My Best Birthday Ever
LSD
Citation:   polypolyman. "My Best Birthday Ever: An Experience with LSD (exp96678)". Erowid.org. Dec 12, 2018. erowid.org/exp/96678

 
DOSE:
1 tablet oral LSD (blotter / tab)
    repeated smoked Cannabis (plant material)
BODY WEIGHT: 230 lb
I'd like to talk about my first, and thusfar only LSD trip. To set the mood, I'll say that this was at college, on my birthday (a bit more than a week away from the end of school), we were still living in dorms, I had only just the week prior heard that we might have access to LSD, and I was the only one of my friends brave enough to try it (everyone was worried about flashbacks, but the research I did suggested that they really wouldn't be too bad, if at all). We're a strong group of friends, tightly knit. These were the guys that introduced me to weed, etc. My first true friends, due to my awful experiences in high school.

Anyway, I awaken for my birthday, the tab already stored away in my fridge, I picked up my brand new grinder from the post office, I check through my mail, and I've gotten an email from a Google recruiter (quick opportunity to call my mom so I don't have to ignore her all day). Oh yeah, and it was an absolutely GORGEOUS day - high of 62*F, sunny (so it was absolutely comfortable to be out in pants and a t-shirt), this was looking good. I emptied my pockets of all but my wallet and keys, and popped the tab in my mouth at 12:00 noon. (so that t+1 would be 1:00, etc.). I chilled on my couch with a few of my friends waiting around for the inevitable, all while wondering if I had just eaten a piece of paper...

Fast forward to about 1:00. Still haven't felt any effects, although I obviously didn't know what I was looking for exactly. Until the shadow behind the towel on the wall started to shift and colorcycle just slightly. It wasn't much, but I knew I was in for a ride. At that point, I only had fairly vague visuals (things colorcycled, but only within a small range of colors), and I could feel my mind starting to run in interesting ways fairly quickly (Two good quotes from me: 'I was going to ask you what color the poster was, but then I realized your answer could not be satisfying to me.' and 'How come words don't look like words upside down, they look like upside down words?'). I enjoyed staring at the walls for a bit, but then decided to start my adventure.

First stop, my friend who lived across the hall from me. She showed me that IBM video explaining logarithms - basically it's a shot of zooming way out on a couple enjoying a picnic, all the way to the universe scale, then zooming way in to the subatomic scale. That absolutely captured me, and did color a lot of my thoughts throughout the day. A few other videos weren't as appealing, and we all decided it would be a good time to go outside.

It's me and three of my friends, we make it out of the door of the dorm, and we run into our RA in short order. I crack up, thinking about how she has no idea what's going on inside my head. We run a little later into more RA's doing an area program involving, as far as I recall, watersports and freezepops - neither of which interested me at the time. One of my friends goes off to get a freeze pop, and I think at that point had to go to class, so goes off towards academic side while the rest of us head off through the woods. I should mention, that in my mind, it's absolutely amazing looking at all the people around, thinking about what they're thinking, thinking about how visible I am to myself, and how basically invisible I am to everyone else, and being put into a damn good mood by everyone talking about how they were basically done with classes for the year.

We head off to the woods, and I don't know whether it's because of the LSD, or the weather, but it seems to me like everything is just a hell of a lot more GREEN in there. Everything was growing in, and I really hadn't noticed until then. Plus, although I wasn't feeling much in terms of visuals, all the green that was there was definitely a lot more vibrant a green than I had ever seen before. We take a walk through the woods (often used by stoners, by the way). I notice how damn big one of the robins is. I'm distracted by the movement of just about everything in the forest. We go over to one of the more popular spots in the woods, 'Narnia', which we hadn't been to since I got caught with a bong between my legs about a month back. We had nothing on us, so nothing to worry about. I run through those events a little bit, although in a totally great mood. We also run through the time we met up with a schizophrenic girl back there, and we figured out which tree she jumped out of. A bit more nature enjoyment, and we're off - we keep walking and we catch up with the road around campus to get back to the dorms. Here's where a bit of auditory tripping comes out.

Up to that point, everything had been fairly moderate - probably a +. When the auditory trip kicked in, I'd say it went up to a ++. I all of a sudden stopped walking - all of my mind was just as 'there' as it had been all day, but I noticed something funny. I could just barely hear the cars driving right next to me, but the sounds of the forest, the wind blowing through the trees, the birds chirping, etc. all were intensely loud. I started losing my ability to think like normal, and started thinking in 'LSD mode' (which I'll explain a bit later), and came up with some funny idea about how important nature was, and how unimportant the real world was... an idea it was almost impossible to put into words. After a little bit, we keep walking, and we head right back up to my dorm.

Physically, at that point, I was red and overheating, people commented that it looked like I had gotten a bit too much sun, but after resting a bit, sweating it off, and keeping with my liquid intake like I had been so careful to do all day, I went back to normal. I should stress this - I was VERY glad to have a ton of those 23oz green tea cans around - I went through alll of the ones I had left, and that was good. Just keep drinking.

Back in the dorm, we met up with a few more friends who had been in class up to that point, talked for a bit, and such. My concept of time is a bit fuzzy, but my guess would be that this was around 2-3pm.

Basically, chilling at this point involved my sitting on my couch, mostly thinking, occasionally talking with people, and my friend who was watching me playing a videogame in my room, while playing music on my stereo. I don't know how much time passed around then - it feels like a lot, but at the same time, I can't remember enough events around there to justify it being a lot - that's a common theme, asking my internal clock about what time it was, and my internal clock responding three different answers at the same time depending on how it figured it - one was way slow, one was dead on, and one was way fast, although I had no trust that any one of them was correct.

At that point, I'd classify my baseline as ++. I was getting used to my thoughts shooting off, etc. I still held myself fairly grounded, though. It was then that I determined that I wanted to try to let that go a little. Basically, I lay down on my couch, stared at the ceiling, and through a process very similar to trying to get to sleep while being a bit curious about what happened while you go to sleep, I let myself drift off into a deeper trip. This was the peak of my visuals, and while I let it, it certainly felt like a +++ (although was still a ++ since I could easily come out of it). The walls started to melt around, distort into absolutely intangible shapes, all while my mind did things I can no longer comprehend... what a cool experience.

Part of that, was one of the coolest things I've ever experienced - I saw the double helix of DNA in the sky, much, I imagine, like Francis Crick did so many years prior. Feeling a thought begin to form, I asked my friend to play Longview by Green Day - with a bassline conceived from an acid trip. It fit exactly well. I realized just how similar all of our thought processes were, and really felt connected to everyone else in the world.

Anyway, I guess at that point it was a bit before, or actually more likely, a bit after 4:00. We decided to go out into the woods again, this time with a different assortment of people, and the tiny bit of weed that we had between us. The goal was for two of my friends to study for a math test coming up, while getting high, and I was coming along for the walk. We went to a lesser-known spot in the woods. My original plan was to not smoke with them - I wanted to experience as pure an LSD experience as possible.

They talked a bit about math, and I thought a bit about other things - well, at the rate I was going, everything all at once. Here I'll explain what my 'LSD mode' is - it's what really made me realize how much of a stimulant LSD really is. My thoughts would start somewhere, then, instead of just going linearly from one thought to the next, they seemed to bounce, for some reason I want to describe it as back and forth always moving up, always moving towards more abstract thoughts and concepts, always towards the same sorts of satisfying conclusions (one of which was the idea of the logarithms - that many concepts we had that are rated on some scale are really logarithmic, not linear, and that everyone has a different 'zero point' - a different spot on that scale. I can pin that idea on the video I had watched earlier). The disturbing part about the thoughts were that they continued faster than I could have them - I felt like I totally understood each point they were bouncing off of, but at the same time, if I tried to actually conceptuallize any one of those points into communicable or even just 'normal' thought, it took far too long, and I missed a few of the points ahead. I was able to, with intense concentration, commit a few of these steps in a single thought to short-term memory, and after a while, to talk about them to my increasingly high friends. They couldn't fathom how I was thinking, so they thought it pretty funny. I did too.

I'd like to mention a few of the more poignant thoughts I had at that point. First off, I should note that this really felt like another peak of my trip, and it was just like my previous auditory and visual trips, although this one was in another sense. I thoroughly believed that there were, for sake of argument, 4 senses - visual, auditory, tactile and the last one, which I'll call chronospacial. The other two 'normal' senses, smell and taste, were part of chronospacial and tactile, respectively (although there was certainly some overlap). I believed (and it would come mostly true) that I would experience 4 seperate major trip events, like the previous two, and that this was the chronospacial turn. Basically, it messed with time, space, and primarily thought - the things involved with this sense that I had come up with. At this point, I was sort of bouncing fairly quickly between this strong +++ trip and my baseline. After that thought came through (well, I was chronospacially tripping, so order really wasn't important to me. It may have been before, I'll talk like I knew any sort of order, but it may not be right), I really started to feel the LSD jitters - I got a very funny feeling in my legs like I had been all day and on a previous trip on LSA, like they had just about fallen asleep, and the bloodflow was returning; I also physically was jittery at that point - my jaw particularly was vibrating pretty violently. I had heard that weed was good for this, and I decided to try it. The others had already smoked a bit, but they were more than willing to pack another - in this case, since we were pretty much out of everything else, a kief pack of my friend's pipe. He had to leave at that point, for either work or class, leaving just three of us on that little hill in the woods. It certainly helped calm the jitters quickly, and sprung my trip back up.

Earlier in the year, one of our good friends had taken a leave of absence from school, and wasn't going to be back until at least the next year. We really missed him. For today, in wishing me a happy birthday, he mentioned to 'smoke a bowl for him.' The type of request that I would usually think about, but never to the degree that I did right there. In smoking that bowl, I was brought right back, almost completely right back into the experience of one lazy saturday morning wake-and-bake with him and one other friend on that same little hill - at that point I was on a t-break, but I still managed, with little effort, into coaxing them accidentally into smoking far more than they were expecting to - 5 big bowls from a BIG bong. I remembered all the details of the experience - although my visual, auditory, and tactile senses were still back there in reality, my chronospacial sense was right back in that old experience. That was absolutely amazing, and truly a great sense of smoking a bowl for someone. I had never missed him more, and I felt great in a reminiscing sort of way.

One more thought I had that I shared with everyone else was about our perception of reality. After a recent salvia trip, I had realized suddenly the difference between perception and reality, and a big part of my current theory on what reality truly was, and how we'd never even be able to come close to comprehending everything in reality, and that the 'reality' we're in - this universe, etc. was just part of our perception of actual reality. Anyway, I wasn't talking about this idea - we'd already talked about this some time prior. First, I had a funny thought about how we'll never really be able to replay experiences ever again. We can remember quite a bit about them, but we can't go back and relive the whole experience - we can't be there again. I thought about the salvia trip I had, and how, although I can imagine what I saw, I can't see it again, and furthermore, how I'd be able to recall the experience at that point, but I'd never be able to have the experience, to feel the same way, to think the same way, etc. After that, I talked to my friends about a funny idea, almost fear that I sometimes had, that I was living life like the main character in A Beautiful Mind - basically, that my friends were all in my head, complete schizophrenic hallucinations. It was thought-provoking, and to satisfy myself, I came back to a conclusion I got during the perception vs. reality discussion from the salvia trip - that it didn't matter, that all we all had was the approximation of reality we see in our perception, so it didn't matter what was real, as long as the perception we lived in was the best we wanted it to be.

I can't recall whether it was the cause or the result of that discussion, but at one point, we seemed to have an entire discussion about some topic, none of us actually using real words for a while, seemingly in each other's heads. It wasn't just me - the other two agreed with me that that had happened successfully. It was odd that it mimicked the way I was thinking so well (in progressing thoughts with and without understanding any of them, at the same time).

Another big theme I felt there (again, all this is totally out of order, but order doesn't really matter when you're brain is in that state), was almost like deja vu. While I was sitting there, looking down, I could see my legs and arms, and I was aware of the sunglasses I had on my face (I was wearing them all day, I liked them, and they came up a couple of times), and it felt... right. It all felt familiar, I guess it felt like it had all come to this point, this was the greatest point ever. I kept thinking about the word 'LSD' at that point, and just seeing how well it fit. It agreed with the shape of my face, the shape of my glasses, the clothes I was wearing, the color of everything, it all felt so familiar as what I can only describe as perfectly satisfying. I hope that made some sense, because it made perfect sense at the time. Also, I felt a totally positive self-image. I had lost about 50lbs from that point last year, I felt healthier than ever, I had only started smoking, and truly expanding my mind in that year, and I really only gained friends, these friends within that year. I absolutely loved every part of me at that moment, and I even appreciated greatly that I appreciated myself so greatly.

Anyway, after some time of that, it was probably after 5 at that point, we decided to walk over to an eatery at the other side of campus, and we'd meet up with another friend there, since she was just finishing up class. The walk there was quite intense, since I was still strongly chronospacially tripping. A common thing that would happen would be for me to continue walking, with no idea how I was doing it, since it felt like my head and my thoughts were just sort of floating around. Random things in my peripheral vision, including the ground, stopped existing in my view of the world, my arms felt weird, time felt weird, etc. Again with that three different answers for time deal, I honestly thought it took an hour to walk there, I knew it was only about 10-15 minutes, and part of me wanted to believe that it was basically instant. Walking around people once we got out of the woods was interesting - it was the same experience with them as it had been earlier, only to a greater degree, and also I had no idea where I was, every knowledge of where I was, and my periphery was going in and out of existence. For parts, I felt like I could, not see, but know the entire path of where we were going and coming from, all at once, and other times, I was just floating thoughts again. At one point, while we were walking past a few buildings, I had entirely believed that we were one path to the right of where we were - it's not that I was visually tripping, but I had entirely interpreted what I had seen completely wrong. That's where I learned a lot about how our other senses relate to the chronospatial, looking back.

We eventually made it. I wasn't hungry (I wasn't expecting to be), although I did need a drink. This was going to be a challenge. This facility was a few different types of food all in one, with different cashiers and lines for food. I'd been there maybe twice before, but this time was really a challenge - I have always had social anxiety related to not knowing how to do certain social processes, and I realized, after wandering around for a tiny bit like an idiot, that I had no idea what to do. I ended up waiting in the Mexican food line with my friends, although I didn't want any food. When the lady asked me what I wanted, I told her that I just wanted a drink, and she said that I didn't have to wait in line, that I could go right ahead to the register. I still had no idea how to do this without cutting a line, so I told her it was alright, and only looked like a bit of an idiot. The most important part was that I not look like a tripping idiot, and I think I pulled that off. Anyway, I bought the large drink cup finally, and went over, wanting unsweetened iced tea. I filled an entire large cup with sweetened before figuring out how to get unsweetened - in retrospect I should've asked one of my friends to help me with that. It was alright, the artificial sweetener was bad, especially in that quantity, but it was liquid, and that helped.

We sat outside, in some of the most comfortably proportioned wooden chairs that have ever existed, and talked about the day, about how done we were with school, etc. There were a lot of people around (it was the start of the dinner rush), and they were all talking about the same things. I spent most of the time half listening, half letting my thoughts bounce around - to the outside, it looked like I was totally spacing out half the time. That period of time lasted for a while, that friend we were meeting met us there, and as it approached what I guess was 6:00, my other friend left to go to that math test. Around then, we realized that the sun was going to set pretty soon, and that we should totally go somewhere to enjoy it fully. We eventually decided on the hill not far from us that was the tallest hill in the county, and where the city's radio towers were. After another seemingly both forever and instant walk back to dormside, we got ready to go. At this point, that was sort of my last big peak, and was on the comedown from there.

5 or 6 of us packed into my car, and I took shotgun and let one of my friends drive. It's a somewhat powerful (above average, at least) car, and while we were on our way, at one point, I told my friend to gun it in second - and was immediately brought back to the first test drive, the first time I got to experience just how fun that car could be, sitting shotgun because I couldn't even drive stick back then. I also remembered a bit of woods on the north side of campus that I wanted to smoke in at some point that day, and made a mental note of that. We made it to the hill, which I thought was fairly cool. I had wanted to make it up there anyway, because I had always been a bit of a radio geek, and tower farms have always interested me. I really enjoyed walking up the hill, and thought about both the time the last year, my senior year of high school, on our senior trip to the Poconos, and how strikingly similar an experience it was - this sort of end-of-year experience that wasn't all the way at the end of the year, etc. I also thought about how I had never truly appreciated hikes like this with my family. We looked out on the landscape, which was beautiful, but it was hard for me to put into place exactly where everything I was looking at was. It was interesting seeing how still most of the landscape was, and then seeing the highway around the city, and all the streets, totally full of motion, like little ants scurrying around. I thought about what it's like to be in one of those cars, and what it's like to look out and see the whole picture (again, like the logarithms from before). I thought about the fact that I could see this tower farm from my window in my dorm, and tried to find campus, but couldn't figure exactly where it was. We took a look at the sunset, but couldn't get a great view, since it wasn't on the right side of the hill to get a good overlook. My friend who drove did take the opportunity to take some great pictures with the light shining through the woods, and got what is still one of my favorite pictures of me (fortunately, I can show it to people, because you really can't tell what I was on). We chilled up there until the sun went down a bit, and then headed back (the mosquitos weren't as strong as they'd be in a few weeks, but there were some bothering us). We drove back, this time I sat in the back, and I thought about how satisfying it was that the sunset wasn't a satisfying cutoff, I thought about what it was like being in the back of my parent's car as a kid, not knowing the way (although I did have to give directions a few times), and so on.

We made it back, at which point it was late enough that pretty much everyone was out of class. We all headed to my room, since it was the most comfy for holding a lot of people (with the couch and all). Everyone talked about the day, again about how they were done or almost done with school for the year, etc. Just good solid, happy conversation. Also, at one point, I got just a tiny bit of a tactile trip - I started feeling the texture of my pants, the shape of my sunglasses, and so on, and feeling absolutely wonderful for every bit of it. A few of our less close friends showed up to and chilled with us for a bit, there was a little bit of beer left (I didn't take any), etc. There were talks to try to acquire more weed, but that wasn't going so well at that point. After a while, pretty much everyone wanted to play kanjam out on campus somewhere - I didn't want to join because the plan was to also drink and smoke while doing that - I didn't want to risk getting caught like that, so I stayed back for a bit.

It didn't take long to get antsy, I packed myself up my bong and everything I needed to go along with it (at this point I'm maybe feeling +, but convincing myself I was totally sober, although I had the biggest urge in the world to smoke). Since we as a group were basically eniterly out of weed, I had to borrow some from someone else - it's great that everyone on my floor is super friendly, and I'm totally willing to smoke him out later, I just REALLY NEEDED to smoke at that point. It's hard to explain that urge. I'm on my way out, and I run into my friend who had been at her sorority thing of some sort all night thusfar (I hadn't seen her since the first time I went outside), and she happily agrees to go with me to the woods. We head to that spot on the north side that I had made a note to smoke at earlier, I talk about my experience up to now, she talks about her day with the sorority thing, etc. I smoked most of a pack of that bong by myself, as she was still new to the weed game.

The first really bad thing to happen all day was when we were almost done (oh yeah, and smoking was really bringing my trip back up), and we hear some people going around the woods - I bag up the bong (although it's totally set up still), and try to figure out what's going on - nobody ever came out to the part of the woods we were in, so we both sort of assumed it was public safety looking for us. A bit of freaking out later, and it's just some people starting a fire a little further away. We finish up, then get word that the other group was in the woods on the other side of campus. Cool, we'll meet up, hang out, it sounds great.

We leave the woods, and I make sure to stop for a second to look up at the stars - I had wanted to lie down, but the grass was very wet. It was a very clear day, and you could see tons of stars. Two things happened to me during that. At one point, I totally heard a rave that didn't exist going on around there, and sort of had the experience in my head to some degree - definitely auditory hallucinations, and a bit on that chronospatial, but not too much. Also, for the first time I totally understood constellations. I had always been able to pick out the shapes and such, but this time, I was actually able to see the horses, the people up there, superimposed over the stars. That was pretty cool.

We continued on our way, and made it to the woods, although we weren't yet at our destination. As we were finally approaching the spot, we, and everyone already at the spot, saw a flashlight, followed be somebody in a deep voice yelling 'Hey, there's kids in there!' The way they were talking, it was as though it was the cops, trying to give us a chance to get the hell out of there, because they were looking. I wouldn't have freaked out, since everything I had on me was away, and I felt confident in my ability to refuse a search and whatnot, except that I entirely believed they had drug dogs with them. I panicked pretty badly, along with everyone else, and was trying to decide whether to ditch my stuff or not - I believed the most rational thing to do was to run. I tried to make it to another path that eventually led across a stream and back to dorm side, but I missed the entrance to that (nighttime in the woods is just about the worst situation for trying to get any input from your senses - which led to it being terrifying in both instances), and ended up cornering myself basically in the swamp. All along, I was thinking, if I didn't have all that stuff on me, I was going to check out the situation, see if it actually was the cops, and maybe end the panic altogether. I was really hoping that someone would do that, and not long after thinking that, it sounded like someone was doing that, although I had entirely believed that, from the sounds of it, it actually was the cops, and that there was no way out of it for me. I should also mention that, since I had already been caught earlier in the year, if I got caught again, I was basically out of school, which basically meant I was afraid for my life. Just a little more of that panic, before it all came out that the 'cops' were some drunk third-years who were playing a bit of a prank while they were looking for one of thier friends who had made his way through the woods somewhere. I was not the only one to thank them for the experience - now that we knew it was totally safe, I realized that I had not been that absolutely terrified in a long time, and in retrospect, it was thrilling. I honestly believed that I was not safe, and that doesn't come up often.

We made our way back to the dorms - I can't recall if we went out again after that, so I'll say we didn't. We all talked over what had happened for a bit, and then, because it was still a weekday, slowly started going off to bed. At that point it was around midnight, and I myself made it into bed.

The next day, I was mentally exhausted, did hardly anything, and still went to sleep early. Both that day and the day after, when I smoked, I was brought back very slightly into my trip, although even at its strongest, it was barely a ++. I have not experienced any other flashbacks since.

Exp Year: 2012ExpID: 96678
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: 19
Published: Dec 12, 2018Views: 867
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LSD (2) : General (1), First Times (2), Nature / Outdoors (23), Hangover / Days After (46), Various (28)

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