A couple of years ago i took what is for me a large dose of acid with some friends. I ended up completely delusional thinking i'd blown my own brains out and my friends were with me in a space outside time to cart me into the next life.

I'd just driven from oklahoma to college in the middle of nowhere illinois that evening and it was new years eve. we dosed almost immediately, about 6 of us. i ended up in my bed with my one sober friend. As i was coming up i had more and more complex delusions about her being dead and me being there to help her into the afterlife. she was a total ghost. at some point i was in the room alone and the tables turned. I hallucinated blowing my own brains out. not the impact itself, just bleeding out and seizing on the floor. I began to meditate naturally because the sensations of unpleasantness, even psychosomatic pain were so intense. i'd feel my body being literally tossed around the room by spasms while my musculature remained inert--dead weight. at one point i remember my friends rolling me back on the bed and tucking my dead body in under the covers smiling at my unblinking face. it was like my consciousness was lingering in the eyes of my corpse.

the first thing i did in the next life was light up a metallic purple cigarette from Russia my slumped friend kevin was suddenly handing me in the kitchen. This was not a hallucination or delusion: a real metallic purple cig. it was the best cig I ever had in my life. groundbreaking euphoria from the nicotine. Next, I drank water, which was so good i scorned the cigarette. Then i ate de-shelled sunflower seeds, which filled me with disproportionate vigor. next i discovered my weed and began breaking it up by rubbing my palms together, spraying weed all over my lap and the futon. somehow i cobbled together an absurdly long joint with a few straight nugs just wrapped up in it. the weed really blew the previous consumptions out of the water of course, but in the end, it was still just weed and I finished the trip feeling beyond frayed and in need of care from a trip sitter who was kind enough to come over.

the funniest thing about this story in hindsight is how none of my friends told me i wasn't dead. one of them kind of encouraged the belief, or didn't understand the question ("Am i dead?" "Yep, totally dude. Sorry bout ya." but the whole time i was freaking out that i'd killed myself, my friends and family seeing my mangled body etc. eventually i came down of course and realized what happened and smoked blunt after blunt in the morning light decompressing, feeling raw as hell.

This experience has disturbed me and comforted me for years. at first i saw it as a practice run for death and bodily injury. now i have come to see it also as a lesson in the buddhist concept of dukkha. there were gradations to my pleasures in the next life, some of them were wholesome and necessary, but all were impermanent and caused suffering and perpetuated craving for a pleasure that doesn't lead to any lasting satisfaction. there was also an intense awareness of everything that would survive me. all the trash i've created, my possessions, the emotional baggage of friends and family. the degree to which this has been meaningful to me and shapes my daily environmental awareness speaks to the necessity of integrating such intense trips through regular practice like therapy, meditation, journaling, etc.

today, i am planning on dosing some vine and shrooms for the first time and maybe smoke some spice as well and so of course ask myself the question: is this going to be the time i really slip? the answer, i am hopeful, is no. now i have much better routine in place for grounding myself (meditation mostly) and trip alone on a dose that significant rather than a hectic friend group.

i hope you enjoyed reading and thank you for doing so. this is my first post, but i have been reading and appreciating the nexus for several years. thanks to the mods and members for making this site possible.

Hi Coconutxlather.

Thanks for sharing your experience.
There are many reports that talk about "dying" on acid, like bleeding everywhere, aging very rapidly and "mummifying", dying of starvation or dehydration, and many other unpleasant ways of physical deterioration. But despite these obviously fatal symptoms, the travelers seem to continue to breathe, walk, talk, etc., and there seem to be very few instances, where the traveler actually came to harm, or lost consciousness.

Some travelers report successive instances of such "deaths" in a single journey, going from bad to worse each time. But it also looks like this is a phase that sometimes occurs in a high-dose journey. Can you recall, what dose you took with your friends? Would be interesting to correlate.

Your friends were obviously just joking with you, since you asked them
"Am i dead?"
"Yep, totally dude. Sorry bout ya."

Dead people don't ask silly questions and eat sunflower seeds.
That's why they laughed.

I would be interested to read your report of your solo-journey that you are planning.
You have not mentioned that you have tried mushrooms or the spice before. If you have not, then I would strongly suggest to NOT mix them the first time you try either one of them.
They can both be very potent in their own right, and combined, may offer you some big challenges that you may not be prepared for, or would rather not deal with.

Thank you for the thoughtful reply!

A friend of mine had psychotic break where he too was convinced he was dead. Holocaust survivor Jean Amery, an intellectual who survived torture at the hands of the nazis only to commit suicide 30 years later wrote of feeling like a part of life ended the moment the first blow was struck that would never be revived. it seems to be a theme in the minds of the downtrodden and disturbed.

I'm not worried about hurting myself. any fear or anxiety is around the actual unpleasnatness of such intense experiences.

Yeah the friend who said something to that effect was egging me on a bit. not necessarily in a mean spirit.

Honestly with street acid its hard to say, but this was a reliable source that is well known around me and been in the game for decades. these hits were so large and potent we had to cut them into fourths to dose my friends. i took a whole one. maybe 1 and 1/4. so prolly a few hundred mics. the weird thing was that for most of the trip the visuals were not super prominent in comparison to the psychic distortions.

Yeah i've done mushrooms and spice and caapi before (smoked) but not together. i've done syrian rue with smoked spice and rue with psilocybin. i find dmt almost intolerable smoked without rue and am hoping the vine/shrooms will provide a nice mindset to lift off from. will definitely play by ear! I will post if i end up having the courage to go through with it.