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The Nature of Tripping
LSD & Cannabis
Citation:   bluedolphin. "The Nature of Tripping: An Experience with LSD & Cannabis (exp46850)". Erowid.org. Nov 8, 2005. erowid.org/exp/46850

 
DOSE:
2 hits oral LSD (gel tab)
BODY WEIGHT: 150 lb
This, the most anticipated trip of the summer, was a real let down in a lot of ways.

Pre-Trip Introductions and Ramblings

The trip that was about to take place was planned perfectly, and everyone was super excited. The trippers would be myself, my girlfriend, and my old friends Kara and Jake.

Kara had asked me if I could 'hook her up' with acid for about a year now, and it just so happened that I finally had a little bit to share. She had only taken LSD once before, a couple years ago, and she recalled this experience fondly so I was excited to share the experience with her once again.

I had tripped with Jake before. Once, at a Phish show where he sort of wandered off, so we didn't actually trip together, and then once again just about a month ago when we ate some fantastic mushrooms and I lost my ego in the woods. This trip had revealed a few personality traits about Jake that made me a little uncomfortable, but I had a great time nonetheless. Regardless, I invited him to trip with us to return the favor. Additionally, he had never taken LSD before, and I was excited to show him why I considered LSD the best psychedelic drug.

And of course there was my girlfriend Psilosara. Some of you who frequent this forum, and inevitably end up reading some of the many trip reports I write, are probably familiar with her. She is my one love, my grounding force, and she also likes to take LSD. Why not bring her along too?

Myself? Well, I'd eaten some LSD from this same batch just a couple weeks before at a friend's apartment. As I already knew, the LSD was of good quality. I'll admit my frame of mind has been out of whack lately. I haven't been spending much time at home, I've had anxiety attacks followed by deep depression, and I only have sporatic and strange forms of employment. Basically, when I hear that Modest Mouse song 'Float On', I think, 'that's what I'm doing'.

And then there was my friend, who we'll call C-Slice. He was going to trip with us, but Kara decided the night before that C-Slice creeped her out, and she refused to trip with him. I had the pleasure of breaking this news to C-Slice, and apologizing on her behalf. It sort of pissed me off to have to do that, especially since the others just wanted to not tell him and instead tell him the wrong meeting time and place, or something. Fuck that shit, I thought, that's not how we do this. If we're going to give someone the boot, somebody's at least gotta tell him straight to his face. So I did that, and felt like an asshole doing it. Upon doing so, the seed of regret had been planted inside of me.

The Trip

So it was 12:00 noon and the four of us parked a car on the bottom of a mountain and began to walk up a steep and rocky trail to the summit, which was only about a half hour's climb, where we'd find a place to trip out. At the bottom of the trail I gave everyone two microdots, except myself. I ate an extra large mutant microdot which looked like it was two normal microdots fused together.

We climbed this trail, and it was really hot out so we were all drenched in sweat by the time we reached the top. The actual top of the hill was a good couple hundred feet off the trail, so we decided we'd claim the top of the hill for our own, as it should prove to be a secluded and scenic location.

Sitting around, over the next couple of hours I observed my friends display the early signs of a trip setting in. A little bit of extra laughter here, a little bit of extra attention paid to a bit of moss there, and some muscle twitches over there. Of course I was already feeling the complex tryptamine surging through me. My hands were shaking a bit more than usual and I could feel the energy surging through my arms. My stomach had tightened just a bit, but nothing uncomfortable or really distracting.

Jake had brought a guitar up with him, and we took turns playing it as our trips set in. About two hours after dropping, I noticed some visuals like rocks breathing and patterns forming in the nature around us. Jake and Kara seemed a bit impatient, but I assured them there was another two hours to peak. This particular LSD seems to hit people a little later than a blotter does, most likely because of its microdot form. I dunno, it just does. So we walked around and explored our surroundings, talked about weird subject matter, and enjoyed stretching and feeling the wind blowing over the hill.

Fast forward three hours, and we are all peaking. At this point I feel like I need a change of scenery, and suggest going for a walk. I know the trails around this area well, and I know there are some particularly nice areas only a few minutes away. Why not explore rather than sitting in the same place for the entire day?

It was not just this particular spot that was getting to me. It was Jake. I thought I could barely stand to listen to him brag about how much ganja he sells one more time. 'It's not about the money.' Yeah, riiiight. Furthermore, I was tried of listening to him dominate the conversation by constantly changing the topic to something which allowed him to show off how well traveled he is and what a deep thinker he considers himself.

Furthermore, whenever I couldn't give a shit about what he was talking about, and spent a few moments looking around at nature or thinking to myself, he would direct his conversation at me. Of course I wouldn't know what he was talking about because I stopped listening, and then he would say something like, 'BD is zoning out again,' or 'It's okay, just go back into your own little world.' Then he would look to Kara and my own girlfriend of almost four years for some sort of reinforcement for this condescending behavior.

Normally I would have said, 'My own little world? What the fuck are you talking about kid... my own little world doesn't revolve around listening to your verbal masturbation. That's right, poking this rock with this stick is exponentially more interesting than you. Put your fucking shirt back on and get over yourself.'

But as many of you know, tension on LSD must be avoided at all costs. Especially at the peak of a trip, and with nowhere to go besides this hill top for the next several hours. So, feeling absolutely no need to explain myself, I said nothing. While there was a thunderhead slowly gathering humidity inside my brain, I remained neutral in outward appearance.

Psilosara was rocking back and forth in her camp seat, and I wondered what she was thinking and experiencing. I could feel the tension oozing out of her, but I didn't ask her for three reasons. First, I no longer felt like I was in the company of trusted friends, and any conversation I was to have with her, I wanted to be private. Second, I am always very respectful of people's rights not to reveal their thoughts, especially in front of other people, until they are ready to do so. I wish people would extend me this courtesy more often. Third, every time I looked at her or tried to start conversation, she was focused on the shirtless wonder boy. I thought it was strange that I could hardly make eye contact with her without her eyes darting towards this source of constant annoyance.

Anyway, Jake decided to roll a spliff (weed/tobacco), and I felt it was late enough in the trip for me to smoke. I took probably 8 or 10 drags from the spliff, and instantly my trip went from a high ++ to a +++.

And instantly my heartrate shot up from slightly elevated, as is normal under the influence of LSD, to VERY elevated and beating extra hard. I became hypersensitive to all my physical functions and it made me very anxious. FUCK. I've been here before. And now I'm back here again. I did this shit to myself and now I have to deal with a hyperactive heart for the next hour... two... three? I'm seriously amazed my heart puts up with this shit.

No, I didn't think I would die or have a heart attack. I've had a few panic attacks on weed, and one particularly nasty one on weed + DXM, where I did think I was going to have a heart attack. Apparently my heart can take it, but there's no way to calm yourself down when your heart is beating way faster and harder than normal. Of course the buzz focused itself into my left arm where it took on the feeling of a numb left arm. I'm no stranger to such psychosomaticism. I willed the buzz to focus in my right arm, and then move up to my mind. I've trained myself to do this.

Then I lay back and crossed my arms over my chest. This is to prevent confusion between my actual heart rate and the frequency of the tryptamine buzz, which is a bit faster than my actual heart rate and can be confused for a heart rate if I am not monitoring it. Maybe you think if I just ignore it, I'll calm down and it will slow down. No. However I can slow it down somewhat by focusing on the beats and gradually imagining that my heart is beating slower than it actually is.

During this time I couldn't have cared less about what was going on around me, except for Psilosara sitting to my left. She knew what was happening and put her hand on my chest for a moment, and as she did my heart calmed down to a level I could cope with.

But like I said my trip had elevated significantly since I smoked the spliff. I stared up at the trees and saw that each one was glowing brightly against the sky. The clouds were constantly shifting and changing shapes. The trees, however, were taunting me. I wanted to stop looking at trees, I was sick of all these damn trees, but no matter where I looked there were trees. I tried closing my eyes but the CEVs were not pleasing to look at. So I stared at the trees and made the entire forest turn into a fractal pattern. Well, that's cool, I guess.

Then I heard Jake mention something about me being in my own world, zoning out looking at the tree tops. I harnessed my negative energy and directed it in a beam right at him. 'I want you to feel what I am feeling!'

Right after that, to my great satisfaction, he appeared to be struck by the intensity of the trip. He laid back and stared at the tree tops himself. Up until this point I felt he had showed little appreciation for the LSD which I had worked hard to obtain for him, saying things like, 'I tripping, I guess.' and complaining about the lack of visuals right after being convinced that a stick in the dirt was a snake about to attack him, and also right after mentioning that the whole world looks like its being seen through a trippy filter.

Stuff like that really makes me want to keep my stash to myself. (not that I have a stash anymore)

After a while of intense thoughts, including some messed up thought loops which I managed to wrestle my way out of, I was ready to move around and get up. My heartrate was still very elevated but not any more than if I had just smoked a bunch of pot. So we began playing a mobile frisbee game. See, most of our throws were pretty good but pretty often we'd ricochet off a tree or throw it in the totally wrong direction, so the frisbee would land away from us. Then we'd just move our game to where the frisbee landed, and so on. This went on for some time, until our game ended up moving too far down the hill and we were attacked by deer flies and mosquitoes. We realized that we were pretty much trapped on the top of our hill, as the bugs were really starting to come out.

What is there to say about the rest of the trip? Coming down was a long, drawn out process. We were stuck up on the hilltop until almost 10:00pm because we didn't want to return to civilization (or anybody's house while their parents were still around, as we weren't near anyone's apartment at the time).

So we made a fire and fed it for quite some time, sitting around with little left to say and nothing left to do. At one point I asked Psilosara if she wanted to join me for a walk, hoping we could discuss things in private and enjoy a change of setting. She refused, saying that she didn't want to split up the group. I jokingly said, 'What, these kids?'... but I was dead serious. I saw no reason to give them any consideration. If Psilosara wasn't there I would have gone for a walk myself, and probably not come back.

Eventually though, it was time to head back. Our original plan, which I was fond of, was to walk back down though the woods to Psilosara's house which was directly off the same trail which took us to the top of the hill, but on the other side of the hill.

So we turned on our headlamps and went down what I thought was the same way we came up, but somehow didn't run into the trail. But since I know the geography of this wooded area pretty well, I just started wandering back and forth systematically back in the direction we had missed the trail. Jake continued to piss me off by constantly questioning my navigation, and suggested we go down the hill in the completely wrong way, away from any trails at all, and tried to rally support for this, the completely wrong direction. This pissed me off because I wasn't in the mood for getting totally lost in the woods far away from any trails or roads. Fortunately Kara agreed that we should keep heading back in the direction that I was taking us. So we walked this way, but Jake jumped ahead and led us, found the trail (of course), and took credit for saving us from being lost in the woods.

Then we went to Wendy's drive through and ate chicken.

What did I learn from this?

1. Be more selective when choosing who to trip with. No more going into trips 'for other people'. Often when I trip with others my intent is for their delight, not my own. No more of that.

2. The woods do not nescessarily provide endless entertainment for a tripper.

3. People who obviously trip face and then complain about the quality/potency of the drugs can suck it.

Exp Year: 2004ExpID: 46850
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Nov 8, 2005Views: 35,379
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Cannabis (1), LSD (2) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Guides / Sitters (39), Nature / Outdoors (23), Glowing Experiences (4), Bad Trips (6), Difficult Experiences (5), Combinations (3), General (1)

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