First Acid Trip - chaos, order, hallucination, re-imprint

I was camping out at Shambhala with a few friends. I'd slept maybe five hours in three days and was still up up up. I'd crashed several times but gotten over the valleys. I was on a heavy diet of mood drugs. A lot of pills of various types were going around - some pure MDMA, some laced with speed, and a lot of pot which had become mere background. By this time I was smoking for the taste which was familiar and comforting, almost quaint.

I drank Jennifer's tequila and smoked dope in the morning until I warmed up. I wandered around, observed the tangled strings of people freaking around me. Later that day, close to sundown, I decided I was either going to head home today or trip out. Okay, I thought, I'll take the acid. Half a hit, since it's supposed to be very pure and 200 mics per hit. I cut up a blotter square and ate half. Gave the other to Brooksy. Awaited the trip nervously.

I was still feeling mental fallout from all the E, and a dazey plateau of stoned sleep deprivation, and as the nervousness faded I laid down on a blanket under the pavilion and rubbed against my girlfriend, talking happily with my friends. Nothing seemed to be happening after half an hour, which was when I started getting impatient. I would comment on my "sober" status at five minute intervals. Jennifer suggested I take a toke to bring it on so I did. I started feeling stoned, but I still didn't feel like I was tripping.

Then I noticed that the colors on my girlfriend's headband were brighter than they should be, and seemed to be glowing and sparkling, the colored stripes interchanging. This was subtle, but signaled the onset. I lay on the blanket and looked up at the pavilion, draped with ornate fabrics. The colors seemed much richer, edges sharper, shades nuanced. Had I ever really seen this shade of red before? It was not quite burgundy, something else. I looked at Tony sitting on the chair. He seemed to sit with purpose, a human hinge in an epic drama that was life - glasses an uber-cool peripheral, omega of style. I felt a moment of timeless contentment. Perception seemed sticky, very mild trailers in movement, higher frames per second, lowering filters in the truest most explicit fashion. It made E feel like fufu brain candy. I told Tony that acid was worth a thousand times more. A wave of euphoria washed over me.

But then the wave of perceptual enhancement dissipated. I sat up with a WTF look on my face, feeling silly for going off on a rapture. I felt nearly down again. No, my field of view was now expanded, a panorama, I could see peripherals nearly as clearly as what was in front of my vision and colors were bright and pure, just not as much as that initial wave. There was a benign confusion and indecision with a buzzy electricity. Felt clean though, my brain seemed to be liking it. After much aimless wandering about the camp, I decided I wanted to go for a walk, the familiar stimuli of the pavilion seemed to be bringing me down. I wanted nature. I walked with Dez. I seemed to be on a plateau of mild alteration. The confusion intensified. What was I doing, what was I supposed to be doing? Where was it going, anywhere? I didn't realize it but this was the subtle beginning of the mind unraveling. The confusion became annoying, where was the clarity?

I wandered around the field away from tent city seeing grass in exquisite detail (also cowpies with swarming flies) but not really caring. I was waiting for the trip to kick into high gear but it didn't seem to be co-operating. I made my way back to the camp whereupon our party decided to walk into the multi-staged rave. I went with them. I was surprised how not-freaked out I was. I knew for sure I was tripping but nothing seemed to be building to anything. Except the frustration and negativity. I decided to take another full hit.

Tony was coming up on his single hit as we entered the forest paths. He was perma-grinning and remarking on the riches of his tracers and perceptual alteration. I followed my group, on the tail end, occasionally wandering off, waiting to tumble into psychedelic tangents that wouldn't come. I reclined on a wooden bench and the others gathered around me. Someone passed a joint around and I toked. It seemed to have little effect. My friends could tell I was not getting off. Where was the other hit? It didn't seem to be getting stronger.

Except - something was different. Something about connotation. Seemed like all connotation had been stripped away. Where before my mind had assigned significance to things it now seemed as if this significance had been destroyed and I was sensing unadorned reality. I didn't reason this out, just experienced it, and it felt like a huge downer. The THEME seemed to be MUNDANITY - not a word I would choose or remotely want to seize on, but remorselessly, maddeningly echoing in my head in fractal feedback loops all the same. EVERYTHING is MUNDANE, HOLLOW, MEANINGLESS, POINTLESS - NOBODY IS REAL - THEY ARE ROBOTS - THIS IS REALITY - THIS IS YOU.

And it seemed like a ridiculous joke... THIS is acid? This is what an acid trip is? What's so fucking great about this? My mind is certainly altered severely but to what fucking effect? Fooock man, holeeey sheit, feck feck feck, yaiaaah (Shambhala lingo - what happened to you last night man?) willfully bending to the smooth, coolified dumbed down version of the gnosis with interlocking highs, interspliced with intellectual cadenzas, ya dude, the shamblahblah isolated oasis novel idiom):

So I'm thinking, I'm not freaking out, I'm not hallucinating, and NOTHING is REMOTELY funny. It's all serious. The thought occurred to me: maybe this is the result of acid tweaking out the seretonin-depleted mind of an ecstasy binger.

We wandered back to the camp. I hoped I wasn't giving my high friends a contact low. The sun had slipped below the mountain and the light was drab. Everything seemed shadowed in limp-wristed entropy. I thought: I'm tripping out on how lame everything is. And it's just going to get lamer. The sun is going to be gone and I'm facing darkness, cold, death, nothingness. I don't feel like partying in that vacuous glowing going through the motions bullshit. And time is dilated, it's going to feel like years.

When I sat down in a chair under the pavilion I realized how different I was already. My mind was unraveling. I was flailing around, the detonation of connotation had already proceeded to such lengths that I could not connect to any aspect of my previous personality or reality and this was freaky. Although what I saw and heard seemed to be pretty much the same, the mechanism of processing was warped in a way I could not come to grips with. Still felt clean physically but connected to the dirt current of classic baroque boddhistatva wrecks.

I didn't really get off for about two hours, it built so subtly and slowly. It seemed like a ridiculous joke for so long (exactly what Tony said would happen) and then my mind tore apart. The vacuum roared in, the fractal chaos hyperorder surged in the cracks, all meaning was everywhere and nowhere. I felt the disconnect, the impossibility of interacting in any meaningful way with this place and these people and all systems of belief collapsed in cryptic crumbles, a ridiculous monstrous chaostrophy.

I was also losing control of myself and emotions. I felt like a freak out was appropriate and I spilled onto the ground, babbling about my trip. I felt a permanent change in my brain. The flavor of cerebral functioning had changed in some fundamental way. The others sensed what was happening. Tony and Brooksy were also on acid though less. They were veterans. Jennifer told me I'd never be the same again, I believed her. I felt it, past the point of no return, a giddy nausea. I couldn't conceive of connecting back to the habits which were now fragments, fucked up, not quite funny, advertising the idiocity of the entity I'd been and must be. The programming of my animal body had halted in syntax error. Brooksy offered me a cigarette, I declined. Gary summed up the meaning of the universe when I asked him for authority: "Rock on". Sounded good to me. But it was only a sound. But it was only a sound. Visual and auditory distortion was minimal but I was mindfucked to the MAX.

I kept asking how long it had been since I dosed. I was tense but it didn't feel intolerable like the mushroom mindfuck. Just unbelievably weird. No, it was believable, it was the only thing I could believe, it was the truth for better or worse. Huge clumps of old superstitions and baseless fears washed away. I felt I was handling things and there was no need to worry about freaking out as I often do. I was beyond living and death, the words had lost meaning. I was dissolved in quantum nonlocality, arbitrarily connecting to alternate realities and personalities and purposes, or with divine purpose? B said something about acid being an instant path to God and at first it seemed ridiculous, but then I saw God as the void, the ultimate reality that was stripping away all the strange notions I'd foisted on the fragments of the world that had managed to pass through my filters into awareness, and the phrase seemed perfectly apt.

I felt like I could sense the ultimate truth, the oberpattern, the SENSE, the ANSWER in the universe. I could sense its reality and how it penetrated everything in my perception and every possibility branching off that. But it was necessarily out of order. This was the theme of the trip - it's all HERE, the meaning, the culmination, but the pattern is scrambled. That's what life is - a puzzle, to be arranged, ordered by mind, according to a mind's aesthetic. But I couldn't decide if it meant ego control.

Now that all methods of comprehension had been yanked away, I had to impose my own order but the responsibility was imposing. Drifting through the chaos didn't seem to satisfy though, I wanted patterns. New patterns. I chatted with Brooksy about what was happening, feeling terribly sublimely weird. I noticed the others had left. Night was almost here. The light in the pavilion was on. I realized I was on the ground looking up at insects circling the light. I noticed that the fabric was breathing, flowing, melting. I WAS hallucinating! Like a MOTHERFUCKER!

There was something beautiful here in this chaos but with a dark splinter, the dark splinter that was in my brain, perhaps necessary to my mind, my existence, something I couldn't tear out without obliterating my reality. Acid was lifting me beyond reality though. It was ridiculously thematic, reminding me of salvia somehow - like a long layered version of a salvia peak, except goddamnit, it had a PERSONALITY. I felt an entity on the other side, filtering me through its elaborate ontology - the acid entity - male, apollonian, shifty-eyed. Smooth olive skin, brown hat, wild black hair, tall as a mountain, sexual, magical. A wise freak, gowned in translucent veils of hallucination, threads of brilliant diamond crystal poly-puns, handing out esoterica like candy, saving the better knowledge for more worthy perturbators, heroic dosers, saving the best for the order of aliens in league with Satan.

A Faustian theme, was this Mephistopheles in chemical form, the philosopher's stone? What would I have to renounce to continue the trip? Omni-hallucination. They moved like mushrooms with more flexibility and variation, they would build from a seed then explode into unpredictable sequels, surprising, confounding. They would flow from cartoon-like to solidity of unfathomable density - sharp texture, shining true fractals, Mandelbrot rockfaces, sea, air, vapour, bubbles, jungles, rainbows, roads, veins, networks, symmetry, asymmetry, moving in the most bizarre ways, sometimes slow, sometimes fast as a flash yet smooth with a framerate to blow synthetic representations of vision out of the water, on and on and on, soaring through halls, artistic, ancient motifs, futuristic designs, maps, words, TEXT! Machines, alien languages on pages, relentless flood of information I felt I should have been understanding. The POSSIBILITY!

I could see how people could leave the body behind - I nearly had the option. With eyes closed I could almost become my hallucinations, surrender to the flow, let open portals to other planets and branches off the genetic tree and alternate civilizations, go through with gravity, taking me on the starchild trip, life being the springboard.

Night fell and I thought I'd try sensory deprivation to intensify hallucination. I went into the tent where Dez was sleeping. Little did I know I was in for an hour of sexual politics, the hyper-real human trip twisted with fractal hallucinogenic possibilities, inescapable human hangups, damning lack of aggression, perceived impurity. I tried the best I could to put things in perspective, then got out of the tent to a cold wet night, the sound of rave music drifting across the field, fucked up people stumbling around. The night seemed in shreds, dregs, all was downer trying to contrive upper with horrible driven decadence and glowsticks to bury the infant footfalls in the mortar of salvia's politics, the reality of bullshit, a cancerous cluster of cars and RVs, Jesus dying for my sins, Satan sucking my soul through a syringe. I tried to forget all that had happened, I thought I could create a new reality. But reality created me.

I wandered through the rave wrapped up in heavy clothes, keeping to myself. Crazy Sunday night party going on in the dregs and detritus of Shambhala hardcore hippie craques. Good vibes I could not connect to - cast out of the crack binge - so some cynical laughter and supreme confusion - and the cold of night, shivering, waiting for the sun, dilated time, slow centuries of hours, everyone sketched out or elated, unable to connect with humans, tangents multiplying exponentially, fractally.

All seemed contrived and vacuous, I couldn't get into it. I met a couple friends, Jenna and Chad. We talked about the various pills we'd found - how the pink ones were speedy and the green ones were mellow and the blue ones were visual, etc. There was a sadness all around but it felt transient and tied to the environment. I wanted to leave, go home, go to a bar, go anywhere, get warm especially, but I was stuck. I thought about doing some E to improve my mood but I already felt like I'd put my brain in a blender from all the pills (the second roll ended up feeling grotesquely fake as my girlfriend peaked after me and reflected my crazed first person sap right back), plus I didn't know where they were and the crash might be awful.

I went back to our camp, stumbling over strewn-about junk. Nobody was close by. I thought I'd sit in a chair and stare until morning. The sky looked amazing. Stars glowed with colored halos while green lasers stabbed into the night from the middle of the rave. There was also a meteor shower happening (not a hallucination), and on top of that, multicolored lines were constantly shooting between stars connecting them in stellar cobwebs on different layers simultaneously.

I closed my eyes and saw portals to alternative universes, clear visions in high definition, infinite variations of form and motion, switchboard open to interpretation. There was a purity of perversion. I wrote several novels in my head. Epic poems and synesthetic symphonies. Achingly beautiful grotesqueries of the gymnastics of the perversions of the love for what I'm not with, and realizing the prize in front of my eyes.

Then, then - so so much happened - so many twists and turns and I know I'm only scratching the surface. All epic and focused and thematic, shifting strangely, then even more strangely recapitulating, boosting the meaning to a new abstraction then discovering its concreteness, raising the tower of babel to collapse in the morning. I got used to waiting through dilated time, I stumbled back into the tent. Me and Dez tried to warm each other, it was a vaguely satisfying way to spend the night. The sun finally came up.

Our party re-convened, Dez felt better. Tony had a nasty acid comedown. We ate, shopped, packed things up, marveled at the decadence and detritus, the craziness of our three day rave. I was in a haze, burnt out with a bizarre humour, ready to leave. I managed to drive us home. I felt a little insane, like I'd lost my mind, but I was loving the chaos frothing out of the newly-rent cracks in habit and mundanity, fantastically beautiful. I also loved that I was dealing with the trip and not a total basket case.

The day after:

Today I'm looking on everything with new eyes. Nothing seems the same, nothing means the same. I'm not who I was, my personal pattern is scrambled hyperdimensionally. My mood is much improved and I still feel a strong resonance from the acid. I don't know how I'll re-integrate.

It was an instant rupture in personality, life, paradigm. I'm re-connotating everything and I feel like I'm a traveler in my hometown. I went into a coffee shop and gawked at the most mundane objects. There was no mundane object really.

The connotation of everything is stripped and I'm a blank slate, able to re-imprint with impunity. There were many things wrong with the setting but it was still a fascinating trip. I'm eager to try again but I don't want to overdo it, I think LSD demands discipline and judicious use.