Getty Images We would also laugh a lot – no doubt about that – and we would hear our favourite songs with ears attuned to different frequencies. Just a few days before the scheduled Saturday, however, I experienced a major professional disappointment. A writing project to which I had devoted more than a year of work would not be published. My self-confidence was shaken to its core, and despite unerringly good advice and support from those closest to me, I entered a period of mourning wherein I found myself questioning everything, even the wisdom of taking drugs that had been helpful before. Among psychedelic drug users, the concept of a "bad trip" is burned into the culture. The effects are deeply unsettling for both the individual and those accompanying them on this troubled journey. I have some experience in this area: while camping outside of Brisbane several winters ago, I foolishly combined a thoroughly pleasant afternoon dose of LSD with cannabis once the sun had set. After inhaling in the darkness near a bone-dry creek bed, my consciousness began to fracture. With each passing moment, I felt my sense of self drift further away from my companions, who recall me becoming more reclusive than usual. One female friend described my behaviour as "withdrawn, silent and scared", while a male friend said I looked "quiet and introspective". He said that at times, my fear was child-like.

After what felt like hours but which may have been three minutes, I rediscovered my voice to share my growing panic. I relied on my friends to repeat familiar phrases – such as the line "Back to reality" from Eminem's song Lose Yourself – to keep me grounded. I was given a torch to regain some control over my environment, as we slowly wound our way back to the light of the fire. Once I was again sitting securely in my comfortable camp chair, I continued to hallucinate, and watched my friends appear to project and bend fire from their outstretched hands. I eventually crawled into my sleeping bag, exhausted. This was the closest I have yet been to a bad trip though, in hindsight, calling it "difficult" would be more apt. The mistake I made was to combine acid and weed. Now that I know that's a bad idea, I won't be doing it again. When that memory comes up in conversation, I reflect on it as a learning experience. I was foolhardy to think that my brain could handle the effects of two powerful psychoactive drugs at the same time. My respect for both drugs grew, as I learned my limits of consumption. The late Timothy Leary, the former LSD experimenter, photographed at his California home in 1992. Credit:AP To reduce the likelihood of a difficult trip while using LSD or psilocybin mushrooms, "psychonauts" – the name for those of us who use these drugs in search of self-improvement – adhere to a concept called "set and setting". This was popularised in the 1960s by Harvard psychologist and psychedelic drug enthusiast Timothy Leary. Responsible users, Leary suggested, should give due forethought to their individual mindsets leading into a trip, as well as ensuring that it will take place in a safe, secure setting. Enlisting an experienced psychedelic guide – a "trip sitter" – was a fine idea as well, Leary reckoned, just in case things started to go awry and the psychonauts needed to be brought back to reality. I started researching psychedelic drugs in 2012 with trepidation and respect, and talked often with experienced users before ingesting anything. My first trips were taken under the watchful eye of seasoned guides. Since then, I have studiously adhered to this idea of set and setting – other than the misstep of the camping episode, where I let my intoxicated self decide that smoking a joint with a head full of acid was a good idea.

Perhaps my delicate head space would send my mind on an express elevator to a lower level of hell. To me, set and setting is about respecting the power of these drugs, and acknowledging that they are not blunt instruments to be used at a moment's notice, such as when someone at a party offers you an unknown dose when you're 10 beers deep. That's just plain dumb and reckless. Instead, I consider LSD and psilocybin mushrooms to be finely crafted instruments which, if used sensibly, can provide deep insights into one's core psychology and decision-making. This wisdom can echo in the mind for a long time after the effects have worn off. When my writing-related disappointment occurred, I saw a fork in the road. I could postpone my planned trip. Or I could take the blotter with my friends, as planned, even though my mindset was fragile. Perhaps taking LSD while mourning a professional loss would be a fulfilling experience where I could analyse the matter from every angle to determine what positives could be gleaned from it. Or perhaps my delicate head space would send my mind on an express elevator to a lower level of hell, where I would be tormented by my raging subconscious for up to 12 hours – no matter what my friends or our trip sitter said.

This latter outcome is a real possibility for any psychedelic drug user, including Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD in 1943 and later synthesised psilocybin. On his first acid trip, after accidentally taking a much larger dose than he had intended, he feared he was either losing his mind or dying. Hofmann's worst trip occurred on psilocybin: he hallucinated that he was wandering all alone, deep inside the Earth's core. "I had the feeling of absolute loneliness," he told a reporter in 1999, aged 93. "A terrible feeling!" On passing through the dark phase and rejoining his companions, however, he was ecstatic. "I had a feeling of being reborn! To see now again … what a wonderful life we have here!" The fear of a dark outcome led me to cancel that scheduled trip. It seemed the safer, saner option; the opposite of drowning my sorrows in a substance, in the way that one might neck a bottle of rum after a painful break-up. Part of me still wonders what I might have learnt about myself had I taken the acid that day. I might have opened windows in my mind that had previously been sealed shut, such is this drug's nature. While tripping, the brain undergoes a marked departure from normal operation. Some psychonauts wistfully describe this process as akin to unlocking the doors of perception, and I am inclined to agree. About once a year for the last five years, I have used psychedelic drugs as a tool to temporarily quieten my ego, examine my life and behaviours, and attempt to change my thinking. Sometimes these were shared social experiences, in small groups. These are some of my favourite memories: euphoric, hilarious and marked by an incredible sense of connection between us. At the start of 2015, I took a solo LSD trip during which I thought deeply about my career. With pen and notebook, and my favourite songs booming through headphones, I decided on a lateral move: to create a podcast about Australian writing.

Within a month, I had started recording long conversations with writers and journalists. Of course, this might have happened without the drug, but that burst of enthusiasm while tripping certainly helped. Towards the end of his life, Steve Jobs credited psychedelic drugs with making him more enlightened. In Walter Isaacson's 2011 biography of the Apple co-founder, Jobs described taking LSD as a "profound experience", "one of the most important things in my life … It reinforced my sense of what was important – creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could." The late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, pictured in 2008, described taking LSD as a 'profound experience'. Credit:Jeff Chiu Though I am operating at a much lower level than Jobs did, I feel similarly about that trip two years ago, where I resolved to create something from nothing. Lately, though, I sense another attraction to these perception-twisting vacations from routine reality, and it is tied to the dread that comes with the simple act of waking each morning and reading the news.

The White House is now occupied by an unstable narcissist with a Twitter addiction. And Australia is governed by a political coalition which largely denies climate change, and whose ministers consider a lump of coal to be a great comic prop during Question Time, even as another punishing heatwave was engulfing much of the country. My friends and I have yet to reschedule that LSD trip, but with each passing day, a temporary reprieve from the onslaught of bad news becomes more appealing.

