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Down in the Park
LSD
Citation:   Matfei. "Down in the Park: An Experience with LSD (exp867)". Erowid.org. Jan 15, 2001. erowid.org/exp/867

 
DOSE:
2 hits oral LSD (blotter / tab)
BODY WEIGHT: 180 lb
Well, this experience wasn't the first time I'd experimented with psychedelic drugs by any means. In fact, the weekend before this particular Saturday, I had eaten a tab on Friday and a tab on Sunday. I had gotten the acid that weekend from someone I ran into completely through random dumb luck, and on the spur of the moment I bought 10 hits. I have very different standards of self-control than most people and that actually made Tom, my sidekick and friend, very nervous about my mental/physical health. He was opposed to doing the LSD and told me that on Friday.

When I woke up on Saturday I was expecting a fairly boring day. Tom had slept on my floor and at 11:30am when I finally woke up and kicked him awake, we set out for coffee. Over coffee and cigarettes we decided that we wouldn't do the acid, we'd save it for later when we'd appreciate it more. He had tripped with me last Friday (not Sunday tho, that was all by myself) and thought it better to wait. Besides, we had plans to go see a few bands in downtown Boston that day at 9pm and we could easily kill 8 hours with grass.

When we got back to my house, however, we found we had a situation on our hands. I still live at home at the age of 19 (taking computer programming classes - my brain isn't rotted quite yet) and I'm pretty absent-minded, and this time I had forgotten my keys. Worse yet, no one was home and we were locked out. So of course, we ended up eating a tab of acid and heading out into the huge park across the street from my house.

We wandered around the park for a while with nothing exciting to report. We smoked a joint and waited and walked. We left the park and headed for the huge graveyard which is also pretty much right next to my house. At this point, the acid was having subtle effects on me. The grass of the graveyard was greener, the sky was bluer, the sun was brighter. This is something that usually happens to me under psychedelics at first and I was used to it. I was also not too taken aback when we passed three or four signs that said 'WATER' very strangely, or so it seemed. The letters were white, on a green background. The font that was used for the sign seemed to have millions of imperfections that I was only then able to pick up because of the drug. The sign seemed to stand out to me, as if WATER was something I should remember and think about.

As if reading my mind, Tom suggested we go buy something to drink from the store. 'Why not?' I thought. At this point the LSD wasn't doing very much and I figured that this was a good time to test myself in public. I asked Tom if he was tripping yet, because it had been over an hour now. He wasn't really. Right about then, Tom suggested we eat another tab. I had to agree with him. We decided tripping was worth doing, so it must be done right. We went back to my house (my parents had gotten home), ate the tab, and headed off to the store.

We decided to smoke another bowl to set us off. We headed towards the baseball diamond, past it, and into a part of the park where people tend not to go, through a hole in a fence, and we were on a high cliff overlooking an authentic train yard. We smoked a bowl and walked along the cliff, and nothing was happening. We left the fence and I got my first real hit from the acid. We were standing on a hill next to the fence overlooking the baseball field and suddenly the green grass and the brown dirt of the baseball field all seemed to be bleeding into each other. The baseball diamond had grass seeping onto it and the sand from the baseball diamond was mingling with the outer reaches of the grass. The metal backstop was gleaming and glittering and hard to focus on.

I looked at Tom. That was a horrible idea. One of the oddest things about my trip was that during the entire time, whenever I looked at my companion, I would see his face in about 10 different perspectives all flashing and changing very rapidly. I had to strain to figure out what kind of looks he was giving me. It was very odd. I'm used to looking at people and seeing strange things when under the effects of drugs, but this time it was just a bit too real. I couldn't see people for what they were during the trip. Children passing me by or playing in the playground all resembled aliens from some Spielberg movie. Most of the adults I dealt with that day looked normal, but they had an aura of evil around them that only I seemed able to grasp.

Had I done too much? How could I really be sure? Four tabs in under two weeks? Was that an excess? Now, it doesn't seem like such a strange thing, but at the time, the thought was running through my head like a marathon runner. It was everywhere in my mind. When I tried to think of something else, it worked its way back into my head, like a virus.

The visual hallucinations had started early and I felt robbed of the laughing hysteria phase that usually overtook me. In place of that, I found myself on a rambling kick. I'd start talking and keep talking and then I'd look over at Tom and he'd be staring at me. I explained to him that my inner conversings had come out to play. He seemed to accept this answer and I was glad about that. One less thing to worry about, but Tom was worried. He was rightly worried, because less than 10 minutes later we passed a mother and a kid on a bicycle and suddenly I starting jabbering about being a kid and all my childhood memories from this very same park. After we got out of earshot, Tom made fun of me for a while about scaring the lady and the kid. I hope I didn't scare them too much.

About this time, the trip was coming on full power. I felt a rush all around me. The world outside of my line of perception seemed to me to be very much irrelevant, and the only thing that mattered was right there in that park. Beforehand I was worried that I would start obsessing over my personal girl problems. I soon learned that those thoughts melted away, and I couldn't have been happier.

Time was also very distorted. Neither of us had a watch nor any way to keep track of what time it was. We had to go back to my house at some point to prepare ourselves to get on the train (we decided not to drive; multiple felons maybe, but responsible people). At what must have been 4:00, we had a huge discussion over what time it was. We were sure that it was nearly 7 and we had to go back soon to get ready for the show. We smoked a bowl and headed back to my house. Well, it turned out that it was 4:30 when we got back (meaning we smoked up at 4:20 - very cool, very cool; we can never make 4:20 unless it's accidental for some reason). After we realized it was early still, we headed back, but the entire rest of the day, time kept doing odd things to us.

We decided to go back to the store, because we had smoked all of our cigarettes (we went on chain-smoking mode once the trip started) and we wanted to buy some candy to eat as an experiment. I found, however, that being in the store was more then I was prepared to deal with, so I told Tom I'd be waiting outside, gave him money to buy me cigarettes, then went outside and smoked the only cigarette I had left from before. Once I was alone and outside, the world changed gears. It went from being extremely small and centered around me to being very large. I suddenly became aware of every single person who walked by me and what they were doing. Then they all seemed to be looking at me. I decided it was all in my head - all paranoid delusions. I tried to find Tom in the store window, and I succeeded. I watched him pay for the gummi worms (our testing material) and cigarettes, and noticed how he avoided looking at and talking to the clerk. I found it very amusing apparently, because I started laughing hysterically. At that point my brain reminded me I was all alone outside and I said, very loudly, 'Oh shit...', turned around, and saw some guy legitimately staring at me.

Bad vibes overcame me, but they were soon gone. Tom got out of the store and tossed me a bag of gummi worms and a pack of cigarettes. Bliss. Usually when tripping I find eating is generally out of the question. When I think I'm hungry, I get a ton of food but then I can't eat it, or something goes horribly wrong in the process of getting food. No matter. Gummi worms aren't exactly food, more like fun, weird, strange globs of chemicals not entirely unlike the ones I had in me causing all these effects in my brain. The gummi worms were great. I puzzled over their movement, their taste and texture, and had a very long conversation about it.

The store is across the street from the park on the other end of the park from my house, so we went back into the park and sat at the end in an area that was circular with benches around it. In the middle of the circle was a tree with a fence around it. We each sat on our own bench and stared at the tree in the fence. Suddenly, in my brain Tom was gone. He was out of sight and out of mind. I checked my limbs for a status report but I couldn't really control them that well, so I gave up. I started to hear my heart pounding loudly and then the tree started to seemingly dance. It was skinny, small, and without leaves. It was twirling and rippling and the fence surrounding it was bobbing up and down. The rush I spoke of earlier intensified. Suddenly, there were church bells. The church bells played a strange, enchanting sound. I can't be too sure how long I sat there watching the tree and fence, listening to the church bells in my own little world. Suddenly, though, I realized Tom was sitting on the next bench over. I had actually completely forgotten about him, but I didn't want to break up what was happening. In my mind I explained it as a pure trip, that is, what was happening to me right then at that exact moment was everything that acid should have been. Of course, this was probably just the drugs speaking, but it sure felt that way. The combination of sight, sound, and taste sensations had overwhelmed me with goodness and I was lost. I wondered to myself if Tom was experiencing the same things, but he looked bored when I finally looked over at him. I made a really quick attempt at explaining it to him, but it didn't work at all.

Anyway, eventually 8pm did come and we had to leave for the show (after smoking some more pot). At this point I was still tripping, not as hard as earlier, but the acid was taking its toll. All the people on the train seemed to be detached from me and Tom, and they also seemed to be staring at us. More paranoid delusions. I had a quote of HST's running through my head all during the train ride, trying to keep myself grounded: 'ignore this terrible drug.' Unfortunately, it wasn't that easy. Everyone I looked at had big, buggly eyes and was leering at me. I had decided that they all knew there was something wrong with me. I could pass it off as being drunk tho, and that's not that bad for 8pm on a Saturday evening.

We got to our desired T stop at 8:30 and that left us half an hour to kill. We wandered around with no particular direction, half strung out and half still tripping. Now, Boston is not a town for psychedelic drugs by any means, but I've survived peaking in Boston so there wasn't much in the town that could throw me off, or so I thought, but instead, out of the blue, two people offered to sell Tom and me two different drugs (one was e, and the other was called 'charley,' which I think is heroin but I can't be too sure). That got me extremely paranoid and anxious about going to this club, because i have spent a lot of my life in Boston and I find it incredibly hard to find anything around here. Odd.

But, by the time doors opened and we got in, the acid was pretty much completely gone and the dope had worn off long ago. I had a slight headache from dehydration but I danced my ass off anyway. All in all, a fun day and a great trip, maybe the most intense I'll ever have. I got home and passed out first thing. Woke up and went to work for some overtime to pay my way through next weekend.

Exp Year: 2000ExpID: 867
Gender: Not Specified 
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jan 15, 2001Views: 4,725
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LSD (2) : Various (28), General (1)

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