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Wonderful and Terrifying
LSD
Citation:   OlderFirstTimer. "Wonderful and Terrifying: An Experience with LSD (exp107136)". Erowid.org. Jul 19, 2020. erowid.org/exp/107136

 
DOSE:
1 hit sublingual LSD (blotter / tab)
BODY WEIGHT: 350 lb
Background: Never tried acid before, and have not been smoking marijuana or drinking alcohol in the weeks preceding the event. The weekend before I took MDMA, 440 mg on Friday, and 220 mg on Saturday. (Poor choice, and not recommended, even at larger body weights)

During the week I felt the depressant after effects of the drug due to the large dose, and it manifested itself in a way that I was doubting why I was pursuing the arts as I was and about what I want to do with my life. By Friday, I was feeling pretty close to normal, and since I had already had the LSD sitting in my fridge, I decided to go ahead and make it an event on Saturday.

The trip:
I thought the 125 ug dose would be too weak for someone of my size so I got the next one up. Little did I know…..

T + 0:00 I dropped the blotter at about 12:30 by dissolving it under my tongue for about 15 minutes, and when it had disintegrated swallowed it.

T + 0:30 About 30 minutes later I was starting to feel the come up, which was like a mild alcohol intoxication. I decided to buy a pack of cigarettes for the day, and I went through about half the pack in those 12 hours from not smoking for months (which I guess is not unexpected as I usually smoked a pack a day).

T + 1:00 I messaged my friend X because I wanted to see him and give him a hug for a good trip while he was at the music festival near my home. I went outside and was not noticing anything visual yet, but I definitely felt the effects of the drug in a euphoric, goofy, smiley kind of way. I remember that the rain started to really upset me so I went back in to my apartment after running into X, as well as some other friends and acquaintances.

T + 1:30ish My visuals are kicking in now. I am looking at my computer screen, browsing around YouTube, and the search results are the first thing I see that get a little strange. So, they are stationary, and there is no movement, My perception was that the preview images were moving really subtly and slowly. It seemed almost like the images were stuck in a slow motion loop, even though they were not really moving. The rest of the screen seemed normal.

It is also around this time that I noticed the blinds “breathing”, or a visual effect that a portion of them are moving while the majority is standing still. This is the first “real life” hallucination I saw other than just a digital one from looking at the computer screen. As I continued, I noticed that my room would light up with yellows and oranges, and I often had to either open or close the window because my body temperature was changing and I was not feeling comfortable.

Somewhere after this, I had to use the rest room – it was the weirdest sensation ever as I felt like the toilet was starting to morph away into nothingness, and I was just trying to do my business. That is the moment when things turned from just visual to physical and it was pretty weird. During this time, I was also seeing the carpet in front of me have some swirling effects, and there were dramatic shifts between light and dark and the colors they were bringing into the room.

T + 1:45 – I think I was just laying around at this point enjoying things, while realizing how slowly time was moving. I sent a text to X and said “I really took this at 2 hours ago? This is terrifying and exhilarating.” In wanting to make sure I was safe while not making him feel like he had to keep track of me, I asked him to check in around 6, and he replied yes.

In the next few hours is when things got uncomfortably weird. While enjoying the visuals, I realized that time was moving too slowly. I was sitting on my bed trying to stay engrossed in videos, and would get up to walk to the bathroom to get a drink of water, come back and repeat the process. The problem is I was looking at the time, and it was become 3:10. 3:12. 3:13. I can’t put words onto the visuals I was seeing, but the slowdown of time felt wrong. I remembered that I put an alarm on my iPod for 3:30 before I started, with a message that would come up to say “You’re OK”. I don’t know why I latched onto that time, but as soon as I did, things went even slower. I was not moving in slow motion, my brain was just moving super fast. I kept pressing the button to light up my iPod while all these thoughts were running through my head and I realized this thing would never be fucking finished.

I took a video of myself during this time, and I was still pretty lucid. I watched through for a couple reasons – number one, I want to know what I was doing, and to try and get a deeper insight into my mind.

As I recall, I was looking out my window at the rain falling, and saw the building across from me as some kind of barricade. And I felt like super strong and powerful, and kind of got lost in that idea, which led to me trying to write This is all I wrote, with the quoted text being me trying to clarify my thoughts at the time…

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A poetical attempt of capturing the fleeting moments of a thought
A barricade. Strong and powerful.
'I don’t wanna get too lost up in this experience of the memory that I remember that the memory isn’t a real memory---and not gonna try to explain this right now either'

What if this poem is my ticket to fame!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So, I knew what I was seeing wasn’t really a barricade, I was just getting lost in the thought of it. Then I went to video…I seemed pretty normal, like I was drunk or high, but speaking normally, and I remember that things were still general positive at this point.

I did notice that I felt like I was playing a part like I do with friends - I am the goofy, funny guy who is always on, and I didn't want to lose control of that...Which is something I fought against for the entire trip. I was afraid that if I let go, then I couldn’t be in control, and bad shit would happen – and that one thought led to me catastrophizing and spinning me off into a bad trip that seemed to last forever.

T-4:00 So, it is like 4:30, and things are getting old. I feel like I am in this time loop where I keep walking to the bathroom to get a drink, and come back out to the bed (I guess that was happening after the videos because I seemed to be OK during those for the most part – I just didn’t want to keep trying to think things through and have pressure on myself) and I kept looking at my clock in between and wishing that time would go faster. I felt some kind of fear as I looked out my window and things were getting busy. Like a car would come in, and it had its lights on for some reason. And I started to get paranoid that they were looking up here.

I started seeing the delivery drivers walk out and to their cars, but it seemed like it was the same guy in a loop. And I kept looking down at my clock and not understanding why things were moving so slowly and that something was really wrong. I saw there were a couple guys by the elevator in the building next door, and I thought that I might need some real help, so I got dressed, and went downstairs for a cigarette to see how I was feeling. It was raining and there was no cover, so I just stood there in pants and a tshirt getting rained on while the 2 guys were smoking and talking. I have no idea what they were talking about, but I know that I felt like they were staring at me whenever I looked away from them.

The cigarette itself took forever to finish, and when I went back up only a couple minutes had passed. I was so fucked up and not realizing it, and I was out in public, but no one asked if I needed help, or talked to me while I was wandering.

Another car came by, and I had total déjà vu, which makes sense – I have read déjà vu is your mind having registered something already, but that it did not process it correctly, so you think you know what is going to happen.

During this the loop became worse, I would look down and see these two guys walking by, thinking that they were looking up at my room, and saw them walk by a ton, and in the grand scheme of things, really fucking slowly. Like, they were walking normally, and I would look away for what felt like enough time for them to leave, and I would look back and they were maybe a foot further than they were before. And again, I had the feeling of someone looking up at my window.

At one point the cleaning woman was out there, talking with someone in the truck that had lights on and engine running, I swear it felt like it was hours. At this point, my mind was really fucking up perception, and I had a hard time realizing what was real and what wasn’t. I kept having the time 6 PM etched in my head cause I knew that was when X was going to check in.

At some point I wrote to him and said, “Am I OK”, in a panic, and trying to have call him, And then realizing that I was (I wasn’t!). I wrote, I am OK at 5:22. And I got to the point where I was panicking, and trying to read online sites about what to do if you are having a bad trip, but it wasn’t making sense, I was going through what felt like walls of text in seconds, but I was understanding (at the moment) what I was reading.

Shit gets twisted here, and my mind was again going a thousand miles a minute. Eventually, things went quiet outside, The rain stopped, the fan from the building below me stopped and the rain stopped. Everything was calm and peaceful. It was during those 20 minutes that I struggled with, and eventually accepted, that I was somehow dead.

I had this 6 PM time in my mind, and it kept inching closer, and I just felt like everything I was thinking now is just a replay (like in a movie) and that I was going through the motions until I got to a place where 6 PM came and it would all stop and I would get pulled back into reality. And I was fighting back and forth between these thoughts of “If I am here, in my room, tripping balls, then I am fine” and “I must be blacked out somewhere on a street, and 6 PM is gonna come and I am gonna realize that something bad happened and I am actually in an ER somewhere being treated for an OD.” This also put me into a real panic to the point where I almost walked up to someone to ask for help and to call me an ambulance, but I had this thought in my head that if I got caught with drugs in my system, then my life would be over and it continued the panic cycle.
I had this thought in my head that if I got caught with drugs in my system, then my life would be over and it continued the panic cycle.


As I was sitting, It became 6, and everything was calming down. The trucks left, the rain was stopping. And I sat there, waiting for X, but I had catastrophized myself to this point so far, that I truly had thought “What if I am dead right now and this is just my soul. My soul is going to be here on this creation of earth and in order to move on I need to move up and better myself to get to the next place. What if I never existed, and all my experiences are just a part of this moment where I realize what life really is?” X messaged me a little later and said “You are fine”.

And I wrote back to him – “yes, the trip is finally dying down” and he was super calm and comforting, to the point where I assigned him at that moment my “spirit guide” through this world.

Words don’t really explain the experience – the bliss and happiness was amazing, the fears I had were paralyzing as I laid in bed trying to sort out these thoughts, and figure out how to move on with life now that I knew this, but I was still here on earth.

So I went out and wanted to live life as best I could. I went out for a walk, and stopped by the coffee shop cause I thought I saw a man I knew working there. At this point my thoughts are still like, everything happening now is a sign, and all the people know what is happening with me right now, but to keep the standards of this world then I just keep things the same as they always were. So, like I cant talk about the trip to anyone, cause they won’t get it, and they will think I am nuts. But it wasn’t actually him, it was just someone who had a similar hair style and beard as him from a distance. He was a total old hippy, and I tried my best to have a conversation with him – because I never stop and talk to people. I just live my life, and let others live theirs, and I never actually stop to really look at myself or others. That night I did.

That part is hard to explain – but I was truly believing that I had an experience that somehow opened me up to a fundamentally different world. At that point, I believed that the world, and everything in it, were created just for my soul as a way to move on to the next level of my soul's life. I still feared being ostracized from this world for doing something crazy, so I acted like things were normal, but I would still have thoughts that people were looking over at me and turning away as I looked up (which in reality they might have been since I obviously was still tripping).

So, I just walked around and took in the downtown, and saw that all the construction that was completed was a sign of my own growth that I experienced today. That the homeless man walking down the street just had obstacles in his life and that he was doing what he could to get through them and better himself. I wasn’t seeing visuals anymore, it was like the trip just died down at 6 PM, and I was just on the come down so I was still feeling kinda weird and panicked while going through what I thought was my “new world”. I will say, that I walked around proud that night, and although I am lucky I didn’t get stopped by the police women I walked by, or get hit by a car at the intersections around me, and proud that I realized that the meaning of my life is to improve myself each day, even if it is in baby steps.

T – 09:00 I am just trying to chill in my new reality, and I want to know if other people have experienced this stuff too so I was just popping around the internet watching some videos and reading about experiences. It is around this point that I really come down and the mental effects wear off, and I just start freaking out in bed about how loud I might have been earlier, who saw me fucked up, am I gonna get in trouble somehow, but none of that happened. I eventually was able to sleep at midnight for about 2 hours, then went back to bed at 2:30 till about 9 this morning.

So my trip turned bad, and I don’t know exactly how or why. Obviously, I used too much for a first dose, and not having a sitter who I trusted with me, I freaked the fuck out. There were some good ideas I got from it which I need to try and bring into my life, but some that are horrible that I don't want to feel again.

Exp Year: 2015ExpID: 107136
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: 30
Published: Jul 19, 2020Views: 777
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LSD (2) : Alone (16), Bad Trips (6), First Times (2)

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