I know this is crazy long, reading definitely optional!
This is an experience produced by ingesting a good dose of mescaline and some nice LSD. The first account is my experience of the night's events, the second half my sister's account. This details an experience of a very bad trip on my sister's behalf and a possible case of serotonin syndrome. I urge anyone on SSRI's to proceed with definite caution when ingesting psychedelic cocktails, even if if previous experiences with psychedelics have all been largely fantastic and without issue. Stay safe y'all.
It had been a while since I’d had a deep psychedelic experience and it was the right time, set and setting with which to take the plunge. This was getting towards the end of a batch of synthetic mescaline hcl and some LSD tabs. It isn’t the most potent acid I’ve had by a long shot but it is really nice and clean...it ain’t all about the potency I have learned.
Three of us would be tripping...me, my sister and one of my best and longest known friends. I have known this guy since the first year of secondary school and we began our pioneer psychedelic experimentation at the same time while at university in London together. This is someone I have a great deal of trust in, he’s a great guy and highly intelligent and empathic. I hadn’t seen him in a long time, and he was free of his rather controlling girlfriend which was a big plus, so he could just be himself. He is also good friends with my sister, and her first mushroom trip was with the two of us, a good few years ago now, and it had been a very special night for us all. My sister is less experienced than us but is by no means inexperienced. She shared an interest with us in psychedelics, and it was on an LSD trip with her then fiancé that made her realise she wasn’t happy. She thought the feelings were induced by the drug and would pass, but they didn’t, it seemed things came into the light she needed to be made aware of. Skip forward to now and we are living together and both working at or going to the same university and have our own flat we’ve made our own space, life is good.
So, I had decided having experienced synthetic mescaline twice before at decent dosages, I would experiment by combining it with LSD, as this was the last of my stash and I had heard great things about this particular combination and here was an opportunity to try it. I’d really enjoyed the past mescaline experiences but found the visual domain much less inspiring than what I experience with cactus, so I hoped that the LSD would more fully open the doors of our visual perception. My sister and I were taking 650mg (approx) of the mescaline, and one and half tabs of acid. My friend is sensitive to the nausea of mescaline so he took around 500mg with two tabs of the acid. We are all in good spirits catching up and looking forward to the experience. The setting was our living room with appropriate lighting, tasty musical habitats to explore, sofas and pillows, a fair few plants, my sister’s beloved little dog, and last but not least a tropical aquarium with fish and other things in a great variety of forms and colours, and something really, really nice and relaxing to look at.
The come up was gentle, the acid first. I felt some stomach awareness but this passed, and I didn’t purge this time with the mescaline, or feel much in the way of nausea. The last two times I did. My friend was sick and felt better immediately. The sun was starting to go down and it was a really nice evening. The mescaline started to build...and build. We all had the desire to stretch out. My sister and friend felt tension in their upper back and shoulders...not from the mescaline per se; just the mescaline was bringing to the surface imbalances in posture and a desire for massage. My sister experienced tangibly and more so than any experience previously the feeling she was being thoroughly examined and scanned in a healing sense. She had a little pain in her ovaries which passed...this is interesting in that the first time we took mescaline together, a lower dose of cactus extract...she had experienced pain in her ovaries, and a feeling like they were sapping her energy, so she went to the doctors and got diagnosed with dermoid cysts which had to be surgically removed. So mescaline I feel definitely has a particular attribute for self diagnosis, and not in a purely mental sense.
The fusion of mescaline and lysergic acid was fantastic. There was energy and colour from the LSD, and this earthy grounded sensual body feeling from the mescaline. I felt enveloped in thick walls of soft bliss and comfort; it felt benign and like the air in the room was thick with it. The LSD added some nice colour, depth and vividness to the visual domain. We were split between wanting to dance a bit and just stretch out and chill on the mescaline. Another difference from the cactus is I find the synthetic mescaline more sedating and harder to move around on. Or maybe I just felt less inclined. But I recall a few woodland adventures into the night on cactus before that had been great fun, but this just wasn’t the vibe with the pure stuff.
The experience began to build more and change in character, becoming more internal, with effects continuing to build for a while. My sister has a little dog that we are both very fond of, and as the effects began to build he began to act stranger and stranger. I have heard of animals acting funny around trippers before many times, and I have experienced this myself a number of times. But this was something else. I fully appreciate we were both altered but we know this dog very well, and have done for the two years we’ve had him. He was acting very restless and we watched for a while as he seemed to be chasing something invisible around the room while attempting to chew it. It was like there was a magical moth in the room. He wasn’t running around lots though but had his neck craned upwards and it really seemed he was playing or trying to chew on something we simply couldn’t see. This behaviour went on for some time, and was of concern to my sister. I reassured her and said he certainly didn’t seem scared, more just curious and playful. It was very strange though and I would love to know what was going through his doggie brain then. It really seemed something was up, and I haven’t had that kind of experience before.
Effects continued to build. The sun had gone down and it had clouded over. I felt a little tinge of darkness then. The trip was shifting gears into something else as the creeping mescaline started to peak. It was around then that my sister started to seriously freak out. She started to get very anxious and voiced all her insecurities, and kept worrying about her dog. This wasn’t good but I have encountered this kind of situation before and we were both talking her through this. She said the experience had become incredibly internal and introspective and that all her senses had crossed over into each other and it was incredibly confusing.
I went into the kitchen having rolled a joint to get some frozen food for the fish in the tank. I walked into the kitchen and heard screaming and shouting and ran back into the living room to find my sister was scrabbling madly for the window and tearing off cloths. She was very distressed...to her, she would later explain, everything, including herself and us, the whole room, was on fire and melting. She could smell it, see it clearly but she really felt it too. She thought we were all burning alive together, and when she looked at us, it looked as if we were melting like molten lava, and this seemed incredibly real to her, so was a truly terrifying thing for her to experience. She got up a few times, and after her going for the window I had to physically restrain her a few times, something I’ve never had to do. She was convinced she was dying, along with us, and she kept having this experience repeatedly in cycles. I could kind of sense that she was both inside and yet outside of herself somehow. For a time I think she really felt out of body, but she described us as being with her there. At other times she wasn’t really aware of the room we were in anymore. Part of her was glad she was on the drugs as she thought these were killing some of the brain as she was dying. She voiced the same anxieties and concerns in cycles. Her concern for her dog was interesting in that she didn’t refer to him by name just a little dog that we need to care for. My friend and I just comforted her and hugged her and reassured her. It was horrible to see someone you care about so much experience such mental agony. And I was the one who had provided the doses, so it was partly my fault. While this was going on I was obviously a lot more focused on her than myself, but I noticed that despite this, my trip had taken on a really dark nature...the visions I was seeing, especially of people’s faces changing, were really grotesque, and the earlier beautiful fusion of the acid and mescaline seemed to have fizzled out and it felt a bit now that my mind and body were caught between two different opposing powerful currents of the drugs. I saw my sister's face grow grey before my eyes when she felt she was dying which wasn't nice to see. But I didn't trust my perceptions at the time. My pulse was elevated and it felt like my blood pressure was up, and I had weird and uncomfortable electric tingling in my body. My friend didn’t experience this discomfort, but the ratios of mescaline and LSD he ingested were different to myself and my sister (more tipped towards the LSD side of things).
My sister was also really hot and sweating profusely, and I thought she may have had serotonin syndrome...this, along with the body tremors and confusion made this seem quite likely. She does take the SSRI citalopram, (which I personally don’t like) but she has taken this along with LSD, psilocybin, 25i numerous times and only had very positive experiences without any trace of physical or psychological discomfort, and had taken her last dose a few days before. So it seems the combination of mescaline and LSD could well pose a risk to people on SSRI’s, so I would caution anyone on SSRI’s to tread very carefully indeed when experimenting with psychedelic cocktails. I also suspected serotonin syndrome from the cyclical nature of her anxieties. When everything was at its very worse for her we told her to let go and not fight it, and often with psychedelics this release can end one’s suffering. She said afterwards love for others in her life was the only thing she still held on to. She did let go but all her anxieties and insecurities would come and bombard her again repeatedly in a cyclical nature. It is possible that marijuana may have contributed to the confusion, although it wasn’t affecting me or my friend in that way; on the contrary it seemed to me to meld very nicely with the mix we had going on, and the combination was very pleasurable.
After reassurance and hugging for a while, the anxiety attacks began to fizzle out in intensity and regularity. Later on it was much easier to talk her out of these loops of doom. Primal brain circuits had been activated though so even when she was ‘back’ from this, she had a strong aversion to candles burning or a joint being smoked, lest the whole room erupt into flames again.
This was the only time my sister can ever say she experienced true terror. It is bizarre the extent to which one’s own mind can rebel against the self and devise extremely convincing and elaborate plots that work against one. Yet it is the experience of terror, to be gripped by the fear of losing everything in an instant that really makes you appreciate all you have in your life. So despite how horrific this experience was to my sister at the time, AND how horrific it was for me to witness this, she came back with some profound and lasting positive revelations on love, life and consciousness. I don’t really label trips as ‘bad’ or ‘good’, this seems far too shallow a way at labeling them...I guess this trip would be a monumentally bad trip for my sister, but in my experience, it is the more difficult experiences one learns more from and brings more back into their sober waking life. We all had the old reoccurring revelation of just how difficult these types of experiences are to put into words...words are great n’ all, just not up to describing the nature of such experiences that transcend their labels to such a degree.
The latter part of the trip was nice. My sister was back and compos mentis; she was clearly exhausted and slept for a while on the sofa. My friend and I talked and listened to music, the electrical nature of consciousness seemed to keep coming up in conversation, and at some point we experienced a rather strange technological malfunction I cannot easily explain. We were listening to a playlist of new albums I had downloaded onto my iPod and prepared for the trip, and through my friend’s recommendation. We were listening to an album on this playlist, a Bluetech album, and the music very suddenly switched to something else. I am not sure what, but it was something with female vocals I didn’t recognise, but definitely not my kind of music. The fact that myself or my friend didn’t know what it was, was strange. I am very familiar with all the music on my iPod, I don’t have ‘filler’ music, and yet I am adamant the music that played is not on my iPod. It played for around 12 seconds before returning back to the Bluetech album, and my friend clearly experienced this too. Now, having downloaded many of these albums, it is possible that this snippet was downloaded with the music somehow, but I have listened to these albums individually multiple times and it has never come up, but for some reason it is now a part of the playlist. My sister identified the singer as Mariah Carey, and I don’t have any of her music in my iPod. The iPod dock also has radio capabilities, but it was on iPod mode at the time so that shouldn’t have made any difference. It seems people tripping report electrical/technological glitches with a fair degree of frequency, and this was definitely a bit odd. Since the trip there have been a few other malfunctions, and on his return home my friend’s computer suffered multiple major malfunctions having been completely fine before, requiring several reboots and some degree of effort to make right again.
We went on a walk at some point the next morning in the park in the sun which was nice, nature is always grounding. We got a few hours sleep and then stayed up for the rest of the day chatting and chilling, and all really enjoyed the rest of our weekend together. My friend decided it would not be wise for him to drive that day on so little sleep and stayed an extra night which was nice.
My sister had a headache the next day and was tired. This went away though leaving a little residual tiredness for another day, but otherwise she felt good and grounded and the insights of the experience are still very much with her.
I would urge definite caution for anyone on SSRI’s who is planning to try a psychedelic cocktail of some kind. The combination of two different chemicals may well be more than the sum of its parts in a biochemical sense. Also these compounds certainly aren’t toys, and this experience reminded us of their incredible power.
It had been a while since I’d had a deep psychedelic experience and it was the right time, set and setting with which to take the plunge. This was getting towards the end of a batch of synthetic mescaline hcl and some LSD tabs. It isn’t the most potent acid I’ve had by a long shot but it is really nice and clean...it ain’t all about the potency I have learned.
Three of us would be tripping...me, my sister and one of my best and longest known friends. I have known this guy since the first year of secondary school and we began our pioneer psychedelic experimentation at the same time while at university in London together. This is someone I have a great deal of trust in, he’s a great guy and highly intelligent and empathic. I hadn’t seen him in a long time, and he was free of his rather controlling girlfriend which was a big plus, so he could just be himself. He is also good friends with my sister, and her first mushroom trip was with the two of us, a good few years ago now, and it had been a very special night for us all. My sister is less experienced than us but is by no means inexperienced. She shared an interest with us in psychedelics, and it was on an LSD trip with her then fiancé that made her realise she wasn’t happy. She thought the feelings were induced by the drug and would pass, but they didn’t, it seemed things came into the light she needed to be made aware of. Skip forward to now and we are living together and both working at or going to the same university and have our own flat we’ve made our own space, life is good.
So, I had decided having experienced synthetic mescaline twice before at decent dosages, I would experiment by combining it with LSD, as this was the last of my stash and I had heard great things about this particular combination and here was an opportunity to try it. I’d really enjoyed the past mescaline experiences but found the visual domain much less inspiring than what I experience with cactus, so I hoped that the LSD would more fully open the doors of our visual perception. My sister and I were taking 650mg (approx) of the mescaline, and one and half tabs of acid. My friend is sensitive to the nausea of mescaline so he took around 500mg with two tabs of the acid. We are all in good spirits catching up and looking forward to the experience. The setting was our living room with appropriate lighting, tasty musical habitats to explore, sofas and pillows, a fair few plants, my sister’s beloved little dog, and last but not least a tropical aquarium with fish and other things in a great variety of forms and colours, and something really, really nice and relaxing to look at.
The come up was gentle, the acid first. I felt some stomach awareness but this passed, and I didn’t purge this time with the mescaline, or feel much in the way of nausea. The last two times I did. My friend was sick and felt better immediately. The sun was starting to go down and it was a really nice evening. The mescaline started to build...and build. We all had the desire to stretch out. My sister and friend felt tension in their upper back and shoulders...not from the mescaline per se; just the mescaline was bringing to the surface imbalances in posture and a desire for massage. My sister experienced tangibly and more so than any experience previously the feeling she was being thoroughly examined and scanned in a healing sense. She had a little pain in her ovaries which passed...this is interesting in that the first time we took mescaline together, a lower dose of cactus extract...she had experienced pain in her ovaries, and a feeling like they were sapping her energy, so she went to the doctors and got diagnosed with dermoid cysts which had to be surgically removed. So mescaline I feel definitely has a particular attribute for self diagnosis, and not in a purely mental sense.
The fusion of mescaline and lysergic acid was fantastic. There was energy and colour from the LSD, and this earthy grounded sensual body feeling from the mescaline. I felt enveloped in thick walls of soft bliss and comfort; it felt benign and like the air in the room was thick with it. The LSD added some nice colour, depth and vividness to the visual domain. We were split between wanting to dance a bit and just stretch out and chill on the mescaline. Another difference from the cactus is I find the synthetic mescaline more sedating and harder to move around on. Or maybe I just felt less inclined. But I recall a few woodland adventures into the night on cactus before that had been great fun, but this just wasn’t the vibe with the pure stuff.
The experience began to build more and change in character, becoming more internal, with effects continuing to build for a while. My sister has a little dog that we are both very fond of, and as the effects began to build he began to act stranger and stranger. I have heard of animals acting funny around trippers before many times, and I have experienced this myself a number of times. But this was something else. I fully appreciate we were both altered but we know this dog very well, and have done for the two years we’ve had him. He was acting very restless and we watched for a while as he seemed to be chasing something invisible around the room while attempting to chew it. It was like there was a magical moth in the room. He wasn’t running around lots though but had his neck craned upwards and it really seemed he was playing or trying to chew on something we simply couldn’t see. This behaviour went on for some time, and was of concern to my sister. I reassured her and said he certainly didn’t seem scared, more just curious and playful. It was very strange though and I would love to know what was going through his doggie brain then. It really seemed something was up, and I haven’t had that kind of experience before.
Effects continued to build. The sun had gone down and it had clouded over. I felt a little tinge of darkness then. The trip was shifting gears into something else as the creeping mescaline started to peak. It was around then that my sister started to seriously freak out. She started to get very anxious and voiced all her insecurities, and kept worrying about her dog. This wasn’t good but I have encountered this kind of situation before and we were both talking her through this. She said the experience had become incredibly internal and introspective and that all her senses had crossed over into each other and it was incredibly confusing.
I went into the kitchen having rolled a joint to get some frozen food for the fish in the tank. I walked into the kitchen and heard screaming and shouting and ran back into the living room to find my sister was scrabbling madly for the window and tearing off cloths. She was very distressed...to her, she would later explain, everything, including herself and us, the whole room, was on fire and melting. She could smell it, see it clearly but she really felt it too. She thought we were all burning alive together, and when she looked at us, it looked as if we were melting like molten lava, and this seemed incredibly real to her, so was a truly terrifying thing for her to experience. She got up a few times, and after her going for the window I had to physically restrain her a few times, something I’ve never had to do. She was convinced she was dying, along with us, and she kept having this experience repeatedly in cycles. I could kind of sense that she was both inside and yet outside of herself somehow. For a time I think she really felt out of body, but she described us as being with her there. At other times she wasn’t really aware of the room we were in anymore. Part of her was glad she was on the drugs as she thought these were killing some of the brain as she was dying. She voiced the same anxieties and concerns in cycles. Her concern for her dog was interesting in that she didn’t refer to him by name just a little dog that we need to care for. My friend and I just comforted her and hugged her and reassured her. It was horrible to see someone you care about so much experience such mental agony. And I was the one who had provided the doses, so it was partly my fault. While this was going on I was obviously a lot more focused on her than myself, but I noticed that despite this, my trip had taken on a really dark nature...the visions I was seeing, especially of people’s faces changing, were really grotesque, and the earlier beautiful fusion of the acid and mescaline seemed to have fizzled out and it felt a bit now that my mind and body were caught between two different opposing powerful currents of the drugs. I saw my sister's face grow grey before my eyes when she felt she was dying which wasn't nice to see. But I didn't trust my perceptions at the time. My pulse was elevated and it felt like my blood pressure was up, and I had weird and uncomfortable electric tingling in my body. My friend didn’t experience this discomfort, but the ratios of mescaline and LSD he ingested were different to myself and my sister (more tipped towards the LSD side of things).
My sister was also really hot and sweating profusely, and I thought she may have had serotonin syndrome...this, along with the body tremors and confusion made this seem quite likely. She does take the SSRI citalopram, (which I personally don’t like) but she has taken this along with LSD, psilocybin, 25i numerous times and only had very positive experiences without any trace of physical or psychological discomfort, and had taken her last dose a few days before. So it seems the combination of mescaline and LSD could well pose a risk to people on SSRI’s, so I would caution anyone on SSRI’s to tread very carefully indeed when experimenting with psychedelic cocktails. I also suspected serotonin syndrome from the cyclical nature of her anxieties. When everything was at its very worse for her we told her to let go and not fight it, and often with psychedelics this release can end one’s suffering. She said afterwards love for others in her life was the only thing she still held on to. She did let go but all her anxieties and insecurities would come and bombard her again repeatedly in a cyclical nature. It is possible that marijuana may have contributed to the confusion, although it wasn’t affecting me or my friend in that way; on the contrary it seemed to me to meld very nicely with the mix we had going on, and the combination was very pleasurable.
After reassurance and hugging for a while, the anxiety attacks began to fizzle out in intensity and regularity. Later on it was much easier to talk her out of these loops of doom. Primal brain circuits had been activated though so even when she was ‘back’ from this, she had a strong aversion to candles burning or a joint being smoked, lest the whole room erupt into flames again.
This was the only time my sister can ever say she experienced true terror. It is bizarre the extent to which one’s own mind can rebel against the self and devise extremely convincing and elaborate plots that work against one. Yet it is the experience of terror, to be gripped by the fear of losing everything in an instant that really makes you appreciate all you have in your life. So despite how horrific this experience was to my sister at the time, AND how horrific it was for me to witness this, she came back with some profound and lasting positive revelations on love, life and consciousness. I don’t really label trips as ‘bad’ or ‘good’, this seems far too shallow a way at labeling them...I guess this trip would be a monumentally bad trip for my sister, but in my experience, it is the more difficult experiences one learns more from and brings more back into their sober waking life. We all had the old reoccurring revelation of just how difficult these types of experiences are to put into words...words are great n’ all, just not up to describing the nature of such experiences that transcend their labels to such a degree.
The latter part of the trip was nice. My sister was back and compos mentis; she was clearly exhausted and slept for a while on the sofa. My friend and I talked and listened to music, the electrical nature of consciousness seemed to keep coming up in conversation, and at some point we experienced a rather strange technological malfunction I cannot easily explain. We were listening to a playlist of new albums I had downloaded onto my iPod and prepared for the trip, and through my friend’s recommendation. We were listening to an album on this playlist, a Bluetech album, and the music very suddenly switched to something else. I am not sure what, but it was something with female vocals I didn’t recognise, but definitely not my kind of music. The fact that myself or my friend didn’t know what it was, was strange. I am very familiar with all the music on my iPod, I don’t have ‘filler’ music, and yet I am adamant the music that played is not on my iPod. It played for around 12 seconds before returning back to the Bluetech album, and my friend clearly experienced this too. Now, having downloaded many of these albums, it is possible that this snippet was downloaded with the music somehow, but I have listened to these albums individually multiple times and it has never come up, but for some reason it is now a part of the playlist. My sister identified the singer as Mariah Carey, and I don’t have any of her music in my iPod. The iPod dock also has radio capabilities, but it was on iPod mode at the time so that shouldn’t have made any difference. It seems people tripping report electrical/technological glitches with a fair degree of frequency, and this was definitely a bit odd. Since the trip there have been a few other malfunctions, and on his return home my friend’s computer suffered multiple major malfunctions having been completely fine before, requiring several reboots and some degree of effort to make right again.
We went on a walk at some point the next morning in the park in the sun which was nice, nature is always grounding. We got a few hours sleep and then stayed up for the rest of the day chatting and chilling, and all really enjoyed the rest of our weekend together. My friend decided it would not be wise for him to drive that day on so little sleep and stayed an extra night which was nice.
My sister had a headache the next day and was tired. This went away though leaving a little residual tiredness for another day, but otherwise she felt good and grounded and the insights of the experience are still very much with her.
I would urge definite caution for anyone on SSRI’s who is planning to try a psychedelic cocktail of some kind. The combination of two different chemicals may well be more than the sum of its parts in a biochemical sense. Also these compounds certainly aren’t toys, and this experience reminded us of their incredible power.