I put this on Reddit initially but figured I should also post this here for anyone who may be curious. Hope it's not too long!
(Tl;dr, Took half a tab of either 25i or LSD and sat in 1000 different living rooms, couldn't talk, everything is fractals.)
I'll start this off by saying that this was the first time I've ever truly altered my consciousness. I've never smoked, never gotten drunk, nothing. The extent of my drug use has been the one time I took a few Percocet and that's it.
I've always wanted to try psychedelics, particularly the infamous LSD. I don't know what it is. A desire to understand? The wanna-be hippie in me wishing to relive the glory days I never actually had? Who knows. I experimented with morning glory seeds once and got nowhere, as I had way too small a dose (100 seeds.) Anyway, I was delighted to find out that there was someone who may sell some to me, although I strongly doubted that it was legit. It was sold to me as acid but I knew it was most likely 25i. I can't be 100 percent sure, as it did taste strong but also glowed under UV despite the paper not being white. No matter, I thought, the dosage was small enough that it should be safe and I was ready for this. I got two tabs, one for myself and one for my brother, and waited for an opportune afternoon when we had the house to ourselves.
The tiny little bits of paper were deceptively hard to cut, and sawing away at them was leaving permanent marks in my desk. "Goddamnit! Here, here's one half, I think that's a half..." We were starting small. I figured the half would take us only to the edge of a trip, and so prepared the other hit in a similarly haphazard fashion.
"What now?"
"Put it in your mouth but don't swallow it or anything. Like under your lip..."
Too late. My brother was already taking the classic "tab on the tongue" selfies that I had thought about joining in on, but immediately rejected after getting a strong metallic-y taste in my spit, wanting to avoid numbing if it was 25i.
"This is really anti-climactic."
"Yeah. It doesn't come on for a while, like it could take an hour, so."
"Ah."
I was wrong. It had to only have been 15-20 minutes of shooting the shit later when I realized I couldn't type anything into google. I thought I was just distracted by the conversation at first until I went to grab a tissue and almost fell over. "I think I might feel kind of lightheaded," said my brother. "But it's really subtle." Subtle?! It was hitting me like a brick wall. I felt as if I had a sinus infection, but with none of the unpleasantness. Just an extremely strange, heavy-headed feel. It was coming on way too fast, way too intense. "I feel lightheaded too. But really really strong. Oh god.." Had I taken too much? It had come out of nowhere. "I'm swallowing it, right now. It's too strong."
"Are you freaking out? Calm down, you're allright."
"No I'm okay, I just wasn't expecting that. At all."
"You'll be alright."
"Yeah."
Suddenly it felt as if water had gotten stuck in my ears. My own voice sounded detached like I was hearing it muffled through a layer of something. I was mid sentence when I noticed it. "Do you want to go downstairs?" I could barely hear my own voice, though everything else was clear. We got up to migrate.
I made it to the kitchen where there was food I had gotten, thinking snacking would be an option. Please. I took one bite of a cookie before it seemed to turn to tasteless chalk in my mouth and seemed like I was chewing really far off to the left of my being. I shook my head at the strange experience, I throwing the rest of the cookie down into the pizza box with a loud "NOPE." Things were building quickly. "Let's watch TV. Oh there's Star Trek, that's trippy right?"
I wasn't paying attention, too distracted by the realization that my living room was now slanted to one side and someone was flicking the lights. Every once in a while I would pick up some particularly "trippy" line from Star Trek which would stick out to me, which I thought was hilarious. I wanted to say something about my rapidly changing perceptions, but I was nervous. I was worried that my brother wasn't on the same level and that they would be freaked out. So I kept quiet.
We sat for a while, the tv playing in the background of everything going on. Somewhere after the first visuals had started I noticed the patterns. They were EVERYWHERE. Particularly they played across things with little asymmetrical particles, like the threads of a carpet or the Formica of the kitchen countertops. Animal faces could be seen in the Formica as well at points. Things with texture seemed to be more noticeable than anything else in the room, and looked exactly how pictures of some computer generated fractals look online. These got more intense to the point where they hung on the walls, in midair, anywhere. If I looked at it and noticed it it would change and bend in on itself and reveal that it too was just made of more fractals. What these patterns appeared to be made of was similar to the heat you see coming off of a hot street during summer. They weren't particularly colorful but they were infinitely detailed, all fitting together in a perfect geometrical pattern. My sense of self was off and if I bent my arm a certain way it felt as if it too had become part of a spiral fractal, as if my being had meshed into the pattern for a moment. Everything was really very beautiful. There's no way to explain it properly, you just had to be there.
My mind was clearly blown and I had been unprepared for it after all the reports of 25i being a relatively clearheaded experience. That's not how it was at all. I was completely incapable of normal speech, starting a sentence talking about one thing and half-finishing on something completely different. I knew what I wanted to say in my head, but when I tried to get it out it came out as some sort of horrendously stereotypical tripping speech. I kept trying to explain that I now finally understood why drug people were so into tapestries and carpets and Alex Gray, but it would come out as "I understand it... Like I understand... Why... Patterns, man."
At one point I remember believing that I was in a completely different world, and had gotten there by using the half a tab as a ticket in. "None of these will be here in the morning," I told my brother, and being a bit down about knowing I would never be able to return to this strange world, until I realized that I still had a "ticket" left. Little did I know the after effects of this crazy fractal-land would stick around for quite awhile after the drug had worn off.
Time was hugely different. Minutes could feel like hours or seconds, and this fluctuated constantly. "I'm going to the bathroom" said my brother. "If I'm not back in 300 years call the ambulance." Time in general had lost all meaning to me. I remember at one point trying to calculate how long we had been under and how long we had left on a calculator by subtracting 2:30 from 11:00. Didn't get too far with that. I didn't get too far with anything I tried to accomplish, actually. My thoughts were moving way too fast for me to speak them or act upon them. I would think "I need to go get some water", get up, and then 1000 thoughts and 3 seconds later sit down again having completely forgotten what I wanted to do in the first place. My mother had left us with a singular task, to clean the dishes. I realized this hours into it with a jolt. "SHIT I need to clean the things... The.. Uh.. Hold on I lost it." 15 minutes later would remember and get up to go do them, forget, and start over again. It was as if I had the most severe case of ADD on the planet. In addition, every time I did leave the living room to attempt to do something, I had this sense of adventure. It was as if getting a pen and paper was a complete journey and I could feel the "storyline" play out through the beginning to the end, with me as the main character. I had some clear, important goal on every quest, and every footstep was like a victorious battle or achievement. If just leaving the room made me feel like this I cannot imagine how going on an actual adventure with this stuff would be, though I can reckon it would be fantastic. I was dying to go out into the woods as it probably would have felt like I was in a storybook but it was 3 in the morning. We did go out to my driveway, however.
I had thought that certain things would appear super amazing looking under the influence. One of those things were the Christmas lights out on my lawn. "They look normal. Like really, really normal." Indeed they seemed to be the only things that hadn't changed, while the grass around the driveway writhed with freakish life. everything I had expected to be super "trippy" appeared completely unchanged to me. My brother had some colored lights, and I remember saying "look at these stupid lights. It's so boring looking compared to the rest of it. Haha! Stupid lights." The drug was playing with my mind, flipping all of my expectations over into their opposites. It was wild.
At some point my brother decided to take the other half of his tab. After a particularly stumbly effort up the stairs, I made it to my room. He reminded me repetitively of what we were supposed to be doing, and I somehow managed to locate the book and toss it on the desk. "You put it in THIS book?! Oh my god! Hahahaha!"
I had thought it clever in the weeks before to hide it on page 25 of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. "It would take mom 5 minutes to find this if she was looking!" The ridiculousness of it got to me as well and we spent far too long laughing over the whole thing.
There was never a moment in the first 4 hours where I thought it could have even been possible to have a bad trip. There was this prevailing urge to take nothing seriously, and the giddiness of the whole experience overrode any negative thoughts. Although everything seemed very out of place and strange and different with my physical body, the "body high" was present, which was just kind of like the feeling you get after you finally let go of something heavy, a pronouncedly relaxed feeling in my muscles. In addition there was just the novelty of being "so fucked up, maaaan." At times the happiness was almost overwhelming. I remember watching the stripes on a pillow moving to the beat of some music coming from the TV and feeling like I was glowing with happiness. What were these people talking about, I thought. Negativity wasn't even a concept I understood anymore really. I thought I remembered having experienced it at some point in my life, but that seemed so far away.
Things reached their peak when I began to lose my grips with reality a little, however. I was maybe 4 hours in. It started with not remembering if I had taken the second half of my own tab. When my brother had offered I had said no, there was no way I could handle it, I had had enough. "Hey, I can't remember, I didn't take that second half, did I? Please tell me."
"Nah, it's still there."
"Okay. This is.. I don't know."
The room was changing. Every time I noticed it, it felt as if I had been moved to a completely different room in a completely different house with a completely different person. It would completely change shape, color, and feel. And it was happening every 5 seconds. I didn't remember what the original room had been. Did that room even exist anymore? That room, that brother, my old self? What was my name again? Who was I, even? I could barely remember myself, my family. I was losing it, losing it, but it didn't feel like insanity. It just felt like traveling. This is why they called it tripping?
Slowly, the realities seemed to last longer and longer each time, until there was once again just one room, one brother, one me. Still patterned, moving, and generally alive, but singular. I was exhausted. It felt like my whole being was taking a deep breath after the chaos that had occured. "Hey, do you want to go to bed? I want to sleep, maybe."
"Sure yeah, sleep is a good idea."
"Okay."
I threw on what I could find and tried to fall into sleep. Hah. Not likely. The darkness was full of fractals. They were almost becoming irritating. "Think of memories", I thought. "There can't be any fractals back in your memories." But there were. My brain had woven them into the grass and trees and everything from years ago in the same perfect way that they appeared in front of my eyes. "That's amazing", I thought. "And annoying..."
Sleep wasn't an option, but music was. I had been clutching my iPod and cat the entire night and kept yelling about how they were "VERY GROUNDING", but hadn't actually been listening. Now in the dark I put on some Pink Floyd. Yeah, I know, real typical. But they've had a hugely significant impact on my life and are very very familiar to me, and I had always said they would be the first music I would listen to when I finally got the opportunity to trip. Oh. My. God. Those songs that I knew so well did sound like the songs that they were, but at the same time completely different and amazingly clear. Not only could I distinguish every instrument, something I occasionally get frustrated with, I could tell what PART of each instrument was being used. The drum tips tapping the metal sides of the drum in Echoes. All the individual guitar notes in Shine on you Crazy Diamond. I put the iPod on shuffle and listened to whatever songs came on by whatever bands, and they were all the same. I felt like I finally understood on some deep level what all those lyrics meant. They stuck out to me like they never had before and I felt like they were speaking straight to me. It was absolutely incredible. I had never heard music like that before, and again, it's something I can only barely begin to describe.
At this point, my emotions felt very vulnerable. I could either be delighted one moment or horribly empty the next. The initial almost superficial "rush" of whatever had ended, leaving me in an introspective place. This is where I could have easily had a bad trip. As the music played in the background, I thought about a lot of things, what i wanted in life, and realized that the people who had that or already had that weren't satisfied themselves, that we are all looking for something we can never reach and that I'd never truly connect to anybody else in the world. It was really quite sad and left me feeling terribly lonely, but made a lot of sense at the time. I hadn't expected those kind of thoughts. But minutes later my bro started chatting from across the room, and the loneliness that I felt completely disappeared.
Neither of us could sleep so we got up and made tea. It had been 9 hours exactly since dosing. I felt kind of pleasantly tired, and was glad to see that my basic functions were returning. Although the fractals and other visuals were still slightly present they had faded to being almost normal. We drank our tea and chatted and I realized frustratedly that I still was having trouble talking. I was concerned that I wouldn't have returned to normal by the time my parents returned. After we finished the tea we returned to my room, where we both did manage to catch about 5 hours of sleep. About 15 minutes after waking up my parents rolled into the driveway. The trip was clearly over but some after-effects still hung around, markedly my difficulties with forming sentences.
"You're fine. You think you sound strange but you don't, trust me."
"I can't talk to them right now.."
"Just say hello and leave."
My brother, who seemed completely sober at that point, handled most of the talking. I tried to hold some basic level of conversation before making an excuse about having to go walk the dog and escaped outside. Wow. I immediately regretted not having tripped during the day, outside. Everything looked so sharp. Colors had not been all that bright during the previous night, but were now much more deep and real looking. My senses were also super heightened, I felt I could hear anything around for miles. It was really almost overwhelming, I felt like there were thousands of things to look at.
The rest of the day was spent recuperating in my room. I felt no negative health effects at all, contrary to what I had heard. Tired, yes, and maybe a bit "whoa" still, but no crappiness as I had expected. I actually felt almost refreshed. My brother, however, did report feeling feverish and some headaches. Although I felt normal enough and regained the ability to speak normally after a day or two, I noticed that something had never quite ended after the trip. It started with seeing plumes of smoke emanate from strange places out of the corner of my vision, extremely vivid colors, and a feeling that I understood or noticed light and the reflections of light more. Also, what I hadn't known was called visual snow at the time blanketed my vision. Uh oh. I gave it a week before becoming concerned, and learned that I may have some of the symptoms of HPPD. Even 3 and a half weeks later, I still see this snow and some tracers following moving objects. I'm not sure if this will ever completely disappear, but it has faded quite significantly. At this point I can accept what is left and move on.
Nothing had ended up as I had expected. All of my visual effects had appeared very geometrical, rather than the flowing organic shapes I had expected. The few things I had strongly suspected would look crazy amazing while tripping appeared no different than they did on any other day. I was glad to have my brother there. While I do feel I could have gotten really "into" the music and what I was seeing and thinking about if I hadn't felt I needed to chat to break the silence or worry if he was bored or not, I also am pretty sure I could have totally lost all grip on reality and things could have gone very badly. I find it strange how only half a tab seemed to affect me in such an extreme way. Perhaps I have a naturally low tolerance to psychedelics, which is something to keep in mind. My brother took a whole tab and still reportedly felt sober enough to be around people, so it was clear we experienced very different things. I figure that I will use the other half of the tab at some point split into two quarter-tab doses (Even the half was a bit strong for me, I wasn't ready for it.) It does bother me a little that I do not know exactly what I took. Still, it was all around a great experience in every way. Now I get where Persian carpets come from.
(Tl;dr, Took half a tab of either 25i or LSD and sat in 1000 different living rooms, couldn't talk, everything is fractals.)
I'll start this off by saying that this was the first time I've ever truly altered my consciousness. I've never smoked, never gotten drunk, nothing. The extent of my drug use has been the one time I took a few Percocet and that's it.
I've always wanted to try psychedelics, particularly the infamous LSD. I don't know what it is. A desire to understand? The wanna-be hippie in me wishing to relive the glory days I never actually had? Who knows. I experimented with morning glory seeds once and got nowhere, as I had way too small a dose (100 seeds.) Anyway, I was delighted to find out that there was someone who may sell some to me, although I strongly doubted that it was legit. It was sold to me as acid but I knew it was most likely 25i. I can't be 100 percent sure, as it did taste strong but also glowed under UV despite the paper not being white. No matter, I thought, the dosage was small enough that it should be safe and I was ready for this. I got two tabs, one for myself and one for my brother, and waited for an opportune afternoon when we had the house to ourselves.
The tiny little bits of paper were deceptively hard to cut, and sawing away at them was leaving permanent marks in my desk. "Goddamnit! Here, here's one half, I think that's a half..." We were starting small. I figured the half would take us only to the edge of a trip, and so prepared the other hit in a similarly haphazard fashion.
"What now?"
"Put it in your mouth but don't swallow it or anything. Like under your lip..."
Too late. My brother was already taking the classic "tab on the tongue" selfies that I had thought about joining in on, but immediately rejected after getting a strong metallic-y taste in my spit, wanting to avoid numbing if it was 25i.
"This is really anti-climactic."
"Yeah. It doesn't come on for a while, like it could take an hour, so."
"Ah."
I was wrong. It had to only have been 15-20 minutes of shooting the shit later when I realized I couldn't type anything into google. I thought I was just distracted by the conversation at first until I went to grab a tissue and almost fell over. "I think I might feel kind of lightheaded," said my brother. "But it's really subtle." Subtle?! It was hitting me like a brick wall. I felt as if I had a sinus infection, but with none of the unpleasantness. Just an extremely strange, heavy-headed feel. It was coming on way too fast, way too intense. "I feel lightheaded too. But really really strong. Oh god.." Had I taken too much? It had come out of nowhere. "I'm swallowing it, right now. It's too strong."
"Are you freaking out? Calm down, you're allright."
"No I'm okay, I just wasn't expecting that. At all."
"You'll be alright."
"Yeah."
Suddenly it felt as if water had gotten stuck in my ears. My own voice sounded detached like I was hearing it muffled through a layer of something. I was mid sentence when I noticed it. "Do you want to go downstairs?" I could barely hear my own voice, though everything else was clear. We got up to migrate.
I made it to the kitchen where there was food I had gotten, thinking snacking would be an option. Please. I took one bite of a cookie before it seemed to turn to tasteless chalk in my mouth and seemed like I was chewing really far off to the left of my being. I shook my head at the strange experience, I throwing the rest of the cookie down into the pizza box with a loud "NOPE." Things were building quickly. "Let's watch TV. Oh there's Star Trek, that's trippy right?"
I wasn't paying attention, too distracted by the realization that my living room was now slanted to one side and someone was flicking the lights. Every once in a while I would pick up some particularly "trippy" line from Star Trek which would stick out to me, which I thought was hilarious. I wanted to say something about my rapidly changing perceptions, but I was nervous. I was worried that my brother wasn't on the same level and that they would be freaked out. So I kept quiet.
We sat for a while, the tv playing in the background of everything going on. Somewhere after the first visuals had started I noticed the patterns. They were EVERYWHERE. Particularly they played across things with little asymmetrical particles, like the threads of a carpet or the Formica of the kitchen countertops. Animal faces could be seen in the Formica as well at points. Things with texture seemed to be more noticeable than anything else in the room, and looked exactly how pictures of some computer generated fractals look online. These got more intense to the point where they hung on the walls, in midair, anywhere. If I looked at it and noticed it it would change and bend in on itself and reveal that it too was just made of more fractals. What these patterns appeared to be made of was similar to the heat you see coming off of a hot street during summer. They weren't particularly colorful but they were infinitely detailed, all fitting together in a perfect geometrical pattern. My sense of self was off and if I bent my arm a certain way it felt as if it too had become part of a spiral fractal, as if my being had meshed into the pattern for a moment. Everything was really very beautiful. There's no way to explain it properly, you just had to be there.
My mind was clearly blown and I had been unprepared for it after all the reports of 25i being a relatively clearheaded experience. That's not how it was at all. I was completely incapable of normal speech, starting a sentence talking about one thing and half-finishing on something completely different. I knew what I wanted to say in my head, but when I tried to get it out it came out as some sort of horrendously stereotypical tripping speech. I kept trying to explain that I now finally understood why drug people were so into tapestries and carpets and Alex Gray, but it would come out as "I understand it... Like I understand... Why... Patterns, man."
At one point I remember believing that I was in a completely different world, and had gotten there by using the half a tab as a ticket in. "None of these will be here in the morning," I told my brother, and being a bit down about knowing I would never be able to return to this strange world, until I realized that I still had a "ticket" left. Little did I know the after effects of this crazy fractal-land would stick around for quite awhile after the drug had worn off.
Time was hugely different. Minutes could feel like hours or seconds, and this fluctuated constantly. "I'm going to the bathroom" said my brother. "If I'm not back in 300 years call the ambulance." Time in general had lost all meaning to me. I remember at one point trying to calculate how long we had been under and how long we had left on a calculator by subtracting 2:30 from 11:00. Didn't get too far with that. I didn't get too far with anything I tried to accomplish, actually. My thoughts were moving way too fast for me to speak them or act upon them. I would think "I need to go get some water", get up, and then 1000 thoughts and 3 seconds later sit down again having completely forgotten what I wanted to do in the first place. My mother had left us with a singular task, to clean the dishes. I realized this hours into it with a jolt. "SHIT I need to clean the things... The.. Uh.. Hold on I lost it." 15 minutes later would remember and get up to go do them, forget, and start over again. It was as if I had the most severe case of ADD on the planet. In addition, every time I did leave the living room to attempt to do something, I had this sense of adventure. It was as if getting a pen and paper was a complete journey and I could feel the "storyline" play out through the beginning to the end, with me as the main character. I had some clear, important goal on every quest, and every footstep was like a victorious battle or achievement. If just leaving the room made me feel like this I cannot imagine how going on an actual adventure with this stuff would be, though I can reckon it would be fantastic. I was dying to go out into the woods as it probably would have felt like I was in a storybook but it was 3 in the morning. We did go out to my driveway, however.
I had thought that certain things would appear super amazing looking under the influence. One of those things were the Christmas lights out on my lawn. "They look normal. Like really, really normal." Indeed they seemed to be the only things that hadn't changed, while the grass around the driveway writhed with freakish life. everything I had expected to be super "trippy" appeared completely unchanged to me. My brother had some colored lights, and I remember saying "look at these stupid lights. It's so boring looking compared to the rest of it. Haha! Stupid lights." The drug was playing with my mind, flipping all of my expectations over into their opposites. It was wild.
At some point my brother decided to take the other half of his tab. After a particularly stumbly effort up the stairs, I made it to my room. He reminded me repetitively of what we were supposed to be doing, and I somehow managed to locate the book and toss it on the desk. "You put it in THIS book?! Oh my god! Hahahaha!"
I had thought it clever in the weeks before to hide it on page 25 of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. "It would take mom 5 minutes to find this if she was looking!" The ridiculousness of it got to me as well and we spent far too long laughing over the whole thing.
There was never a moment in the first 4 hours where I thought it could have even been possible to have a bad trip. There was this prevailing urge to take nothing seriously, and the giddiness of the whole experience overrode any negative thoughts. Although everything seemed very out of place and strange and different with my physical body, the "body high" was present, which was just kind of like the feeling you get after you finally let go of something heavy, a pronouncedly relaxed feeling in my muscles. In addition there was just the novelty of being "so fucked up, maaaan." At times the happiness was almost overwhelming. I remember watching the stripes on a pillow moving to the beat of some music coming from the TV and feeling like I was glowing with happiness. What were these people talking about, I thought. Negativity wasn't even a concept I understood anymore really. I thought I remembered having experienced it at some point in my life, but that seemed so far away.
Things reached their peak when I began to lose my grips with reality a little, however. I was maybe 4 hours in. It started with not remembering if I had taken the second half of my own tab. When my brother had offered I had said no, there was no way I could handle it, I had had enough. "Hey, I can't remember, I didn't take that second half, did I? Please tell me."
"Nah, it's still there."
"Okay. This is.. I don't know."
The room was changing. Every time I noticed it, it felt as if I had been moved to a completely different room in a completely different house with a completely different person. It would completely change shape, color, and feel. And it was happening every 5 seconds. I didn't remember what the original room had been. Did that room even exist anymore? That room, that brother, my old self? What was my name again? Who was I, even? I could barely remember myself, my family. I was losing it, losing it, but it didn't feel like insanity. It just felt like traveling. This is why they called it tripping?
Slowly, the realities seemed to last longer and longer each time, until there was once again just one room, one brother, one me. Still patterned, moving, and generally alive, but singular. I was exhausted. It felt like my whole being was taking a deep breath after the chaos that had occured. "Hey, do you want to go to bed? I want to sleep, maybe."
"Sure yeah, sleep is a good idea."
"Okay."
I threw on what I could find and tried to fall into sleep. Hah. Not likely. The darkness was full of fractals. They were almost becoming irritating. "Think of memories", I thought. "There can't be any fractals back in your memories." But there were. My brain had woven them into the grass and trees and everything from years ago in the same perfect way that they appeared in front of my eyes. "That's amazing", I thought. "And annoying..."
Sleep wasn't an option, but music was. I had been clutching my iPod and cat the entire night and kept yelling about how they were "VERY GROUNDING", but hadn't actually been listening. Now in the dark I put on some Pink Floyd. Yeah, I know, real typical. But they've had a hugely significant impact on my life and are very very familiar to me, and I had always said they would be the first music I would listen to when I finally got the opportunity to trip. Oh. My. God. Those songs that I knew so well did sound like the songs that they were, but at the same time completely different and amazingly clear. Not only could I distinguish every instrument, something I occasionally get frustrated with, I could tell what PART of each instrument was being used. The drum tips tapping the metal sides of the drum in Echoes. All the individual guitar notes in Shine on you Crazy Diamond. I put the iPod on shuffle and listened to whatever songs came on by whatever bands, and they were all the same. I felt like I finally understood on some deep level what all those lyrics meant. They stuck out to me like they never had before and I felt like they were speaking straight to me. It was absolutely incredible. I had never heard music like that before, and again, it's something I can only barely begin to describe.
At this point, my emotions felt very vulnerable. I could either be delighted one moment or horribly empty the next. The initial almost superficial "rush" of whatever had ended, leaving me in an introspective place. This is where I could have easily had a bad trip. As the music played in the background, I thought about a lot of things, what i wanted in life, and realized that the people who had that or already had that weren't satisfied themselves, that we are all looking for something we can never reach and that I'd never truly connect to anybody else in the world. It was really quite sad and left me feeling terribly lonely, but made a lot of sense at the time. I hadn't expected those kind of thoughts. But minutes later my bro started chatting from across the room, and the loneliness that I felt completely disappeared.
Neither of us could sleep so we got up and made tea. It had been 9 hours exactly since dosing. I felt kind of pleasantly tired, and was glad to see that my basic functions were returning. Although the fractals and other visuals were still slightly present they had faded to being almost normal. We drank our tea and chatted and I realized frustratedly that I still was having trouble talking. I was concerned that I wouldn't have returned to normal by the time my parents returned. After we finished the tea we returned to my room, where we both did manage to catch about 5 hours of sleep. About 15 minutes after waking up my parents rolled into the driveway. The trip was clearly over but some after-effects still hung around, markedly my difficulties with forming sentences.
"You're fine. You think you sound strange but you don't, trust me."
"I can't talk to them right now.."
"Just say hello and leave."
My brother, who seemed completely sober at that point, handled most of the talking. I tried to hold some basic level of conversation before making an excuse about having to go walk the dog and escaped outside. Wow. I immediately regretted not having tripped during the day, outside. Everything looked so sharp. Colors had not been all that bright during the previous night, but were now much more deep and real looking. My senses were also super heightened, I felt I could hear anything around for miles. It was really almost overwhelming, I felt like there were thousands of things to look at.
The rest of the day was spent recuperating in my room. I felt no negative health effects at all, contrary to what I had heard. Tired, yes, and maybe a bit "whoa" still, but no crappiness as I had expected. I actually felt almost refreshed. My brother, however, did report feeling feverish and some headaches. Although I felt normal enough and regained the ability to speak normally after a day or two, I noticed that something had never quite ended after the trip. It started with seeing plumes of smoke emanate from strange places out of the corner of my vision, extremely vivid colors, and a feeling that I understood or noticed light and the reflections of light more. Also, what I hadn't known was called visual snow at the time blanketed my vision. Uh oh. I gave it a week before becoming concerned, and learned that I may have some of the symptoms of HPPD. Even 3 and a half weeks later, I still see this snow and some tracers following moving objects. I'm not sure if this will ever completely disappear, but it has faded quite significantly. At this point I can accept what is left and move on.
Nothing had ended up as I had expected. All of my visual effects had appeared very geometrical, rather than the flowing organic shapes I had expected. The few things I had strongly suspected would look crazy amazing while tripping appeared no different than they did on any other day. I was glad to have my brother there. While I do feel I could have gotten really "into" the music and what I was seeing and thinking about if I hadn't felt I needed to chat to break the silence or worry if he was bored or not, I also am pretty sure I could have totally lost all grip on reality and things could have gone very badly. I find it strange how only half a tab seemed to affect me in such an extreme way. Perhaps I have a naturally low tolerance to psychedelics, which is something to keep in mind. My brother took a whole tab and still reportedly felt sober enough to be around people, so it was clear we experienced very different things. I figure that I will use the other half of the tab at some point split into two quarter-tab doses (Even the half was a bit strong for me, I wasn't ready for it.) It does bother me a little that I do not know exactly what I took. Still, it was all around a great experience in every way. Now I get where Persian carpets come from.
