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My First Difficult Experience...
LSD
by D
Citation:   D. "My First Difficult Experience...: An Experience with LSD (exp69495)". Erowid.org. Oct 23, 2012. erowid.org/exp/69495

 
DOSE:
3 hits oral LSD (blotter / tab)
BODY WEIGHT: 160 lb
This could also be a report of my 5g mushroom trip from 3 weeks ago, minus the nausea, as it was very similar and equally terrifying but somewhat more devastating afterwords, because it was from LSD, which had been very gentle with me up until yesterday...

I've taken LSD numerous times over the past couple of years. My 1st experience was with half a hit of a strong blotter, unperforated, no taste/body load and lasted around 12-16 hours but every time after that, it was an 8-12 hour thing with very minor body load and and nothing but positive experiences. I always wait 2 weeks between trips, even tho the literature says a week should be fine... I'm 28, in pretty good shape and try to live a healthy lifestyle, I watch what I eat, I lift weights, run and don't drink or smoke.

The most I've ever taken was 3 hits, a couple of times, and the last time, although I felt it was a bit too overwhelming, was a very positive experience. It was from the same sheet I took this dose off of. Around that time, I was also experimenting with growing my own shrooms and had some fruiting so I made up my mind to take Terence McKenna's favorite heroic dose of 5 grams couple weeks later with horrifying and decimating results which brings us to 3 weeks after that mushroom trip, which was yesterday, when I took 3 hits...

I work nights and sleep during the day and after getting home from work Friday morning, I passed out and woke up at 6pm.. I was trying to decide if I should go ahead and trip now or tomorrow and after a couple of hours of back and forth, decided to go for it. By now it was a little passed 8pm. A friend called and said she was gonna stop by with her bf to pick up some stuff for the weekend so I had to wait for them to show up. They finally show up around 9:30 and leave at 10, I'm finally free of any obligations and it's been 12 hour since I last ate so my stomach is totally empty. Perfect! I cut out 3 hits from the unperforated sheet of what used to be 25 hits, now looking like some weird tetris block... I put in under ny tongue and let it fully absorb for about 10-15 mins and swallow. By 11pm I start to come up, feeling the energy/anxiety building up in my body, some visual distortion start to appear and I start hearing slight echoing effect I always get with LSD. So far so good, I get under the covers and turn on my mp3 player which contains my fav music and some Terrence McKenna lectures for later on when I'm coming down, like I always do..

It's around 11:15 now and I'm getting hit pretty hard but nothing shattering, it's just really good with a hint of overwhelming, like the last time I took 3 hits, no biggie, I'm feeling good. But another 15 mins pass and something's different... I'm getting stronger sound distortions than usual, people talking downstairs, in the background (the TV was on in the living room) sounds very low pitched and echoing harder than normal but when I turn the music back on, it sounds fine... Hmm, this is interesting... I try not to pay too much attention to this and keep enjoying the experience but something else seems wrong now... The music I'm listening to all of a sudden sounds like it's slowing down to a crawl but the pitch remains the same. Wow, this is kinda freaky, so I feel like I should get up and look around to see what other strange effects I notice... Wrong move... When I stood up and I feel dizzy, feeling as though I'm short and stretched sideways. Running out of breath or I also feel it's harder to breath and I automatically reach for water and drink from the bottle like my life depended on it. Some of it run down my face. I'm now thoroughly convinced I'm having a bad reaction to this chemical. Feeling like I'm going to fade away amd I'm not ready to die here like this, not yet! I definitely have issues letting go. But how can I not? What will my parents think when they find my lifeless body? What will happen to all those that I care about? C'mon! Get it together! You're not gonna die, you're gonna pull thru this and you're gonna fight! If I say things, if I sing, if I act hyper, I can jumpstart my heart and have it beat faster and stronger so I can't slip into unconsciousness and die... Sheer terror at this point...

Collapsing back on the bed, I put on some music; well, hit play again, since I had paused it previously when I started to freak out and get scared because I could hear it getting fainter and actually slowing down to a crawl, which obviously meant (at the time) that my heart was also slowing down... My senses are severely distorted and wouldn't sync up, for instance, when I would get up to turn on a light, I would see me getting up but somehow felt like my body was still on the bed, trying to catch up to what I was seeing, which was me standing up now, or was it the other way around, was I still lying in bed, just thinking about standing up and visualizing it, I just wasn't sure anymore... I kept mumbling about the chemical effecting my blood pressure and tried to make myself remember the words blood pressure medication and adrenaline (like my life depended on being able to remember these words after the trip) but somehow just couldn't utter them... This was almost a repeat experience of 5 grams of mushrooms I ate 3 weeks ago, when I had the most horrific trip of my life... Except this was going to last twice as long. That last notion was enough to freak me out even more...

This cycle kept continuing for couple of hours where I would sit back in bed and calm down for 10-15 minutes, then this would happen all over again, it was happening in waves, like it would as if it was psilocybin... At this point I had many crazy theories as to what was happening. One of them was I was having a mushroom flashback while I was tripping on LSD, which was the only plausible explanation because of the similarities... Looking back now, maybe I would have had a very profound experience if I had just let go and accepted that I was 'dying' and allowed myself to let go but it's really hard when your mind actually believes that you are and utterly convinces you that 'now you've done it!'

Anyway, then when things finally started to calm down, still some OEV's and distortions but nothing of the so called life threatening experience, I started getting that uncomfortable body load feeling and had the revelation that this part of the experience totally depended on how the peak experience was. If it was a good trip, then there would be little to no body load, no physical manifestation, no build up of toxicity but if the trip was difficult, the end result would present itself as a lot of body load. This also made sense at the time and I kinda chuckled at my own cleverness for figuring this out. Now I had to think of ways to get rid of this body load and I remembered I had some herb stashed away so I prepared that and took a hit... When I laid back down on the bed, a sense of calm started to appear all around me, a body buzz started and I had the revelation that this was what had been missing from my trip to calm my nerves all along... Now I was feeling more relaxed, less anxious and I wanted to put back on some tunes... The OEV's also strengthened but it was different, the patterns on the walls wren't really swirling but they were, pulsing now...

The music was sounding heavenly and I couldn't help but marvel at how clear it sounded and kept chuckling, saying 'oh my god..' and 'this is awesome' every now and then.. and it was. The feeling continued for about an hour and I kept taking an additional hit every other hour till the 12th hour mark to prolong the expereience and relaxation. This definitely decreased the feeling of body load... I just tossed and turned in bed and listened to some Terence McKenna lectures, now having a better understanding of what he meant when he said 'difficult experience.' I just never thought I would have this sort of reaction from LSD which has been gentle with me up till this point. I still feel it was the 5g of mushrooms I took 3 weeks ago that changed something in my brain chemistry.

I've now been awake for 26 hours and felt like I have insomnia. Although there were no OEV's or visual disturbances anymore, I still got a slight CEV, some white energy thing just burning and radiating like the sun, or even boiling... I also feel anxiety and slight depression, probably because I was worried that I won't ever be the same now. I've thought like this on mushrooms previously when I completely feel like mentally challenged and that it's gonna be permanent but it always goes away and I come back to regular consciousness after 6 hours or so, so it should have cleared up by now but it hasn't. It's also possible that I feel this way because I haven't slept and I'll feel better once I do but what use is that if I can't fall asleep? What if I'll never be able to go to sleep again? What if I'm still like this tomorrow when it's time to go to work?? Negative though loops still continuing, residuals of a bad trip no doubt or it could be an instant flashback, right after the come down, I don't quite know how those work. Not knowing when (if) it's going to stop is depressing and equally terrifying.

The music I listened to while I was tripping was also giving me anxiety when I thought about it, for no good reason. My head feels like it's heavy and kinda numb, almost as if not from LSD but from the weed I smoked, it's just not clearing up and lingering for way longer than I want it to... I have doubts about re-trying these experiments now, this might very well be the last time I touch these things for a while. A few more hours pass and it all starts to finally clear up, very slowly. I'm starting to get a minor headache and it feels as though I'm going to finally start recovering. I've never been so happy because of a headache! I can feel my head again. I quickly swallow an Advil cap, anticipating some relief by the time I'll lay down to go to sleep... I was able to go to sleep around 1am, after some 30 hours of being awake.

When I woke up the next day (today), I was fully back to 'normal,' no hints of the haze or anxiety/depression I felt the day before... Now I'm wondering if these things actually precipitate or exacerbate a latent or existing mental disorder I might have...

Exp Year: 2008ExpID: 69495
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Oct 23, 2012Views: 24,681
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LSD (2) : General (1), Difficult Experiences (5), Music Discussion (22), Hangover / Days After (46), Alone (16)

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