Enigmatic Hell and Turmoil only to sort myself out afterwards

~500ug LSD

Tripped with J (long time friend from uni), K (his partner aka firefox) and with C (friend and also Barney the dinosaur)

I’ve had LSD twice so far and it has been noticeably brilliant, beyond the comprehension of my mind. But this trip report is not like many of the spectacular ones posted on this forum, and really I wouldn’t have made one at all if not encouraged by my experienced friends who consider it a good way to re-experience the trip through and through, suddenly picking up details otherwise not realised before. I focus a lot on what makes me uncomfortable and the range of the discomfort I have experienced on lsd has been hard to stomach immediately after. With time though, it’s proven supremely beneficial. This report dwells on a lot of discomfort and the trip was hard to interpret, so to those who have time and patience in reading this introspective trip report I am indebted!

Here we go.

I hung out with C for half the day and got into some interesting discussions over religion and science. At one point he made me realise the error of assuming Christians attribute creationist theory to God or something along those lines. I was certainly tripped up intellectually and actually hoped that this would provide good impetus for avoiding analysis during the oncoming trip.

J and K came home and after preparing the valve amp for the trip we prepared the dropper for dosing. We alighted on the subject of the last trip (the first time for me) and J made a comment that I had a deeply repressed ego of sorts. This struck me hard and I acknowledged that he could be right but not with enough emphasis; there and then we probably could have talked more about where I could have gone but maybe it was beyond prevention. It seems I went introspective with this and it lingered into the trip.

The dose.

After we dosed I was not particularly nervous but generally quite excited. It felt like what I expected to be a good start to the night. J handed me his iPad and told me to read an ebook until I couldn’t read anymore. It was Timothy Leary's Bardo publication and his concise and academic language surprised me, I’d read some of Terrence McKenna’s work before. I stopped reading just before K slipped off the sofa onto the floor…it was clear in her eyes that she was disappearing and melting in on herself. Following this I tested my eyesight and waved my hands in front of my face to check for tracks. J and C told me not to expect much and to stop thinking it over. I wasn't seeing much in particular but the walls and floor did somewhat start breathing in and out. I took it for an NBome effect [I had taken this a few weeks back prior to new years eve] and this may have caused a somewhat unpleasant recollection, perhaps even pushing me even further into expecting what visuals I would see. Throughout this time I noticed that I had wandered in and out of attention, not keeping track of the conversation between J and C, and before long my body began to feel heavy and I was exploring my CEVs more. The melting took over a great deal and much more than I could believe at the time. Opening my eyes, the room was 'gravely' dark and I saw auras that seemed to envelope everyone around me, though I could not see their actual bodies - it was accompanied with a sort of droning sound, at least that's what I feel like I can remember. This droning sound started with a slow rotor like frequency and seemed to descend (or ascend) into something else, but I noticed in attempting to dive further into this other world I was being rebuffed, I hadn’t envisaged that I was somewhat worried at the time. C was notably younger at this point, like a boy! And it is possible that I shared something at this point in time with all the others but it seemed to instill me with a sense of fear that I had taken too much [Speaking to J who had taken practically more than double of what I'd taken, it seems that this fear may have originated from him]. But in respect to myself, I had not taken a dose of any dramatic proportions. At this point J went upstairs to calm down or feel safer, and soon after this K followed him. C would have followed too and after whatever time I took to adjust to my headspace [I suppose], I came upstairs. I was horribly disconcerted to see J in a state that was clearly beyond the reaches of my imagination. Reading his eyes it seemed his consciousness basically came back to look at me and then seemed to spiral off for a second or two and then to recognise me again; it is possible that I had an inkling of something but I simply registered these disappearances in his eyes [J told me later that I had triggered a snapback of sorts]. I was generally scared to see the state of J like this, C holding his hand and K comforting him, that I headed back downstairs perhaps to my own consternation with being somewhat cowardly in that act. This perhaps dragged me into what I considered to be psychological hell. The turmoil [which nevertheless seemed to have beneficial aftereffects] was greater than any turmoil I thought I would experience going through pain and torture. But it was perhaps the struggle of ego against the permeating (melty) one-ness. I did get up during this turmoil and walked around the bottom of the house into the study, the kitchen and then the conservatory to grab some fresh air [J at this point saw me wandering the house through my own eyes, many many times, where I had only believed I'd done it once! We both agreed that I was sighing and holding my head in the precipitious state I was in. This loop supposedly took place without halting until my legs tired out]. And then what follows is the entry into what I nicknamed in a language beyond the language we speak here. The closest in the European dialect would be: an enigma, an absolute enigma. It could not be understood in language. It flowed, it melted and seemed to bubble into two parts, pinkish and orange, flesh coloured, separated by a worm like filament that made the two bubbles flow in and away from each other. I thought back to how I might be dying of an overdose and my thoughts drifted to the circumstances following my death and what to do about my family. As far as I remember, this brought more optimism to me as I was able to sense my lucid reassuring self, the original self that has accompanied me always through my (adult?) life. I do not know if this was the ego but it was helpful to bring me out of the state of chaos and disquiet.

At some point Leela the cat jumped on the sofa where I was lying on my back and she nudged me for attention. She started nibbling one of my fingers which I pulled away for no reason. This triggered one of the most memorable occasions of the night. She turned her face away from my hand in irritation to my doing this. I have never seen anything like it, she was clearly irritated and from hereon she took on a personality of a slightly spoilt princess! Her personality had the similarity of a human's and I was ecstatic to discover a sort of caring beauty in her look too. I react very strongly to affection by both humans and animals and I was soon noticing that she was relaxing on the top of my torso in response, wet nosed and showing much much affection. She did soon move off, and I believe she headed upstairs.

I headed into a negative spiral over music, I blamed the lack of music as insufficient mood for a good trip. However the amp was not working at all and I must have dropped in and out of time many times before giving up [C says I had said 'music' , 'need music!' many times]. I managed to work the iPad and the music came by to what I thought would be my relief. It wasn't relief at all, more like disdain for attempting to jar the trip, to guide it. At that point of the trip I knew I was plateauing and the regret began to seep in. From this I have learnt that I must absolutely not try to do anything that I do not feel any strong inner need for, your brain is not fooled by the distractions it makes. I still got much pleasure out of the music and iPad though; a song came on with beautiful vocals of a sweet voiced 'pixie' and as I waved the iPad around, this pixie was flying. The iPad speaker has already been designed with some three dimensional depth as but on lsd...it was incredible! And I wear 2 dimensional hearing aids! Caused by incredible extrapolation or even enhanced senses!

Me and C were to go out so we had to wrap up warm. This would have taken us some time but I managed to ‘sequentially’ get my shoes and coat on. While picking up the coat I was overwhelmed by a sense of complete detachment from it, I couldn't even remember why it looked the way it did; it was like a rag in my hands. I wondered why I had picked that coat, why I chose that colour and why I wore it. It just didn't seem to be mine, it was someone else's. Sure enough it wrapped me fine like it usually did, and this was the only part about the coat that brought recognition, through the tactile senses.

At some point the undercurrent of the trip more or less morphed lsd into a kind of surgical scalpel of sorts, it was unpleasantly artificial and felt intrusive. This was perhaps the entire negative spiral of the trip which was loosened when I finally realised this unfavourable conception of lsd. While thinking about lsd now, I have the sense that I back then I hadn’t gotten its purpose in mind, that actually lsd has little purpose at all in what you experience. It merely inhibits a secondary process in the brain, a set of filters that actually comprise your ego; it breaks down the socially standardised brain. And that…is something you have not experienced in many years…

I did naturally get fed up of the music and a trigger sent me up the stairs to give the iPad to the other three guys. On the landing J and K were undergoing some intimate play of some kind and I was struck by the force of surprise on J's face. But what struck me more was K's mischievous face [and later as we discussed, K's hair was orange as a result of morphing into the firefox!]

I ran back downstairs and kicked myself in mind for disturbing the other two (doubt and guilt were big factors in this whole messy trip) and maybe this was when I saw the ying yang that J saw (already explained earlier as a melty one-ness). The rest of my memory disappears at this point of the night and I can only head straight up to the point where I went upstairs again.
J, K and C were naked.

And here we went again, the horrible anxiety set in, I was being preyed upon, they were out to lure me into a snare and into an orgy. It is a weird, innane and illogical thought but that is the nature of paranoia. J immediate clocked that I was uncomfortable and passed this onto the other two. I was on the plateau within seconds.
It was the usual negative spiral and I acknowledged it there and then. I started to laugh at the chatter between the J and C, and even at myself for the silly negative spiral there and then. But in my heart I believed it would happen again. It would need to be resolved face on.
The cat flew past J while he was standing next to the bedroom. J saw it too!
The colours of the dawn were the most gorgeous I have ever seen in my life. No words to describe how beautiful.

The last of my visuals was a wavy room, and apparently I saw C's visuals in the winamp visuals too. He was supposedly enhancing the fractals, giving them greater depth and pushing imagery in there. I wasn’t able to believe this as I had thought winamp capable of recurring details down to the pixel. It appears I had rationalised this a little too much.

MDMA dose

MDMA brought out a huge amount from the previous trip and blew apart much of it in the most pleasant and sharable way possible. It's beyond my limitations to explain all of my epiphanies of sorts but I can make concise points here:
I had seen the 'firefox', this was the first time I had discovered that someone else's visuals had influenced mine!

I was vocal about my negative spiral, and it was soon explained away to be the product of my paranoid imagination. It was a strong negative spiral that made me plateau fully, only leaving mild OEVs.

I decided that there were some problems to be fixed with my own family, minor ones but nevertheless important for the family's wellbeing and trust. I almost texted my mother with a friendly 'I'm well' text but the others suggested not to; best not to use any phones on mdma (and obviously not lsd!)

I was phasing in and out and occasionally seeing the tiniest glimpses of disappearances into nothingless.

I began to understand the underlying thread of help that my best friend J has given me all these years, and my lack of receptiveness to what he was egging me on to realise. It was beyond all regret as the convergence of years of memories and interactions with others (women too) began to make complete utter sense. Where the lsd had left a bomb site of sorts, mdma spurred on a few hours of sharing and shared comtemplation which brought an extraordinary amount of realisation. The remaining acid in the system probably allowed these realisations to be retained where they might have otherwise been lost in the whirlpool of mdma memory loss. Time was also well dilated into a more normal progression whereas mdma alone would have forced the night away in the blink of an hour; we actually found that within 3 or 4 hours we were already ready for bed (apparently could have been caused by a slight over-measurement).

After

I have been so much more communicative with my friends recently and I’ve been finding that I’ve been pushing out of my comfort zone. It has made me tremble a little with both excitement and apprehension. The idea that ‘man is an island’ has surfaced and since then I couldn’t understand why a phrase so misdirecting has to be counted amongst all fame. It is surely the opposite, that the more we share with other people, the more freedom we can gain. It has brought a sort of clarity to my life, and to the life of the past: that everything has a thread of some sort of underlying beautiful purpose, it was always there and I actually went abroad to find and share it. Only here it has become clear. It feels like the rest of my life will be about encountering many people and sharing that feeling that keeps welling up. MDMA makes this feeling clear and maybe LSD will prolong it, and maybe my own life will complete it.

Try J's trip report too:
J's trip report on ~1000ug+ LSD

 

Nice report dude ... you'll get over these negative stuff soon ... once you do ... the ride is gonna be awesome

Kori

 

Yes, I really hope so. Reading your report gives me the impression that I was in a very dark place indeed without realising it. It's a scary thought that something brought me down there, that low.

 

no wonder you ended up in a dark place...you took ~500 ug on your 2nd time tripping! i've taken acid maybe 50 times, and never taken quite that much.

you guys might want to keep in mind that LSD may not be 'the ultimate truth.' sure it can teach us things and help us be better people, but i don't think it is necessarily the key to understanding the universe. maybe i would if i ate 10 hits

 

It was doses like that that sent me over the edge and a 40 year abstinence.

LSD isn't the key to understanding the universe, but it is a key to that understanding. And even if the understanding slips away in a day or so, still a great blessing to have had the understanding at all.

 

i think LSD can help you learn certain life lessons - like loving your fellow man.

but i don't think the visuals are a glimpse at some ultimate truth. what makes people so ready to accept that LSD "removes filters" and let's you see the world more clearly? (not that anyone really said that in this thread)
how do we know that it doesn't add MORE filters to make shit look so damn cool?

one of the main things LSD has taught me is if THAT can happen from taking LSD, your world can become so different....then maybe everyday life and how we perceive things normally is an illusion too. but that doesn't necessarily make LSD closer to the "truth."

it's kinda like with God and religion - that stuff can make people better, make them nicer to their neighbor. but is it really the "truth?"

 

Well put

There's certainly no ultimate truth available directly to you.

However, what it does give you is a shift in your perception to allow look at things in completely new ways, it reconnects you with your childhood and opens you up to new experiences.

There are some very interesting things in there, however... these shared experiences are fascinating. That doesn't automatically mean to me that there is universal shared consciousness or more, it just means that we're able to exchange information non-verbally... which is a wonderful realisation. On the other hand, it's nice to want to think that there may be more to all of it and certainly that death may not be the end.

The ego is seemingly a selection of filters that you build as you grow... LSD removes that and seemingly lets your more developed brain experience life more like a child, likely with extra twists on the visual perception

It's quite staggering how many people have had similar "delusions" without any mind altering chemicals.

 

Over the years, from early writers like Huxley to people writing on HF today, there have been countless accounts of experiencing some degree of enlightenment, truth, reality, and so on as a result of ingesting psychedelic substances.

Is what so many have seen the truth or any kind of truth at all? Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. Learning to discern is part of the trip.

Psychedelics changed my life in ways I could never have imagined before turning on. It's as if all my dreams came true - some of them dreams I hadn't even dreamed yet.

:sunny:

 

I just want to say that it's been really awesome reading about this trip from three different perspectives. It's not often that you get to read such good descriptions with such accurate doses. You really get an idea of just how strong 500ug of LSD is.

 

Just want to say that i second this opinion. Great reports from all you guys.

 

3rd. right on.

i should have my brother write a trip report the next time we dose together. my wife wrote one about 2c-b, but i don't think i did about that same trip.

 

^^^Agree.

 

Nice tale OP. Was a good read