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a REALISTIC description of LSD?

sounds like a big fat oxymoron. a realistic description might be "unrealistic" or ineffable. buy the ticket take the ride, drop around good people in a good place with some good stuff to do, we painted and watched movies and looked through this dudes telescope. Last time I dropped I was in the woods alone camping, almost got lost on my way back to my tent (kinda freaky but I had a good laugh at myself later) I spent 90% of that trip in my tent, thinking about Henry Ford and other inventors, watching the flies try to escape, the light coming through the tent fabric gave a very comforting glow. Mainly I was in the tent because there were so many mosquitoes, that was my only complaint.
 
I think there's a tremendous amount of bullshit talked about LSD visuals. It's almost as if people feel under pressure to say "Yes, I saw God crawl out from under the duvet".

What you get is the world looks like a painting. They're are enhanced colours, you get an appreciation of nature. If you look at patterns in stained glass windows you'll notice them moving, similarly patterns in the walls etc. When you close your eyes you'll see the Alex Grey kind of visuals.

But that's about it. There's going to be no elephants dancing down the street wearing pink tutus I'm afraid.

I don't think anyone said anything quite this extreme. It depends on the dose, the batch, the person, the setting.
I have seen so many incredible things on LSD, far more extreme than what you've said, patterns moving and "Alex Grey kind of visuals" and I haven't even ventured beyond 250ug's yet, if that.

You can say it's because I feel "pressured" to say this kind of stuff but not at all, it just blows my mind so much I feel the need to share it.

One of my best mates had 15 fingers on one hand as his first ever LSD hallucination, this was on half a tab.
It's VERY VERY different for everyone, for me it's always been spectacularly visual.

As for some of the things I and others have seen, I could give a quick list: I will stick to trips of single doses to show just how far you can go with a single dose depending on how potent the hit, and who you are.

- Sand turning into dead bodies all around the beach melting up from and back into the ground.
- Little pimple like volcanoes rising and popping on a friends face, he also looked quite like a demon.
- My Mum came outside and looked a lot like a witch with her hair blowing furiously in imaginary wind.
- The grass turns into triangular fractal like patterns that flow out of the ground to make scorpions and lizards (This is a recurring hallucination I get EVERY time I take LSD)
- I was once thought a house was following me, because it had a movement tracking light out the front.
- My friend yelled at me, and he was green and troll like and I thought he was able/going to eat me in one big gulp.
- I once saw a wall of a garage start coming out at me like a three dimensional Pixar animation, it proceeded to look like it was somehow being pumped outwards from behind and filled with various pockets of air, which then began to split at the seams
- I once saw a wattle tree, although it was bright red, right up in my face despite being at least 5 - 10 metres away and instead of branches it had tenticles with an eye on the end of each.
- Perhaps the most beautiful and amazing thing I've seen on LSD was an entire front garden made of of trillions of tiny little wooden cubes, painted different shades to create colours the same way digital pictures work. Although because it was such a large thing and such a selection of complicated structures, it was completely physically impossible. It didn't make sense, and it did not get less vivid when I got closer. It was frozen and I was able to actually study it up close in amazement.
That same walk, the various front yards became a gallery of memories from the last time I had tripped there, which was my first horrifying LSD experience, although this time I was calm, collected and was able to see the situation logically.

Like I said these are all just from a single tab, or a single dose of liqqy. Don't be fooled by people who say "LSD isn't that visual" I know people for whom this is true, but I am definitely not one of them and you never know which category you will fall into.
 
sounds like a big fat oxymoron. a realistic description might be "unrealistic" or ineffable. buy the ticket take the ride, drop around good people in a good place with some good stuff to do, we painted and watched movies and looked through this dudes telescope. Last time I dropped I was in the woods alone camping, almost got lost on my way back to my tent (kinda freaky but I had a good laugh at myself later) I spent 90% of that trip in my tent, thinking about Henry Ford and other inventors, watching the flies try to escape, the light coming through the tent fabric gave a very comforting glow. Mainly I was in the tent because there were so many mosquitoes, that was my only complaint.

Are you me? Cause this is my post.
 
Im sure this has been mentioned, but while reading all this great info everyone has given, dont set expectations for yourself - when you try to "expect" things out of a trip, you're almost sure to be disappointed, or in the worse case scenario, cause yourself a difficult trip.
 
For me its like becoming a different person (specifically a child) for the duration. I see, hear and think utterly different to normal allowing me to enjoy the world like the first time I saw it.

I find this to be so true for a wide range of psychedelics. I often feel like a child exploring the world while tripping. It's wonderful.
 
I wonder how much of the things people see are down to the LSD rather than their own imagination? I think seeing things with your eyes open that arn't actually there is quite unusual. I remember some writer saying after taking acid Jim Morrison walked down the street and saw a man walking up to him who didn't exist. That's so far removed from my experience of psychedelics that I find it a stretch.

And other things - like the opening of Fear and Loathing when Hunter says "I'd dropped the mescaline and the bats appeared flying above the car". I get the impression he claimed was using "mescaline" because he thought it sounded more "hip" than acid (my guess is he'd never actually had mescaline in his life and didn't realise it's the gentlest and least likely drug to make you see bats than any psychedelic). That's the kind of thing I'm talking about people feeling like they need to exaggerate what they see. If Hunter had just said "The sky looked a bit more blue" I think he would have disappointed his readers somehow.
 
And other things - like the opening of Fear and Loathing when Hunter says "I'd dropped the mescaline and the bats appeared flying above the car". I get the impression he claimed was using "mescaline" because he thought it sounded more "hip" than acid (my guess is he'd never actually had mescaline in his life and didn't realise it's the gentlest and least likely drug to make you see bats than any psychedelic). That's the kind of thing I'm talking about people feeling like they need to exaggerate what they see. If Hunter had just said "The sky looked a bit more blue" I think he would have disappointed his readers somehow.

I agree. I think people tend to emphasize the visuals because the way psychedelics change your thoughts is so much harder to explain.

So, if someone who never experienced it reads "there were bats above the car", it's easier to understand than if they read "the clouds were wonderful, everything felt like one and I wouldn't do harm to any living thing", although the last description is much closer to my personal experiences.
 
I see a lot of really great responses in this thread!


Music is easily the best bit for me. You notice sounds which were never there before and it seems to acquire an added dimension of elegance and beauty. The character of sound changes entirely. Sometimes the music can begin to twirl and move in quite a strange fashion. The best way I can describe it is, it sounds extremely psychedelic.

This, I agree with 100% LSD enhances music like nothing else I've ever experienced before, it's just unreal. You don't just "hear" music anymore, you hear it, feel it, see it, it's no longer simply just sound. Every note adds another layer of depth and you can flow along with it, experience every notes birth, life, death and incarnation to the next note. It's really something wonderful and it's also my favorite part of the LSD experience.
 
i used to think that lsd oev's were pretty predictable. once you're a bit experienced you will see similar things again and again like: fractal patterns, landscapes looking like a blurred impressionist painting while at the same time being perfectly sharp, fucked up distance perception, dust crawling around on the floor, the paint on the walls running downwards (or upwards if you want it to ;) ), objects melting into other objects (had the greatest "wow" factor for me in the beginning) etc..., etc...
but once you dose high enough anything can happen.. still, when reality begins to dissolve and time spirals backwards instead of flowing normally, a pink elephant wearing a tutu isn't going to be making a big impression on me ;).


and +1 for music enhancement being one of the absolutely best parts of a trip.
 
Yeah, I've taken some pretty high doses of many different psychedelics, and I've never seen any object or entity that straight out did not exist. Of course you can erroneously interpret the identity of objects e.g. thinking a pile of blankets is a dog. You can misplace objects, e.g. characters on a TV can lift themselves off the screen and shift laterally.

Only deliriants (atropine, scolopamine, dph) are generally known for producing realistic entities. People often report spending the day with a friend only to later realize said friend was never around (and of course the infamous imaginary cigarettes and spiders). I'm not sure the mechanism of action, nor why deliriant hallucinations seem so consistent.

If users of 5ht2 agonist psychedelics report seeing life-like apparitions I would assume that either they are grossly exaggerating for effect or the drug is uncovering some sort of latent mental illness.
 
It really, really, REALLY depends on dosage.
You can take enough lsd to feel it and have different thought process but no visuals at all (one hit is usually like this for me).
At the same time, I have been at points where the entire room evaporates before your eyes into geometric shapes and people turn into insect like aliens. You can't escape the visuals even when you close your eyes because the insides of your eyelids are more colorful and intense then when they are open. (strongest psychedelic experience of my life, not actually on lsd but 4-aco-dmt, went into a trance and was told by my friends I curled up into a ball and murmured to myself under a blanket for most of the night. Made me swear off psychedelics for almost a year.).
 
The most reliable explanation I can come up with, is it makes me feel like I'm a child again. All social apprehensions, all pre-determined ideas, all neuroses and every "shortcut" my brain has ever made, is just bypassed, and I am plunged into REALITY with the innocense of a newborn baby, except that I still have the skills of my previous life.

I too feel like I "remember" that it was like this. I think it was like this when I was just a kid. I think I remember seeing patterns everywhere - if I looked hard enough. I never met anybody with prejudice. I was innocent. So it is with LSD. Everything can be experienced anew - everything has to be learned again.

That being said, LSD doesn't make me stupid. Intellectually, somehow, my minds bandwith is expanded and billions of deep philosophical insights beam through my mind as I struggle with mundane stuff like tying my shoes.

All in all, I read about LSD for about five years (since I was 17 till 22) before I got the chance to try it.
Nothing prepared me for what it was. It was infinitely better than I could have imagined.
 
I think there's a tremendous amount of bullshit talked about LSD visuals. It's almost as if people feel under pressure to say "Yes, I saw God crawl out from under the duvet".

What you get is the world looks like a painting. They're are enhanced colours, you get an appreciation of nature. If you look at patterns in stained glass windows you'll notice them moving, similarly patterns in the walls etc. When you close your eyes you'll see the Alex Grey kind of visuals.

But that's about it. There's going to be no elephants dancing down the street wearing pink tutus I'm afraid.

Thank you. You hit the nail on the head.
Mirrors get a bit funky, but that's about it.
 
And other things - like the opening of Fear and Loathing when Hunter says "I'd dropped the mescaline and the bats appeared flying above the car". I get the impression he claimed was using "mescaline" because he thought it sounded more "hip" than acid (my guess is he'd never actually had mescaline in his life and didn't realise it's the gentlest and least likely drug to make you see bats than any psychedelic). That's the kind of thing I'm talking about people feeling like they need to exaggerate what they see. If Hunter had just said "The sky looked a bit more blue" I think he would have disappointed his readers somehow.

About that... Hunter was a big fan of amphetamine and would use it a lot. If you read the book, it's explained that he had little to no sleep during the duration of the whole story. I've heard that lack of sleep can cause paranoid delusions and some times even hallucinations, so that checks out quite well with me. I don't remember how long he hadn't slept when the opening scene is played out but it's at least a day or so (they spent some time gathering supplies: A tape recorder, a rented convertible, and the drugs).
 
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