The night before the fourth of July (if you're not American, that's independence day in the US) my boyfriend and I decided to drop 250 ug of LSD - we both had a day off the next day for the holiday, meaning we didn't need to sleep, and tripping at night = awesome. We take every opportunity to do it that we can.
We dropped around 7 pm and decided to go hang out in his hot tub while we waited for it to kick in. I took the tabs on an empty stomach, and I started feeling stimulant effects and seeing brighter colors within 10 minutes of dropping. The trip stayed at this threshold level for nearly two hours. I first really started to notice effects when we went back inside. I was laying on his bed staring at the ceiling, when I started to see the ceiling tiles melt in to one another. At this point we decided to go for a walk before we watched the fireworks our town was putting on for the fourth. There is a bike path that runs through our whole town and one of the entrances to it is a two minute walk from my boyfriend's house. We started wandering down the path. We walked in a blissful silence, his hand in mine, and took in the world around us. I could feel the affection radiating off of him, even though we didn’t speak. We didn’t need to – it was like the greenery around us, the warm, humid air, the moon that had just begun to make its way in to the dusk sky, were telling us everything we needed to know in that moment.
We decided to turn down one of the trails in to the woods that runs off the bike path. We spent a while walking in the woods, and it was unbelievably beautiful. The woods were the most serene green color, dusted here and there with clumps of flowers that dotted the green backdrop bright orange, cool lavender, and vivid blue. The fireflies were just starting to come out, and the air was thick with them. Everywhere I looked, every part of my vision was sprinkled with these flickering, iridescent points of light, like the sky was sifting stardust on the earth. It really looked like a fairy tale.
The magic of the moment was disturbed little bit when my boyfriend came across a family of skunks on the trail. We decided to avoid intruding on their territory and go back to the bike path. We eventually came across a large clearing in the woods, full of tall grass, with a circular footpath mowed through it. We decided to sit on the path while we waited for the fireworks to begin. Somehow, in the darkness, my boyfriend noticed a tiny, inch long praying mantis squirming through the grass. We became enamored with this little life for a good ten minutes. I wondered if it was aware of us, if it knew what we were, and what it would be like to be that tiny in a world this huge. I realized then that essentially, I am that tiny. I am thousands and thousands of times larger than this minuscule creature in the grass, and yet, in the grand scheme of the cosmos, comparing my size to that of the insect is like comparing the sizes of two grains of sand. I had always known that the universe was larger than my mind – that the vastness of the world is too large for me to comprehend. But I felt that in that moment, I began to understand just how small and insignificant I am. I felt no fear or discomfort because of this – it only served to put my worldview in perspective. I am a highly strung person, and thinking about how infinitesimally small I really am made it feel silly to care about all the tiny details of life I can so easily get hung up on. If my imagination is that small in comparison to the universe, how much tinier are the “problems” my imagination creates?
When the fireworks began, my boyfriend and I moved back to the path to get a better view. This was one of the most visually stimulating experiences of my life. Every time a blast would go off, it looked like someone had taken an ice pick and cracked the sky, exposing the light underneath. The whole world would light up with color, filling my expansive pupils with awesome beauty.
After this, my boyfriend and I went back to his house. His brother had been at a Fourth of July event with a couple of their friends (they are two-thirds of a set of triplets, and have basically the same social group). He had brought them back to their house for a bonfire. It was at this point, at the beginning of my comedown, that I decided I wanted to smoke a little weed. I like smoking on the comedown because it so intensifies the trip that it allows me to keep tripping hard all the way through the comedown rather than having the effects fizzle out. I am an every day smoker, but my boyfriend isn’t. Since he’s less experienced, he’s prone to paranoia while on cannabis so he decided not to smoke. He had already come down a lot and ended up having a couple beers with his friends and talking. They had started a bonfire that had to be at least fifteen feet tall. The sound of the crackling fire echoed around the yard, and it sounded like it was coming from all directions. It started to consume me as the cannabis high began to take effect, and it felt like I was falling through a tunnel. When I landed, I was in another universe that looked as if our reality had been based upon it. Our world was a very primitive, unsophisticated replica of the one I was seeing. I could still see the fire, I could still see the yard, but it was like I could see it in five dimensions.
My boyfriend was seated next to me in a lawn chair, and I was sitting on the ground with my head resting against his knee. My head was tilted, but I noticed that it didn’t feel like that – it looked to me like the world had tilted, and my head had stayed stationary. I was captivated by the firelight, and as I stared in to it, I could see the grass start to split in to fractals with the fire at the center. I could see what looked like tribal-style carved faces in the firewood, and the longer I stared at it, the more the world began to fade around me. All my surroundings began to morph in to flat, solid blackness except for the fire, which stood out in five-dimensional radiance against the darkness. I stared at the flame as it crackled and licked the black backdrop, and all of the sounds of the world around me began to fade away. I don’t even know what I was thinking about during that time I was staring at the fire. I’m sure I looked hilarious to the people around me – in the middle of a group of ten drunk college kids, who were socializing, laughing, and blasting music, while I sat on the ground completely zonked out, unblinking and motionless, staring in to the fire. Even though I have social anxiety and it’s usually terrifying to me to look “off” or out of place around others, I didn’t care what they thought about me. I was so enveloped in the world I had found myself in that I couldn’t even make myself care about one of my worst fears. It was so peaceful and liberating.
Every so often, my boyfriend would lean in and ask if I was alright, which would pull me out of my world and in to this one. I would hastily tell him that I was fine and continue to gaze in to the fire, hoping that if I stared long enough, I could make it back to that otherworldly dimension. I always did. It felt like it was ten thousand years I spent there, until finally my boyfriend and a few of his friends decided to go out and get some food. The thought of going out in public in that state really terrified me and I started to panic a little bit. I told my boyfriend I didn’t want to go out. He was confused and worried about me, I think he thought I was starting to go to a bad headspace. I wasn’t, I just knew that if I had to be around strangers who didn’t know I was higher than high, it would send me to a bad headspace. I was still pretty messed up and I was unable to communicate this to him. He was really reluctant to leave me alone and I was having a very hard time trying to explain to him that I was fine and he could go, which did start to make me a little anxious. I think he realized he was stressing me out and decided to let it go. He brought his dog in to his room to keep me company and I laid in his bed, put my headphones in and put on some music. I laid there for a while, with my eyes closed, cuddling his dog and taking in the visuals. It felt like the music and my emotions synched up, and with every note I could feel myself morphing in to it until the music sounded like it was coming from inside my head. I played the same song on a loop about five times (Find your Cloud by Papadosio – I preach the gospel of this band for staving off anxiety while tripping. Their music is awesome) and right about when my boyfriend came home was when I started to gain my grip on reality again. We laid there for hours talking about the trip, and we both agreed it was one of the best trips we’d ever had. Every time I have a beautiful trip like this (although, most of my trips don’t come close to the happiness and warmth I felt on this one), it’s like I learn how to see the good in the world again. I came down from the trip with so much forgiveness for the mistakes of the people around me. I let go of grudges and replaced them with compassion. It was truly beautiful
I wish that everyone in the world would have an experience like that at least once.
Anyways, thanks for reading, happy tripping friends!
