The Smoking Caterpillar

The Smoking Caterpillar

    LSD

    SmokingCaterpillar  November 27 2024 06:00:00 PM
    In my  life, so far, I've had two LSD trips. I've talked about a sort of risk assessment that I do in order to decide whether a recreational drug is appropriate for me to take.

    Here's my basic thoughts on LSD. By the way, I'm not saying that I assert that the contents of the table are true. They're my opinions and as such are probably wrong to some degree. But on the basis that it's best to do some risk assessment before doing anything risky, here it is.
    Area Measure
    Toxicity Low
    Metabolic effects (heart rate, temperature etc) Slight elevations, maybe arrhythmia
    Chemical addiction risk None known
    Dependence rate None known
    Entertainment potential Very good
    Negative psychological effects Some links to issues. But also frequent anecdotal evidence of benefits.





    So, I took 125 micrograms of LSD at around 8pm one evening. I went to bed, watched a bit of TV, has a couple of rips on a THC cartridge and waited for the fireworks. But I fell asleep, to wake some time later in the middle of an LSD trip. Never having experienced anything like that in my life. It was incredible. Intense open and closed eye visuals like nothing I had ever seen. But here's the thing. I knew I was in a trip and most of the time I was a spectator to my own trip, of that makes sense. And this leads me to believe that it's possibly the case that if you're going to take recreational drugs, wait till you're older. I helps to contextualise things. It's a bit like watching horror movies, Stay with me, I will make sense eventually. I think. When you're a child, watching scary movies can be really scary. Whereas as an adult, I can watch scary movies without being disturbed by them. (Usually, anyway). But why is this? It probably doesn't matter - it's the fact that it happens that is the salient point.

    Some time into the trip (you'll understand if  say that timescales are difficult to work with when tripping on LSD) I decided that I needed to pee. The problem that I had was that the bathroom was a trip across a landing then six or seven stairs to get to the door of the aforementioned. Well actually, even that wasn't the problem. I was inhabiting two worlds. On the one hand I was in the physical world with things like gravity, emulsion paint, furniture, doors, floors etc. But I was seeing pulsating walls, colours, writhing tentacles etc. Even in my brain, though, I knew a couple of things. Firstly, I didn't want to pee in my pants. Secondly, I formed the opinion that I couldn't trust that things I could see were actually there. So, I devised a strategy dredged up from my fire training as a merchant navy officer. I had a clear mental picture of the layout of where I was (the LSD didn't interfere with that). So I approached what I thought was a wall and tentatively reached out. A bit like a line from Chris McCausland. He is blind, and says that he's nervous about trying to pet animals, saying one end has teeth and the other end ejects faces regularly. In other words, he's cautious. Anyway, once I was on the wall, it was a simple task to navigate my way to the toilet. Urinating in the middle of an acid trip is not one of the things I ever thought I would be doing, but there we go. A bonus was that I didn't miss.

    There was a short period during the trip when I became sure that I had been noticed tripping by the neighbours and they had called the police - it might have been an ambulance passing that triggered the slightly paranoid opinion. But once I processed the thought, which admittedly took a while as I recall dimly, I realised that this was not the case and that I should lie down in bed to let things settle around me. The feeling quickly passed.

    Some people talk about psychedelic experiences as being spiritual. I think I understand. It's a roller coaster of the mind and takes (for me, anyway) more than a day to process the trip.  Yes, it's spiritual, for me, but not in a religious sense - you can have a non-religious spiritual experience, I believe. Through the trip I was never far away from the fact that I was chemically hacking my brain and that what was experiencing was a direct consequence of that. And I won't be making the same mistake when taking my next dose of LSD.