My first LSD experience took me completely by surprise. I was unprepared for the potency of the trip, of reality being bent and stripped away, of the level at which set and setting can drastically steer the course of your emotions. I have tried plenty of recreational chemicals (mdma, cannabis, heroin, tramadol, codeine, amitriptyline, cocaine, mephedrone) but they were exactly that; for recreation. After this, I do not look on LSD as a recreational drug. More like therapeutic tool.
I will say now that what I experienced could not exactly be called pleasant. I dropped one tab while walking back to my flat, and the effects began to manifest by the time I was half way there. Light intensified, I began to feel a powerful sense of elation, and the quiddity, the what-ness of things seemed more apparent and immediate and beautiful. I had an irresistible urge to smile, as though my cheeks rested naturally in that position, and the more I thought about how goonish I must look, the more I grinned.
Then I got home, threw some pasta in the microwave, and settled down to enjoy the trip. It was around this point that things started to about-face. The typical breathings walls and shifting imagery began to appear, and instead of finding this interesting and beautiful, a part of me was oddly disturbed. I looked in the mirror, and found my face distorting and moving, passing through a variety of expressions, (at once I understood what that cartoonish style was all about in the movie "A Scanner Darkly") and it suddenly occurred to me that had the potential to be a profoundly frightening experience. This though was accompanied by the first wave of anxiety, in which a knot of tension wound itself up in my lower back and a chill flooded through me, but I dismissed it, knowing thinking about having a bad trip would end up giving me one.
After a while I realised I desperately needed the toilet, there was an uncomfortable grumbling in my stomach and it was seriously dragging me down in terms of mood, but as soon as I got to the bathroom I realised there was no toilet paper. Shit! I had to journey up the stairs to the second floor and retrieve some, and in my mind this became an arduous quest, the sound of the TV in the living room opposite the stairs a harbinger of some terrible intrusion into my trip world, and I was beset by the notion that, should I encounter someone, my imagination would transform them into horrid tormentors and phantasms. I returned with two toilet rolls, cradled in my arms like children, suspiciously eyeing the doors. After my ablutions I felt markedly better, I had imagined going to the bathroom to be some act of anxiety expulsion, and convinced myself that I could expel all the negative mood and flush it away for good. It worked, I returned with high hopes for the night, and started eating my pasta. It tasted rich and succulent and good, and the glass of juice flowed down my throat with refreshing coolness. I watched the shifting patterns of a Kandinsky print on my wall revolve and snake about, and unlike before found this terribly amusing.
Then I realised the music I had put on earlier was quite loud, and that, at one o'clock in the morning, this was bound to upset somebody. But I had no choice! The though of silence unnerved me, yet at the same time, I was afraid of how my imagination would twist and disfigure a simple bang on the wall or worse, a knock at the door. Nevermind, fuck it, I told myself. They'll deal with it.
Throughout this, I had been texting my girlfriend, and it was around this time I lost the ability to do so. I didn't feel up to the task of manipulating my limbs, which seemed increasingly distant from my motor functional control, so I lay down on my bed, threw on some calm music, and closed my eyes. Then I died, or at least a part of me did.
I can only describe the next two hours in vague terms, because my thought processes were so totally skewed I have no words to really translate what I felt and thought. Slowly I was stripped of all my outer layers, the bits that call themselves "me", and what remained was a singular, vast sense of fullness and nothingness. I lost all sense of time, and I truly felt I was in there for days. I could sense a profound beauty, but I perceived in it an indifference to me, rather than the sense of benevolent love I had hoped for. I was being absorbed by this all-encompassing thing, and it didn't care if I liked that or not. This, I am certain, was the root cause of my anxiety. I feel like I was pushed in a river and, having never bothered to learn how to swim, I had no choice but to ride out the current, to abandon "me", and become...what? Our grammar has no pronoun for the entire universe besides "it", and that seems oddly disrespectful.
Slowly I returned from my "pilgrimage to a cross in the void" (to quote Ginsberg) and I experienced a mild surprise when I remembered I had a body and a name, a past and a life and a girlfriend and family...I looked down at my body and imagined I was some alien consciousness transplanted into it, reborn in a new and strange form. The form carried inside it an uncomfortable grumbling ache, too, and it took me a while to realise that it was my stomach, that I was simply hungry. I told myself over and over: "I think its wearing off now", knowing, or hoping, that this would hasten the comedown. Deep down, I just wanted the rollercoaster trip to end, and this was another spring for the Fear. I was possessed by the idea that I might not fully return, that I might spend the rest of my life in some trippy, anxious state of self-disassociation. I spent the next five hours listening to pleasant music, texting my girlfriend and trying to return to sobriety. I felt I had glimpsed something pure and bright and holy. I remembered how in the cabala, the voice and name and true nature of god was too holy to be glimpsed or heard by humans. I am not religious in the slightest, but this seemed like an appropriate idea for what I saw. I felt I had not been pure enough, which was confusing, because rationally I was sure there was no moral force in the universe, no ultimate good and bad, and yet I had perceived quite obviously both of those. Had those feelings been an illusion, a derangement of the senses? Was my experience a delusion, an induction of temporary insanity, or did I catch sight of the true nature of things? I feel only more trips will reveal this to me, if they reveal it at all.
I still carried the knot of tension, only now I accepted it. I told myself: "okay, if fear is what the trip is going to be about, then fear I shall feel". Fear seemed appropriate considering I had just confronted the death of the ego, and therefore in a way confronted actual death itself. Then I noticed the sun was rising. My bedroom window faces east, and the pure golden light through the curtains was tantalising. I ripped them open and stuck my head out.
Gorgeous, bracing spring greeted me, and already I felt the knot easing, but it wasn't enough. I needed to be out there, not confined to this dark, clammy room, full of residual horror and panic. I put a coat on and headed to the park. What a tonic! What a refreshing, uplifting sense of life and living and wonder! I felt the smile return, and laughed quietly to myself on a hilltop with a view of the city in the distance. I had come full circle, returned to my state of mind when i began the trip, and something about that thrilled me. The worst was over, and now all I had to do was ride out the comedown. I walked around for a while, until I decided I needed human company again. I called my friend, who was just awake and on his way to university. I arranged to meet him and his girlfriend and walk down with them, but she was in a bad mood, and the negativity was in danger of bringing back the anxiety. Luckily, my friend counterbalanced with with his own unquenchable positivity (which was the reason I had called him in the first place), and I parted company with them feeling better.
After that I headed down to my aunties house to relax and spend the rest of the day winding down. She knew acid, and so knew what to say and what not to say, and after a few beers and some banter I felt, while still dazed and distant, at least happy and content. We spent the rest of the afternoon at the pub, where I got rather uncharacteristically drunk. I think perhaps the acid potentiated the alcohol, because at one point I had to take a little cocaine to sober up. I ended the night at around eight, too wasted and exhausted to continue, and slept for the night on my aunties sofa.
I feel I have learnt a lot about myself from this, and I have a profound respect for LSD that I did not have before. I took it cavalierly, and it made me its bitch. Next time, I will trip at a lower dose, in company, and go for a walk. I'm also thinking of candyflipping to ease the anxiety of the last stages and just bliss myself out in general. I believe the peak of that cocktail could become what is described in the shulgin scale as a plus four experience. In fact, I feel that is what I did experience, but the initial reluctance to surrender the ego made it a fearful and less than pleasurable adventure. Still, it was an adventure, one of gravity and self-revelation and serious transcendent power, and one I shall be repeating soon.
I have a lot to learn from this chemical.
Swirl on 
