School Daze
Boarding school was very boring, so C and I were excited to receive a certain letter one Saturday morning. We went to my room and opened it eagerly to examine its contents. There was nothing but a little folded piece of tinfoil inside, and inside that lay two thin white slivers of blotting paper. LSD! C took his, ripped it in half, and placed half under his tongue, and rushed off to shower and dress. I decided to take mine all at once, because I wanted a full experience. I went to the mirror, opened my mouth, and held my tongue up while I placed the blotter lengthways along a big dark vein within the fold at the bottom of my tongue. I then went about getting ready for the day, carefully ensuring that the magic blotter was not disturbed from its position.
We were seventeen and the year was 1996. Until that day the only drugs I had encountered were alcohol, caffeine, cannabis, poppers, and my daily use of topical antibiotics for teenage acne. I had little concept of the power of psychedelics, so I felt no fear in consuming LSD for the first time.
Coming Up
In an hour's time I was dressed and feeling the first effects. I felt positive and energised. My mouth tasted strangely metallic. I went outside to meet C, who was watching our schoolmates playing a game of rugby. As soon as I caught his eye, he beamed, and I beamed back. Words were unnecessary. It was as if we both knew what each other was experiencing, a big telepathic "Wow". "The colours, man" I said. Everything was so vivid, and the colours seemed to radiate into the cold autumn air as if the grass and trees and sky were too saturated to contain their pigments.
I went back inside to chill in the warm for a bit, then when darkness fell I met C in the street to go to the canteen for supper. It was a magical foggy night. He called my name, then lifted his arms to the sky slowly like wings. But they were wings, beautiful wings! When he had lifted his arms, they had left a trail of arms behind them to form his own angelic silver and blue wings. Each trail faded one after another until he was whole again, then he moved his arms back down and his plumes returned. Amazing! I did the same for him, then we walked through the fog gesturing wildly to each other as we spoke to enjoy the phenomena.
Dinner was strange but unremarkable. We concentrated on appearing 'normal' in the sickly yellow light of the canteen. I was anxious given the amount of teachers around and our degree of visibility to the rest of the school. I can't remember anymore if I ate or not. My trip grew stronger, and I returned to my room to chill out in private. C had taken the second half of his tab hours after the first one, which probably explained how I was now feeling the effects far more than he.
The Visionary Peak
I put some music on and sat on my bed in the flourescent yellow light. I could tell that something was about to happen, that visions were about to flow. Shadows that I had assumed to be cast by dents and irregularities in the wall came to life. Animated cave paintings! Primeval stick men danced around with their spears to the 4-4 beat of the music.
I looked down at the carpet, and suddenly the entire thing was overlaid with an incredible sight. Aztec lizard men dancing in concentric circles! These vivid 2D green and silver creatures inhabited a plane floated on the surface of the carpet, where they danced in rings that got larger and larger, the stout members of each ring holding hands and tails, with each ring rotating in the opposite direction to the neighbouring rings. Their plane was mapped perfectly to the carpet alone, such that they appeared to disappear under the wardobe, chairlegs, skirting boards, and reappear again once they had danced under the obstruction. I got on my hands and kness and rubbed the carpet, but could not feel them, and nothing I did would distract them from their perfect dance along their perfect paths.
I decided to lay back on the bed and close my eyes. My vision was filled entirely with colourful flowers that opened and closed continuously and randomly. In the foreground, a winding, silver path flowed from the distance towards me, then a mercury man in matching top hat and tails waltzed alone up and down the shining path. Beautiful!
I got up to make myself a glass of water, then caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. My facial features would not stay put! I was a living Picasso. I tried to rotate my eye by ninety degrees back to its usual position, and push my nose then lips back where they belong, but they were undeterred and continued to flow around my face as they wished. I was not sure how I felt about this happening, so I decided to avoid the mirror and sit on the bed again.
The Loop
Suddenly the mental effects took over. My mind was one big "Why?". I knew nothing. I doubted everything I had learnt and been taught prior to this moment. I was a newborn child. Why? What is this? What is existence? What am I? Am I? What? I don't understand? What's to understand? What is understanding? I am a newborn child. Why? I was stuck in this horrific loop for what could have been one minute or thirty, but judging time was impossible in a cyclical state of complete ignorance of anything but questions, questions, questions.
The Taper
Someone popped their head in the room, and I was released from the loop. I went into my friend S's room and talked to him. He asked me what it was like, so I told him my experiences so far. I then laughed at him, because while he spoke his neck grew and grew. I told him he had a neck as long as a giraffe's, and we laughed at the strange vision.
We then went to a small library in another room, knowing that it would be quiet there. People were like paper. They were completely flat. A teacher came into the room and asked me if I was alright. "Don't panic!", I thought. I told him I was fine, trying very hard to focus on his eyes and appear normal, while at the same time trying desperately to resist the temptation to take hold of the corner of his ear and peel this 2D paper nuisance off my vision to solve the problem!
After that, the effects slowly wore off, and by evening I was pretty much back to baseline. I had taken a mindblowing psychedelic drug at school, and somehow got away with it! I found C watching television with his girlfriend. He later told me that he hadn't really seen that much after dinner, so I told him that he should have taken it all in one go. I was not happy though. I felt really uneasy. The loop had shaken me up quite badly, and actually put me off high dose LSD for life. The set and setting was obviously poor, given that I was at school and had to worry about playing sober in front of the teachers. I had no idea of the power of LSD before this experience, and if I had known I would have taken it in a friendlier environment. I did take a quarter dose of LSD from the same source and supply a month or so later, which proved very pleasant and sociable with threshold visionary effects.
Despite the ordeal of the loop, I am grateful that I have experienced the beauty of LSD. Aesthetically, the precise visionary style painted by LSD surpasses all other psychedelics in my opinion. LSD: the molecule of beauty. However, I do not have any desire to take it again, and personally I agree with John Peel's opinion that "LSD is like visiting Stratford-Upon-Avon. It's nice once, but you wouldn't go back there again."
