(Edit: I've just realized this post is really, really long. Sorry for that
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So I've recently had my first trip since joining the nexus! I ended up making a couple of bad decisions that I would not recommend making, as I'll point out in the trip report.
I recently got my hands on two tabs of LSD, they were from two different sources so one was a 100 ug tab, and the other was a 150 ug tab. I was tripping with my boyfriend, so in order to make sure we got the same dosage I just cut both tabs in half and we each took half of each tab, so the dosage was about 125 ug.
A little bit of background - my boyfriend, who I have been dating for three months, lives with his family, and we did this during the daytime at his house with his family home. We figured it was fine because my boyfriend and I are both adults, and his family has kind of a don't-ask-don't-tell kind of attitude about drugs, so we figured we shouldn't have to be concerned about getting caught or getting in trouble. He said if we were acting off, his family (namely his parents, we weren't worried about being caught by his siblings) would just assume we had smoked a bunch of weed or something and they would leave it alone. Plus, he has the entire basement of the house to himself, where no one else will intrude on us if we leave the door closed, so we would have a good amount of privacy. All this made me feel going in to it like it was a good setting. He told me he had tripped around his family plenty of times and it was never a problem. Later on though, some complications happened.
My boyfriend has a large span of woods behind his house (not big enough to get lost in, we wouldn't be tripping in the total wilderness without a sitter) with lots of beautiful places to wander and explore. I had never been back in to the woods before. We decided to drop the acid and then leave for an excursion in to the woods. It was a GORGEOUS day, 75 degrees and sunny, with a beautiful breeze. We brought a portable speaker with us and we were playing Papadosio (my favorite trip music, because it's just so upbeat and makes for such good vibes). We had been walking for about half an hour when we decided to sit down and take in the nature for a while. About 5 minutes after that I started to feel the inability to sit still, which is always the first thing that happens to me when I do acid. I immediately stood up and started walking circles around the tree we were seated under. He was still totally sober and he found my pacing funny, which kind of embarrassed me. I have social anxiety and didn't think about the problems that could be caused by me trying to "impress" my new boyfriend while tripping (they were fairly mild. The real problems happened when his family showed up).
We spent the next few hours wandering in the woods - there was some stuff back there that kind of gave me the creeps. His dad was a mechanic and left piles and piles of car parts and old scrap cars and things that he had worked on in the woods. For some reason, the old, empty, rusted cars and all the parts looked very ghastly to me, but in a sort of good way? It wasn't scary enough to make me want to leave, but there was a part of me that started to feel sorry for the cars and the people who could have driven them, and wondered why it was that his dad decided to save certain cars and not others. These cars were the misfits, the products of his mid-life crisis, taken to be improved and left for useless in the middle of the woods. I felt like there had to be some use for all of this, if only for scrap that would make his family some extra money and be recycled in to something better. I felt like the cars were being restricted from fulfilling their purpose, like they were wasted.
I remember a really strange sensation on my skin which I now realize was just the heat in the air, but I remember not being able to tell if I was hot or not. It was just a very strange tingling sensation that felt sort of like having sunlight on your skin, but not quite. It was very strange. I also remember spilling some water on the ground, and I would have SWORN on my life that when the water hit the ground, it was sizzling like the ground was a hot skillet. This really startled me and I pointed it out to my boyfriend who gently reminded me that I was tripping and the ground wasn't actually sizzling. I insisted that no, *he* was tripping and that was why he couldn't see it. I spent about two straight minutes tossing droplets of water on the ground and trying to figure out if they were really sizzling.
Another train of thought that followed me while I was tripping was when my boyfriend mentioned parks and how they used to be places for families to have fun together and now, at least in our town, they're places where teenagers go to get high while being away from their families, and he said that was sad. It got me thinking about how crazy it was that we even need to have parks - why is the outside world so industrialized and so infiltrated by humans that we need to have roped-off sections of land where nature is allowed to be nature?
We stayed in the woods for hours. We didn't realize how long we had been gone until his mom called him and told him they were waiting for us to eat dinner. This was when the fit hit the shan. His family is the type where his mom makes dinner and leaves it in the fridge for everyone to come and go as they please, because everyone is busy and has different work schedules, etc. However, it just so happened that THIS was the day where every member of the family was off of work, so his mom had decided to have a family dinner. Not only had she decided to make dinner for the family members that lived in the house, she even went so far as to invite over his step sister and her 5 year old daughter, whom I had never met before.
So needless to say I started having a meltdown saying that I couldn't sit through a dinner with his family while I was tripping, and I was so worried about what they would think about me and how I would make myself look. Not that I was worried about getting caught or his parents being mad or anything, but I didn't want to be acting like an idiot in front of his parents. I was crying and I kept telling him I would just stay in the woods and he could come back for me later, and he kept saying no, that wouldn't work because his family was expecting me and his mom had made a specific entree for me (she had made everyone else ribs, and she had made me a portabello mushroom because I'm a vegetarian). He wasn't worried about it at all because he didn't care if he looked like a mess in front of his family. I realized that the only thing we could do was go to dinner and try to power through it, keep quiet and don't speak unless spoken to, and I would be fine. That's what I kept trying to tell myself.
So we show up at dinner and I kid you not we walk in his front door and there is his ENTIRE family at the table waiting for us. We literally opened his front door to a set dinner table with his whole family sitting around it watching us come in. At this point we were around hour 4 or so. For me, trips tend to last a really long time. This trip in particular lasted about 12 hours for me even though it was only 7 for my boyfriend (before you say anything we did test the tabs, they were not NBOME) so at 4 hours, I'm still tripping pretty damn hard. I was probably at the very end of my peak.
I will say that one of the most revolting experiences of my entire life was consuming a portobelllo mushroom while on acid. Yikes. More unpleasant though, was the absolute mortal terror that came with tripping through a 45 minute dinner with my boyfriend's family. I was totally convinced that they were whispering about us, that they were looking at me weird, that they were judging me, etc. I have social anxiety so even when I'm sober I'm usually dead sure that everyone around me is doing this.
There was a point during dinner as well where I looked down at my plate and there was a grey juice that had squished out of the mushroom and was swirling around on the plate in the most unsettling and disturbing way, I was convinced I was seeing omens in the swirl patterns and I started to get the shakes. This made me more nervous because I was convinced that everyone was noticing how nervous I was. I was SURE that everyone was staring at me and judging me and thinking I was a bad influence on my boyfriend. I was really fighting back tears for the entire dinner and when the family FINALLY all got up and finished dinner, I literally sprinted in to my boyfriend's room where I proceeded to sit in the dark crying. I left so fast he didn't even see me leave and I scared the bejeesus out of him because he had no idea where I went.
I sat there for about a solid hour trying to just let the waves of anxiety wash over me and let my nerves play it out. I didn't want to resist it, I just wanted to let my body feel what it needed to feel. That was really hard. I never realized how immediate my reaction is to trying to quell anxiety until this moment. As humans, we try really hard to avoid emotional discomfort and it's almost reflexive when we feel a negative emotion to try to talk ourselves out of feeling it, even though usually we're feeling what we feel for a reason. Anyways, I felt really stupid for deciding to trip around his family, I should have known not to do it. I started to go through every interaction I had had with my boyfriend during the trip and started to feel like I had embarrassed myself, like I was acting weird and that I wasn't any fun to trip with. I started to feel myself spiral out of control, like my emotions and my paranoia were just shooting through infinity and I would never be able to run fast enough to take grab on to them.
Then, I heard this little voice in my head, that honestly didn't even feel like it came from me. It felt like it was something someone else wanted to communicate to me, like my subconscious was speaking to my conscious. It simply asked me why I cared. Why did I care if my boyfriend didn't like tripping with me? What bad thing was going to happen to me if I made myself look stupid in front of my boyfriend? Who cares if his family doesn't like me? Who cares what anyone thinks? Nothing bad is going to happen to me, I'm not going to be hurt or anything. The world will keep turning after an awkward, drug induced encounter with my boyfriend's family. So why am I acting like these people's opinions of me are the most important thing in my life?
The weirdest thing happened to me after that. As soon as I came to that realization I was smacked in the face (in the best way) with the most ridiculously intense wave of euphoria that I have ever felt in my entire life. No substance I've ever tried came close to it, even MDMA, even much higher doses of acid, DMT, literally anything. Everything felt perfect. It felt like the stars aligned for me in that moment - before, there were these clouds that blocked me from being able to see all the beauty and joy in the world, and all of a sudden the clouds had broken and I could see clearly. I think that I was supposed to learn something from that - I need to get better at letting myself feel negative emotions rather than running from them. I can't stop myself from feeling bad about things, and I just need to know that it will pass rather than desperately searching for anything that will make me feel better. I also need to stop caring so much about what other people think of me. As soon as I let go of the fear of rejection, the world around me fell in to place. I think that's a really big root cause of a lot of my problems in life.
After that, nothing super noteworthy happened. My boyfriend and I chatted for a couple of hours before he fell asleep. After he fell asleep I got another wave of visuals, especially closed-eye ones, so I put some headphones in and put on some music and just enjoyed it for a little while. That's an experience I've never had before - feeling sober for a couple hours before being hit with another couple hours of tripping. I don't know if that's common or not.
So now that that's over, I can say that my boyfriend's house is probably a fine place to trip. Next time we'll be sure that no one is going to call us home for dinner in the middle of it though. Other than that part of the experience, it was a great time and we plan to trip together again in another couple of weeks!
(P.S., we talked to his sister later on who told us that she literally didn't notice anything weird at all during dinner. My boyfriend also told me that I was a really good trip partner and made great company for tripping. Figures that all those fears would be totally irrational and unneccessary
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