CW: Suicide, Mental illness, existential terror, violence, loss of autonomy
Age:18
Weight-130 lbs
Dose-2 tabs LSD,
3.5 g mushrooms
T0:00-Took 2 tabs
of acid in a beach house. Leave to go to the beach shortly after.
T1:00-Coming up
on the acid on the beach-mostly slight body effects such as the familiar
feeling of floating. There are shafts of light piercing through the clouds and
the entire sky and sea are dancing with patterns. Colors are brighter and
everything seems to have a rainbow sheen. Friends decide to go to a diner.
T1:30-Perception
of sound is very strange in the diner with sounds phasing in and out around me
with a sort of Doppler Effect. Patterns are swimming and swirling on every
surface, people’s faces are slightly shifting. Everyone looks very very
strange- although they are not deformed, it’s as if the human face as it is had
suddenly stopped being a familiar and accepted image and became something
strange and alien. After lunch I go into the bathroom, where the visuals have
become quite apparent- the walls are swirling and swimming around me, pulsing
and breathing with harmonious and flowing patterns.
T2:20-Leave the
diner and go back to the house. I’m getting the awkward social interaction I
usually get from acid where I’m hyper aware of my own voice and inflection and
in doing so completely lose a sense of how to use tone or inflection properly. Sunlight
is filtering in through the windows, colorful rainbow wood grain patterns
breathe and emboss themselves on the walls, I feel floaty, confident, euphoric,
and my jaw is clenching. I feel awkward and am having trouble articulating
sentences and finding the right words to use, so I retire to a quiet hallway to
draw pictures by myself.
T4:00-The acid
trip is tailing off. I can really only feel the physical effects anymore.
Visuals and emotional effects are only noticeable if I try to notice them. At
this point we’re waiting for the sun to go down so we can smoke weed. My social
skills have mostly returned and I feel comfortable and euphoric in the presence
of friends.
T5:00-The sun is
down. We are preparing to go to the beach to smoke. I decide now is the time to
take my mushrooms. I eat them with orange juice as a chaser across a period of
about 15 minutes and then head to the beach. We struggle to light the bowl in
the strong winds but eventually find a way and smoke several bowls.
T5:20-I sit down on
the beach and stare out into the vast ocean. I can feel my body growing heavier
and numbing away as the visuals begin to pick up. Tessellated spiral patterns
mirror themselves on the sand and my entire field of vision appears to be mirroring
itself and repeating. The light of boats on the horizon are beaming and
swirling into the sky. I go back to where my friends are and sit down as they
have intense and serious discussions about politics. I wish I could’ve
participated but my brain was processing their words in a way that was
ineffective for response and comprehension. Whenever I would talk, my voice
would sound isolated and dreamy before trailing off into nothing.
T5:40-The
conversation has shifted to the future, the scope of human progress, the
entirety of humanity and its fate, the scope of our universe, of time, of
everything leading up to now and everything to come. This is an amazing
conversation to be having while on mushrooms and I am more actively and eagerly
participating. Human constructs come up a lot, and there is a lot of talk about
a new paradigm built from radical reinvention of what we consider human, about
utterly dismantling every social and cultural construct and society built anew,
aided by technology. As they discuss this, I look to the sky- rippling,
pulsing, and exploding with the energy of time and the potential of the future.
The town in the distance glows with glorious artificial light of the modern
human, the entire earth is expanding around us. The great sky and the expanse
of space above me, the vastness of nature on one side, the monuments of
humanity on the other. I feel like a small little being on this great planet as
it hurtles through time and space. As we talk, my friends begin to glow with
auras, my depth perception fails and my entire vision is one flat plane with my
friends amidst a sea of swirling, spinning dancing fractals and astral forms.
T6:10-I stand up
because I need to pee really badly. Everything is downhill from here. Once,
several months ago, I took Hawaiian Baby Woodrose seeds, and ever since then
I’ve been afflicted with an occasional pulsing, tingling pain and a numbness on
the inside of my thighs and all down my legs. I think I caused permanent
vasoconstrictive damage. I feel it again this time, but very intense, probably
from sitting in the same position with my legs folded for so long. I walk to
the sea to pee in it. As I stumble forward with my throbbing aching legs I get
the worst feeling of ominous premonition. I feel déjà vu, like I’ve experienced
this in a dream, and it was my final moments. The patterns in the sand carved
by the waves begin to mirror and swirl and tessellate to infinity. Each step
feels like I’m stepping not on sand but on something solid, like wood, and it
feels like the blood is hardening inside my body. I have had premonitions and
feelings of coming death while tripping before, and each time it is accompanied
by a swirling metallic sound, a sort of whining, with swings in pitch, and each
step I take, that dizzying noise fills my ears and bounces around the sounds of
the waves. This is it. This is my final trip. This is the one that kills me. I
have deep vein thrombosis, my blood will clot in my legs and I will collapse
into the sea and die. Normally I can keep calm while feelings of death come on,
I accept it as a consequence of my actions, and even while I think that, it
still triggers a physical panic response in me. As I pee, my friend runs around
me, saying all sorts of things, I forget what they were and they were most
likely friendly in nature, but I construe them as negative and malicious.
T6:20-I still
don’t feel like I’ve totally lost control. I go back to where my friends are.
The word bad trip is coming in my mind, I can feel the tendrils of ill
thoughts, infinite loops, and unstoppable chains of negative ideas seeping into
my brain, spreading like a cancer. Have you ever played the game with someone
where you keep putting your hands on top of one another, infinitely topping
each other? That is what my thoughts were doing, flowing from infinity right
into one another, each one building on the last in an infinite untraceable
stream, and I would keep having to cut off the chain of thought when the
negativity began to creep in, cut if off before it consumed me. This was only
sort of effective. We begin to walk back to the house. I need to get back, I
need to lie down, I need somewhere warm and calm and safe to gather myself
before things get worse. One vivid visual I remember is my friend running
towards me. He seemed like he was going absurdly fast, like in an old movie. As
he ran, his face multiplied until his entire body was just his face over and
over again in the shape of his being. This was then replaced by his hands,
until he became a running mess of extremities. As we walk back, I begin to have
the racing thoughts of memories I get while on tryptamines. Only unlike other
times, where every memory is warm and pleasant, these ones are cold and
unwelcoming, I can only think of how uncomfortable I have been, how tedious
every moment of existence is, how I will never feel good or comfortable and
never have. I can only think about the cold negativity of every moment of my
past, the bad drowning out any good. My heart has been racing this entire time.
T6:40-We get back
inside. I do not recall what happened much, I remember walking around the
house. I wasn’t in full suffering mode yet, but was facing a brutal existential
crisis. Everything feels so wrong, so uncomfortable, there is so much suffering
in the world and everyone feels so much suffering, and there is no way to avoid
it. Any potential future I envision is filled with more tediousness, more
unfulfilling mediocrity, more pain, more draining crushing depression and
debilitating self-loathing. It’s completely inescapable and all I can do is
laugh at my total despair. I sit next to a table, it looks alive, it feels
alive, I can sense a life force in it. The corner looks like a huge grinning
mouth. Normally while tripping I can appreciate the beauty in that, but in this
instance my racing negative thoughts are giving me a headache and this living
table is just a reminder of what I have done to myself. It only serves to
incite even more painful thoughts.
T7:00- I sit in a
room. A large group of people are having a spirited discussion about something
I know a good bit about. I wish I could join but I can barely form words at
this point. I feel even worse about this, I feel stupid and useless, I feel
like I am condemned to always be stupid I useless. I am the fool, the jester
who decided to take too many drugs in the presence of people who were content
with weed and alcohol, the dunce who decided to silence himself and stifle his
own thoughts in pursuit of hedonism. I sit and listen, barely comprehending the
English language, before the discomfort and painful thoughts boil over. All I
can think about is suffering. There is so much human suffering. In history
people have experienced such incredible pain, physical, mental, emotional, and
so often at the hands of the malice of others. And what could they do about it?
They certainly weren’t able to stop themselves from feeling that pain, because
it happened, because suffering is real and unavoidable, especially when some
are purposely trying to inflict it on others. And I certainly wouldn’t be able
to stop any suffering that came my way. I was lucky, I was fortunate that
nothing terrible ever happened to me, I was lucky that I had never been dismembered
or set on fire or beaten or tortured or maimed in a car accident, but it was
such a fine line between my current life and that. And I was powerless.
Completely and utterly powerless to stop any of that. And I was powerless to
stop myself thinking about it, I had unwittingly opened a new paradigm, one
where I could understand nothing but suffering, where every moment was
experienced relative to the potential suffering I could be experiencing. So
many terrible painful things could happen. I remember vividly, someone could
run into this house, some madman, find me on the floor, rip off my fingernails,
crush my limbs, splinter my bones, splatter my muscles, rip my organs apart,
and what the fuck could I do to stop them? I was so vulnerable, I was so weak,
I was so powerless, and because of that, incredible suffering felt inevitable,
I had a premonition that my life in the future would be suffering I couldn’t
even imagine at the current time.
T7:30-I run
upstairs, I feel sick, I feel like my body is shutting down and I am losing
control of my organs. I lock myself in the bathroom. I spend the next half hour
sitting on the toilet, wishing this could end. Why did I do this, why did I
ever enjoy tripping? I feel as though this trip has opened my eyes to a realm
of anguish the likes of which I had never seen before. I would never be able to
view the world in a pleasant away again, I had doomed myself to a bleak life of
knowing only the yawning and infinite chasm of despair that I had dared to gaze
into. I sat on the toilet, shaking violently, wanting to escape this burden of
existence somehow, though I knew death would not even be an escape. Literally
everything I could think about was crawling with negativity, there was a
downside to every possible option that overpowered and destroyed any potential
good side. My thoughts were racing and every single one hurt. I begin to
imagine every fleeting moment, how exact and precise every occurrence in the
world was. Normally, while tripping, I would appreciate the beauty of this,
like thinking about a certain thing in a certain situation, how that would
happen just once, and never happen again, how every specific instance swirled
forth from the chaos. But instead of appreciating each moment, I cried in the
tragedy of their fleetingness and their death, and in mourning for the
astronomical amounts of moments that would never ever happen ever, for the ones
that never did happen, for the ones that weren’t happening, for the ones that
happened and never will happen again. The unfulfilled desires that would be
impossible to ever fulfill, the missed opportunities and pereptual failures. I
heard voices from downstairs having the same spirited discussion, and again and
again I hear my name coming from downstairs, they’re talking about me, they
know I fucked up, etc etc (I doubt anyone actually said my name once). I
suddenly realize, what if someone else wants to use this bathroom? I decide to
suffer in my existential crisis out in the hallway. People come upstairs and
find me for the first time. Despite me saying I’m okay, they can tell something
is wrong, and offer to bring me water. They are nothing but friendly, loving,
accommodating. I feel sick, but this calms me down a bit.
T8:00- I go back
downstairs for some awkward social interaction. My speech and language
capabilities are still subpar, and I am having great difficulty explaining how
I feel, what I just felt, and making conversation in general. My memory fails
me as my thoughts jump and chain around, causing me to lose track of
conversations mid-sentence. Visuals are dying down, but the perspective and
size of the room still feels totally out of whack.
T8:30- More
friendly, loving, caring interaction slowly pulls me out of the negative chains
of thought. I am no longer meticulously and consciously thinking and wrangling
every bit of stimulus and every action. My automatic thought returns and it’s a
huge burden off my mind. My thoughts are no longer blossoming into toxic
tendrils of negative possibilities and wicked pain and a bleak and hopeless
future, they now blossom into warmth and considerations of a pleasant future
and good things to come. The storm has passed, the sickness is over.
T10:00-I smoke
more. Nothing to note, everything has calmed down, people are going to bed, I
am still wired from the acid and stay up later. I feel confident, warm, happy, and
energetic. I thoroughly clean the house
while everyone is sleeping just to make myself useful and make up for being an
incoherent basket case most of the night.
T12:00-I lie down
to sleep. Visuals are still slightly playing if I pay attention to them-a
rippling of everything that looks like the waves of heat rising off a hot
surface. I eventually fall asleep.