Captain Ping
Bluelighter
This happened a couple of weeks ago in Byron Bay, Australia. A group of friends and I were camping there for the week, and on the second day of our stay decided to take the acid my mate S had brought up; sugarcubes, the LSD dosage of which was completely unknown. In retrospect, I'd say it was quite high, if not extremely high. I have no doubt in my mind that this was a trip of the highest order, easily the worst experience of my life. But it was priceless also.
3pm: Myself and my very good mates S and G dissolve our sugarcubes in three mugs of perpermint tea, and down them in about 10 mins. Of the three of us, G is the most experienced with acid. I have tried 2c's before, and have had a fairly scary and alienating experience, but to call LSD a different ball game would be a monsterous, criminal underestimation. So anyway, our other friends O and T haven't taken anything as they are unsure whether they should or not. They're both kind of a bit wierd and T is a bit of a bogan scumbag so I'd kind of be happy if they stayed away from the stuff and gave me two less things to worry about. We head down to the BBQ area where S, who is a chef, starts cooking up some meat. G claims to be feeling something after 15 mins, and I may be feeling something too, but I imagine its more just anticipation and/or complete recovery from yesterday's ice comedown paranoia messiness. I feel good, though.
3:30pm: Now shit is starting to get noticably wierd. G and I wander off for a bit. The colours of the Byron landscape have become paler but luminescent, like some strange pastel colour scheme endowned with inner fire. We quickly realise that we've left S alone at the BBQ with O and T and should head back. S is looking a bit crazy marshalling the food production. I take a sausage, not quite able to get a plate or sauce, and I just munch it while staring at the clouds, which are now flowing like ribbons and are indescribably enthralling. The sausage is too complicated a task and I leave it on the table. Things are getting very intense now and I'm having great difficulty communicating.
3:45: I head back to the campsite by myself, lying down in my tent and becoming totally lost in the purple dome shifting like sand. Time has gotten lost. I can't get up... but I can, and I get up and out of my tent then back in again numerous times. The world is crackling with energy and colour, the leaves on the evergreens unfolding and breathing: beautiful, but beauty is fast becoming too simple a concept to apply to this experience. The others come back up soon, and G and S seem to be tripping as hard as I am. We can't communicate with one another very well, except when we all burst into cohesive laughter... those moments were so perfect, but the rest of the time we were so not on the same wave length. I'm saying all sorts of abstract shit about being of the verge of something, my mind is make all these complex connections between the objects around me, conversation, concepts, memories and colours, some unifed theory of everything just out of my reach. I am filled with the sense of some cosmic joke that everone in the world is in on, that everyone with oblivious to but deep down have always known. I find out later that no one knows what the fuck I'm talking about, but for me that wasn't a possibility at the time. Everytime I look at one of my friends, it seems that they expression of their face belies the exact opposite emotion I expect them to be feeling, which is very alarming. T is being very annoying, continually asking if he should drop or not, guffawing like an idiot at our random shit and generally being a horrible person to be around. There is an eternal silence, everyone lost within themselves, and suddenly S bursts out "T, take some or get the fuck out of here, seriously take it or just fuck off." This is an hilarious outburst. T says laughingly that its only been 55 minutes since the tea, which sends a tinge of concern through what is left of my consciousness. I'm extremely fucked up, and although I have no concept of time I know deep down that I'm probably in for some serious shit.
4:15pm: All five of us now head down the bush path to the beach. Holy fuck. The world is ALIVE... each time I turn my head I'm greeted by a new and devestating alien vista of unimagineable size and detail. One of the many differences between 2c's and LSD; I could draw you a picture of what I saw on 2c's, but I'll never truly be able to communicate to another person what happened to me on acid. I am completely unable to communicate with anyone, occassionally picking up snatches of conversation and managing to walk the straight line. S is a little freaked out and says to me "Help me, am I here? am I real? Whats happening?' which is obviously a pretty freaky thing to hear from your friend during the indescribable intensity of your first acid trip. I try to reassure him, but I'm not convinced that what S said wasn't just a mechanism of my own mind. My thought processes are now completely alien. I don't know where I'm going, just that its somewhere we have to be.
???pm: We are at the beach. I can tell you nothing about time. At this point I do not know who I am or that I've taken a drug. But things are okay, because the beach is the most mindblowing thing ever. I lay in the sand watching the surf boil against overcast skies in the most amazing hallucination imaginable. I leave all sense of myself, I'm in the clouds, revelling in the complete oneness of the universe. I dissolve, die, become completely untethered from all things. This lasts FOREVER.
???pm: O shakes me and I slurp back into reality for a sec. We've got to keep going it seems. This is where things literally go to hell. As we begin, I am suddenly filled with a nameless dread. The uninviting bushland grows to grotesque size and swallows me; the clouds blacken and race towards the earth. My path descends in some indescribable and terrifying manner, and I am completely lost and alone in the evil jungle. I can hear my friends, but it is more like memory; they are taunting me. "Oooh, be carefull, I've heard there might be snakes around here..." And when ever I think about the snakes (which is extremely hard not to do) the voices get more urgent. "I think I just saw a snake over there..." "Shit! A snake! Lookout!" I somehow know that if I stop think about the snakes and relax that I'll be fine, but I just can't. A horribly sincere entity, perhaps myself, puts a hand on my shoulder and says "Grant, man, you've got to get out of this. Seriously, this shit is NOT cool. You've got some serious work ahead of you." I'm bucking out of my brain like a horse, fighting so hard, trapped and lost, resisting panic by sheer force of will.
Suddenly I snap back. G is screaming at me. I find my friends, standing on the path looking at me, while I seem to have wandered some 10 metres into the actually dangerous wilderness nearby. Thanks a fucking lot, sitters. I told you these guys weren't gonna be helpful. Somehow I find my way back and we keep going. I'm not walking, just propelling myself forward with will, trying to ignore the evil surrounding me. All I could tell myself was that this was the worst thing ever, to remember that this was the WORST THING EVER. And I know that its because I can't let go, but I just can't do it. I am too afraid.
I get trapped for eternity in various time loops. We do eventually reach our campsite, where I lie in the dirt beside my tent, completely lost in a paranoid nightmare delusion. My friends are hostile beasts, conspiring against me; the sky turns to blood as bombs crash over 1945 Berlin. I could be dead, or in a hospital or police station for all I reasonably knew, and each of those possibilities would be better than this. I get back in the tent at some point, and end up again in a very dark place for god knows how long. I am awakened by S, shaking me and telling me to wake up, that I'm not responding. In my mind, its the snake thing again; if I focus on this particular demon, it will get worse and worse like you cannot imagine (this was happening a lot). So I ignore him, although it IS actually S trying to rouse me. Eventually I speak. I tell him I'm trying to sleep, and fade away again.
Later, I am amazed to find that I am able to get up and out of the tent. I sit with T and G, and while I am starting to come down now they are still a demonic presence. T turns the butane lantern way up, exposing the heart of hell and illuminating his true devil's form. I don't know how to accept the bong. Reality is seeping through me now in dribs and drabs; relief is slowly developing. I am rebuilding reality one brick at a time, learning how to exist again. T is still asking if he should take a sugarcube. I say no. I beg G to talk to me, and finally it isn't telepathic malevolence coming out of him. I can understand what he is saying... I am feeling so vulnerable and violated, I don't want to be here. But I'm back.
S emerges from the tent, looking suitably spooked. We confirm one another's suspicion that something insane just happened to us, something unspeakably terrible. We are like war veterens, or lost children in a fairly tale. We fuckin made it yo. I'm still tripping quite hard I suppose, but in comparison to what just happened to me its barely noticable and completely bland. It must be like 10 O'clock. For some crazed reason, T and O now drop, (!!!!) and head to the games room to wait for it to kick in. Once they leave, the gravity of the situation hits me. We are in NO shape to look after these guys, and if what happened to US happens to THEM... well, I think they'll freak the fuck out. T is NOT equipped for that. He could go seriously violent, or god knows what.
So we're all freaking out a bit about that, but it turns out to not be a problem somehow. T and O never get particularly fucked up. They didn't take a whole dose (more than half though) and drank their tea slowly. They probably get only some very minor visuals and are completely lucid the whole time (T is riding a bike around for fucks sake), yet they keep trying to compare their experience to ours and its apocalyptically frustrating. S is getting kind of angry and asking if they are taking the piss out of him. O seems to realise something of the stark difference between their experience and mine, but T mindlessly and tactlessly doesn't get it. Its all been pretty upsetting. We smoke billies and got to sleep. O ends up driving into town alone at 3am to pick up hitchhikers.
This scope of this experience cannot be exaggerated. While the revelations were of unparallelled brilliance, the dreamscapes/doomscapes I visited will haunt me forever. I don't know if I'll try acid again, perhaps at a low dose. I'm not keen to go back to those places for a while. Apologies for the length, kids. The one true thing I learned from acid is that when the REAL shit starts coming down, you better have a nice warm comfortable place to hide.
3pm: Myself and my very good mates S and G dissolve our sugarcubes in three mugs of perpermint tea, and down them in about 10 mins. Of the three of us, G is the most experienced with acid. I have tried 2c's before, and have had a fairly scary and alienating experience, but to call LSD a different ball game would be a monsterous, criminal underestimation. So anyway, our other friends O and T haven't taken anything as they are unsure whether they should or not. They're both kind of a bit wierd and T is a bit of a bogan scumbag so I'd kind of be happy if they stayed away from the stuff and gave me two less things to worry about. We head down to the BBQ area where S, who is a chef, starts cooking up some meat. G claims to be feeling something after 15 mins, and I may be feeling something too, but I imagine its more just anticipation and/or complete recovery from yesterday's ice comedown paranoia messiness. I feel good, though.
3:30pm: Now shit is starting to get noticably wierd. G and I wander off for a bit. The colours of the Byron landscape have become paler but luminescent, like some strange pastel colour scheme endowned with inner fire. We quickly realise that we've left S alone at the BBQ with O and T and should head back. S is looking a bit crazy marshalling the food production. I take a sausage, not quite able to get a plate or sauce, and I just munch it while staring at the clouds, which are now flowing like ribbons and are indescribably enthralling. The sausage is too complicated a task and I leave it on the table. Things are getting very intense now and I'm having great difficulty communicating.
3:45: I head back to the campsite by myself, lying down in my tent and becoming totally lost in the purple dome shifting like sand. Time has gotten lost. I can't get up... but I can, and I get up and out of my tent then back in again numerous times. The world is crackling with energy and colour, the leaves on the evergreens unfolding and breathing: beautiful, but beauty is fast becoming too simple a concept to apply to this experience. The others come back up soon, and G and S seem to be tripping as hard as I am. We can't communicate with one another very well, except when we all burst into cohesive laughter... those moments were so perfect, but the rest of the time we were so not on the same wave length. I'm saying all sorts of abstract shit about being of the verge of something, my mind is make all these complex connections between the objects around me, conversation, concepts, memories and colours, some unifed theory of everything just out of my reach. I am filled with the sense of some cosmic joke that everone in the world is in on, that everyone with oblivious to but deep down have always known. I find out later that no one knows what the fuck I'm talking about, but for me that wasn't a possibility at the time. Everytime I look at one of my friends, it seems that they expression of their face belies the exact opposite emotion I expect them to be feeling, which is very alarming. T is being very annoying, continually asking if he should drop or not, guffawing like an idiot at our random shit and generally being a horrible person to be around. There is an eternal silence, everyone lost within themselves, and suddenly S bursts out "T, take some or get the fuck out of here, seriously take it or just fuck off." This is an hilarious outburst. T says laughingly that its only been 55 minutes since the tea, which sends a tinge of concern through what is left of my consciousness. I'm extremely fucked up, and although I have no concept of time I know deep down that I'm probably in for some serious shit.
4:15pm: All five of us now head down the bush path to the beach. Holy fuck. The world is ALIVE... each time I turn my head I'm greeted by a new and devestating alien vista of unimagineable size and detail. One of the many differences between 2c's and LSD; I could draw you a picture of what I saw on 2c's, but I'll never truly be able to communicate to another person what happened to me on acid. I am completely unable to communicate with anyone, occassionally picking up snatches of conversation and managing to walk the straight line. S is a little freaked out and says to me "Help me, am I here? am I real? Whats happening?' which is obviously a pretty freaky thing to hear from your friend during the indescribable intensity of your first acid trip. I try to reassure him, but I'm not convinced that what S said wasn't just a mechanism of my own mind. My thought processes are now completely alien. I don't know where I'm going, just that its somewhere we have to be.
???pm: We are at the beach. I can tell you nothing about time. At this point I do not know who I am or that I've taken a drug. But things are okay, because the beach is the most mindblowing thing ever. I lay in the sand watching the surf boil against overcast skies in the most amazing hallucination imaginable. I leave all sense of myself, I'm in the clouds, revelling in the complete oneness of the universe. I dissolve, die, become completely untethered from all things. This lasts FOREVER.
???pm: O shakes me and I slurp back into reality for a sec. We've got to keep going it seems. This is where things literally go to hell. As we begin, I am suddenly filled with a nameless dread. The uninviting bushland grows to grotesque size and swallows me; the clouds blacken and race towards the earth. My path descends in some indescribable and terrifying manner, and I am completely lost and alone in the evil jungle. I can hear my friends, but it is more like memory; they are taunting me. "Oooh, be carefull, I've heard there might be snakes around here..." And when ever I think about the snakes (which is extremely hard not to do) the voices get more urgent. "I think I just saw a snake over there..." "Shit! A snake! Lookout!" I somehow know that if I stop think about the snakes and relax that I'll be fine, but I just can't. A horribly sincere entity, perhaps myself, puts a hand on my shoulder and says "Grant, man, you've got to get out of this. Seriously, this shit is NOT cool. You've got some serious work ahead of you." I'm bucking out of my brain like a horse, fighting so hard, trapped and lost, resisting panic by sheer force of will.
Suddenly I snap back. G is screaming at me. I find my friends, standing on the path looking at me, while I seem to have wandered some 10 metres into the actually dangerous wilderness nearby. Thanks a fucking lot, sitters. I told you these guys weren't gonna be helpful. Somehow I find my way back and we keep going. I'm not walking, just propelling myself forward with will, trying to ignore the evil surrounding me. All I could tell myself was that this was the worst thing ever, to remember that this was the WORST THING EVER. And I know that its because I can't let go, but I just can't do it. I am too afraid.
I get trapped for eternity in various time loops. We do eventually reach our campsite, where I lie in the dirt beside my tent, completely lost in a paranoid nightmare delusion. My friends are hostile beasts, conspiring against me; the sky turns to blood as bombs crash over 1945 Berlin. I could be dead, or in a hospital or police station for all I reasonably knew, and each of those possibilities would be better than this. I get back in the tent at some point, and end up again in a very dark place for god knows how long. I am awakened by S, shaking me and telling me to wake up, that I'm not responding. In my mind, its the snake thing again; if I focus on this particular demon, it will get worse and worse like you cannot imagine (this was happening a lot). So I ignore him, although it IS actually S trying to rouse me. Eventually I speak. I tell him I'm trying to sleep, and fade away again.
Later, I am amazed to find that I am able to get up and out of the tent. I sit with T and G, and while I am starting to come down now they are still a demonic presence. T turns the butane lantern way up, exposing the heart of hell and illuminating his true devil's form. I don't know how to accept the bong. Reality is seeping through me now in dribs and drabs; relief is slowly developing. I am rebuilding reality one brick at a time, learning how to exist again. T is still asking if he should take a sugarcube. I say no. I beg G to talk to me, and finally it isn't telepathic malevolence coming out of him. I can understand what he is saying... I am feeling so vulnerable and violated, I don't want to be here. But I'm back.
S emerges from the tent, looking suitably spooked. We confirm one another's suspicion that something insane just happened to us, something unspeakably terrible. We are like war veterens, or lost children in a fairly tale. We fuckin made it yo. I'm still tripping quite hard I suppose, but in comparison to what just happened to me its barely noticable and completely bland. It must be like 10 O'clock. For some crazed reason, T and O now drop, (!!!!) and head to the games room to wait for it to kick in. Once they leave, the gravity of the situation hits me. We are in NO shape to look after these guys, and if what happened to US happens to THEM... well, I think they'll freak the fuck out. T is NOT equipped for that. He could go seriously violent, or god knows what.
So we're all freaking out a bit about that, but it turns out to not be a problem somehow. T and O never get particularly fucked up. They didn't take a whole dose (more than half though) and drank their tea slowly. They probably get only some very minor visuals and are completely lucid the whole time (T is riding a bike around for fucks sake), yet they keep trying to compare their experience to ours and its apocalyptically frustrating. S is getting kind of angry and asking if they are taking the piss out of him. O seems to realise something of the stark difference between their experience and mine, but T mindlessly and tactlessly doesn't get it. Its all been pretty upsetting. We smoke billies and got to sleep. O ends up driving into town alone at 3am to pick up hitchhikers.
This scope of this experience cannot be exaggerated. While the revelations were of unparallelled brilliance, the dreamscapes/doomscapes I visited will haunt me forever. I don't know if I'll try acid again, perhaps at a low dose. I'm not keen to go back to those places for a while. Apologies for the length, kids. The one true thing I learned from acid is that when the REAL shit starts coming down, you better have a nice warm comfortable place to hide.
