In September 2012, I prepared a table of SR1 LSD vendors & products. When VitaCat’s listings went up, I added them in and they were no-brainer to order. I ordered a 2-tab Mayan on the 5th and they arrived on the 19th barely within my predicted time period of 2 weeks (but they did arrive). I rather liked their stealth packaging, that would not have occurred to me. My main complaint was that I was expecting it to arrive by the 15th or 16th, and when I PMed the vendor for the tracking number (I had paid for that), he never replied. More than a little annoying at the time, but the package did arrive, so I decided to leave a 5-star review after my trip.

I spent the next day doing the first tab. I should mention I have never done any psychedelics before, so I can’t really judge from my experience whether they were 250μg as advertised (at least with most other drugs I’ve used, the first use is the strongest, I don’t have any other trips to compare to, and there is much between-subject variation). It was a long and exhausting day, so I will just sketch it. I had a light breakfast, went through my checklist of preparations: empty camera, back up computer, clean up, shower & dress nicely, hide modafinil & other tab of LSD, and then review the trip plan - meditation, music, and walk.

At 1:25PM I finished preparations, took the tab sublingually, and went outside with my blanket to meditate. I noticed no taste beyond the paper. It was an extremely nice day out, with a very bright sun but a cool steady breeze off the water. I was disappointed in the first hour when nothing seemed to be happening during my meditation except I found it unusually easy to concentrate. I wondered if my slight muscle tremors were related, but I find the half-lotus posture difficult so that is not unusual. By 1:54 I finished meditating. A little disappointed that after half an hour, nothing seemed to be happening, I headed inside for some music.

The music was unusually absorbing; but within 15 minutes (by 2:26), a vague tiredness like I needed a nap, a headache, and some nausea had built up. At 2:45, I made myself a PB&J sandwich, but the bad feeling doesn’t go away so I decide it’s a good time to go for a long walk. (I check my pupils in the mirror before going. They seem a little bigger but I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it - I don’t regularly check my pupils’ dilation.)

The walk at 2:50 makes me feel a little better within 10 minutes. During the walk, I notice my body seems to be feeling ‘mechanical’ and my movements weaker, with my skin feeling like a flesh glove (if that metaphor makes sense), although at the same time, the bright sunlight and cool wind feel exceptionally vivid to my senses; I was reminded of when I went skydiving and on the way down, the world seemed to ‘pop’. Apparently the acidhead term for this is ‘body load’. My normal chatter of thoughts and introspection slowed down considerably, perhaps because the walk was making me feel much better and I was trying to enjoy the raw sensations. I was relieved that the LSD was not a bust as I had begun to fear, since that would force a hard choice (continue the microdosing experiment with LSD of unknown quality or quantity, or abandon it by using the second tab to see if the first tab was a fluke?). One persistent problem was my jaw or neck muscles seemed to be rigid or clenching and I had to keep relaxing them or they would create a sort of want-to-vomit feeling, which was pretty strange when I focused on it. But I still wasn’t impressed by the experience.

In no real hurry at all, by 3:25 I got to the end of the road where there’s a beautiful view of the inlet and the sky. As I usually do on this walk, I happened to spend a little time cloud-watching, and I realized that the clouds were strobing like stop-animation as I focused on individual patches; in particular, I realized that I could force a visual flip (like the young/old woman optical illusion or the rabbit-duck illusion) from seeing a sky of blue with thin clouds to a roiling stormscape where the blue was the black, and the white clouds were just the illuminated underside. Quite interesting, and an unexpected figure-ground inversion. I also could temporarily force pareidolia by visualizing and willing the clouds to form claw or grasping hands or vaguely human-like shapes.

This absorbed my attention for half an hour or so until a guy on the pier asked if I was OK (I hope just because I’d been laying looking like I was taking a nap and not because I was visibly tripping). I waved him off successfully but I decided it was a good time to head back. The walk back was entirely uneventful, although I stopped at the grove of trees by my place to watch the clouds some more from a longer perspective.

Back home, I spent the next 2-3 hours listening to music by Explosions in the Sky tracks, which while planning I had thought would sound better on LSD. I was right - the experience was amazing. Lying in bed with my eyes blindfolded and just listening carefully, I have never followed the music so well, or been so moved emotionally or physically by it. My misanthropic soul was moved twice to tears.

Entirely wrung out by the experience, I went out to watch the sunset over the creek with the cat and ruminate over the day. This actually turned out to be almost as meaningful, since I realized as the cat gamboled over our little hill of a few tons of rocks that a cat or fox playing on a pile of rocks as the sun set was a good metaphor for my own life. (I am a thorough-going atheist, and as I predicted, I had no real mystical experience and I remained an atheist.) This realization made me feel better.

When I went in, I was sitting in the bathroom thinking how my expectations were guiding the visual effects, and I thought to myself, “Speaking of pareidolia, I bet even this orange-bleach-stained towel could become something interesting if I focus hard enough” and after a few minutes I realized that I could see the stains as the Tibetan underworld god Yama and see the flames flicker behind the towel. (Yama is not important to me and I do not think about him, so I don’t know how he came to mind. For a report in middle or high school long ago, I had drawn by hand a large albeit stripped down copy of a Yama mandala because his design was really cool. I guess it stuck!)

After that I watched Wings of Honneamise (I prefer it to 2001: A Space Odyssey, and needed to rewatch it for my Gainax research), which was as excellent as I remembered. I noticed a number of things this time around that I hadn’t the first time, like the protagonist employing his sword training in dealing with an assassin - echoing the general theme of him drawing on the training & space program he had previously considered useless. I also think I understand his attempted rape better: throughout the movie appear dichotomies between peace & war, good and bad - the space program is peaceful but used to spark war, technology is what lifts up man but also used to hurt and kill, etc. The protagonist befriends the woman and orphan, but there can be a thin line between love and desire.

By 9:39, I finished it and then did some dual n-back to see how bad my performance was 9-10 hours after dosing (average: 50/20/41/42/47). Some generic reading and chatting online rounded off my day. By this point, I felt pretty much fine except for some odd fine motor control issues: typing had become surprisingly challenging as I had to think about it. But I was kind of tired from all the new experience, so I went to bed - whereupon I suffered massive insomnia. This apparently isn’t an unknown effect, although the reports I read did not emphasize it, and I should have planned on going to bed more like 3AM. Oh well. A lesson is learned but the damage is irreversible.

(To quantify what I mean by insomnia, here are the Zeo numbers: I went to bed at 12:50AM, took 2.1 hours to fall asleep, slept for only 7.4 hours, awoke 8 times, and self-rated my morning feel at 1. All of these values are extreme for me: in z-scores, the last 4 are respectively 8.713 (!), -0.7232, 0.5249, & -2.304.)

Overall, a good experience as I expected especially since I experienced no law enforcement trouble and so far have experienced no flashbacks. But I’m not sure I’ll ever need to do a LSD trip again (the second tab is for the microdose experiment), and I don’t understand how people can do it on even a monthly basis, for a number of reasons: LSD isn’t cheap, for starter; I felt it was too powerful an experience to undergo for frivolous reasons (I definitely see why it was investigated in connection with brainwashing); and in particular, one shouldn’t weaken it but save it for when one has questions or needs.

In retrospect, 250μg may have been too high and responsible for the ‘body load’ and the insomnia. I’ve felt somewhat similar feelings with too-high doses of stimulants and nootropics. (I don’t regard it as a big deal, though: the insomnia was much more unpleasant, and I think could have been dealt with by staying up later.) Otherwise, the dose was OK. As I said, I had planned things and hidden anything incriminating and had already done the risk analysis, so I wasn’t worried about police. It was a beautiful day out, few people were around, and I knew I was safe (and also that thinking I was safe helped make me be safe - ‘set and setting’, right?). Plus, I am a relatively calm & emotionally controlled, so I figured I had less reason to fear turning out like the cliched ‘friend panicking in the woods after a dose’. It seemed to work out.

I didn’t write it up the next day because I was still feeling poorly from the insomnia, but the day after that. Hopefully the distance does not distort too much.