Experience:1S-LSD (1050μg, oral) - A 2-day long dance with insanity
- Substance(s): 1S-LSD
- Dose: 1050μg
- Route of Administration: oral
Subject
- Age: 25
- Sex: male
- Height: 190cm
- Weight: 80kg
- Date: 08/2024
- Location: Germany
Background
Beware this is a high dose. Two days before this trip, I stopped taking agomelatine, a medicine I had been using regularly for better sleep. I had been gradually increasing my LSD doses, with the effects intensifying as I went higher. However, I had been on agomelatine for most of these trips. Looking back, I believe it helped protect me from the dysphoric and overstimulating effects of high-dose LSD by blocking the 5-HT2C receptor. It allowed me to do an insane total amount of 3000 μg in a span of 3 months and have positive experiences. A month earlier, I had a slightly bad experience on 1050 μg. Later, I realized I had forgotten to take agomelatine the night before and wondered if that was the cause. To test this, I decided to wait two days without the medication before this trip. Since agomelatine has a short half-life, it would clear out quickly, allowing me a “raw” LSD experience, which I felt I needed for my pride and curiosity. What I hadn’t considered was that stopping the medication might leave my serotonin system temporarily more vulnerable for a few days while it was resetting.
Experience report
Preparation
I considered my trip preparation immaculate. I stocked up on easy-to-prepare foods like fruit, sweets, and snacks. I carefully selected movies and series, bookmarking them for quick access, and curated a music playlist that would last for hours. Like lucid dreamers who remind themselves to do reality checks, I planned to perform regular “thought loop” checks to help recognize and break out of them. I wrote down intentions, encouragements, and ideas for activities on little cards, which I placed in front of me. I even drew symbols alongside the words, in case I struggled to read them during the trip. Most importantly, I had slept enough.
Timeline
T+0:00 (Saturday, 12 p.m.) – I placed 7 tabs of 150 μg (1050 μg) under my tongue and decided to tidy up my room while waiting for the effects to kick in.
T+0:20 – After only 20 minutes, I began to feel the usual signs of the come-up, such as heightened tactile sensations. It was as if the number of skin cells on me had increased, making my skin feel more high-resolution. The same effect was noticeable on my tongue.
T+0:40 – I looked for some soothing music videos to play in the background to ease me into the experience. All the while the tactile enhancement grew more intense and progressively penetrated into the deeper layers of my skin. When I breathed I could feel every little alveoli in my lung breathing with me.
T+1:00 – At this point it started to feel like a billion tiny tentacles forcibly making their way into every fiber of my being. I tensed up in response to this almost painful sensation.
T+1:30 – The pressure reached so deeply into my body that I wondered if a lifetime of stretching and yoga could ever reverse it. Next, I noticed my visual field was expanding. I could somehow see my entire room at once just by looking straight ahead. It was as if I were viewing it through a fish-eye lens but without any distortion, if that makes sense. The visuals were coming on strong now, causing my walls to melt and my floor to become fluid and wavy. I tried to shift my focus to the chantress, the soothing voice from the music I had started playing earlier.
T+2:00 – Things were changing extremely fast. Whereas I had previously been able to reflect on my feelings and thoughts at any moment, my conscious thinking now gave way to sheer astonishment and bewilderment over my shifting reality. I clenched my fingers into the sofa and then grabbed a pillow, hugging it tightly. Instead of providing comfort, it felt like it was pulling me into itself. I turned to the chantress, but she no longer resembled herself. The visual fractals became so intense that I could barely make out her face beneath them. Every point I looked at expanded infinitely into a cascade of kaleidoscopic geometric patterns. Even her tiny earring zoomed and expanded into a vast mountain range. It was fucking beautiful, though I didn’t have much time to appreciate it. Things were just getting started.
What followed is truly impossible to put into words, but I’ll do my best to approximate it. Reality, as I knew it, began to disintegrate completely. Everything I had known—myself, my job, my friends and family, and the entire universe—seemed like a sophisticated illusion that was now shattered. None of it existed; it was simply a trick of the mind. I wasn’t sad about this, what did sadness even mean at this point? I had a quick chuckle at that fact and how seriously I had taken life all this time. Speaking of time, it and space merged into one, and I was able to actually see the movement of time as it slowed down. Eventually, time stopped, and matter, along with space, ceased to exist. My senses became one. It was only vibrations from now on. I recalled having taken LSD in what felt like a previous reality, however I now was convinced that neither it nor my body existed materially. The experience of “ingesting” LSD was surely another random appearance in consciousness, and the trippy effects were just a coincidence rather than a direct result of a drug. I thought of the infinite monkey theorem, which suggests that a monkey typing randomly on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time will eventually produce any given text, including works of Shakespeare. In my case, it felt as though the monkey was typing out any sensory input, and that my entire lifetime’s worth of perception, with all its complexity, was just a tiny slice of that infinite timeline. Slowly, my awe turned into anxiety. “Am I dead?” I asked myself. Perception is our only way of knowing we’re alive, and all I could notice was that every single aspect of my perception was either altered or diminished. I felt like a lonely bundle of attention floating in a vast dark void, represented by a single electron, separated from a grid of electrons that I believed to be the architecture of the simulation we live in and I broke out of. To my luck, time decided to move on again. The vast dark void was suddenly filled with an orgasmic explosion of every color imaginable, as though I was being part of the Big Bang, happening all over again. I’ve never been more relieved in my entire existence. I was alive.
T+6:00 – Time and space slowly returned to their usual state, and I was able to take in and navigate my surroundings again. The peak was over and I anticipated coming down as usual, hoping for a good night’s sleep in a few hours. Boy, was I wrong. This was still more intense than all other peaks I had experienced. The visuals remained very strong, not your typical after-glow. I listened to my prepared music playlist, which was already nearing its end.
T+8:00 – I grew nervous and went to the bathroom for a change of environment. The white tiles on the floor glowed with a light neon green hue. At that moment, I felt an inexplicable sinking pit in my stomach. From the tiles emerged numerous little eyes, squinting angrily at me. I knew what they were trying to tell me: “Are you really expecting to ever come down from this? You have gone insane.” To avoid freaking out, I knew I needed to kill time until I regained a better grip on reality. Without my music, however, the auditory hallucinations went into overdrive. Among them was the voice of my sister, angrily yelling, “Have you lost your mind?”—a phrase she often used during my childhood whenever I did anything even remotely unexpected. It always made me feel insecure back then, and now, it seemed more applicable than ever. The other voice was my dad’s, repeating, “I’ve had it with you”, a familiar echo of his short temper with my childhood self whenever I did something wrong. These two voices were accompanied by what sounded like a playground full of children —a playground on fire, to be exact— and the kids were dying, screaming for their lives. As if this cacophony of sounds weren’t enough, paranoia began to manifest as well. Not as direct thoughts of being persecuted, but through random sounds of my flat’s door—locking, unlocking, opening, and closing. Each sound felt so real that I had to sneak a peek at the door every time. These sounds more or less continued on for fifteen hours and felt like a living nightmare.
T+10:00 – I opened my journal to somehow make sense of it all. I needed to write something down. But my short-term memory was so impaired that, as soon as I started writing, I noticed the page wasn’t empty and frantically flipped to the next one, not realizing the page was filled only because I had just started writing on it. This cycle continued until I reached the end of the book without writing a single sentence. I then came back to the initial page and stayed there. But all I could do with the pen was make waves; my hand moved faster horizontally than vertically, causing my words to look like stretched telephone cord. Eventually I managed to write down a few words about love and hate, including phrases like “It hurts to feel judged”, “You don’t need to do this alone” and “Let it be”.
T+13:00 – Despite my attempts at self-compassion, the avalanche of judgmental voices from my past overwhelmed me. Combined with the still prevalent but fleeting feeling of being a lonely god, this led to an ego replacement in the form of the devil. At first it was liberating to think that I was responsible for all human experience. I could direct my attention anywhere I wanted, right? But then it dawned on me: I was also responsible for allowing myself to be traumatized as a child. Not only that, but I was also responsible for all the bad in the world—every war, every crime, every famine, all human suffering. It was all because of me. I was intrinsically evil and I had absolutely nothing to say in my defense. I threw away the little cards I wrote to myself. I didn’t deserve to live. Nothing could have prepared me for the sheer amount of pain I was experiencing at this point; it was by far the worst part of the trip.
T+15:00 – I was still identifying with the devil and watched videos of the series “Lucifer" while sitting in the bathtub to keep warm, having barely eaten. I was attempting to relate to the devil in my self-loathing. All the while, I could feel tentacles reaching into the deepest recesses of my mind, planting psychosis bombs that seemed destined to detonate at some undefined point in my future when I would least expect it and send me into a full-blown psychosis. This of course, fueled my fear of going crazy. To counter it, I tried to create even more powerful mental imagery in which I defused these same bombs and threw them out. It was extremely difficult to avoid retraumatization through past memories while fighting off these tentacles, but I managed it, saving my present and future self. If I hadn’t had trauma therapy, I would have lost it here.
T+18:00 – Slowly, I began to realize that I was not the devil. However, I still couldn’t believe that a good person could emerge from a bad upbringing. It seemed I had to either forgive my parents and admit that they hadn’t harmed me or accept that I was just as evil. This black-and-white thinking persisted for hours, and saying “thought loop” out loud over and over didn’t help the matter. I resorted to listening to music for a while and imagined thinking “grayly"again.
T+24:00 – It was noon again, 24 hours later with no sleep. And nothing was back to normal. I reassured myself there is no such thing as an eternal trip, but I feared I got HPPD and/or schizophrenia. When I tried to convince myself that I was okay, it felt as if the words in my thoughts were futile even before I fully formed them. It’s paradoxical, but it felt like my thoughts were judged before I even had them, and so when they fully emerged in my consciousness, they were already tainted in negativity. The act of thinking itself seemed laughable, as if it no longer felt like it was coming from me. It was extremely frustrating.
T+28:00 – I decided to watch some old videos of Sam Harris discussing peace of mind and living a good life. He has been a significant teacher for me, and I’ve had insightful meditations in the past while tripping. I thought to myself, “If I can at least understand what he’s saying and follow it, then I’m probably not insane.” However, the auditory hallucinations started affecting this process again. I listened intently, but each time I thought I grasped his message, I would hear a subtle, mocking addition—like a hidden caveat—that left me confused once more. I was afraid to replay the video though, seeing it as a sign of defeat against insanity.
T+34:00 – What followed was the most important meditation of my life. I experienced what others have described as a non-dual breakthrough. I found myself able to step back and observe the chaos of my mind, viewing everything as just another appearance in consciousness. Even the aspects that had previously felt completely beyond my control were simply part of that same conscious experience—no different than any other thought or sensation. In that moment, I realized that I didn’t need answers. What I truly needed was to be more engaged with life. A few hours later, the auditory hallucinations subsided. My continuous hunger and exhaustion were major contributors to my bad state at this point. I promised myself never to do a trip lasting longer than a day again, as it’s not worth it to let these crucial pillars—food and rest—crumble. Not that I had planned for that to happen in the first place. I listened to some more soothing music now.
T+40:00 – In a state of indifference at this point, I watched Kung Fu Panda. I found that it had a powerful and positive message.
T+45:00 – Then morning came around. It was now 9 a.m. on Monday. After two nights of tripping, no sleep and barely any food I was destroyed beyond measure but didn’t want to call in sick at my relatively new internship. So I booted up my computer and logged into work, relieved to be working from home. My screen was still covered by mild visuals. I joined the daily video call, I presented my progress on tasks, hoping I didn’t sound like I was still tripping. A coworker said that my speech sounded “sweetly poetic.” Luckily, I had no other meetings that day. I shut down the notebook, managed to eat a proper meal, and then lay down. My whole body was aching from total mental and physical exhaustion. But I knew I would be alright. By the end of the day, there was only subtle, barely noticeable visual noise left (similarly to when you try to see in the dark). It fully cleared up in the following weeks.
Aftermath
A month later, I’m still not sure if a trip this intense was necessary for me. The duration of two days was unexpected. It was a lot to work with and definitely not the most pleasant trip. Time will show how I integrate it into my life. But I guess I’m just a curious fella, always will be. I was surprised at how clearly my subconscious bubbled up in the form of voices. It showed me that self-judgment is a significant source of suffering for me and made me more understanding, empathetic and patient toward myself and the pain in others. Attention is a muscle, and I gave it a good workout. Now, I find myself more fully engaged in the moment rather than lost in thought. And sometimes, you just need to get out of your head. I cannot overemphasize the intensity of this trip—it was an entirely different mode of being. I would definitely not recommend this huge dose to anyone inexperienced. That being said, I am extremely thankful for my ability to experience life on so many levels. I have found a new appreciation for it and cherish it even more.
Submitted by Hill
Effects analysis
 |
This analysis section is incomplete. You can help by adding to it. |