ErgotFiend
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Aug 11, 2022
- Messages
- 54
Background:
Not having access to an analytic scale, coupled with traveling a lot is a recipe for spoiled volumetric liquid doses. Specifically, when I got my hands on 250 milligrams of 4-ACO-DMT I excitedly dissolved it in 100 milliliters of water. This was not the first time I had done this, not by a long shot. Twice now, in the past, the water had gotten “moldy” or something, as it would turn black and goopy after a few months. Adding alcohol hadn’t worked, so this time I thought I would turn down the PH and up the salinity. Lemon juice and salt! This time, I thought, I had cracked the code and wouldn’t need to refrigerate, or freeze my solution and could instead just leave it in my closet. This time long term storage felt like a must because the powder I had received was clearly more than I ordered and was white and pure like no one's business. The first trip I had on the stuff, at only around 30 milligrams blew me away with an unexpected ego-death. This stuff had to last, it was too pure and strong.
So, imagine my abject horror upon discovering the solution had once again turned black and goopy, this time after a few months. I still had more than 75 milligrams left. I was bummed. This is why non-chemists, or otherwise dumb people like me, struggle with the dosing side of psychedelics.
My 4-ACO-DMT solutions had turned black so many times at this point that my girlfriend and I had started calling it the, “Black Sarcophagus Liquid.” I wanted to drink it, drink it all! I really wanted a high dose psychedelic experience, and with my magic mushrooms still only in spawn jars, this was my only option. I only ask that I receive no mockery on this post for my decision. I know drinking mold is a great way to get sick from mycotoxins, but I am juvenescent and this was only a LITTLE bit of black mold. Everyone knows a little bit of anything is safe.
Expecting a post-heroic dose level experience, I prepared with meditation for an entire week in advance. As always, I planned to take salvia the night before to perform diagnostics on my headspace and reveal any hidden fears or self-deception. On Saturday I was going to dose and writhe around in bed for a good 6 hours. Solid plan; let's see how execution went.
The Trip:
It was the night before my big trip. I loaded my pipe with a smidge of Salvia 80x. I use a machine to smoke salvia (yes the beer bottle with a hole and steel wool). It works well enough for my taste and I only use salvia every couple of months. I like to start with a threshold dose on salvia. I hit the pipe and held the smoke in. I suddenly remember what this stuff feels like. So familiar yet indescribable to someone sober. My ego feels like it’s been partitioned more than usual. The salvia compulsive redosing hits. This light dose feels mildly euphoric. I, without any hesitation, load up and hit a larger hit. I lay back. My inner dialogue becomes less aware of the fact it’s me. Am I thinking or am I entertaining someone? I speak like someone’s listening in. I am hit with a sudden distinctive feeling of reality being only a facade of impossibly complex, vibrantly colorful machinery. Sally-space begins to appear. It’s shuffling through a sequence of blocks representing different states of consciousness and we are progressing through them. Someone on the right was entering this process with me and we were talking about it. I think about that, and it makes no sense. I remember I am one, but can’t help but split up over and over. The group of voices and I are taking turns speaking words, but none of our sentences have enough meaning to constitute sentences. The blocks are seen as houses now and these beings live in them. I realize the absurdity of the situation and as such, the pinwheel becomes very noticeable. I tell myself that all is well and I want to feel happy. Reality is now orbiting a center like a fair ride and with great speed. I exist above the rotation, feeling its intense centripetal force on my body. I then shift below to an area of less intensity with the blocks still very much on my mind. This dialogue is scripted out. One character is really cool and is saying some edgy, but smart stuff. He’s talking about the futility of life and how much I should just give up. I take on his role, reading out the lines as they come to me. They feel great to say, until the one we are interrogating responds, “I love you, I want to feel happy, that’s why I’m doing this.” I am suddenly aware of an intense dilemma. The pleasure of being negative in the short term is great, but the more I do it, the more painful and intense the trip becomes. If I say the usual, “I do things because they make me happy,” I feel almost bored, but it staves off the negative side effects of the salvia. I open my eyes feeling more stoned by the drug than usual.
I loaded up the pipe again, convinced my experience was still only threshold. I was clearly pretending to feel effects. Maybe a bit more plant matter this time. I take the hit. The smoke is more painful than usual. Once it’s in my lungs though, the pain disappears. I feel an immediate increase in my lethargy and the force of gravity. I lay back. Lots of chatter. I am concerned when the smoke gets released by him so early. I figure that maybe in my ego-fragmented state maybe some part of me timed it correctly, at least that’s what I tell myself to stay calm. I travel forward on a rail. To my right are machines and geometry of incredible complexity. Though when I try to analyze them, things get a bit scary again, I do well enough just riding the wave.
I think about playgrounds. I ask myself to construct one. I ask what I would do to make one. As I put forward ideas the playground builds itself in front of my very eyes. I imagine a playground resembling the gameworld of q-bert. I place spires and slides and watch as children run around on it. I imagine a tall tower with a claustrophobic interior. I get lost in scenarios of kids getting stuck in the tower from bullies blocking their egress. Or perhaps the opposite, bullies could block the entrance and keep the tower for themselves. This worries me, but I assure myself the playground I am constructing is of such great magnitude that there would be plenty of attractions to focus on instead. I look back and forth to the left and right in a periodic fashion, getting lost in thoughts of similar nature. Memories of conversations between my personalities are intermixed in with no clear chronology. Each time it seems, my more positive self is constantly staving of criticism coming from a barrage of borderline incoherent negativity. I think hope is winning the fight pretty handily. This comes as no shock, the fundamental truth of reality is that things are pretty great under the right conditions. These were those conditions, I was in a safe environment and sally-space was just fascinating. The experience grows in warmth, perhaps reaching the happiest I’ve felt on salvia. I watch as a bird flies through Riemanian branches on my(?) complex plane. My reality flows like a river of lava and the aviator takes many daring dives, weaving through it all. Salvia is like an extreme sport. It’s hard to do successfully and the risk is high, but when you do, the complexity and depth of the experience is beautiful. It feels like I’m doing a backflip in skis right now! I feel a pull towards the top left, I watch a pair of footsteps walk towards it. The beings around me wanted life, they encouraged me to get my DMT out and give them color. I seriously considered it, this felt pretty great. My anti-hedonist nature intervenes though. “Wait until tomorrow, you’ll get the psychedelia you are after then.” I obliged. I relax into my bed. I feel like I am in a dome. Above me is a projection of my neurons. I feel them running normally until all of a sudden they all stop. They get clogged on something. I am convinced I am actively feeling the dopamine suppressing effects of the salvia. My sober self reminds me of the unlikelihood I could physically feel my neurons reacting to a shortage of dopamine. I take deep breaths, this one thought caused me an unexpected amount of fear. However, it gives me a chance to realize something important - that my anxiety is entirely self-fulfilling.
I open my eyes and ponder the salvia to my right. Should I go up once more? I’m leaning towards yes. I want to go the full mile, I want to have a breakthrough. I want to have the strongest experience I’ve ever had, I’m ready. I understand that there is no secret to having a good time. The fear I feel is only a fear of fear itself. I am only concerned that I will get so scared that the salvia will go south. The solution is obvious. Love. Whenever fear comes, comfort it with love. It’s okay to feel pain and negativity, but it’s your choice whether or not you incubate it by allowing it passage on your train of thought. I load up a quarter gram or more. I take it with confidence, ready to have my mind blown. I am ready for the neverending barrage of negativity that you must ward off on salvia. It will be worth it.
I take the hit and the pain is severe. I barely choke down the whole thing. I hold it in and lay down. I want to entertain myself, I need to stay calm. My ego has now been stretched to infinity on a hyperbolic surface and I view a Poincare disk projection of this. In effect, it feels as though my consciousness is a circle of infinite circumference. At its very peak, two of me point toward the octopus in the center. “Look at it! It’s funny.” I’m playing pretend at first. “Tell me what you like about it,” I say to myself. I start to think I’m on a game show. The realization of the absurdity of the situation hits and I feel panic. This is a lot. I don’t say that out loud though. Fine let’s talk about the octo- Suddenly things are too buzzy to think. In fact, the salvia hits me with the force of a bullet train. No words anymore. The circle representing my ego contorts to form a view of a doorway from its side. It pulls back with bright light to form the contents of a room like a camera on a long exposure. The room exists now without the ellipsoid required to illuminate it. Instead the circle of color moves very slowly. In a band. I perceive the room. It is covered in a strip of floral wallpaper. There are raised alcoves I would love to access and hide in. Like a child finding a secluded spot on a playground. I would love to watch the action happening below. This sequence of thoughts is one element of the set (of infinite cardinality) of thoughts, of which are occurring simultaneously as I watch this all unfold. I can choose plenty of other thoughts now, but at the time, there was no ego in place to interpret what any of this meant. The thoughts accumulated into a feeling of pure nostalgia so vivid that nothing can compare. I assumed I was at the church from my childhood, we had a wing just like this where the kids would play. The architect of this insanity is talking to me. Our dialogue was nothing but peaks and troughs of this universal language of buzzing. In summary they were asking if I liked it. The flowers on the walls dance wildly and are alive. I say yes to be nice. I want to be polite, but the madness and intensity scares me.
The band of color from before begins to move faster. The doorway is of great focus. The band is rotating in three dimensions revealing new perspectives to the room. It periodically SHOOTS towards me. Each time we enter a new room, having just gone through the doorway of the last. I am in awe at the beauty and vividity around me. Each room is a different color. I swear we cycled through the entire rainbow. Music plays loudly, a passage from a Scriabin piece that doesn’t exist loops endlessly. Each time we enter a new doorway some level of awareness returns. Vague notions of being a human and having desires start to show up. After some time the laser light show of bands of colors and doorways unravels itself back into the more expansive sally space. One of the architect’s minions is talking to us. We are in a room with a spiral on the wall. He’s a bit rowdy to say the least. We talk for some time but nothing is said. Eventually things reach a breaking point and he’s ready to do his thing. The room unfolds to reveal the top of a mountain. Me and some other person run away from him as he equips a paint roller. It’s huge. He creates a trail of carpet over the surface of the mountain. I watch him flatten the other person that listened to his spiel. I laugh at them, but then realize I am about to get flattened too! I knew this shit was coming, I had been burnt by lava on salvia before, never flattened, but it’s so common, it’s basically a rite of passage. Here it comes, give in and accept it. It happens. I feel a splotch of paint pour over me as my body squishes like play-doe. I sink into the abyss below. I sat there thinking, “well that was stereotypical, what’s next a zipper?” One appears in my vision only opening with a half-assed effort. I scoff at it. After some vague confusion, I find myself walking back up another mountain facing the opposite direction. I remark, “Oh, I’m on salvia, that makes sense.” I swear to god, if I get dementia I will spend the entire duration of it repeating that sentence. I open my eyes. I am immobile. The next 15 minutes is just me laying down trying to recuperate. The salvia is intense still, but incredibly mild compared to what came before. I experience similar psychological events to my second hit of the night. I survived, but I’ve been changed. I seriously contemplate if I should just be nice and loving at all times. Should I reinvent myself to be a constantly loving person, nice to everyone I meet? I am still seriously considering it. I thought I understood the importance of negative emotion, but this experience showed something else. Every step of the way, love saved me from oblivion. I know I need to wear my fundamental purpose close to my chest at all times. If I forget what I’m here to do, I’ll get tangled in a web of self-deception and petty drama. At some point I remark on my exhaustion, this salvia has been like a marathon and I’m about out of gas. A reminder to avoid negative thoughts serves the rest of my comedown until I am ambulatory again.
I got some pineapple to ward off the post-salvia melancholy. Surprisingly though, I felt sober maybe an hour after dosing. Usually, on lower doses, I don’t feel baseline until I sleep. Paradoxical Indeed. My girlfriend and I chat briefly before I go to bed, she’s busy. I love her, these experiences bring me closer to her. I am in a good mood.
The next day, I woke up and immediately went for a run. I want to clear my head. I get home, make a big breakfast and prepare my room. I take a small edible to loosen up my brain and increase the vividness of my visuals. I shower and meditate for an hour. The meditation was unexpectedly difficult. Meditating on cannabis is not easy when you know you’re about to trip balls. Trying to think rationally put me into thought loops. But, every time I gave in to the experience, I would come to, shocked that I even exist, experiencing a short ego-death. Serious whiplash. Finally, I figured out that thinking about jovial stuff like movies and people helped to pass the time and lowered my stress. The best strategy was to accept that I had made the choice to dose in a sober state, and all there was left to do now was enjoy myself. After about two hours of this silent meditation, the time came to dose.
I dug around in my drugs container, locating the Black Sarcophagus Liquid. I had tums, lemon juice, and ginger ready for the nausea. I threw back about 80% of the dose, too scared to get the last 20% down.
…
I am sorry, but this gets really disappointing. NOTHING HAPPENED. I mean, I felt something? I don’t really know. I got teary eyed at some point, and an hour in I drank the remaining 20%. I think the 4-ACO-DMT decomposed? I felt different than I did on just the weed. I think maybe some tryptamine might have been left over, maybe a sedative tryptamine? I felt really tired and basically layed down half asleep for 3 hours, before finally deciding to cut my losses. I just called my girlfriend for the rest of the day
(up until sleep) and had a fun time watching the Creator Clash 2. I effectively just drank black mold for no reason. I am physically well though, I feel fine.
So, I’m sorry to disappoint you. In fact, I’m disappointed, too. I am bummed, I put a lot of effort into prep work for this trip. Still, I want this weekend to be metacognitive - I’ve needed to think about myself for a while. So, for the sake of whoever may have gotten this far in the report and for my own benefit, I will write out my first ever trip story, and the nightmare that it was. It’s been nearly 5 years since.
My First Trip (the pool party):
I had been 16 for 6 months. I had tried acid twice up until this point. Both times were 75 micrograms or less. I enjoyed acid more than weed because it made me feel energetic and creative, but never anxious. My girlfriend (who I am still deeply in love with now) had been forcefully separated from me by her parents. They found out we were together, but didn’t want her dating until she was 16 (she was only 15 at the time). Their solution was completely blocking me on every one of her devices and holding severe punishment over her head if she ever got into contact with me.
I reacted impulsively when I learned her parents had found out about our affair and snuck out in the dead of night. I biked to her house and hopped her fence. I knocked on her window trying to get her attention. I wanted to give her the new discord account I had set up for her, with me as one of her friends. Nothing went as I intended. She woke up and heard my tapping and saw a flashlight. She thought I was a home-intruder. She got her dad and they called the police. Through sheer dumb luck, I coincidentally left only minutes before the cops arrived. Her dad apparently saw me through the window as I left, and was made only angrier to discover it was me he had called the cops on.
The whole summer I was a total wreck. I’m one of those kids with well off parents, who neglect you types. I think my dad was cheating on my mom at that time and was rarely at home. The largest interaction I had with him over the summer was the cops again being called because we were fighting so loudly. He beat me after. That was probably rock bottom. It didn’t help that I had switched schools due to behavioral problems and any time my parents saw me, all they wanted to talk about was how much I needed to get a job. I’m not claiming that my adolescence was anywhere near as awful as plenty of the people who are reading this, but I feel as though this context is necessary. I was suicidal for months, and I had already tried killing myself once in middle school. Psychedelics saved me. I was going down a dark path. None of this stuff happened in a vacuum, my worldview was in desperate need of a shake up.
The only skill I developed over that summer was learning how the drug world worked. I was fascinated with the youtuber PsychedSubstance, who acted as a surrogate father figure. I was obsessed with psychedelics and desperately wanted to try a large dose of anything as soon as possible. I was not the only person I knew who wanted to achieve this goal. I collaborated with Maxim, who’s a year older than me. He could drive already and acted as the de-facto leader of our friend group. Unfortunately, he was never the voice of reason, arguably the least mature out of all of us. I wanted to buy acid. To secure funds for this very illegal purchase I sold in-game items from Team Fortress 2 and Counter Strike. What a juxtaposition huh? To say the least, we were some very young people getting involved in very serious business.
The dealer claimed our drugs would arrive within the week, so we finally set a date for our group trip. Next friday. I remember the sadness I felt the night before when I checked my mailbox and found it empty. I told them. I told all 5 people that we would just have to stick to weed again. I had been looking forward to this for months. I got home from school the day of. I packed my bag. Minutes before my mom would drive me, I checked the mailbox again. I thought, “might as well check.” The package was waiting for me. I felt a rush of joy. I was ecstatic. I told everyone we were back on.
I arrived to find Maxim and Joe waiting for me. Joe was funny and unusual at the time. but later developed some mild form of schizophrenia. He wanted to go first. I busted out a tab for him, they were dosed (accurately) at 200 micrograms each. He ate it and we went for a swim. We three talked about youtube and memes as his dose kicked in. I was a bit nervous to try it myself and figured Joe would be a good guinea pig. I still remember how he got the first time. He looked wide eyed, like his mind had splayed open. After he said he felt it, he acted weird and aloof. He spoke in riddles and eluded to forces beyond our comprehension. Maxim and I studied him for a while in the pool before retreating back to the room. He sat at Maxim’s computer as we listened to music. He pointed at the screen. He said he saw entities. He felt “papa rhythm.” I was shocked, I had never heard of someone encountering entities on LSD. This only increased my excitement.
After maybe another hour of standard 16 year old boy discussions, Alex arrived. It was around 7 pm at this point and we were ready to embark on our journey. I ate 300 micrograms, Alex ate 100. We had only bought three tabs. I remember feeling that there was no way this paper could have any effect on me. I was prepared for mild effects. We all went out to the pool again.
We chatted and the water and weather were perfect. I closed my eyes repeatedly, hoping to see patterns behind my eyelids. Maxim was stoic. Alex and Joe had a bizarre dialogue that I wasn’t following. I wanted to be filled in. He asked Joe to tell me his joke. I hadn’t heard it. He said that the MP meter in a video game we played at the time stood for, “Mario Points.” All bets are off as to what exactly the joke is, but we found it hilarious. It was one of those jokes that are only funny when you are 16 and coming up on acid for the first time. Alex and I entered laughing fits so intense from simply repeating the joke that our chests hurt. It was contagious. I started to feel dreamy. I closed my eyes and saw the patterns I was looking for. Maxim’s face flowed vividly like a river. All the surfaces started to drift. His face morphed into cartoonish shapes. I was startled, but hyped. It was starting. We dried off, still giggling, and went to Maxims room to change. The carpet was covered in geometry so intense that I struggled to stand up right. Alex said it looked like swastikas, I saw hexagons. I got my turn in the bathroom, covering myself in feces by accident. I washed off using the bathtub’s faucet. I felt like a tick or a water balloon. Every pose I struck, I assumed by default to be that of some Francis Bacon painting. Everything felt incredibly familiar. I returned to the kitchen to eat the pizza that Maxim’s mom ordered. Alex didn’t want to eat the pizza, he felt it looked too alive. I ate between bouts of laughter. I felt fuzzy and as though I was sleeping while awake. Incredibly vivid colors were everywhere.
I blacked out, coming too sitting in Maxim’s bed. I was laughing so intensely that my body hurt. Joe, Alex, and I were fried. I was barely coherent enough to speak, Alex was my connection to the outside world. On the computer was a picture of the youtuber Ant Venom’s face. We were just pointing at it and laughing uncontrollably while repeating his name. It felt so good to laugh, it’s all I wanted to do. It felt wrong when I wasn’t. Justin, a super rich brat who liked to hang out with us commoners, just arrived and entered the room. Maxim pointed to us saying, “look how messed up they are.” I didn’t know how to respond. I had forgotten I was even on acid. I remembered, “oh yeah, this is the trip.”
The trip felt like an alternate reality, time moved incredibly slowly, but the whole thing had happened in an instant. I went outside in my robe. Thoughts of unity and interconnectedness were taking over and words began to lose all meaning. The garden Maxim’s mom planted was incredible. I lay on the concrete next to the pool. My entire vision was a kaleidoscope. I couldn’t discern the material world from geometry. The clear cutoff between surfaces was replaced by tessellation. Everything was covered in a repeating pattern stuck somewhere between the second and third dimension. It was so beautiful. Mosquitos buzzed around me weaving in and out of the hallucinations. I couldn’t tell if a hundred mosquitos encircled me or the same one was being reflected like a broken mirror. The whirling frequencies that my sense of sound had become didn’t help either. I accepted my fate and allowed them to devour me, feeling empathy for even the simplest animals.
The peak came and went as I now sat in a pool chair watching the stars. I recognized the fractal branches of the tree to my left silhouetted against the sky as me. I saw the moon as my girlfriend and the sky separating us. As I felt this, they moved in conjunction with my emotions. Power radiated through the world, as projections of the underlying cosmic energy of creation. I understood now the trials of me to be reunited with who I cared about most. I walked over and sat on the sidewalk, looking at the flowers. Joe came out and talked to me. He told me that Steve Jobs took acid, “he said the trip was like the other side of the coin that is life.” I agreed so much. This felt like a reality that had always been there, I just never had the ability to perceive it.
Joe’s mom apparently showed up at some point to take him home. He wasn’t allowed to spend the night. Despite the peak being over, I returned inside to find everyone’s faces still covered in geometry. People’s eyes looked like they had been mirrored horizontally and their faces moved like pieces of armor affixed to their ears. Justin and Maxim had just dosed. Justin had secured some gel tabs from an in person dealer, they didn’t seem to be as strong as the stuff we had.
We all sat in a circle and talked at first. Alex and I kept looping over and over. Every once in a while, we would realize, or otherwise be told that we were repeating ourselves. We talked about how our trains of thought were like tracks that we as conductors jumped between. We were stuck in time together. Justin and Maxim started looping with us too. With no one sober left, reality left the room.
Maxim was an usually quiet person. Apparently he had a radically different, bubbly, personality in middle-school, but still to this day, he’s always silent. He had an aura of coolness to his stoicism. At least at the time I perceived it as cool.
Maxim said he felt sick. He didn’t like how it felt. It was too intense. He went to lay down. Our conversation continued with Justin getting looped into our nonsense more and more. He told us that his friends told him, “you never remember what LSD feels like unless you’re on it.” I don’t think this statement really means anything, but it seemed profound at the time. Justin was a great bullshit artist like that.
Maxim started murmuring. He sat up, catching our attention. He was incredibly childlike and whimsical. He wanted to join the conversation. I was excited by the prospect of him engaging with us for once, but he was acting obnoxious and attention seeking. He made little to no sense. He kept rambling on and on about some anime he was watching and made everyone nervous. All of us were pretty deep under the influence and had no clue how to deal with his outbursts. He was getting agitated, and while, at first, I optimistically assumed this was just positive character growth, it was becoming increasingly clear that he was losing his shit. Alex made him lay back down, being the closest person to sober there. Justin kept asking if something was wrong.
After a period of uneasy peace, and looping discussions about what to do about Maxim, he shot up. He ran past us and out the door. We didn’t even chase after him. It was his house. We sort of sat still unsure of what to do, if what happened was even real. Knowing Justin could freak out too, Alex and I tried to keep the conversation pleasant.
Maxim returned, he still made no sense. He invited us to go for a walk with him. We made him sit down in his bed again. He kept going on and on about how fun the neighborhood at night was. He was acting like a pouty child. He decided to leave again. This time Alex and I grabbed him by his legs and desperately tried to prevent him from leaving. He broke free, kicking Alex in the face. I chased after him, entering his living room to find his dad and younger brother still awake. Maxim went right out the front door. His dad didn’t even seem to notice. I took advantage, skulking back to the room.
Justin was stressed, but he had probably taken a similar dose to Joe. We managed to hold on. We convinced ourselves he would probably be fine. It had been about an hour of unease when Justin said, “this is how it happens.” He was referring to those stories of people taking acid and running into traffic. Alex and I agreed. Someone who went to a school in our city had recently jumped off a bridge after taking some unknown pill.
Like clockwork when we started to get our shoes on to go look for him, Maxim showed back up. This time, I said I would need to accompany him. Alex didn’t want anyone leaving, but it was clear Maxim wouldn’t take no for an answer. Maxim left before I could finish getting ready, so I chased after him. I caught up. He was barefoot. He led me around his neighborhood. I told him he was scaring us. He couldn’t figure out why. Every question I asked came back with an obvious answer. He was in his own world. I was still tripping too. He wore one of those awful ahegao hentai sweatshirts at the time. As a result, the whole world was covered in a tessellating pattern of faces moaning in orgasmic pleasure. We looped around the block. I asked if we could go back, pointing at his bloody feet. He refuses, laying down in some random person's yard. I tell him, “the people living inside might see us, we need to go back; it’s too late at night.” A security vehicle for his neighborhood drives right past us. My heart sinks. Miraculously it sees two teenages high as fuck in someone’s yard flopped over, and has absolutely no reaction to it. It passes us.
The vehicle scared Maxim too apparently, or otherwise the effects started to wear off because he finally let us go back home. Maxim begins to transform back into his drab, former self. We even entered through the front door, but his dad still had no reaction. We return to the room and Alex and Justin sigh with deep relief. His little outburst was over.
After the awkwardness faded, we went back to our conversation. Those last hours before sleep are why Alex is one of my closest friends. We talk about cognition and how our brains must work, given these effects. We talk about the video game we want to make together. Justin joins in occasionally, Maxim lays in bed still recovering. I talk for once about how I feel, not about the world around us, but about myself. I drift to sleep thinking about what I want out of my life. I feel fizzy.
Through an attempt to simply, hedonistically hallucinate beautiful, fractal geometry, I unintentionally learned self-awareness. I had no active parental figure at the time, so this was absolutely instrumental to my development. I was forced to reflect, for once. I was made aware of the fact I am just a single person in a huge world of real people and that I have a lot to learn. If everyone should trip (which I think they should), then everyone must have their first trip. Mine was not handled responsibly. But I knew that. When I introduced my girlfriend to psychedelics I was sure to make hers far more safe and pleasant. While I look back on this experience nostalgically and as a fun story to recount, there is no denying it was reckless.
Conclusion:
I’ve really been trying to improve myself this year. I wanted to take on this dose (the salvia and 4-ACO-DMT) not just because it’s been months since I’ve tripped, but also in reaction to something within me. I had a week of some very serious existential depression that caught me off guard. I genuinely believed that there was more pain in life than joy, but I think I was wrong. I understand the world is really messed up right now and I don't think depression like this is healthy. I think that humans aren’t capable of long-term depression in a natural setting (living nomadically). I think depression is a result of a lifestyle that our brains are simply not built for (why are dolphins at sea world getting prescribed prozac? are they depressed when they’re in the wild?). However, we have psychedelics. They can help. They offer an answer to an ever changing, artificial world. They can help reset and reintegrate your reward structure. We are incredibly privileged to have access to them. They may be the only saving grace we have. I will trip again soon, I know it’s good for me. This has probably been the best year of my life in terms of self-improvement. My relationships are the healthiest they have ever been and I am lucky to be alive.
Not having access to an analytic scale, coupled with traveling a lot is a recipe for spoiled volumetric liquid doses. Specifically, when I got my hands on 250 milligrams of 4-ACO-DMT I excitedly dissolved it in 100 milliliters of water. This was not the first time I had done this, not by a long shot. Twice now, in the past, the water had gotten “moldy” or something, as it would turn black and goopy after a few months. Adding alcohol hadn’t worked, so this time I thought I would turn down the PH and up the salinity. Lemon juice and salt! This time, I thought, I had cracked the code and wouldn’t need to refrigerate, or freeze my solution and could instead just leave it in my closet. This time long term storage felt like a must because the powder I had received was clearly more than I ordered and was white and pure like no one's business. The first trip I had on the stuff, at only around 30 milligrams blew me away with an unexpected ego-death. This stuff had to last, it was too pure and strong.
So, imagine my abject horror upon discovering the solution had once again turned black and goopy, this time after a few months. I still had more than 75 milligrams left. I was bummed. This is why non-chemists, or otherwise dumb people like me, struggle with the dosing side of psychedelics.
My 4-ACO-DMT solutions had turned black so many times at this point that my girlfriend and I had started calling it the, “Black Sarcophagus Liquid.” I wanted to drink it, drink it all! I really wanted a high dose psychedelic experience, and with my magic mushrooms still only in spawn jars, this was my only option. I only ask that I receive no mockery on this post for my decision. I know drinking mold is a great way to get sick from mycotoxins, but I am juvenescent and this was only a LITTLE bit of black mold. Everyone knows a little bit of anything is safe.
Expecting a post-heroic dose level experience, I prepared with meditation for an entire week in advance. As always, I planned to take salvia the night before to perform diagnostics on my headspace and reveal any hidden fears or self-deception. On Saturday I was going to dose and writhe around in bed for a good 6 hours. Solid plan; let's see how execution went.
The Trip:
It was the night before my big trip. I loaded my pipe with a smidge of Salvia 80x. I use a machine to smoke salvia (yes the beer bottle with a hole and steel wool). It works well enough for my taste and I only use salvia every couple of months. I like to start with a threshold dose on salvia. I hit the pipe and held the smoke in. I suddenly remember what this stuff feels like. So familiar yet indescribable to someone sober. My ego feels like it’s been partitioned more than usual. The salvia compulsive redosing hits. This light dose feels mildly euphoric. I, without any hesitation, load up and hit a larger hit. I lay back. My inner dialogue becomes less aware of the fact it’s me. Am I thinking or am I entertaining someone? I speak like someone’s listening in. I am hit with a sudden distinctive feeling of reality being only a facade of impossibly complex, vibrantly colorful machinery. Sally-space begins to appear. It’s shuffling through a sequence of blocks representing different states of consciousness and we are progressing through them. Someone on the right was entering this process with me and we were talking about it. I think about that, and it makes no sense. I remember I am one, but can’t help but split up over and over. The group of voices and I are taking turns speaking words, but none of our sentences have enough meaning to constitute sentences. The blocks are seen as houses now and these beings live in them. I realize the absurdity of the situation and as such, the pinwheel becomes very noticeable. I tell myself that all is well and I want to feel happy. Reality is now orbiting a center like a fair ride and with great speed. I exist above the rotation, feeling its intense centripetal force on my body. I then shift below to an area of less intensity with the blocks still very much on my mind. This dialogue is scripted out. One character is really cool and is saying some edgy, but smart stuff. He’s talking about the futility of life and how much I should just give up. I take on his role, reading out the lines as they come to me. They feel great to say, until the one we are interrogating responds, “I love you, I want to feel happy, that’s why I’m doing this.” I am suddenly aware of an intense dilemma. The pleasure of being negative in the short term is great, but the more I do it, the more painful and intense the trip becomes. If I say the usual, “I do things because they make me happy,” I feel almost bored, but it staves off the negative side effects of the salvia. I open my eyes feeling more stoned by the drug than usual.
I loaded up the pipe again, convinced my experience was still only threshold. I was clearly pretending to feel effects. Maybe a bit more plant matter this time. I take the hit. The smoke is more painful than usual. Once it’s in my lungs though, the pain disappears. I feel an immediate increase in my lethargy and the force of gravity. I lay back. Lots of chatter. I am concerned when the smoke gets released by him so early. I figure that maybe in my ego-fragmented state maybe some part of me timed it correctly, at least that’s what I tell myself to stay calm. I travel forward on a rail. To my right are machines and geometry of incredible complexity. Though when I try to analyze them, things get a bit scary again, I do well enough just riding the wave.
I think about playgrounds. I ask myself to construct one. I ask what I would do to make one. As I put forward ideas the playground builds itself in front of my very eyes. I imagine a playground resembling the gameworld of q-bert. I place spires and slides and watch as children run around on it. I imagine a tall tower with a claustrophobic interior. I get lost in scenarios of kids getting stuck in the tower from bullies blocking their egress. Or perhaps the opposite, bullies could block the entrance and keep the tower for themselves. This worries me, but I assure myself the playground I am constructing is of such great magnitude that there would be plenty of attractions to focus on instead. I look back and forth to the left and right in a periodic fashion, getting lost in thoughts of similar nature. Memories of conversations between my personalities are intermixed in with no clear chronology. Each time it seems, my more positive self is constantly staving of criticism coming from a barrage of borderline incoherent negativity. I think hope is winning the fight pretty handily. This comes as no shock, the fundamental truth of reality is that things are pretty great under the right conditions. These were those conditions, I was in a safe environment and sally-space was just fascinating. The experience grows in warmth, perhaps reaching the happiest I’ve felt on salvia. I watch as a bird flies through Riemanian branches on my(?) complex plane. My reality flows like a river of lava and the aviator takes many daring dives, weaving through it all. Salvia is like an extreme sport. It’s hard to do successfully and the risk is high, but when you do, the complexity and depth of the experience is beautiful. It feels like I’m doing a backflip in skis right now! I feel a pull towards the top left, I watch a pair of footsteps walk towards it. The beings around me wanted life, they encouraged me to get my DMT out and give them color. I seriously considered it, this felt pretty great. My anti-hedonist nature intervenes though. “Wait until tomorrow, you’ll get the psychedelia you are after then.” I obliged. I relax into my bed. I feel like I am in a dome. Above me is a projection of my neurons. I feel them running normally until all of a sudden they all stop. They get clogged on something. I am convinced I am actively feeling the dopamine suppressing effects of the salvia. My sober self reminds me of the unlikelihood I could physically feel my neurons reacting to a shortage of dopamine. I take deep breaths, this one thought caused me an unexpected amount of fear. However, it gives me a chance to realize something important - that my anxiety is entirely self-fulfilling.
I open my eyes and ponder the salvia to my right. Should I go up once more? I’m leaning towards yes. I want to go the full mile, I want to have a breakthrough. I want to have the strongest experience I’ve ever had, I’m ready. I understand that there is no secret to having a good time. The fear I feel is only a fear of fear itself. I am only concerned that I will get so scared that the salvia will go south. The solution is obvious. Love. Whenever fear comes, comfort it with love. It’s okay to feel pain and negativity, but it’s your choice whether or not you incubate it by allowing it passage on your train of thought. I load up a quarter gram or more. I take it with confidence, ready to have my mind blown. I am ready for the neverending barrage of negativity that you must ward off on salvia. It will be worth it.
I take the hit and the pain is severe. I barely choke down the whole thing. I hold it in and lay down. I want to entertain myself, I need to stay calm. My ego has now been stretched to infinity on a hyperbolic surface and I view a Poincare disk projection of this. In effect, it feels as though my consciousness is a circle of infinite circumference. At its very peak, two of me point toward the octopus in the center. “Look at it! It’s funny.” I’m playing pretend at first. “Tell me what you like about it,” I say to myself. I start to think I’m on a game show. The realization of the absurdity of the situation hits and I feel panic. This is a lot. I don’t say that out loud though. Fine let’s talk about the octo- Suddenly things are too buzzy to think. In fact, the salvia hits me with the force of a bullet train. No words anymore. The circle representing my ego contorts to form a view of a doorway from its side. It pulls back with bright light to form the contents of a room like a camera on a long exposure. The room exists now without the ellipsoid required to illuminate it. Instead the circle of color moves very slowly. In a band. I perceive the room. It is covered in a strip of floral wallpaper. There are raised alcoves I would love to access and hide in. Like a child finding a secluded spot on a playground. I would love to watch the action happening below. This sequence of thoughts is one element of the set (of infinite cardinality) of thoughts, of which are occurring simultaneously as I watch this all unfold. I can choose plenty of other thoughts now, but at the time, there was no ego in place to interpret what any of this meant. The thoughts accumulated into a feeling of pure nostalgia so vivid that nothing can compare. I assumed I was at the church from my childhood, we had a wing just like this where the kids would play. The architect of this insanity is talking to me. Our dialogue was nothing but peaks and troughs of this universal language of buzzing. In summary they were asking if I liked it. The flowers on the walls dance wildly and are alive. I say yes to be nice. I want to be polite, but the madness and intensity scares me.
The band of color from before begins to move faster. The doorway is of great focus. The band is rotating in three dimensions revealing new perspectives to the room. It periodically SHOOTS towards me. Each time we enter a new room, having just gone through the doorway of the last. I am in awe at the beauty and vividity around me. Each room is a different color. I swear we cycled through the entire rainbow. Music plays loudly, a passage from a Scriabin piece that doesn’t exist loops endlessly. Each time we enter a new doorway some level of awareness returns. Vague notions of being a human and having desires start to show up. After some time the laser light show of bands of colors and doorways unravels itself back into the more expansive sally space. One of the architect’s minions is talking to us. We are in a room with a spiral on the wall. He’s a bit rowdy to say the least. We talk for some time but nothing is said. Eventually things reach a breaking point and he’s ready to do his thing. The room unfolds to reveal the top of a mountain. Me and some other person run away from him as he equips a paint roller. It’s huge. He creates a trail of carpet over the surface of the mountain. I watch him flatten the other person that listened to his spiel. I laugh at them, but then realize I am about to get flattened too! I knew this shit was coming, I had been burnt by lava on salvia before, never flattened, but it’s so common, it’s basically a rite of passage. Here it comes, give in and accept it. It happens. I feel a splotch of paint pour over me as my body squishes like play-doe. I sink into the abyss below. I sat there thinking, “well that was stereotypical, what’s next a zipper?” One appears in my vision only opening with a half-assed effort. I scoff at it. After some vague confusion, I find myself walking back up another mountain facing the opposite direction. I remark, “Oh, I’m on salvia, that makes sense.” I swear to god, if I get dementia I will spend the entire duration of it repeating that sentence. I open my eyes. I am immobile. The next 15 minutes is just me laying down trying to recuperate. The salvia is intense still, but incredibly mild compared to what came before. I experience similar psychological events to my second hit of the night. I survived, but I’ve been changed. I seriously contemplate if I should just be nice and loving at all times. Should I reinvent myself to be a constantly loving person, nice to everyone I meet? I am still seriously considering it. I thought I understood the importance of negative emotion, but this experience showed something else. Every step of the way, love saved me from oblivion. I know I need to wear my fundamental purpose close to my chest at all times. If I forget what I’m here to do, I’ll get tangled in a web of self-deception and petty drama. At some point I remark on my exhaustion, this salvia has been like a marathon and I’m about out of gas. A reminder to avoid negative thoughts serves the rest of my comedown until I am ambulatory again.
I got some pineapple to ward off the post-salvia melancholy. Surprisingly though, I felt sober maybe an hour after dosing. Usually, on lower doses, I don’t feel baseline until I sleep. Paradoxical Indeed. My girlfriend and I chat briefly before I go to bed, she’s busy. I love her, these experiences bring me closer to her. I am in a good mood.
The next day, I woke up and immediately went for a run. I want to clear my head. I get home, make a big breakfast and prepare my room. I take a small edible to loosen up my brain and increase the vividness of my visuals. I shower and meditate for an hour. The meditation was unexpectedly difficult. Meditating on cannabis is not easy when you know you’re about to trip balls. Trying to think rationally put me into thought loops. But, every time I gave in to the experience, I would come to, shocked that I even exist, experiencing a short ego-death. Serious whiplash. Finally, I figured out that thinking about jovial stuff like movies and people helped to pass the time and lowered my stress. The best strategy was to accept that I had made the choice to dose in a sober state, and all there was left to do now was enjoy myself. After about two hours of this silent meditation, the time came to dose.
I dug around in my drugs container, locating the Black Sarcophagus Liquid. I had tums, lemon juice, and ginger ready for the nausea. I threw back about 80% of the dose, too scared to get the last 20% down.
…
I am sorry, but this gets really disappointing. NOTHING HAPPENED. I mean, I felt something? I don’t really know. I got teary eyed at some point, and an hour in I drank the remaining 20%. I think the 4-ACO-DMT decomposed? I felt different than I did on just the weed. I think maybe some tryptamine might have been left over, maybe a sedative tryptamine? I felt really tired and basically layed down half asleep for 3 hours, before finally deciding to cut my losses. I just called my girlfriend for the rest of the day
(up until sleep) and had a fun time watching the Creator Clash 2. I effectively just drank black mold for no reason. I am physically well though, I feel fine.
So, I’m sorry to disappoint you. In fact, I’m disappointed, too. I am bummed, I put a lot of effort into prep work for this trip. Still, I want this weekend to be metacognitive - I’ve needed to think about myself for a while. So, for the sake of whoever may have gotten this far in the report and for my own benefit, I will write out my first ever trip story, and the nightmare that it was. It’s been nearly 5 years since.
My First Trip (the pool party):
I had been 16 for 6 months. I had tried acid twice up until this point. Both times were 75 micrograms or less. I enjoyed acid more than weed because it made me feel energetic and creative, but never anxious. My girlfriend (who I am still deeply in love with now) had been forcefully separated from me by her parents. They found out we were together, but didn’t want her dating until she was 16 (she was only 15 at the time). Their solution was completely blocking me on every one of her devices and holding severe punishment over her head if she ever got into contact with me.
I reacted impulsively when I learned her parents had found out about our affair and snuck out in the dead of night. I biked to her house and hopped her fence. I knocked on her window trying to get her attention. I wanted to give her the new discord account I had set up for her, with me as one of her friends. Nothing went as I intended. She woke up and heard my tapping and saw a flashlight. She thought I was a home-intruder. She got her dad and they called the police. Through sheer dumb luck, I coincidentally left only minutes before the cops arrived. Her dad apparently saw me through the window as I left, and was made only angrier to discover it was me he had called the cops on.
The whole summer I was a total wreck. I’m one of those kids with well off parents, who neglect you types. I think my dad was cheating on my mom at that time and was rarely at home. The largest interaction I had with him over the summer was the cops again being called because we were fighting so loudly. He beat me after. That was probably rock bottom. It didn’t help that I had switched schools due to behavioral problems and any time my parents saw me, all they wanted to talk about was how much I needed to get a job. I’m not claiming that my adolescence was anywhere near as awful as plenty of the people who are reading this, but I feel as though this context is necessary. I was suicidal for months, and I had already tried killing myself once in middle school. Psychedelics saved me. I was going down a dark path. None of this stuff happened in a vacuum, my worldview was in desperate need of a shake up.
The only skill I developed over that summer was learning how the drug world worked. I was fascinated with the youtuber PsychedSubstance, who acted as a surrogate father figure. I was obsessed with psychedelics and desperately wanted to try a large dose of anything as soon as possible. I was not the only person I knew who wanted to achieve this goal. I collaborated with Maxim, who’s a year older than me. He could drive already and acted as the de-facto leader of our friend group. Unfortunately, he was never the voice of reason, arguably the least mature out of all of us. I wanted to buy acid. To secure funds for this very illegal purchase I sold in-game items from Team Fortress 2 and Counter Strike. What a juxtaposition huh? To say the least, we were some very young people getting involved in very serious business.
The dealer claimed our drugs would arrive within the week, so we finally set a date for our group trip. Next friday. I remember the sadness I felt the night before when I checked my mailbox and found it empty. I told them. I told all 5 people that we would just have to stick to weed again. I had been looking forward to this for months. I got home from school the day of. I packed my bag. Minutes before my mom would drive me, I checked the mailbox again. I thought, “might as well check.” The package was waiting for me. I felt a rush of joy. I was ecstatic. I told everyone we were back on.
I arrived to find Maxim and Joe waiting for me. Joe was funny and unusual at the time. but later developed some mild form of schizophrenia. He wanted to go first. I busted out a tab for him, they were dosed (accurately) at 200 micrograms each. He ate it and we went for a swim. We three talked about youtube and memes as his dose kicked in. I was a bit nervous to try it myself and figured Joe would be a good guinea pig. I still remember how he got the first time. He looked wide eyed, like his mind had splayed open. After he said he felt it, he acted weird and aloof. He spoke in riddles and eluded to forces beyond our comprehension. Maxim and I studied him for a while in the pool before retreating back to the room. He sat at Maxim’s computer as we listened to music. He pointed at the screen. He said he saw entities. He felt “papa rhythm.” I was shocked, I had never heard of someone encountering entities on LSD. This only increased my excitement.
After maybe another hour of standard 16 year old boy discussions, Alex arrived. It was around 7 pm at this point and we were ready to embark on our journey. I ate 300 micrograms, Alex ate 100. We had only bought three tabs. I remember feeling that there was no way this paper could have any effect on me. I was prepared for mild effects. We all went out to the pool again.
We chatted and the water and weather were perfect. I closed my eyes repeatedly, hoping to see patterns behind my eyelids. Maxim was stoic. Alex and Joe had a bizarre dialogue that I wasn’t following. I wanted to be filled in. He asked Joe to tell me his joke. I hadn’t heard it. He said that the MP meter in a video game we played at the time stood for, “Mario Points.” All bets are off as to what exactly the joke is, but we found it hilarious. It was one of those jokes that are only funny when you are 16 and coming up on acid for the first time. Alex and I entered laughing fits so intense from simply repeating the joke that our chests hurt. It was contagious. I started to feel dreamy. I closed my eyes and saw the patterns I was looking for. Maxim’s face flowed vividly like a river. All the surfaces started to drift. His face morphed into cartoonish shapes. I was startled, but hyped. It was starting. We dried off, still giggling, and went to Maxims room to change. The carpet was covered in geometry so intense that I struggled to stand up right. Alex said it looked like swastikas, I saw hexagons. I got my turn in the bathroom, covering myself in feces by accident. I washed off using the bathtub’s faucet. I felt like a tick or a water balloon. Every pose I struck, I assumed by default to be that of some Francis Bacon painting. Everything felt incredibly familiar. I returned to the kitchen to eat the pizza that Maxim’s mom ordered. Alex didn’t want to eat the pizza, he felt it looked too alive. I ate between bouts of laughter. I felt fuzzy and as though I was sleeping while awake. Incredibly vivid colors were everywhere.
I blacked out, coming too sitting in Maxim’s bed. I was laughing so intensely that my body hurt. Joe, Alex, and I were fried. I was barely coherent enough to speak, Alex was my connection to the outside world. On the computer was a picture of the youtuber Ant Venom’s face. We were just pointing at it and laughing uncontrollably while repeating his name. It felt so good to laugh, it’s all I wanted to do. It felt wrong when I wasn’t. Justin, a super rich brat who liked to hang out with us commoners, just arrived and entered the room. Maxim pointed to us saying, “look how messed up they are.” I didn’t know how to respond. I had forgotten I was even on acid. I remembered, “oh yeah, this is the trip.”
The trip felt like an alternate reality, time moved incredibly slowly, but the whole thing had happened in an instant. I went outside in my robe. Thoughts of unity and interconnectedness were taking over and words began to lose all meaning. The garden Maxim’s mom planted was incredible. I lay on the concrete next to the pool. My entire vision was a kaleidoscope. I couldn’t discern the material world from geometry. The clear cutoff between surfaces was replaced by tessellation. Everything was covered in a repeating pattern stuck somewhere between the second and third dimension. It was so beautiful. Mosquitos buzzed around me weaving in and out of the hallucinations. I couldn’t tell if a hundred mosquitos encircled me or the same one was being reflected like a broken mirror. The whirling frequencies that my sense of sound had become didn’t help either. I accepted my fate and allowed them to devour me, feeling empathy for even the simplest animals.
The peak came and went as I now sat in a pool chair watching the stars. I recognized the fractal branches of the tree to my left silhouetted against the sky as me. I saw the moon as my girlfriend and the sky separating us. As I felt this, they moved in conjunction with my emotions. Power radiated through the world, as projections of the underlying cosmic energy of creation. I understood now the trials of me to be reunited with who I cared about most. I walked over and sat on the sidewalk, looking at the flowers. Joe came out and talked to me. He told me that Steve Jobs took acid, “he said the trip was like the other side of the coin that is life.” I agreed so much. This felt like a reality that had always been there, I just never had the ability to perceive it.
Joe’s mom apparently showed up at some point to take him home. He wasn’t allowed to spend the night. Despite the peak being over, I returned inside to find everyone’s faces still covered in geometry. People’s eyes looked like they had been mirrored horizontally and their faces moved like pieces of armor affixed to their ears. Justin and Maxim had just dosed. Justin had secured some gel tabs from an in person dealer, they didn’t seem to be as strong as the stuff we had.
We all sat in a circle and talked at first. Alex and I kept looping over and over. Every once in a while, we would realize, or otherwise be told that we were repeating ourselves. We talked about how our trains of thought were like tracks that we as conductors jumped between. We were stuck in time together. Justin and Maxim started looping with us too. With no one sober left, reality left the room.
Maxim was an usually quiet person. Apparently he had a radically different, bubbly, personality in middle-school, but still to this day, he’s always silent. He had an aura of coolness to his stoicism. At least at the time I perceived it as cool.
Maxim said he felt sick. He didn’t like how it felt. It was too intense. He went to lay down. Our conversation continued with Justin getting looped into our nonsense more and more. He told us that his friends told him, “you never remember what LSD feels like unless you’re on it.” I don’t think this statement really means anything, but it seemed profound at the time. Justin was a great bullshit artist like that.
Maxim started murmuring. He sat up, catching our attention. He was incredibly childlike and whimsical. He wanted to join the conversation. I was excited by the prospect of him engaging with us for once, but he was acting obnoxious and attention seeking. He made little to no sense. He kept rambling on and on about some anime he was watching and made everyone nervous. All of us were pretty deep under the influence and had no clue how to deal with his outbursts. He was getting agitated, and while, at first, I optimistically assumed this was just positive character growth, it was becoming increasingly clear that he was losing his shit. Alex made him lay back down, being the closest person to sober there. Justin kept asking if something was wrong.
After a period of uneasy peace, and looping discussions about what to do about Maxim, he shot up. He ran past us and out the door. We didn’t even chase after him. It was his house. We sort of sat still unsure of what to do, if what happened was even real. Knowing Justin could freak out too, Alex and I tried to keep the conversation pleasant.
Maxim returned, he still made no sense. He invited us to go for a walk with him. We made him sit down in his bed again. He kept going on and on about how fun the neighborhood at night was. He was acting like a pouty child. He decided to leave again. This time Alex and I grabbed him by his legs and desperately tried to prevent him from leaving. He broke free, kicking Alex in the face. I chased after him, entering his living room to find his dad and younger brother still awake. Maxim went right out the front door. His dad didn’t even seem to notice. I took advantage, skulking back to the room.
Justin was stressed, but he had probably taken a similar dose to Joe. We managed to hold on. We convinced ourselves he would probably be fine. It had been about an hour of unease when Justin said, “this is how it happens.” He was referring to those stories of people taking acid and running into traffic. Alex and I agreed. Someone who went to a school in our city had recently jumped off a bridge after taking some unknown pill.
Like clockwork when we started to get our shoes on to go look for him, Maxim showed back up. This time, I said I would need to accompany him. Alex didn’t want anyone leaving, but it was clear Maxim wouldn’t take no for an answer. Maxim left before I could finish getting ready, so I chased after him. I caught up. He was barefoot. He led me around his neighborhood. I told him he was scaring us. He couldn’t figure out why. Every question I asked came back with an obvious answer. He was in his own world. I was still tripping too. He wore one of those awful ahegao hentai sweatshirts at the time. As a result, the whole world was covered in a tessellating pattern of faces moaning in orgasmic pleasure. We looped around the block. I asked if we could go back, pointing at his bloody feet. He refuses, laying down in some random person's yard. I tell him, “the people living inside might see us, we need to go back; it’s too late at night.” A security vehicle for his neighborhood drives right past us. My heart sinks. Miraculously it sees two teenages high as fuck in someone’s yard flopped over, and has absolutely no reaction to it. It passes us.
The vehicle scared Maxim too apparently, or otherwise the effects started to wear off because he finally let us go back home. Maxim begins to transform back into his drab, former self. We even entered through the front door, but his dad still had no reaction. We return to the room and Alex and Justin sigh with deep relief. His little outburst was over.
After the awkwardness faded, we went back to our conversation. Those last hours before sleep are why Alex is one of my closest friends. We talk about cognition and how our brains must work, given these effects. We talk about the video game we want to make together. Justin joins in occasionally, Maxim lays in bed still recovering. I talk for once about how I feel, not about the world around us, but about myself. I drift to sleep thinking about what I want out of my life. I feel fizzy.
Through an attempt to simply, hedonistically hallucinate beautiful, fractal geometry, I unintentionally learned self-awareness. I had no active parental figure at the time, so this was absolutely instrumental to my development. I was forced to reflect, for once. I was made aware of the fact I am just a single person in a huge world of real people and that I have a lot to learn. If everyone should trip (which I think they should), then everyone must have their first trip. Mine was not handled responsibly. But I knew that. When I introduced my girlfriend to psychedelics I was sure to make hers far more safe and pleasant. While I look back on this experience nostalgically and as a fun story to recount, there is no denying it was reckless.
Conclusion:
I’ve really been trying to improve myself this year. I wanted to take on this dose (the salvia and 4-ACO-DMT) not just because it’s been months since I’ve tripped, but also in reaction to something within me. I had a week of some very serious existential depression that caught me off guard. I genuinely believed that there was more pain in life than joy, but I think I was wrong. I understand the world is really messed up right now and I don't think depression like this is healthy. I think that humans aren’t capable of long-term depression in a natural setting (living nomadically). I think depression is a result of a lifestyle that our brains are simply not built for (why are dolphins at sea world getting prescribed prozac? are they depressed when they’re in the wild?). However, we have psychedelics. They can help. They offer an answer to an ever changing, artificial world. They can help reset and reintegrate your reward structure. We are incredibly privileged to have access to them. They may be the only saving grace we have. I will trip again soon, I know it’s good for me. This has probably been the best year of my life in terms of self-improvement. My relationships are the healthiest they have ever been and I am lucky to be alive.