I was extremely afraid. This experience I was seeking could land me in prison or even possibly kill me, due to lapse in judgment or pharmacological interaction with an antidepressant I was on. Yet I needed answers, perhaps the experience could set me free. Perhaps it could enable me to glimpse enlightenment, or to see into eternity. Perhaps it could give me a completely different perspective, or perhaps it could make me realize that all things were one. As a matter of fact, while it didn’t kill me and didn’t lead to prison, the experience I had on January 10th, 2015 did indeed allow me to have the other five realizations, plus so much more. It was to date the most powerful, strange, supernatural and life changing event I’ve ever had in my entire existence.

The four of us stood in my kitchen at my homey apartment, looking at the eight sweet and sour candy chews sitting in front of us. I was so apprehensive that I had taken a couple of shots of rum in advance to calm my nerves. That was about half an hour ago, and I was certainly buzzed. However, the alcohol had done its job and allowed me to relax and stop fearing the candy. Well, not the candy, but the doses of lysergic acid diethylamide that the candy pieces had been imbibed with.

I had done my homework on psychedelics, reading extensively, listening to podcasts and watching documentaries. I learned about McKenna and Alpert, Huxley, Leary and Hoffman. I had familiarized myself with Pierre de Chardin’s concept of the Omega Point, with Stanislav Grof’s experiments with psychedelics, and had learned about Alan Watts, Carl Sagan and Robert Anton Wilson and their viewpoints related to psychedelics, nature and society. I knew that typical psychedelics were 5-HT agonists (specifically 5-HT2A) that altered serotonin receptors and thus changed brain communication by destroying the filter that confined consciousness to the mundane. I knew which psychedelics among mescaline, DMT, psilocybin, LSD and Harmala alkaloids were indoles and which were phenethylamines, and how these two classes of compounds differed at the atomic level. I knew which substances were safe to mix with monoamine oxidase inhibitors and learned the symptoms of serotonin syndrome and hypertensive crisis. I also knew a bit about atypical psychedelics such as Ketamine, Salvia Divinorum and MDMA. Aside from accumulating considerably greater knowledge than an average person in regards to psychedelics, I had tripped once before, off of one hit of LSD on blotter a few months back. The experience was profound but manageable. I had done it with a friend we’ll call J, it had been his first trip too. But whilst my perspective had changed significantly (I could think on a much more abstract level, couldn’t sleep for a long time, and felt connected to everybody I met) I had no visuals, though J did on the same single dose. It had been a stage one or mild stage two psychedelic experience. Today I was going to double the dose (or so I thought) by taking two of the eight candies, as would my three companions. J was with me again, and I also decided to have the experience with two other friends, A and E. The latter two were much more experienced trippers.

So I popped two pieces of the candy in my mouth (a green one and the single yellow one of the batch) in unison with them, emboldened by the alcohol and thinking my experience would be roughly double what it had been. However, I’m not sure that the dose-response curve for LSD is linear at all, or perhaps (as E and A stated later) there had been two hits on each candy resulting in four hits total per person, because we were all about to embark on the trip of our lives. I’d say it was five to ten times more powerful than my first experience. I was shooting for a level two or maybe level three trip, but I ended up going straight to level four, a huge jump from my first experience. At least it was likely pure LSD, since A had experienced other imitations and stated later that what we had ingested was the real thing (no mouth numbing, not extremely bitter, and the effects were consistent with LSD he’s had before). The time of the dosing was about 3:30 in the afternoon.

Immediately after ingesting (before any effects had taken hold of us), J drove us in my car to his house, where we’d stay during the come up. Truthfully I had wanted to stay at my place, which was very comfortable and filled with good vibes, but I went along anyways. Once in J’s house we sat around on some couches and talked for a while, waiting eagerly. A and J kept saying they felt something about forty five minutes in, but I don’t think I did, and was in fact able to do some wild and amusing break dancing moves. Well, perhaps now I did notice a slight change in mood. A and J kept looking at the ceiling, telling me it looked different, though from my perspective it did not. E was fairly quiet at this point and kept denying that he was tripping at all. After perhaps forty five more minutes I noticed that my hands, when waved in front of my face, were producing slight tracers. My ability to remember things I was just thinking of was decreasing a bit, and my attention span was very limited. I also began to have a dramatically higher ability to think abstractly, and whilst I could still perceive time I stopped thinking about past and future to live entirely in the present. It was about five o'clock at this point, and we decided to go walk around our college campus, despite the cold and snow.

We walked around for a bit, and as we did I knew I was definitely a different sort of inebriated. Conversation flowed between us quickly, chaotically and profoundly, I’ve noticed that trippers talk differently than sober people. I noticed that I was quite relaxed at this point. We walked through the snow and arrived eventually at the school’s lake, which was surrounded by small hills dotted with trees. The frosty trees were still adorned with Christmas lights that made the whole space look to be illuminated by tiny multicolored stars. The sun was starting to set, and thus the sky turned a brilliant pink, subtle shamrock green and electric azure. The lights were glinting off the snow, making it pearlescent. And the lake itself was thickly frozen over. All of the different light sources and the sunset reflected off of the lake ice, making it look like an enormous glistening opal. The most prominent reflected colors upon the crystalline lake were green, pink and gold, yet the ice itself was a lustrous slate blue-white, and was dotted with interesting frozen white starburst like patterns of ice, whose tendrils fragmented continually outward into complex branches. Even sober it would have been an incredibly beautiful spectacle, but coming up on the trip I realized that it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and so far it still has been.

J jumped onto the ice which freaked me out, thinking we might be on the news as “crazy kids on acid” who fell in a frozen lake and died. Upon my expressed discouragement J climbed back ashore. A tweaked out looking couple dared us to go on the ice as they walked past, but also told us it was not their fault if we died and anybody asked. A ran into a kid he knew and briefly greeted the guy as he walked past. Then I climbed a tiny snow covered cliff and viewed the frozen lake from a higher vantage point, which was spectacular. I convinced the other three to climb up and they were thankful that they did, taking pictures of each other. We then left the lake to go to the campus park, where we looked at the sunset and trekked through the snow. We were acting silly and there were certainly some people around! I didn’t know if they could tell anything was up with us. Eventually we decided to head back, and I rolled down a snowy embankment a few times for some laughs and fun, covering myself in snow. As we were leaving the park E pointed out that to our left it was night, a dark cloudy purple, and to the right it was still day, the pink sunset. This struck me as extremely cool, and I took it in for a few seconds despite my companions pressuring me to keep moving.

Upon arriving back at J’s house we were certainly tripping, seeing tracers and minor visuals. We felt very abstract and empathetic as well, and even E admitted that he was no longer sober. Somebody suggested that we smoke the joint that A had brought, so we went up to J’s room, lit up the weed and passed the joint around. We each took about three or four hits and J turned on his Christmas lights adorning his ceiling. J had a fairly trippy room already, with a psychedelic fabric covering a whole wall (this would later look three dimensional), and other trippy artwork adorning the other walls. But when the weed began to hit we all started to feel incredibly strange. Indeed, I wonder if it was the weed that caused me to peak like I did. This was when my tripping did start to reach its peak, and I believe the others were feeling their peaks at the same time as me. I was lying on the floor of J’s room when crazy things next began to happen, which I shall now explain.

Firstly, my already enhanced ability to think abstractly became phenomenal. This was accompanied by intensification of distractive thought patterns and short term memory loss. Our trippy talking style intensified too, and we talked a bit to each other in amazement as we all felt how crazy our perceptions were rapidly becoming. Now the tracers were obvious, and time began to act stranger and stranger. Soon my ability to comprehend the perception of time was completely gone and I entered eternity. The visuals quickly followed, the most corporeal of which would stay around until we left J’s house. I saw fractal images of geometric order, which quickly changed in fluid and graceful ways before my eyes. They were vivid whenever I shut my eyes, but also were slightly visible when my eyes were open. The images looked like iridescent organic molecule chains that fractalized before me, but some of my other visuals looked like neon spider webs that had mini-fractals in some of the gaps between the fibers. Another color effect I got was that images in general had monochromatic overlays of brilliant color that flowed from red to green to purple and blue and orange and gold over and over again. Visually I also saw slight “rippling”, though I would better describe it as slow, eerie undulating of objects, the most prominent of which objects would be my companions’ faces and eyes.

Aside from the color visuals, thought processes and inability to process time, I began to lose the ability to understand spacial relations. The floor and the ceiling traded places in a way I’m not fully sure how to describe. Objects looked as though they would in a warped mirror, even the walls and ceiling and floor of the rooms themselves were warped into a circular arc, as was everything else within the room. The last critical thing to happen, which was rather short lived compared to the other effects, was also the most profound. I experienced ego death. I realized that there were absolutely no boundaries between myself and my environment, which ultimately was the universe as a whole. I realized that ultimately consciousness is the universe’s fundamental nature, that I was the universe creating and experiencing itself, that the universe was conscious and I was a leaf on the tree of universal consciousness. My consciousness transcended matter, energy, space and time, I became everything and my sense of self disappeared. This cosmic consciousness was the most profound realization in my life, and it was completely and truly ineffable. It was, in retrospect, like a crude, linear animal consciousness (ordinary human consciousness) was somehow, by this strange drug, metamorphosized into a divine, eternal and transcendental consciousness describable only as god like. I was at this point not even able to think like a human being and thus was not able to feel emotions like fear as one would think would be natural upon confronting ego death. I would later ponder how in the hell I’d be able to act like a human being again after an experience like that, and was also absolutely amazed that humans were capable of experiencing such a powerful and different state from ordinary consciousness.

Needless to say, I was not expecting to have an ego death and was completely shocked. A said that he was going through the same identity dissolution process as I went through it, and E kept muttering things like “holy SHIT!” and looking wide eyed. J was strangely quiet. We eventually snapped out of that ridiculously intense state of consciousness enough to leave J’s room and go downstairs to the living room and the kitchen. As I stood between the two rooms I experienced synesthesia (crossover of the senses) as it related to taste. I felt like I could taste images or sounds, which was very strange. After I was done getting caught up in the synesthesia, which didn’t last long and strangely didn’t really surprise me in the moment, I began talking to the other three about how society tries to define everything so rigorously and how it tries to turn all processes into mechanical sequences governed by mathematics and formulas (I’m a physics major so this was quite natural to me too). I told them that I felt that humans were more like songs, works of art or expressions than machine components, that we were ethereal, a unique and one of a kind phenomenon, and that our culture currently seemed to be taking the essential aspects of being a human out of our lives as we were expected to behave mechanical, pragmatic, pedantic and efficient, rather than spontaneous, creative, transcendental and profound.

I then tried to explain to the other three how I was feeling. I grabbed a piece of paper and a pen and drew (against J’s fridge) two clusters of diagonally separated dots, explaining that one set of dots represented my normal consciousness and the other set represented my new consciousness. I then connected the dots in a long enclosing ellipse, circled each cluster of dots around and outside of the ellipse, and finally drew another long skinny ellipse perpendicular to the first long ellipse at its center. The picture looked quite interesting, almost like a strange cousin of an atom, very sci-fi. I told my companions that symbology was incredibly important to fundamental human comprehension and communication; symbols were powerful abstract tools. I realized how important symbols were to the processing of meaning in the human brain. I then told them that the picture I drew could be used to interpret my state of consciousness, thus providing a window into my inner world. That was the power of symbology, allowing the other a window into the contemplations of the self. E tried to coax me to drink some water which at first did not work because I suspected that he had dosed it with more LSD somehow, forgetting the obvious fact that E couldn’t conjure up drugs at will.

We then went into the family room and sat on the couches. I started drawing another picture and kind of went into a trance while I did. E started yelling in amazement and A told him to let me let it out. We analyzed my new image for a while and then E held up a blank sheet of paper. Pearlescent patterns of soft pastel colors spiraled around on the paper, and E screamed about how blank paper was amazing because it could be anything and was untapped potential. He would later tell me that this was his epiphany of the night. I felt that we were all on such a similar wavelength that we could read each others’ thoughts and moods, and this actually seemed eerily true, as we were able to somehow know to an extent what the other was thinking or would say. The social cohesion was quite strong, and I realized in this moment how much set and setting affect an experience, and how crucial social dynamics could be to the psychedelic experience.

It was at this point that E tightened his belt, and then J strangely asked him why he was taking his clothes off. E said he didn’t know what J was talking about. A, E and I then continued discussing symbols and the meaning of life and how this experience was liberating us from our personalities. We didn’t notice J’s slip upstairs to his room. E and A really started going into intense, deep conversation and I was eagerly taking part in it when J demanded I come up to his room. I was sketched out by this but decided to go up anyways, to perhaps see why he was acting so quiet.

When I got up to his room J shut the door. He asked me what was going on downstairs and I told him that we were talking and experiencing a shared renaissance of consciousness. J said he and I weren’t communicating on the same wavelength and demanded to know why I was putting walls up. At this point I started getting extremely negative vibes from J. I asked him what he meant and he finally told me that he thought E and A were being gay downstairs. For the record, I don’t care if people are homosexual, but that said, J was being delusional because the other two were not being gay at all. I told J this and got uncomfortable, wanting to go back downstairs. I quickly left the room and J followed. He became angry with A and E, and eventually demanded that they stop trying to turn ME gay with them! When we repeatedly denied this J kicked us out of his house and into the cold, dark snowy wilderness while we were still tripping hard. J had an unsettling look in his eye, and for the next hour or so I was worried he was going to kill himself or call the cops or something. He had tripped way too hard and wasn’t thinking straight, and would later tell me he never wanted to try LSD again in his life.

When we got kicked out we had to go to my place again, there was nowhere else to go! It was incredibly frigid outside and the trek from J’s place to mine was our walk through the valley of death, it was purely horrifying. I had been on that campus for over three years but walking through it on the peak of a powerful LSD trip, I couldn’t recognize any of it. I kept freaking out, thinking I was the reason J kicked us out. A didn’t know how to function any better than I did, but somehow E was able to pull himself together and guide us back to my apartment, a feat I will respect him for forever now. As I walked the sky flashed different colors due to the trip visuals, a wild purple, then a dark rich blue, then a turquoise green. There was a helicopter in the sky, many people walked around including garbage collectors whom I thought were paramedics coming to get me. I assumed the cops were onto us, and at one point we walked past a campus security vehicle. While walking past it a nervous A thought he dropped his scarf and started mildly freaking out, only to discover that the scarf was around his neck the entire time. I felt that the night would end in a prison cell, A kept mentioning the police and I began to wonder if I wasn’t already strapped down to a hospital gurney, simply imagining the events I was participating in. The whole walk to my place had a strange dreamy quality to it, with a nightmarish and strongly delusional flavor. I thought about J’s sinister actions, wondered if he had drugged me with some date rape drug, and whether he was trying to come onto me in his room, repressing his own latent homosexuality which exploded in an episode of delusional homophobia. I even wondered if somebody had died and if I had seen it or in some way caused it. I was incredibly impressionable; I could be told something untrue and would conjure up detailed, if fragmented false memories. I kept apologizing, I was terrified, frigid and had no idea where I was. A and I just put our complete faith in E and he somehow came through and led us back to my apartment, helping us avoid cars too (I couldn’t understand crosswalks). A block before we reached the apartment, while we were crossing a road, my left and right fields of vision strangely flipped places in a way I can’t easily describe, though it was incredibly strange. All of the apartments began flashing different colors, or perhaps my whole field of vision was. I didn’t even recognize the street I lived on.

Once we got back into my room we tried to calm ourselves down about J and the possibility of cops coming. A kept mentioning somebody making contact with “the outside world” but E knew the cops weren’t coming and tried to tell me he was sober now (I later found this to be completely false), which freaked me out even more since it supported my hypothesis that J had drugged me against my will if I was the only one still tripping. Had I been sober I would have noticed that A was still tripping hard too (he had a very intense trip that night), though E was genuinely handling himself well at this point relative to us. With effort we were able to bring the trip back to a good state again, and I huddled under a blanket to get warm. The trip persisted for a while, with subtle recurring geometric patterns appearing in places like my towering room light. My vision was still occasionally overlaid with shifting monochromatic tinges of color too. Also, I noticed when we got back to my place that I was unable to read my phone at all. The letters and numbers that normally comprised my phone’s wording had been replaced by strange, unrecognizable alien hieroglyphics which flowed and evolved on the phone’s surface. I thought at the time that this might be the fundamental language upon which the brain operates at a subconscious level, but who knows.

Eventually we settled down enough to function like relatively normal humans again, and invited some sober and stoned friends over. J even came over later and everybody reconciled. I couldn’t stop talking to other people about the trip though, it was so fascinating! However, I didn’t get to sleep until 8 am, and then woke up three hours later. Thus needless to say, the day after the trip I was extremely frazzled and exhausted mentally and physically. It took a lot out of me to push my consciousness to cosmic proportions! I don’t regret the trip I had at all, I learned so much and it was so fascinating. However, I did reach all of the hallmarks of a powerful LSD trip this time, all of my curiosities had been satisfied. I am a spiritual seeker, and I feel that all that I had wanted to learn from tripping I had acquired that night. I experienced practically all of the hallmarks of a very strong trip, from visuals to the destruction of time to ego death and synesthesia! I got a completely new perspective. I did learn without a shadow of a doubt that the human consciousness really can ascend to supernatural states of existence. And I experienced eternal cosmic consciousness.

But in sum, I do believe that LSD has tremendous potential and think more people should experience it at least once. I realized that perception truly is the only way humans can know anything, it is primary. Thus it was strange to see how easy it was for a chemical to so severely tinker with this intimate and fundamental ability of consciousness to perceive. Especially strange was the level of profundity and power to which my consciousness was altered on this substance. Whereas weed makes you silly and spacey, and alcohol makes you confident and sloppy, this substance has the potential to dissolve your perception of space, time, the universe and yourself in it! I’m proud that I was able to have the considerable courage and open mindedness to try the substance, breaking federal law and over two decades of cultural conditioning in the process, and I feel a new confidence bred by knowing that I went through such a crazy experience and came out on the other end with my mind, body and consciousness intact. By far LSD was the most interesting, life changing and provocative thing I have ever done.