Ok so I've asked a lot of noob questions on this board lately, this is the last time I promise. In the past 2-3 months I have tried acid five times, having no previous experience with the drug or with psychedelics in general. All 5 times were, in my opinion, ultimately very positive experiences though the fourth was nothing at all like the first three or the fifth to the point that I can scarcely believe it was even the same drug.
The first three times I got very giggly, chatty, and just kind of sat around for hours watching music videos that I would probably otherwise not have enjoyed with my friend whilst cracking jokes that would not seem funny in the cold hard light of day. It felt kind of similar to smoking weed only much longer lasting and without the paranoia and with some mild visuals (mainly intense colours and the like). These times were great fun and each one was the best day of my life up until that point.
The fourth time I went fucking crazy. Extremely intense visuals and my brain feeling like it had turned inside out. I was attacked by Venom from Spider-Man, then I was convinced I was on fire and/or that I was travelling through time and that I would die at the end of the night and that I was experiencing flashbacks as some kind of coping mechanism for my body to deal with the fact that I had been killed. It got worse from there as I somehow lost sight of the fact that I had taken acid and instead came to believe that I was just a consciousness existing alone in some kind of void and that the real world had never existed and was some kind of hallucination I had dreamt up and that my constant state of unease and the nature of my existence shifting from moment to moment was actually reality.
I cried, I begged a God I didn't believe in to help me, I did shit like putting my shoes on or warming things up in the microwave to try to reassure myself that the real world had in fact been real only to suddenly find myself back in a void out of touch with everything. Even after the most intense part of the trip had ended I found myself having a long, deep chat with some guy I had only met that night in which he had to convince me that he was neither God nor me from the future (certain coincidences about the situation made this seem more plausible than it sounds) whilst I obsessively checked my phone to make sure that time was only going forwards and not backwards. My friend, who is far more experienced than I, said that this was not an actual "bad trip" just an intense one but it was pretty horrifying at the time.
But afterwards I felt good. If you've never genuinely believed you are truly alone in the universe and that nothing else exists you can't even begin to imagine how scary such an idea is. Everything else, all my niggling little fears about little everyday things melted away because they simply couldn't compare. I'd gone from thinking acid was "some hippy bullshit for people like me who aren't really into drugs" to thinking it was "the most dangerous and most amazing drug on the planet".
I stopped being shy, I stopped needing to get drunk, I sang, I danced, I stood up for myself, I went on dates and I basically became who I had always wanted to be for a couple of weeks. Then the memories began to fade, I started to retreat back into my bedroom, the self-loathing returned, I renewed my runescape membership, started drinking again, and watched more cartoons.
Then, on Sunday, I did some more acid. This time I tried to induce a repeat of the previous experience, I looked at scary images, listened to scary music and just generally tried to deliberately freak myself out. Nothing happened. It was far more like trips 1-3 than it was to trip 4 and, whilst fun, did not produce any kind of change in my outlook on life or my personality.
How do I get it back? How do I become Venom again?
If you want to get back "there", just take a higher dose. It sounds like trip 4 was a considerably stronger hit than 1-3.
It won't be quite the same apart from the fear, although you do start to develop some deja vu ideas from trip to trip. The past 2-3 months you say? You may want to take more time between. I don't know how sensible any of this sounds.
>>7676 Yeah the only reason I hadn't tried acid before now is because I had somehow gotten it into my head that every trip would be along the lines of how trip 4 turned out to be but then I met several people who seemed relatively normal on it so I decided I'll try it and had a great time hence deciding to experiment further. If trip 1 had been in any way comparable to trip 4 it's likely I would never have touched it again.
>>7677 Regarding the dosage, I'm kind of scared to increase it because so far I have always taken the same amount, at least as far I can tell. The same little bit of paper under my tongue for half an hour or so though I've been told that, because such a small amount is needed tiny immeasurable differences can produce wildly different results, kind of like having one beer or three bottles of vodka without really being able to tell the difference until it's too late.
As for frequency, I was told the "magic" wears off if you take it more than a maximum of once every couple of weeks. I've stuck to this so far, admittedly mainly because of lack of availability though I did turn down the opportunity to take some once when I otherwise could have done. Is even that too often?
>>7677 >If you want to get back "there", just take a higher dose. It sounds like trip 4 was a considerably stronger hit than 1-3.
This. If you've got any other source of acid (i.e. you're on a darknet marketplace and there are other vendors) I'd try switching it up, because what you've had sounds dangerously variable in dosage. If you wound up taking two blotters of what you had on "time 4" and got another two heavy doses then you could be in some real trouble. LSD's physical toxicity is nothing to worry about, so overdosing in the classical sense isn't a concern, but lasting psychological trauma is not unheard of - although as you've found out, lasting psychological benefits are equally possible.
>I found myself having a long, deep chat with some guy I had only met that night
Where did you take this, and with whom? (Not names, obviously, just a general description of where you were and your relationship to the people you were tripping with.) The reason I ask is that setting and company are far more important with psychedelics than any of the other classics like MDMA, coke, speed and so on. Ideally you want to be somewhere you feel safe and with people who make you feel secure. Not saying it would've made that much of a difference in this case, mind; if you thought you were fighting Venom/on fire/dead/talking to God I doubt any setting would've made the trip that much more manageable - that just sounds like an absolutely knockout dose of acid.
(You may want to read up on "ego death" as yours is a very familiar story.)
Does acid always have the potential to make you forget what you're experiencing is drug-induced, or is that just when it's taken by easily-influenced people? I have no experience with to tell truth any drugs, but I feel like I'm grounded enough to never lose my sense of reality. Is this just arrogance on my part?
>>7680 Does alcohol always have the potential to make you pass out, or is that just when it's drunk by lightweights? I have no experience with to tell truth any drugs, but I feel like I'm a manly man enough to never pass out. Is this just arrogance on my part?
>>7679 Echoing what this chap says, it sounds like your doses were significantly different. Laying acid blotters is notoriously tricky and requires someone who actually knows what they're doing when it comes to titration, so finding variance like this in the marketplace is sadly not unusual - though in the more golden days of the markets we were starting to see more reliable product from established vendors. Shop around and try to go for one of the more reliable, higher rated sellers.
>>7680 Strictly speaking, any psychedelic does. The outcome of a trip is always far more dependent on the person taking it and where they are in their heads/environment (the oft-mentioned "set and setting") and then affected by dose. Some people may end up forgetting that they're on drugs, some people can take 1200ug and never doubt what's happening. I would say that the less experienced someone is with psychedelics, or the more unstable their mentality (someone who is naturally anxious or not very sure in their emotions and sense of self) the more likely they are to have adverse effects.
As for OP, I would suggest he pick his setting and company very carefully, and give it a few weeks before trying a slightly higher dose. Or even the same as he's done before. I've even heard of people taking acid and MDMA before psychotherapy sessions, precisely to achieve this kind of deep personal understanding and transformation. (Or they fuck off to Central America to take ayahuasca after seven days of yoga, same difference.)
It is just arrogance, no offence. It's just one of those things that's hard to explain/imagine without first hand experience.
The best way I can put it is that you always feel like a dream is real, until you wake up. I've never tripped hard enough to full on disappear off into wonderland, but it does become easy to loose focus on aspects of your self. For instance, even on a relatively mild dose of LSD I found it difficult to distinguish between the sensation of physically speaking, and the act of imagining myself speaking, which became a problem because imagining oneself speaking is, as it turns out, a pretty integral part of the act of actually speaking.
Sure the typical stuff you see in films where the characters lick a cactus and suddenly they are off into space with floating animals everywhere is a bit nonsense, but psychedelics are not to be underestimated.
> where the characters lick a cactus and suddenly they are off into space with floating animals everywhere is a bit nonsense
Says you! I've died traveled through the underworld and visited 5 different planes of existance that human beings exist within. came back to life and concluded therefore I am god. All this happened after I had forgotten how many arms a human being was supposed to have and it was difficult to tell because everyone had different numbers and they kept on spagettifying and moving all round the place and concluded the average was 4, and believed machines were something I cam up with on the trip because the basic concept was so uttlerly ridiculous. I'd do it all again if you know dieing wasn't a deeply terrifying experiance, that I hope never to repeat. That and this wasn't I didn't make up as I was passing out there was a strange goth girl next to me who claimed to be a vampire who I thought was going to drink my blood (I assume she ment she was into blood letting which is fine, but when you actually introduce yourself as a vampire you probably aren't the full shilling and would take advantage on weak 'prey' who had just colapsed from 20 grams of shrooms infront of you and believed they were dead anyway).
Good grief. You took what must have been a pretty heroic dose, and you came out the other side with a story that sounds like an MSN chat-bot crawled through Erowid with a hangover.
I spend most of the trip being an anthropomorphic fox, and the other half staring intently at embossed wallpaper. A trip to the seaside on AMT had me convinced that the Steps hit 5,6,7,8 was some form of coded propaganda, and I was quite racist for a while after an epiphany in a church yard once.
Maybe I just need to do more cliche shit like listen to Pink Floyd and set up a lava lamp next time. That might do it.
>>7679 >First paragraph
I only have the one source, a friend of a friend who seems pretty switched on and who I quite like actually, I have no idea where he gets it from though. But I know he takes the stuff himself and so one could reasonably expect him to be some kind of conoisseur. Regarding psychological changes, whether damaging or beneficial, I'll take whatever I can get on that score. I'm just crazy enough to be unable to fully function like a normal human but not crazy enough to not give a toss, a little push in either direction would do me.
>2nd paragraph
All 5 times I have tried it have been in my flat with my friend. On all but trip 3 there have been other people around vaguely but nobody scary or weird enough to freak me out and almost all of whom I knew previously. To be totally honest there was one stranger around during trip 4 (the venom trip) but he turned out to be from [same country as my father's parents] and I remember speaking [language] to him a little bit which actually made me feel more relaxed. On the other hand, we live on a busy road with a lot of sirens going past all the time, the sound of sirens which we have all been conditioned to associate with danger, I think maybe wormed its way into my brain and was why I thought something was wrong.
>Ego death
Googling this led me to a reddit post saying that what happened can't have been ego death because the concept of "I" still existed (though to be fair I started using "we" instead but that was probably influenced by watching Spider-Man). To be completely honest my sense of self became more important as the trip went on and I became convinced the universe didn't exist, I reverted all the way back to the basic Descartes "cogito ergo sum" and tried to rebuild everything I knew from there. Felt pretty silly a couple of hours later when I was fully lucid and just looking at pretty colours on my phone screen as the trip drew to a close.
>>7683 >the less experienced someone is with psychedelics, or the more unstable their mentality
That is literally a description of me. I should just stay the fuck away from drugs in future shouldn't I? I'm not going to, because I actually really enjoyed the whole experience (at least in retrospect) but I know that I should.
I've left a lot of shit out by the way, because this post is already way too long. Like how both the guys in the flat on trip 4 had names I have identified myself as in the past and so it was weird to hear them having a deep conversation. My sister, who I haven't had a proper chat with in months, was also really important for reasons I can't explain succintly.
In spite of everything I still think acid is great, I haven't been so suddenly bowled over by a substance since the first time I got drunk more than a decade ago. Finding a drug you like is like falling in love, there's an intensity there and a kind of mix of fear and lust that doesn't happen with just any other chemical/girl.
>Finding a drug you like is like falling in love, there's an intensity there and a kind of mix of fear and lust that doesn't happen with just any other chemical/girl.
Potent words, friend, just make sure you don't fall out with our Lucy. You have to treat her with respect, or she will break your heart like no girl ever could.
I wish you luck on your future voyages, but exercise caution as the meta-trip takes shape.
Obviously dont write specifics, but where the hell does one find LSD in the UK?
The only chap I knew who got some, was through silk-road-like websites on the deep web, and the amount of bullshit he had to jump through didn't seem worthwhile.
>>7692 There's currently an analogue of LSD floating around on the usual "research chemical" sites which is more or less identical in effect, by all accounts. It's legal, for now.
If you want to try and buy the proper stuff, you'd need to look into darknet markets and TOR and Bitcoin all that shit, and right now I think the markets are all a bit of a mess due to some potential TOR vulnerability anyway.
> If you want to try and buy the proper stuff, you'd need to look into darknet markets ...
I would be very wary of anyone offering LSD for sale in 2015 unless they're someone who's been a long-term user and meddler since at least the 90s. These are probably the only people (in the UK, at least) who both A) still have some kind of link to real LSD and B) are experienced enough to know if it's actually LSD or not.
I will bet dollars to doughnuts that the vast majority of anything sold as LSD today is either 25i or 1-propionyl-LSD, whether it's on the darknet, festivals, clubs, dealers, whatever.
> ... I think the markets are all a bit of a mess due to some potential TOR vulnerability anyway
The only truly reliable market since sr2 has been Agora, which even with its constant downtime and maneuvering has been a constant, stable, and reasonably fair place to do business. Now that they're going to "pause operations" for an unspecified amount of time there will indeed be no stable darknet markets to do business on, unless you're doing FE transactions with vendors you already know and trust (which is the way things will probably go, at least for the next couple of years or so).
I know a guy who claims to have a contact who makes it, but I've never tried his stuff despite him apparently being a Chemistry PhD. I'm a wimp when it comes to psychedelics. Uppers and Downers I can handle, but I wonder about what I might see.
I had an episode where I was hearing voices a few years back and I just don't know how I would feel on it and I think that is good enough reason not to do it because I read your trip is effected by your mood.
> I know a guy who claims to have a contact who makes it, but I've never tried his stuff despite him apparently being a Chemistry PhD.
Good point, one thing I didn't consider is that there are tons of people who know the actual chemists personally and not through a drugs supply chain relationship; if you actually know someone who makes the stuff themselves (and by stuff I mean whatever your synthetic tipple of choice is) then consider yourself very lucky indeed and go hog wild.
> I had an episode where I was hearing voices a few years back and I just don't know how I would feel on it and I think that is good enough reason not to do it because I read your trip is effected by your mood.
Honestly, and as someone who's blown his own brainstem one too many times, you sound like an ideal candidate for someone who shouldn't do psychedelics, unless under very highly controlled circumstances (I mean with a bunch of good friends who'll take care of you and benzo you into bolivian if need be, not in a science lab) and with very tightly titrated doses.
Guess I should mention I took 100 ug of 1P-LSD, primarily inspired by this thread, so go on you mad bastards, pat yourselves on the back because you might have changed this cunts life.
Anyway, deeply profound experience and I highly recommend this under these stipulations;
- You have a trustworthy friend to look after you, not one of your cunty ladm8's "affin a laff" sort of type, because they can fuck you up, e.g.: start yelling things at you and/or make up stories about what you did.
- You go outside, don't sit at home and fester in front of the screen. Bring your phone for obvious reasons, but the deeper into nature you delve into, the far far better things will be.
- I would not do this if you suffer from mental illness and/or have panic attacks or shit like that. Just don't bother, it'll be a very long afternoon and you'll be annoying everyone around you.
It's also noteworthy that talking to people you love and trust, that will not judge you for being on acid, is one of the most amazing experiences. Because the best way I can describe is that you're in a dream-like / child-like state and you're in the care of those you trust, and you have to ride it out that way - whether you like it or not.
>You go outside, don't sit at home and fester in front of the screen. Bring your phone for obvious reasons, but the deeper into nature you delve into, the far far better things will be.
Absolutely. Best trip I've ever had was a camping holiday, so I had pretty much no choice but to wander around this little seaside village and the surrounding fields in the dead of night. Sat on the cliffs and watched the sun rise. It was magical.
Even so I have a mate who is always stubbornly resistant to the idea of going outside. I think he just feels anxious of the outdoors on psychedelics, but he always says he found the experience to be a let down, when all he wanted to do was sit in the house staring at the wallpaper. The clue's in the name.
>You have a trustworthy friend to look after you, not one of your cunty ladm8's "affin a laff" sort of type, because they can fuck you up, e.g.: start yelling things at you and/or make up stories about what you did.
I've never been fond of having a sitter personally. It feels like getting drunk with a tee-totaller, too self-concious and restrained to really enjoy it. I prefer having someone along for the ride with me; despite the reputation these sorts of drugs have, I've never done anything too daft, even on pretty intense doses.
You're right to steer well clear of any top-bants LADS who enjoy winding people up for a laugh and what have you. Those kinds of guys are simply not your friend on acid.
One tip- I usually put my phone on airplane mode too. You really don't want to get one of those cryptic texts from an ex-girlfriend out of the blue in the middle of your time dilating ego meltdown.
