some trees. Now, this was probably the first time I'd seen a tree up close since I started the trip. They looked absolutely insane. The bark of the trees looked like the cracked sand you see in deserts sometimes, but it still held the solid properties of the bark. Since it was fall, the leaves were a bright red color, and occasionally one or two would fall down. My brain interpreted the leaves as great masses of wax, and when a leaf would fall, it looked like the tree was dripping wax. There were also faint bits of light peaking through the leaves that looked like lit candles.

When we got into the parking garage, the whole place started getting hazy, and it looked as if bugs were flying at the lights. They weren't moths, but they were behaving in the same manner. When we got out of the parking garage, though, is when things started getting weird. We crossed the lawn toward the street, and I began noticing that all the people we passed looked a bit off. It was as if each person was odd in their own way. For example, when we passed one group of people, the girl on the left began morphing into one of those zombie people you see on Ed Hardy tattoos. Other people would turn into strange over-exaggerated versions of themselves, while other people would undergo transformations into completely different creatures, some menacing, some not. I wasn't scared at all, but the world was becoming more and more foreign. I think it could be equated to moving to an entirely different planet without any prior knowledge of the culture and mannerisms of the intelligent species that lived on that planet. You just weren't 100% sure how to act.

When we began to cross the road to the first hill, my perceptions of time and space were starting to diminish. I saw there was a car coming, and I wanted to hurry across the road, but it seemed like every step I took brought me further and further away from the other side of the road. The car kept inching closer, and I started to walk really fast. When my roommate asked me why I was walking so fast, I realized that I had cleared three or four times the distance of the road. It was as if my mind had trapped me in the middle of that road, even though my body had already crossed it. But that was only the beginning.

When we began to climb the hill, it became increasingly difficult to percept time correctly. I remember walking up the hill, and there were distinct periods where time would be moving in slow motion, quite literally like one of those stupid YouTube videos where they repeat the funny part of the video five or six times with increasingly slower playbacks. And then there were times when it was like someone hit the fast forward button on me. According to my roommate, I would fluctuate between looking like I was tip-toeing up the hill, or speed-walking up the hill. I also want to note that by now, people were taking on increasingly strange forms, and that their eyes seemed to glow, almost like a laser was being emitted from their eyes. When they walked, it looked as if the glow was following where their eyes had been, similar to the way headlights appear on a long exposure photograph of a busy street.

The first hill was a challenge, to say the least, but it hadn't prepared me for the second. Up until this point, I hadn't felt any true feelings of fear. Yes, everything around me was crazy, and at times a little hard to swallow, but up until that second hill, I was able to accept what was happening, and just go along for the ride.

(To put things into perspective, I noticed that the intensity of the trip and the grip it had on my mind seemed to increase over time at an exponential rate. At any given time, I could assess how insane things were, but I could never accurately imagine how crazy things were going to be five minutes from then. The insanity level always exceeded my expectations by a very large margin.)

Ok, so second hill. I'm beating around the bush a little because as I'm writing this, I'm reliving some of the emotions, albeit on a much smaller scale, of the trip. The second hill was a little unnerving. The actual hill sits behind a library, and is more of a shortcut into town rather than an actual road. That being the case, the hill becomes very dark at night, and can even be a little scary when you're not taking acid. Anyway, so we're making our way up the hill, and my perception of time is going absolutely nuts. The transitions between slow motion and fast forward are becoming more violent, to the point where I can't figure out how fast I'm actually supposed to be walking. I probably looked like a mental patient at times, but that wasn't the least of my concerns.

As I explained earlier, the top of the hill turns into a park with lots of trees and limited visibility, so during this part of the journey, I had to pay close attention to how I was acting because the amount of people around me was rapidly changing. It seemed like every few steps I took, another person was rounding a corner from a different side. I felt like I had to act normal, but it became increasingly more difficult when I had to remain relaxed and unfazed when another scarecrow, skeleton, or dark figure with glowing red eyes past me. All the while I had to fight my perception of time, and remember which path to take to get to town. And let's not forget about the melting trees, and did I mention that at this point the path was shifting back and forth like one of those old rope bridges that you see in movies all the time? That's when things got a little overwhelming and I begun to feel what could only be described as sheer terror. I don't think I'd ever felt that scared at any point in my life up until then. There really wasn't any reason for it, but I guess the combination of menacing transformations, a sense of urgency to get to where we were going, and the fact that it was dark freaked me out.

The sensation didn't last long, though. In fact, had I been able to perceive time correctly, it probably would have lasted somewhere in the neighborhood of two or three seconds, but at the time it seemed to last for an eternity. It was as if someone just hit the stop button on the crazy movie that my life had become. During that wave of emotion, I had managed to take the wrong path toward town, and my roommate began laughing at me. The reintroduction of laughter into my world rejuvenated me, and allowed me to get back to just accepting what was going on around me. Don't get me wrong, the world wasn't any less insane, but I was back in the right mindset to enjoy my time in this strange and new world.

When we made it across the road though, we ran into another small hitch. In the state my mind was in, there was no way in hell I could have handled the simple task of handing the clerk my credit card and ID and asking for a pack of lights, so I told my roommate he had to do it. He was really stoned, and was having a hard time understanding how he could just go in and use my credit card and sign for me, but eventually we got it sorted out.

I waited outside while he was buying my smokes. He was probably only gone for a few minutes, but it felt like a really long time. Not only that, but I felt like everyone that was passing by me knew I was tripping. Of course, I knew at the time that that was a completely irrational fear, and that most, if not all the people that had seen me hadn't the faintest clue that I was tripping. Still though, I was a little worried, and I kept misinterpreting people's words, thinking they were talking about me. It was at this point that I decided to let it all go, and not worry about whether people knew if I was tripping. It was my trip to enjoy, right?

When my roommate finally came out of the store, we both lit up a cigarette. I thanked for taking me into town, and we began to make the long trek back to our dorm. The way back wasn't nearly as eventful. I seemed to have control of myself physically, and I didn't experience any overwhelming emotions almost the whole way back.

When we got to the dorm building though, everything went wrong again. We weren't even forty feet from building, and I began to get a flash of terror again. This one was easily hundreds of times worse than the first, but only lasted for a second. It was as if confusion was triggering these extreme bursts of terror. I guess I didn't want to be confused in a world that already made no sense whatsoever, and my mind reacted in the most extreme way it could.

I also want to just mention how strange smoking cigarettes was at this point in the trip. When I would first light a cigarette, it was just like any cigarette, but as I kept smoking it, it would eventually become a part of my hand. It was almost like I was smoking my own finger. Now don't get the wrong idea, it wasn't painful, scary, or disturbing, the cigarette was simply a part of me while I was smoking it.

Anyway, so we get back to the dorm room (after a close encounter with an RA), and decide to go back over to our dealer's dorm to watch the Bengals game. The last time I had seen a clock was before we had gone to go get cigarettes, so I was a little surprised to find out that we had only been gone for about 35, 40 minutes.

This is where things get a little hard to explain. I don't even think there are words in any modern language that can truly explain the things that happened next, but I'll try my best.

Now, earlier in the trip, people I was familiar with hadn't really changed much. It was the unknowns that took on radical transformations. But now, the people I knew were starting to morph. I'll start with my roommate. My roommate began to emit what looked like the bright light that appeared over the heads of the angels in Touched by an Angel. The light wasn't on the top of his head though. It seemed to be coming from behind his neck, and radiated upward. Also, his head became very rounded, his eyes became beady, and his smile was extremely childlike. He reminded me of one of Santa's elves. My dealer on the other hand, started to become really blocky, as if his entire body where made of different sized bricks. Occasionally some of those bricks would break off, much like the wax in a lava lamp does, and would sort of float in front of his face and disappear. My friends weren't what was crazy though. The walls were. Reality itself was.

I think this is the point when I started to let go of reality. The three of us were perched on my dealer's bed watching the game, except I wasn't watching. I was looking at the walls. Now I'm going to do my best to explain this, but bare with me on this one. The walls were coming apart at the seems, but beyond them wasn't the outside. Beyond them was what appeared to be another dimension of sorts. I don't remember much of what I saw on the other side, but I do remember that there were some scary looking creatures, and the world on that other side was a crimson color. It's nearly impossible to put to words what that other dimension was. It was almost calling out for me. It wanted me to explore it, but every time I got close to it, I willed myself to come back to the dorm room. I know that if I had gone there, I would have run the risk of literally going insane.

Remember that music I mentioned back in the beginning of the story? Well, when the seems of reality began tearing, I started to hear the music. It wasn't aurally pleasing at all, really. It was more like a strange drone that changed pitch and kept a rhythm. There's a song by Arcade Fire called Sprawl II where they let the chord at the end of a verse just drop off, note by note, and then come back in. It's probably the best way to describe how the music sounded. It was almost eerie, but I was OK with it, because I felt like it was just the sound of the Earth.

Anyway, back to the story, so I'm sitting in my dealer's dorm, and we're watching the game. I won't explain the visuals, aside from the walls splitting, because it was all pretty average for a trip. This is when I started to feel the pressure. Maybe it's just me, but when I trip on any drug, I tend to feel as if some invisible hand is grabbing the back of my head and applying pressure. During the majority of the trip it didn't really bother me, but I guess it kind of got to me when I was sitting in that dorm. I started to get really uncomfortable, and antsy, so I decided to go out for a cigarette.

I don't know how long I was out there. All I know is that when I got out there, reality abandoned me completely. My brain was now being fully controlled by the acid. The invisible hand had grasped me. I was now, for at least a little while, insane.

My whole life made no sense anymore. I couldn't figure out why or if I existed, and I couldn't put together the simple chain of events that had put me into the situation I was in. I had no idea how I had gotten to the bottom of the building, or how I ended up tripping, or even why I was smoking a cigarette. As time past, I lost my grasp on things more and more rapidly. After a while, I couldn't even comprehend my being a human being. I was just there, existing in a strange time and space.

That's about as far as I can probably go, as my thoughts became so paradoxical from then on that I can't really give any sort of chronology of events. I remember getting trapped in my brain, thinking in circles, trying not to feel empty, for a long period of time. I think at one point I seriously contemplated calling one of parents to let them know how hard I was tripping. I remember ideas and feelings became tangible entities. I remember forgetting what it was like to be high or drunk, and really trying to contemplate what it felt like. Eventually I even forgot what being normal felt like.

But I also remember catching myself a few times and reminding myself that it would all be over in the morning, because during those times, I had legitimately thought that I wasn't coming back from the trip. These thoughts probably lasted for hours. I remember picking up a GameBoy at some point and my life began to revolve around the Tetris game I was playing. When I did well, I was happy. When I made mistakes, I felt devastated.

The next thing I can remember with clarity was coming down. I don't know whether it's normal, but I remember lying in my bed feeling slightly sick to my stomach. As time progressed, the feeling of sickness would move up my esophagus and into my mouth. The process took about an hour, but it was, in effect, a ticking time bomb. When the sickness reached my mouth, it didn't leave. It just brought a nice puke along with it. The puke almost felt good though. It made me feel alive again; real almost.

After I puked, I smoked a few bowls, and spent the rest of the night looking around my room, waiting for the trip to be over.

The next day I had a bit of a headache, and felt mentally exhausted. A nice warm shower helped.

Overall the trip was a fantastic experience. Even with the fear I felt at some points, and state of absolute insanity I fell into at one point, I feel like I learned a lot from the trip about myself. And even though it wasn't mentioned much in the account, I think the predominant emotions throughout the trip were positive ones. You just tend to remember the scary parts. They impact you the most.

Ever since I first tripped, I wanted to know what a crazy trip was like. I know that tons of people have had way crazier trips than mine, but I truly believe that fate made me take four hits so that I could experience a serious trip. Now I don't have to look for that trip anymore. I can be done with psychoactive drugs and just stick to good old ganja.

Exp Year: 2010	ExpID: 89195
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 18
Published: Dec 20, 2011	Views: 17,923
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LSD (2), Cannabis (1) : General (1), Nature / Outdoors (23), Various (28)