LSD: Steve Vai Autograph Signing at Roosevelt Field

Date/Time: Saturday Afternoon, Early Fall, 1990

Age at time of experience: 17

Weight at time of experience: Approx. 110 lbs.

Substances/Doses:
  LSD - 2 blotter tabs
  Cannabis

Setting: shopping mall

Companions: Dave, Nick, Quinn

I was totally stoked to trip when I woke up. I ate breakfast and showered. While waiting for Nick to pick me up, my father expressed intense disapproval of how I was dressed because I was wearing ripped blue jeans and a thrash metal t-shirt. We had a brief, heated exchange during which I was told I “look like a dirtbag.” I changed my shirt to a short sleeve, white, button-down to ensure that this bullshit wouldn’t start back up before my ride arrived. I didn’t want to risk blowing my plans by getting grounded. My dad told me I looked “better.”

Nick arrived around noon and we left to pick Dave and Quinn up at their houses. We parked in the wide, secluded lot behind the twist-tie factory. It was a grey, dry, breezy day. Quinn and I took two tabs of blotter each and we all hung out smoking herb for a while. At some point the decision was made to go to the mall. 

I peaked during the drive there. Nick had a stolen Alpine stereo with a 200-watt amplifier and a giant Kicker box cabinet in the hatch back of his metallic tan, early-80’s Dodge Omni. We listened to “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” at absurd volume the whole way to the mall. At about the midpoint of the drive, as we were traveling down a 4-lane main road, my attention locked in on the trees passing us in the shoulder. As I watched their branches wave around in the breeze, the leaves became 10-foot tall, green, floppy dogs. The dogs were jumping from the tops of the trees into the traffic. On contact with the road, they exploded into massive flurries of falling leaves.

When we entered the mall, I was in hysterics. The mall was thick with shoppers. Everyone’s features, especially they way they moved, looked comically exaggerated. As we cruised through I found myself pointing and laughing at people, feeling invincible and maybe even invisible. When we entered Record World, we were greeted by a surprise sign on a stanchion:

“LINE FOR STEVE VAI FORMES AROUND BACK.”

We all looked at each other stunned. All summer, our little crew of teenage dirtbags had been driving around, smoking weed, and listening to the new album by guitar shredder, Steve Vai, “Passion and Warfare.” Dave ran up to an employee and asked what the sign meant. The clerk told him that Steve Vai was going to be signing autographs in the store in a little while. We all freaked out and decided we’d be staying for that. Nick bought “Freaky Styley” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the cover of which really weirded me out when he showed it to me. Dave bought “Band of Gypsies” by Jimi Hendrix.

Outside, by the unmarked back door of the store, a line of about 50 people were already waiting (Was it really 50 or did it just feel that way? Might it actually have been half that?). We set up camp at the end of the line. Steve Vai was supposed to be there at 5:00 PM. It was only about 1:30. We sat around smoking cigarettes and laughing and being stupid teenagers. Nick set the frayed ends of my ripped jeans on fire and I jumped up shouting. Nick and Dave got the idea of sending Quinn and I, the guys tripping on acid, to pick up McDonald’s. We agreed.

Before getting food, Quinn and I took a stroll around the mall. We went inside the Disney Store and watched a movie that was playing in the back of the store. Quinn thought we were getting dirty looks from other customers. He got freaked out and had to leave. We went to a kiosk and bought bulk candy. I vaguely remember trying to weird out the other customers waiting for theirs. We went into a hippieish candle shop and I got kicked out for smoking in the store.

McDonald’s was crowded. We had a hard time keeping it together standing in line. When we got to the front we were greeted by Angel, the cashier, according to his name tag. Quinn and I struggled both to remember the orders and to relay them to Angel without howling with laughter. He seemed to think it was pretty funny and was like “Ok. Ok.” We managed to pay for the order and left the mall to return to our friends holding our place in the autograph line. After fewer than 10 steps outdoors, all the drinks fell through the bottom of their bag and dramatically splashed all over the walkway. We whooped and hollered and ran away from the mess.

By the time Steve Vai arrived at Record World, two hours past the scheduled time, I was well past the peak of my trip. I was tired of waiting on lines and I didn’t feel as strongly as I did earlier about getting this autograph. Dave and Quinn ended up ahead of Nick and I in the queue and we could see them excitedly waving their arms around and talking to Steve Vai. When I approached the table I didn’t really have anything to say. I just said, “Hi.” Steve Vai said “hi” from behind his sunglasses, signed a white square of paper with a marker, and handed it to me.

Immediately after I walked away from the table, Dave asked if he could buy my Steve Vai autograph. I was like, “We all just waited all day to get autographs. Why didn’t you get one?” He told me that Steve Vai refused to sign the Jimi Hendrix “Band of Gypsies” CD he’d bought earlier. This made no sense to me but I said I’d give it up for a pack of smokes.

LSD: Psychic Flex

Date/Time: Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - 2:30 PM

Age at time of experience: 45

Weight at time of experience: Approx. 190 lbs.

Substances/Doses:
  LSD - 3 blotter tabs

  Cannabis

  Caffeine - 2 or 3 cups of black tea

Setting: home

Companions: H

H came over to my place with a bunch of snacks and at 2:30 PM we dosed ourselves. H took two tabs, I took three. I always get pretty anxious right after I dose and this time was no exception. Those three tabs felt huge under my tongue. I nervously paced around and talked about it to get it out of my head. After a bit I decided to make tea and that calmed me down. We drank some tea, smoked some weed, and listened to some music while waiting for the come up.

At 3:00 PM an alarm in my phone went off reminding me to take notes on the experience. Thinking that I might be able to conduct real-time self-reportage on my trip, I’d set an alarm for every hour of the next 8 hours. I took the note “kicking in stevie wonder” and turned the rest of the alarms off. I knew right away that they were going to get on my nerves. At this time, H and I decided to put our phones in sleep mode because neither of us wanted to be bothered with social media, calls or texts.

Things were definitely starting to happen. A giddy, speediness came over me and I started feeling like I had macro vision. When I looked at my couch, I felt like I could see microscopically into the fibers of the upholstery. We started pacing around the apartment. For whatever reason, I wanted to listen to “Power, Corruption & Lies” by New Order and spent what felt like forever but what was probably 3 minutes looking for my LP and never found it (this would happen one or two more times during the day). I gave up and put on “Innervisions” by Stevie Wonder and we chilled on the couch for the duration of the album, talking about what perceptual changes were happening and laughing at the emotionally leading ballad tracks. When I looked out my living room window, there was a big distortion in my depth perception. Even though I logically knew the relative distances of the fog on my window and the power lines and the trees and the neighbors’ fences from me, all of them were randomly changing places with the foreground in my vision. A laugh began that kept going for the better part of the next 6 hours.

At 4:00 PM this trip was in full swing and H and I were in hysterics. I was making a lot of funny movements with my arms. My wall art would move around in a stuttering smear that would jump cut in its own flow and distort into wet, dayglo pixels. H reminded me that sundown was coming and that maybe we should go up on the roof and watch the sunset. 

We went up there and I almost immediately felt like we were superheroes or gods standing atop Mount Olympus. The sky was like a pink fleshy membrane. The far-field view of my Brooklyn neighborhood was undulating like gentle waves on an ocean made of beige suede. Watching the rush hour cars coming over the Brooklyn Bridge, I commented that I felt like I could see the people in the cars even though they were a couple of miles away and that the cars were going to drive up to my roof and be miniature when they arrived. A construction site across the street and down the block a bit looked like a giant pile of rusting steel wool. A tree in my neighbors’ yard reminded us both of the Ents in Lord of the Rings. In its branches, I saw a wooden, flying phoenix covered in flames made of pretzels. One of the neighboring roofs looked like it was covered in liquid metal and a bunch of David Bowie faces were poking out of it. A set of exhaust pipes on another neighboring roof looked like a rack of broken metal hockey sticks but also like objects one might skewer hors d’oeurves on. I was ranting, “It’s a cocktail garnish! Trust me!” One building on the Manhattan skyline looked to me like something out of the video game Katamari Damacy and I started calling it the “little sushi man” though I couldn’t really discern whether he was made of sushi or if he was a sushi chef or both.

We gave upon watching the sunset about 15 minutes before it happened because we were really cold. It was 30 degrees Fahrenheit and breezy up there on the roof. We went back inside to my apartment where it was a cozy 74 degrees. Heather started eating one of the bananas she brought over and gave me a bite. She asked me how that was and I told her I could feel little men working hard being the banana getting mashed up by my teeth. I made tea and we smoked some more herb and went back to chilling on the couch and listening to a playlist I’d made earlier.

My giddy excitement eventually mellowed to a warm, calm, and fuzzy but still-engaged euphoria. As the music played we both kind of slipped into a quiet zone-out. My idea of myself mostly disappeared and I found myself floating through visions that I seemed to partially control. It felt similar to my few experiences with lucid dreaming and astral projection and I imagined this state to be almost like the ideal realization of the daily mindfulness meditation I started practicing a few months ago.

During this reverie I had this idea of “PSYCHIC FLEX” which I then unsuccessfully attempted to explain to Heather on and off for the next several hours. I made a note of it in my phone which verbatim reads: “The psychic flex it’s like the twist the whimper at the flex at the 3nd [sic] of the world squeak the whimper at the point of flexion.” I’m sure I won’t be able to make this make sense now so I can only report on things I saw and felt. The visual representation of the psychic flex in my mind was made out of a malleable, almost liquid, silvery metal. I pictured spiral ropes of this metal twisting together. I pictured fists of this metal squeezing and relaxing. I pictured spheres of metal being twisted at their center until the bodies of the two halves were nearly touching. I had visions of curved metal bodies flowing past each other with only subatomic space between them and with zero friction. I made a bunch of jokes while trying in to explain this to Heather. (“Buy my new book, The Psychic Flex! You can find it in the Non-Friction section of your local bookstore!”) While I was meditating on this a raga from Ravi Shankar came on and it seemed like the sonic equivalent of the psychic flex. The drone of the tambura seemed to occupy the subatomic space between the polar bodies of the flex. The tight twisted connection between them glowed with a white light that I perceived as the “end of the world” or the “fusion of all things.” In that twisting there was a tension that I could feel in my heart. There was a sound like a whimper or a squeak that came from it. The twisting felt like an act of joining with a deeply buried point of deeply hurt weirdness inside me without fear. I had a sort of cathartic grokking of the simultaneous uniqueness and banality and universality of all the traumatized, creepy, fuckedness of my heart and I wasn’t afraid of it. At one point I opened my eyes and I felt that my face was covered in tears.

Around 9:00, Heather suggested we order a pizza and I was very much into that idea. Calling the pizzeria without collapsing into hysterics was a bit of a challenge but it worked. Around this time I also stood up and announced to Heather that we, being the marginally-employed 40-somethings tripping on acid on a Tuesday afternoon that we were, were in fact the coolest people on the planet at that moment. The pizza arrived 11 minutes later and was glorious. An idealized vision of steaming bread and sauce and cheese. We attacked that pizza like we’d been crawling across a desert for a week without food. We also ate bananas and peanuts and even some leftover shepherd’s pie that I had in the refrigerator, laughing at ourselves for our insane appetite.

At some point, I suggested watching something on the television and, when we started looking for something to watch, I immediately regretted it. We started to watch some crime thriller from the 70s with Faye Dunaway and as soon as the opening credits finished rolling I was like, “This is killing my head. Do you mind if I shut this off?” I felt embarrassed for suggesting it in the first place, because I know better. I shut the TV off and put the music back on.

For the next few hours we hung out, swinging between talking a lot and totally spacing out. I found myself examining and talking about the unhealthy and embarrassing alcoholic behavior in my past with an unflinching candor. I don’t really drink very often these days and every new psychedelic experience I have seems to push me further and further away from any desire to consume alcohol. In past experiences with heroic doses of mushrooms, I’ve come out of the void shouting “SPIRITUAL FITNESS” and feeling like my zen could rival any Buddhist guru (or, you know, something like that or whatever). This experience felt like another one of these workouts, so to speak. I may have been physically tired but my sense of “true self” felt stronger than ever.

At around 2:30 AM I walked Heather home. On the way, she got me a hot chocolate at the deli and drinking it made me feel like a happy child. When we got to her house I hugger her and thanked her for accompanying me on a journey. I ran into a friend on my walk home and we talked for a couple of hours. When I got home, I slept like a baby.

I’m still trying to sort out the psychic flex.

This is a list of a bunch of the music we listened to over the course of the day. Some of it is a darker and more aggressive than I’d imagine than most go for on acid but I was pretty into it:

Stevie Wonder - “Innervisions” (full album)

Blind Faith - “Do What You Like”

Can - “Halleluhwah”

Grateful Dead - “Alligator”

Ravi Shankar - “Raga Jog” and “Raga Malgunji”

James Holden & Animal Spirits - “Each Moment Like The First”

Jon Hopkins - “Everything Connected”

Swans - “The Great Annihilator”

Blanck Mass - “Rhesus Negative”

Bleep Bloop - “Encounter”

Aphex Twin - “diskhat ALL prepared1mixed 13” (This kinda sucks. I almost skipped it.)

Deerhunter - “Nothing Ever Happened”

Genesis - “Abacab”

Konono No. 1 - “Nakobala Lisusu Te”

Liquid Liquid - “Optimo”

Tobacco - “Street Trash”

Harmonia - “Monza (Rauf Und Runter)

The Brian Jonestown Massacre - “Anemone”

Kraftwerk - “The Robots”

Helium - “XXX” and “OOO”

The Necks - “Drive By” (full album)

Steve Miller Band - “Fly Like an Eagle” (most of the album)

Sherbet - “Howzat,” “Life,” and “Midsummer Madness”

Skyhooks - “Horror Movie”

The B-52’s - “Mesopotamia,” “Give Me Back My Man,” “Dance This Mess Around, “52 Girls”

Tom Tom Club - “Wordy Rappinghood” and “Genius of Love”

Steely Dan - “Aja” (whole album)

ABBA - “People Need Love”

Tortoise - “DJed”

Cocteau Twins - “Blue Bell Knoll”

William Tyler - “Highway Anxiety”

Dopplereffekt - “Superior Race”

Cybotron - “Clear”

Large Mechanics - “Alien FM”

Miles Davis Quintet - “If I Were a Bell”

Forest Swords - “War It”

The Cramps - “TV Set”

LSD: My First Two Experiences

Date/Time: December, 1989 and January, 1990

Age at time of experience: 15

Weight at time of experience: Approx. 110 lbs.

Substances/Doses:

  LSD (microdot): 1/2 tablet and 1 tablet

Setting: outdoors

Companions: Nick

My first two experiences with LSD were in the winter of 1989/1990, the mid-point of my Junior year in high school. My memories of these experiences 30 years ago are spotty so accurate, unbiased reportage here will be pretty much impossible.

I remember meeting my soon-to-be close friend Dave in the weeks before winter recess outside the courtyard adjacent to the cafeteria at my high school. He, like me, was in a small group of people secretly smoking cigarettes, an activity that had recently banned on campus. We were obscured from the view of nearby classrooms by a large evergreen bush and hidden from the courtyard behind a metal door. Someone introduced us and almost immediately he asked me, “Hey, maaan. You ever do aaaacid?” It felt like the beginning of an after-school special on television.

Dave was a Senior but he was someone I’d seen around since I was a little kid. We lived about 5 blocks from each other and went to the same elementary school. He had a goofy disposition, an awkwardly-bouncy, pigeon-toed gait, and big, bugged-out, blue eyes. My childhood friends and I referred to him as “Space David” because of the spaced-out look he always had. When I got to high school, he was a class ahead of me and he hung out with the kids my father referred to as the “dirtbags.” Dave had a different nickname in high school: “Altered States,” earned partly because his last name started with “Alter” but mostly because he was one of the most obvious drug users in school. He once passed out on Valium in class during his sophomore year and got sent to a 30-day rehab. He had the robot handshake from the jacket of Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” painted on the back of his denim jacket.

I told him I hadn’t. He told me he had some to sell and if I was interested I should let him know. I’m not sure if it happened that day or later in the week but we eventually met up in the school parking lot in his big, white beater of a car and he sold me two red microdots in a small plastic baggie. He called them “raspberries.” I might have asked him some questions about what to expect but I’d already done some reading at the library about it. He told me I might want to cut one in half for my first time just so I’d know what it felt like before trying a full dose. My eagerness to try it once I had it bordered on obsession. It was like the acid was literally burning a hole in my pocket. 

On the night of Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, I cut the microdot in half with a razor-sharp box cutter in my bathroom, figuring there was a lower risk of my being walked in on there. As the blade pressed through it, one side of the tablet stayed on the Formica countertop and the other shot off the counter and across the bathroom. Terror struck through me. For the next 15 minutes I anxiously searched the bathroom floor in vain for the missing half, having nightmare visions of my dog eating it or someone in my family unknowingly dosing themselves by stepping on it with wet feet.

I took that half-microdot in the last week of 1989. I was with my friend Nick. He’d never taken LSD but, being my best friend at the time, he acted as my trip sitter. It was a dry, gray day and not very cold. I took the dose around noon and Nick and I hung out until about 8 PM. I don’t remember much about this experience except that it wasn’t very psychedelic in the way I now understand it. My only frame of reference was whatever I’d read in books but I expected to hallucinate and that didn’t really happen. I was very high, though, and could hardly stop belly laughing all day.

My second LSD experience was a few weeks later, on a Sunday in January, 1990. I’m pretty The sky was overcast and the streets were sandy and wet with melt from a snowfall a few days earlier. I dosed myself with a full microdot at noon when I got off work from my part-time job at a stationery store. Again, Nick acted as my trip sitter.

We met up in the parking lot of a small office building about a half mile from my job and skateboarded for a while. This parking lot had a small stairwell down into a hallway below street level that led to the back entrance of the office building. The hallway had no lights but was bright with sun exposure from big glass windows toward the ceiling at street level. At one point we were down there smoking pot and this when I experienced my first psychedelic effects. 

I noticed a pattern forming in the droplets of water condensing on the windows. The trails of the droplets running down the window started to glow like the filaments in an Edison bulb. These filaments moved about, slowly forming the outlines of what became a vision of a pack of glowing, cartoon dogs. Some were wagging their tails, some were panting, there was one with droopy ears howling up at the sky. They all seemed friendly and I laughed as I described them to Nick. Eventually a big, snarling, Husky-like dog started to dominate the scene in this window and I felt a little threatened. When it started barking and scratching at the window, I yelped and ran out of that hallway. Nick followed me and we left the parking lot, whooping our way down the street. Dogs persisted as a pattern during this trip. When I looked at things like brick or tile or even gravel, dogs would appear in M.C. Escher-esque, interlocking patterns. I remember frequently wondering, “Is that real or is it just me?”

As we walked and skated, I saw wispy, repeating trails coming off moving objects and my body when I waved my arms around. Little piles of the yet-unmelted snow glowed and seemed to breathe. The branches of the trees seemed to create geometric patterns out of their chaos. Everything around me emanated a strange, smoky aura. 

Emotionally, this all felt pretty intense and I totally understood how people could have “bad” trips. At the time, I believed I was risking my sanity any time I took acid; that any experience could be the one where I “freak out” and “never come back.” I felt somewhat protective of my mood.

After skateboarding some more in an alcove outside the elementary school Nick went to, we sat next to each other on the cold bricks and smoked some more weed. Nick got too stoned and he said he thought he was gonna throw up. I was like don’t throw up on me, dude. He yelled, “Well get away from me then!” I jumped up and ran away. When I turned back, I watched Nick launch a purple-green rainbow stream of puke, little bits of it splashing up off the bricks into the air. The splattering sound reverberated in the alcove as if gallons had just come out of him. When he was done, I asked if he was ok and he said he was fine now. We made our way back to his house and chilled there until my mom came to pick me up around dinner time.

I kept my head down at dinner to hide my saucer-sized pupils and to avoid engaging with my parents. At this point in my high school career, my parents were making me do my homework where everyone could see because they didn’t believe I was actually doing anything when I was in my bedroom at my desk (they weren’t entirely wrong). Since it was Sunday and I had school the next day, the tail end of this trip was spent in the dining room pretending to do the school work I was completely incapable of concentrating on. It wasn’t an ideal situation but I felt cozy and warm under the dining room chandelier after being outside in the winter cold all day. I also had my proud little secret, that I’d made it through my first real acid trip and that it would not be the last.

Mushrooms: Tron Valhalla

Date/Time: early February, 2018/approx. 10 PM

Age at time of experience: 44

Weight at time of experience: Approx. 200 lbs.

Substances/Doses:

  Mushrooms - 5.5 grams

  Cannabis - a few bong hits

  Escitalopram - 10 mg. (daily prescription)

Setting: home

Companions: (none)

I needed to know what a “heroic dose” of psilocybin mushrooms was like. In 2018, I found out and then I found out a few more times. I’ll never forget any of those trips but the first one changed everything for me. It is the main reason I’ve started this blog.

While I didn’t go into this trip with a serious, mindful intent, I was still hoping it would be therapeutic in some way. I’d been feeling pretty low and worn out by my lifestyle. My nocturnal job and the overworked schedule I’d kept at it had been messing with my head and depleting my Vitamin D on me for years. I’d been abusing alcohol hard and steadily for a decade and I was having trouble denying it anymore. I’d been on SSRIs for most of the decade but I knew they were just mitigating the fallout of my near-constant hangover, keeping me functional in my constant, low-grade depression. I’d gained a lot of weight. I wasn’t sleeping well. I felt lonely and alienated. I decided to go dry for February and see if I couldn’t put a little order to my messy life, or at least lose a couple of beer pounds.

When I woke up on the day of this experience I took my daily escitalopram prescription of 10 milligrams. I hadn’t drank for a few days. I hadn’t eaten any food in at least 6 hours prior to dosing and, even then, I’d only had a croissant and a cup of coffee. I took this dose sometime between 10:30 and 11:30 PM on either the first or second Saturday of the month. It had been slow at work and I’d cut out around 9:30 PM. I went home and consumed all the mushrooms I had left, 5.5 grams. I almost always make tea from mushrooms but I can’t remember if I did on this occasion. Considering the gastrointestinal discomfort I experienced late in the trip, I think I probably ate them dry.

I set my VHS player and my headphones up with the 1940 Disney classic, Fantasia. I’d seen this movie once before in 1990 when it had it’s 50th Anniversary theatrical release. I was a junior in high school, I was with friends, and was on 4 hits of acid. The choice of re-watching this seems strange to me writing this now since my memories of the previous time are pretty superficial. I smoked a little weed and puttered around the apartment while waiting for the come up.

When the effects of the mushrooms started their queasy, tidal rush in my stomach and chest, I pressed play, put my headphones on, and leaned back. My eyesight isn’t great so I was watching with a pair of dirty reading glasses because that was all I had at the time. As I the movie started, the distortions and the low fidelity of VHS made me feel nostalgic. The colors seemed hazy and saturated. I wondered when the last time I actually listened to classical music had been before this because it felt so satisfying now. I noticed myself grinning ear-to-ear in the darkness. I sat up and started to wave my outstretched arms in focused circles from my shoulders. There was something like an athletic warmup about it. An energy started to pass through me that felt like liquid waves of “YES.” I started rotating my neck in circles. It felt like my head and my whole body were rubbing up against a membrane that had the whole of the universe on the other side of it as if I was wearing my existence like a glove or it was enveloping me. When I blinked my eyes while moving my head, images I saw with my eyes open would smear and become fixed behind my eyelids. 

Maybe 15 or 20 minutes into Fantasia, I noticed that what I saw when my eyes were closed was much more in focus - and much more compelling - than what I saw on my TV screen. I decided to take off my dingy readers and close my eyes. My field of vision was filled with visions of a very complex, constantly changing flow of three-dimensional geometric patterns swirling around in deep, pastel hues of purple, blue, and pink with veins of white. They existed in a space that seemed galactic in scope. 

Occasionally, I’d open my eyes and see my actual living room. One of those times I saw the ballet-dancing hippos in the “Dance of the Hours” section of Fantasia and laughed and though, “Oh right! That’s happening!” It felt silly to be seeing with my eyes open. I felt like I was pulling back curtains and peeking in on someone. I guess, in a sense, I was. When I closed my eyes again, I’d return to this expansive other space with the swirling colors and patterns. I felt myself starting to float freely around this space. Eventually, my vantage point rose to a great height and then backwards so that I was ultimately looking out over something that left me awestruck.

In my closed eye vision I was surveying a vast, alien landscape. It seemed simultaneously natural and technological, as if there were no difference between the two. There were peaks and valleys, buildings and spires. There were vehicles on roads and in the air. The sky was dark over this pulsing, fluid, moving tableau but everything in it had its own internal light that was neither sharp nor diffuse but retained a pastel neon glow. It looked like a scene out of some kind of combined fantasy and science fiction mythology mixed with early-Netherlandish landscape paintings. I now refer to this space as the TRON VALHALLA.

A voice spoke. I felt its giant presence but saw no physical form. I don’t really remember what the voice sounded like but it seemed to come from a singular mind and from everywhere near and far. It was fatherly but not anything like my actual father. More like some kind of giant oracle. It was relaxed, confident, graceful, and undemanding. It was clear to me that it only had loving, understanding, and healing intentions.

While I can’t remember much of what the voice said verbatim, I remember its message. The voice told me that the space that I was looking out over was mine, that it had always been mine and that it will always be mine. It told me that in this space I am the same as god and I am free to be exactly what I am. It told me that I could return to this space whenever I want to. It told me that this space is actually all around me all the time and that I am the same as god in that space as well. It told me that none of the barriers that I feel up against in my life really exist because everything I think of as “reality” or “life” were just illusions. It told me that everything that I have ever had a true drive to do could be achieved. It told me that all the things that I’ve ever done in my life that keep me from being in a peaceful state are no longer necessary. There is only one sentence the voice said that I remember in full. 

“You don’t need to do the shit that sucks anymore.” 

I knew exactly what the voice was talking about. There was a lot of shit I was doing that sucked. The drunken rage and violence. The multi-day hangovers spent in bed just regretting everything. The up-all-night seething with silent resentments. The empty, habitual, narcissistic, and mindless time-wasting and procrastinating. The unattended health issues. The secrets and the lies and the keeping up appearances of being “OK.” The things said and done that can’t be taken back.

In that moment, I felt a feeling of what it might be like to not do any of the shit that sucks. Not to do any of the things that sap me of my mental, emotional, and physical energy. I felt what it might be like to be free of all of that and actually live a fully genuine life, accepting of others and accepting of myself. It might have been the most sane and whole and true and at peace I’ve felt in my entire life. I was happy.

I’m not sure how long this went on for. Feeling the normal passage of time and the normal experience of my living space had fully disappeared for a while. I was completely wrapped up in this cathartic sense of coming together and wholeness. Eventually, I felt the vision fading and I got very sad because I worried I would lose connection to this moment and never experience anything like it again. I don’t know if I said it aloud or not but I pleaded with the voice not to leave me and that I was afraid. It reassured me as it was drifting away that it has always been with me, it is always with me, and will always be with me. It told me I don’t need to be afraid because what I see as “me” and whatever I think of as “god” are the same thing. It’s said I can do anything I really want to do.

When the movie ended and the soundtrack in my headphones faded away, so did the otherworldly voice and visions. I got up from my couch and turned on the lights. Despite only a little under two hours having passed, in that moment I felt like this trip had been epic but was essentially over. I felt moved to go about straightening things up in my apartment. The trip, however, was clearly not done with me. At one point I was in the middle of my kitchen, staring up into one of the recessed lightbulbs in the ceiling, completely entranced by it for who knows how long, only to snap out of it and find myself holding my cat’s full litter box in my hands. I laughed at myself and was like, “What am I doing? Why am I doing this right now?” Nonetheless, I somehow finished the job of cleaning the litter box. I don’t remember how long this strangely distracted straightening up went on or what else I did.

At some point I started to have really bad abdominal pains. I remember rolling around on the couch dealing with that, hoping it would pass soon. I went to the bathroom and took a seat on the toilet. The gas pains became so great at one point that I thought I was going to pass out. I didn’t really get too scared by it but it wasn’t pleasant. I laid down on the floor so that I wouldn’t fall down if I lost consciousness. Eventually the pain passed. I got up, took a huge shit and felt relieved.

Despite having just experienced this unpleasantness in my guts, I was really hungry. I hadn’t really eaten much all day and this trip took a lot of energy. Despite my better judgement, I used a delivery app to order a bacon cheeseburger deluxe and a milkshake from a diner. I don’t remember what I did while I was waiting for its delivery but when it arrived I wolfed it down. I felt like I’d made a bit of a mindless and decadent choice in food considering the spiritual experience I just had but I didn’t get too down on myself for it. Soon after, I was tired. I smoked a little more pot and went to bed.

In the week following this trip, something opened up in me. I found myself reassessing all aspects of my life and how I was living it. I kept thinking about what the voice had said to me. While I generally don’t go in for thinking like this, I felt that I’d heard the voice of some kind of god consciousness. The words from this “divine voice” all rang true to me and I decided that I ought to take them seriously.

In the first couple of months that followed this experience I purged a bunch of pieces of furniture from my apartment that felt like they had bad vibes from my past trapped in them. I built a desk. I hung a bunch of wall art and started a weird art project. I sold a large collection of vintage concert t-shirts for a few thousand dollars, opened a savings account with the money, and planned a vacation. I made a decision to cut my bartending schedule so that I could spend more time creating things and seeking things that feel truer to me.

Over the rest of the year I saw my use of chemicals I see as anesthetic decrease significantly. I tapered down my dosage of my antidepressants until it felt safe to cease them altogether. As of this writing I’ve been off escitalopram for 9 months. I saw my alcohol consumption radically drop. I put it this way because it feels like it just happened, not because I willed it to happen. Before this trip, I drank 4-10+ drinks a day, 4-7 nights a week, for about 10 years. In the last 5 months, I’ve consumed alcohol no more than 10 times, mostly out of perceived social pressure. The last time I drank was New Years Eve and I was crippled with depression for three days afterward. Drinking just doesn’t seem to work for me in the ways it used to and I just don’t feel moved to do it. Even my cannabis consumption decreased to a small but noticeable degree.

What this pile of mushrooms did is nothing short of miraculous to me. They healed a piece of my spirit and I can feel my body following along with it. I think there may be a lot more for me to learn in this way and I feel a responsibility to pass on what I find to the community. Here we are.

An earlier version of this report was previously published in the Erowid Experience Vaults at erowid.org under the title: “Grand Reception At Tron Valhalla.”

Introduction

Starting in my childhood, I spent many years in psychotherapy. Throughout my 20’s, I was involved in a 12-step fellowship. As an adult, I spent close to a decade on SSRI medication. All of these have, in their times and with varying efficacy, buoyed me through the choppy seas of chronic depression, anxiety, low self esteem, and substance abuse. None fundamentally improved my experience of being human. They kept me functioning.

Last February, after a few years of playing around and becoming very familiar with them, I had an experience on 5.5 grams of psilocybin mushrooms that changed something at my core. Somewhere in the boundless darkness a light switched on. Something healed. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel disconnected from myself or the world. It was like therapy and religion jumped up and high-fived inside my head. I’ve been talking about it to anyone who’ll listen ever since.

My intent here is to catalog and report on every full-dose psychedelic experience I have ever had. To the extent that is possible, I will include all pertinent and available data for each of these experiences: date, age, body weight, substances consumed and their doses, setting, timeline of effects, mindset going in to experience, activities engaged in, and companions.

A number of these experiences happened between the years of 1989 and 1991. My memories of these experiences are incomplete at best.

Since 2015, I’ve had a growing number of new experiences. My memories of these are, obviously, much fresher.

While being objective about tripping my face off is impossible, I’m taking as much care as I can to not embellish, exaggerate, or fictionalize these reports, including my own feelings. Particularly for the older experiences, I ask myself, “Did I really think/hear/see that? Was this really as funny/meaningful/dramatic as I’m saying it was?” I feel like the psychedelic space is the closest thing to sacred that I’ve experienced and I want to be respectful to it.

I don’t mean to be overly serious though. Psychedelics may have had a big therapeutic impact on my life but they’re also really fun. I like hearing trip stories. I hope you enjoy mine.

  

Thanks for reading. Travel safely.

Disclaimer: Most psychedelics are illegal to cultivate, synthesize, sell, buy, and/or use in most places around the world. I might think that’s absurd but here we are. In no way with this blog am I suggesting that you do any of those things.