(Yes, this trip report is the length of a novel but I do this because I try to explain what happened in the most logical way and show how cause and effect led to the outcomes. If you read this all the way through, I promise you will not be disappointed. If you don’t then take this one lesson, don’t be an idiot like me and never assume that just cause someone says they are selling you “Acid” that it is actually LSD and not a research chemical that can be sold as Acid to those with little experience.)
I really hoped it would never come to this but it happened. I got in over my head using psychedelic drugs and ended up in the hospital. What happened was that I though I would be taking LSD. I know there is barley ever real LSD around my area (Maryland) so I jumped at the chance. I have taken 12 hits of LSD before and not ever had a problem. The problem though was what I though would be LSD turned out to be a research chemical, my best guess from other reports, DOB. Let this report also reinforce how important Set and Setting is.
Here is a brief summary of my history with drugs (Weed, Salvia Divinorum, Cocaine, Kava Kava, Morphine, Opana, Vicodin, Adderall, Inhalants, Pure Molly and Moon Rocks, Ritalin, Ambien, Xanax, Valium, and the biggest category hallucinogens: Ketamine, DMT, LSD over 200 times, Magic Shrooms over 15 times, 2c-E, 2c-I laced Ecstasy, AMT, DOC, 25-I, and my mind goes blank here even though I know there are more.) I considered myself to be a hardcore psychonaut and I seldom went into experiences looking to enjoy them, rather to see what I could learn from them and bring back.
I decided to take 3 hits when I got them. The kid who sold them to us claimed that he had taken 4 and been fine although it was a rough ride. I later learned he took 4 after taking the shit for the 3 days previous in increasingly large doses. Day 1 he took one hit, day two he took 2, and so on up till 4. What this meant is that his tolerance was about as high as it could possibly go and he still had a hard time. This would have saved me if I had known. What really led to the hospital though was the state of chaotic entrapment of mind, and severe amnesia that led to me fighting my parents and the hospital staff, caused by the power of the blotters I took.
As soon as I took the three blotters and began sucking on them, my mouth immediately went numb and an overwhelming bitter taste spread over my tongue. As soon as the bitter taste got stronger instead of going away, I knew I was in for more then I bargained for.
I turned to my friend and said, “This isn’t LSD.” And he was like “Yes it is.” I knew it wasn’t however. It had a bitter taste, which meant that is was most likely DOB, DOI, or ALD. I knew that all three were substantially stronger then LSD because of my previous experiences with 2c-E, 2c-I, 25-I, and AMT. For me, one hit of a DO-X usually equals the strength of a 2-3-tab LSD trip. I had just taken three hits.
I can’t be sure what exactly it was that I took because I have no way of testing it but by best guess is DOB. I had never done DOB though and I had no idea how strong it would be, made even stronger by the fact that I hadn’t tripped in months and my tolerance was as low as it was going to get.
The other big problem was Set and Setting. I was hanging out at my friend’s house with the owner and another one of my friends who drove. I will call the owner R and the driver and my friend J. R is a massive hippie with experience in many psychedelics but I don’t like hanging out at his house while I am tripping because it is very cluttered and gross. J is a hilarious pot dealer who I hang out with almost ever day. One of the things that I really like about J is his ability to be sober while I am tripping and not piss me off by asking me all sorts of questions and making me feel like I am an animal in a zoo being watched.
Fool I am, I ignored the old saying, “if its bitter it’s a spitter” and kept the three tabs in my mouth. I knew my trip was going to be very strong but I was sure I would be able to handle it. I was at my friend’s house and when he had to leave and drive me home, my parents wouldn’t be home for a few hours. I assumed I would be able to act normal by the time they got home. I assumed wrong. Holy shit was I in for a surprise.
Within 10 minutes I was overcome with a massive feeling of lightness in my chest. I though I was imagining it but then the corners of my vision began to waver. All I could think of was that this must be some sort of joke that it was coming on within 10 minutes. I repeated to my friend that this was diffidently not LSD because by this point, I began to see close eye visuals. They were not the organic visuals of LSD but the geometric math formula oriented visuals I had on other Do-X chemicals in the past. I didn’t mistype math-oriented visuals either. I see geometric shapes and in the background, I see tons of mathematic formulas that literally explain everything. They are usually complex Physics formulas; I recognized one as the threshold formula under the field of Relativity. I usually can’t make out the whole formula but I see enough to get the idea.
The first obvious open eye visuals were posters on the wall. A poster with many different stripes of color appeared to spin like a wheel. I knew I was in for something massive though because I could stare directly at the poster and it would still spin. It wasn’t distortions out of the corner of my eye; they were full on hallucinations within 15 minutes of dropping. Holy Fuck.
Within 30 minutes, my mental capacity was rapidly expanding in frightening ways. I started to forget how to do everything in ordinary life that I am used to and started to perceive language in my head that was build up of pictures and motion. The language was like Mandarin as in, the same picture could represent 3 or 4 different words depending on the way the picture moved, just like one word in Mandarin can mean 4 different things depending on the tone of voice when spoken. This language evolved into more and more complex meanings. Soon, I felt like I had discovered a completely new language and at the same time I understood all the flaws of the English language. I realized that English was way to obsolete and basic to ever convey what was learned from psychedelics. They were showing me their language which was so much more complex then English. One animated picture that I saw held a complete story. This is very hard to explain due to the fact that this language is not spoken or written in anyway. It is conveyed by pictures and images that each holds a wealth of information. I am just touching on the surface of this idea as it became much more relevant later.
It was now about 40 minutes since I had taken the tabs. By this point, the entire room that I was in was moving. My friend’s faces began to seem like they all had shadows covering them. It was like I was looking at the room through a light fog. I had never experienced this “fog vision” before except for on the comedown of a DMT trip and I would use the words “Rubber Vision” to describe that. I picked up this collapsible ball then my friend had and tried to calm down my racing thoughts and just focus on the ball. I broke it about 30 seconds later by trying to mold it into an abstract shape. After this, I for the first time conveyed to my friends that I might be in over my head. This was a bad idea because I have much more experience with psychedelics then both of them put together and they had no idea what to tell me which further convinced me that I was in trouble. I still had the situation under control however. I was able to make jokes about my condition still. I started to really feel the dissociation at this point and it felt like I was only powering 50 percent of my body in this condition. I could move my head but it was really tough to get my brain to send the message through to my nerves to move my arms or legs. My speech became very muddled and took on a pitch that was much lower then normal, kind of like I had just inhaled a huge hit of Nitrous.
This is when things in general started to go downhill. Not to the point that I was worried, but to the point where I began to gradually set myself up for a bad trip by ignoring old rules that I had established for when I take hallucinogens due to my previous experience with them. One of my rules was to never watch anything on TV that was frightening, depressing, or provoked too much negative thought and worry about my state of life (such as a Michael Moore documentary). Due to my drug use though and already heavily altered state of mind, I decided that there was no way that some reality TV would negatively impact my trip.
I pulled out my laptop and decided to watch an Intervention episode about a woman who was addicted to Heroin who could maintain her habit because her mother was a terrible parent and gave her all the money she needed to buy Heroin, even using it with her own Daughter. For the first 10 minutes of the episode, I was fine although I was being a complete asshole and laughing at how stupid the poor heroin addicts were for getting themselves into this situation and not just quitting. (I really kicked myself later for my ignorance) About 15 minutes into the episode though I started to get very concerned, as the episode grew darker and plunged deeper into the addiction. I realized how easily this could happen to me with my addictive personality and then I realized how close I had been to a lifestyle like this at several points. I realized that if I had not quit some of my earlier habits I could be the one on this show, with my parents being the people that I was making fun of 10 minutes earlier. I realized then watching Intervention was a terrible idea and I shut it off but this had certainly negatively impacted my state of mind. It began to move my though process toward negative thought loops and I knew I needed to go outside and pull myself together.
I managed to convince R to go outside and smoke a cigarette with me. Standing up was hard and opening the door was harder. By the time I got out of the door, I completely forgot why I had stood up, let alone left the room and assumed that I was leaving my friend’s house. I was completely surprised when he came out after me and lit a cigarette. I lit my own and just stared at the road, not even talking.
Outside, the visuals seemed to calm down but the mental disarray started to build more and more. I had to sit down because I was literally falling over because my visual input felt like it was inconsistent with where my legs should be. I stared straight at the ground and watched as a pattern jumped from stepping stone to stepping stone, moving in an animated way very fluidly across at least 8 different rocks.
I told R that I might be over my head. He asked again if I was close to ego death. I stared at him with disgust and confusion and he realized that I was in no condition to be talking. He told me that he was going inside and I suddenly realized that he had finished his cigarette. I hadn’t taken one puff off of mine and it had burned all the way to the filter.
This is where I began to have minor bouts of memory loss, which would really fuck with my mind and put me in complete states of confusion. It started when I turned around and was completely surprised to find myself at R’s house. Even though I had been at his house for hours, my brain was moving so fast and my thoughts were so complex and racing that my mind simply began to stop processing less relevant facts, such as where I actually was in real life. Because of this, my mind started to trick me and I found my utter loss of the ability to know where I was located unsettling at best. At this point, I had stopped joking around. I walked back into the room where J was smoking a blunt and just stated:
“This isn’t good Gentlemen.”
I sat back down and this is the part where I started to loose the ability to talk just like while on shrooms. My mind was racing so fast that I would start a sentence, forget the next word, and in the second it took me to remember the word, my brain had moved on and I completely forgot why I had started the sentence and I would just stop talking and stare. At this point, the only thing I could really say was “I can’t believe how strong this is”
The open eye visuals began to become so real that there was no way of telling that they weren’t there except for the fact that I knew it wasn’t possible that there were mathematical formulas floating and circling in between my fingers. I’m not joking there. I literally saw 5 or 6 mathematical equations that were floating around and snaking their way through my fingers. These were no ordinary open eye visuals though as I moved my hand and looked at it from every angle. The formulas circled my hands and rotated in 3d, never once fading, and they would be there whether I was looking right at my hand or just seeing them barley out of the corner of my eyes.
My friends began to look at me like I had lost my mind. They suggested that I take a hit off the blunt to calm myself down. I should have known better. I always use weed to bring up my trips into overdrive. Even worse, the blunt was laced with “Scooby Snacks,” the synthetic weed as well. I should have refused to hit the blunt but in my state of mind, I actually assumed that my friends knew what they were talking about and hit the blunt without questioning it. I took two long drags then realized how much of an idiot I was and quickly passed the blunt away.
About 3 minutes later, I started to begin fading away. I would close my eyes and instead of the normal close eye visuals, my entire consciousness would dissolve away and I would be seeing 360 degrees in my head into this vast desert. There were these huge totem poles rising out of the sand and spinning as if on a wheel, emerging and disappearing from the sand. Each totem pole represented a year of my life. I could see them rapidly emerging and I saw the quality of the year that was displayed on each pole was directly proportional to the construction of the pole. In hyper high definition detail, I looked at the totem pole with the most flaws in the woodwork, with cracks and pieces chipped out of the wood. I realized that this was the year that I was addicted to Duster and Adderall, I crashed my car, and realized that I would have to leave my college due to issues of not yet being mature enough to handle being on my own. I have since resolved these issues and am back in college but seeing this all before me in this completely real situation brought back bad memories. I then realized that I was not aware of anything in the real world anymore when I closed my eyes. There was only this endless desert. The realization of how deep I was in the Rabbit Hole hit me like a ton of bricks and I opened my eyes and I was back in the room, completely shaken. It took me about 30 seconds to realize that I was at my friends house and that I had been lying on the ground completely cut off from everything. I realized this had never happened before where I would close my eyes and suddenly loose all touch with reality and literally fade away from where I was to a different plane of existence.
(I wonder if this place was what convinced Heaven’s Gate that there was another level of existence that could be reached but you couldn’t reach it in your human form? Haha. As If. But in all seriousness, back to my dilemma)
J began to tell me that he was leaving soon and since he was my ride, I would be leaving also. I began to get very worried at this point because I knew I hadn’t even peaked yet, let alone been tripping for more then an hour, and I was going home where my parents would be in an hour or two, when I was tripping harder then I ever had off of 9 grams of mushrooms and 12 tabs of LSD.
By now, I had started to repeat the phrase: “I can’t see anything.”
This greatly confused my friends but I really could barely see. It wasn’t like my vision was going dark, there were so many visuals and my vision was strobing so fast that I couldn’t see a foot in front of me through the maze of exploding colors.
J told me it was time to go home and he was going to drop me off at my house. At this point, I would normally have him drop me off at a local park and pick me up later and take me home but it was thundering and pouring down rain and that was out of the question. I should just have refused to leave R’s house. That was the only thing that would have saved me looking back. At the time though, I was so out of it, I though I could get away with it by just locking myself in my room and not making any noise and my parents would think I was doing homework. I should have realized that there was no way to avoid talking to them eventually.
I left R’s house for real this time and walked with J to his car. On the way, I told him how hard I was tripping. The gravity of the situation that I was in and the utter mental confusion and turmoil was very intimidating. The ride did nothing to calm my nerves. It felt like my friend was breaking every law, alerting everyone that we had drugs, almost like some sort of sick joke to scare me. In reality he was doing nothing wrong and driving great. He even managed to make me laugh for the first time in hours by rolling down all the windows, rocking the car, and screaming like he lost his mind. I laughed because it was such a preposterous sight and it temporarily shifted the chaos of my thoughts to something different.
I was so out of it by the time that I was almost home; it felt like I was floating away. I didn’t recognize my house and I looked J and asked him why we had stopped driving. He didn’t say anything and then I realized I hadn’t actually spoken out loud. I knew that I was indeed heading for an ego loss because each second that passed, the fight to stay on this planet became harder. Every second, I forgot more and more about my normal life. I started to get very concerned that I would just disappear, get lost among the raging and chaotic void that had consumed my mind and simply not exist any more. The feeling that I am trying to convey is very obscure but it is a very sobering feeling. This is the feeling that makes people want to fight the psychedelic experience when it starts because it feels like if you don’t do anything, you will just fade away.
(For those who are still with me, I know I am long winded but I try to elaborate as much as I can because I know there are people out there like me who want to read reports that are detailed about the trip. Anyway, I’m reaching the climax of the trip.)
When I got to my house, the worst-case scenario happened. I discovered that I was locked out of my house, in a thunderstorm, with both of my parents at least an hour away. I sat in the car with my friend and tried to think of a way out of the situation but the only thing that I realized I could do was call my Dad. I wanted to give the phone to my friend to call him but realized that was not an option because my Dad would know in a second something was wrong if I couldn’t talk to him. I felt like I was Custer during his last stand as I dialed the number. I knew that it would take a superhuman effort to talk to him without going of on some ridiculous tangent or just forgetting how to talk while he asked me what the hell was going on. I knew that as soon as he was suspicious, it was over because I would in no way be able to explain myself in my condition. It was really a horrible situation knowing that I would probably give my self away calling him but had no choice. I called him. I summoned every sober cell in my body and focused on simple sentences, straight to the point.
He answered and I started off the conversation pretty good. He told me to check the basement door, as it might not be locked. I kept him on the line as I walked to the basement. The basement door was unlocked luckily. I told my Dad that I was inside but failed miserably saying goodbye and thanking him for the help. I couldn’t put together a sentence to end the conversation and I ended up saying a mix of broken statements, questions about the weather, and how I wouldn’t have been locked out in the first place if he had installed upgraded keyless locks. Then I just hung up.
Smooth
My last clear memory was entering my room and lighting up a cigarette as I pulled out my laptop. I wanted to attempt to write a trip report for Erowid while I was peaking but I failed completely as the English language lacked the words I needed. This is what I managed to type:
.Think about M MMMMM ./…………………/…./. how funny iy is got you right now. For every being in this un universe is limited to what you make of it jut sit here every day, take it all in, don’t disrupt life if any way Y9U TH8NI GHIDSHD S9DIGJ
IIITS GGGOOOTTT MEEEEEEEEEEE00000000-09-09-09-YOIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIOIUOIUOIUOIOIUOIUOIUIUIUO8IOUOI8UUFGGG-09000000000SHITSHYTShITYFUKFUCK!(())))))O
HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLLYYYYYYYYYYYSSSHHHIIITTTT
GGGGFGGGGGGGGGGGGFGFGFGRT56FGHGFGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGRRYTRYTRYC54XEWOOOOOLOLOLOLOL
123IRJOSJFDKDJJJJJJKLSDKJFA;LDKFJKDDDDDFDFDFDFDFDFDFDFDFDFDFDBFDBFDBF
Clearly, I lost it after the first few sentences. I entered the part of the trip where I was so cut off from my body, I had no idea what was real and what wasn’t anymore. My memory starts to experience huge gaps at this point too which led to my going to the hospital. The reason for this will make sense as you read on but what happened was that since there were gaps in my memory where I would move from one place to another, I became convinced that I had never left the place that I last remembered being in. This in turn convinced me that anything I saw past that point wasn’t real and I was still in my bed imagining it all. As you can probably guess, this phenomenon could pose real problems for me if say, I ended up in the hospital and was convinced it wasn’t real because I never remembered going there. That part comes later though.
This started while I was lying on my bed typing. The next thing I knew my laptop was gone and I was lying under the covers of my bed. In reality, I had thrown my laptop across the room and crawled under the covers but I didn’t remember anything. My memory just skips to the next point in time.
This is where I lost all connection with the outside world entirely. From this point on, everything that I did in real life didn’t even occur to me because I wasn’t there. I was completely inside my mind and had no awareness of my body. Everything that I saw after this point was interpreted by my brain as being a creation of my mind and I knew that I had never left the bed where in reality, I was rolling on the floor naked and running around my house.
At this point for me, the only thing I could see was these four pictures that each represented 25% of reality. Together, each picture combined to make up one quarter of everything. These pictures broke apart and I was only able to view one at a time in rapid succession. I knew that I would never be able to go back to my normal reality unless I could mentally fit all of these four pictures back together in a linear sequence. These four pictures are very hard to explain in themselves. Each picture was animated in a different way, with its own specific motion and color. I would play them one after another in my mind as fast as I could in an attempt to make them overlap each other. Sort of like when you flip pages in a book really fast and there is a picture that changes slightly each page that appears animated while flipping. The animation of the four pictures got slower and slower and I realized that I was loosing the fight and sliding farther and farther away from reality as these pictures stopped fitting together.
(This is the part where it becomes almost impossible to explain)
I started to count out loud from 1-4. Each number represented one of the four animated pictures I was seeing that I mentioned earlier. Number 1 was the upward pounding motion of these green blocks, 2 was a yellow spinning triangle, 3 was these dark blue bubbles that would stretch as if they were traveling at light speed, and 4 was a red flowing sea. Like I said, as hard as it may be to understand, each of these numbers and the pictures and motions they corresponded to ¼ of existence and I was currently failing to fix the gaping gap in reality that I had slipped away into. I went through this phase for what seemed like hours, with no awareness of where I was or what I was doing. I knew that if I stopped playing this sequence or I waited to long to repeat it and forgot a small detail, that it would be the end of me.
All I was concerned about was counting from 1 to 4 to over and over again, desperately try to set the raging broken reality back together. Soon, I couldn’t count past 3 before forgetting what I was doing and having to start again. Soon I couldn’t count past 2. I knew that this was it. I had failed to correct the rift and now I would never go back to my life. I knew that tomorrow, life would go on, my parents would never know they had had a son since I had in effect, slipped away into a different plane of reality in another dimension. I imagined a scenario straight out of a time travel movie where I changed the past and thus altered the present. My parent’s lives would go on, never knowing they had a son. I would disappear from all of the pictures, my room would be a guest room, and there would be no evidence I ever existed. This was completely terrifying.
In real life however, my mom had gotten home. I’m my desperate quest to count from 1-4, I had removed all of my clothes, lit several cigarettes, and was rolling back and forth on my bed holding my head and screaming. I had knocked over my bookshelf and my dresser, thrown my laptop, and as she walked in, I was currently busy putting a cigarette out into the wall. This would be a horrifying sight for anyone to walk into. My mom immediately began trying to find out what I had taken and she called my Dad to come home right away but you will not fucking believe how I perceived this experience.
In my state, I didn’t remember my mom coming into my room. I became aware of a presence that looked like my Mom but since I didn’t remember her coming into my room (one of the gaps in my memory), I became convinced that it was some sick trick played on me by my mind and she wasn’t really there. I knew that I was still on my bed, typing on my laptop. I can’t believe how small gaps in your visual input can convince you that nothing is real. In my mind, she was an entity created by the drug to get me to give up the fight to bring myself back. I truly thought that the drug was using my mom as the entity to do its bidding because the drug knew that I would be more likely to give myself into it if it used someone I knew in real life.
She asked me over and over again what I had taken and screamed my name and asked what I had done to myself. This is where it gets even more surreal. My mind was receiving such little visual input that I actually saw complete loops of action that were played over and over again. My mom would come into the room, ask what I had taken, open my draws, scream my name, and then leave the room crying. Then she would come in again exactly like she had the first time, angry and asking me what I had taken, then she would open all of my drawers, scream my name some more, then leave again. This same scene kept repeating in my head, exactly the same as the time before which made me realize with absolute clarity that what I was experiencing could not be real and had to be a creation of the drug.
I then started to realize that to escape from this mental torment, I would have to do something to disrupt the loop of my “mom” coming into the room, yelling at me, searching my drawers, then leaving crying. This really seemed like the only logical course of action so the next time my mom came in and asked me what I had taken I answered “enough to get where I needed” I was convinced that if I could keep answering her questions then I could trip her up and prove that what was happening was in fact not real therefore causing me to break out of my mind and wind up back on my bed with my laptop. In reality, this led to a completely insane exchange of dialogue that my mom relayed some of to me later. Ill try to remember some parts.
Mom: What did you take?
Me: Would it really make a difference even if you knew?
Mom: Come on! What is the matter with you?
Me: Matter defines anything with mass and volume in a three dimensional space! There is no “matter” where I am right now.
Mom: (Screams my name)
Me: You know that tone of voice you just used was the same as the 5th time you came into my room!
Mom: I need to know what your on!
Me: I’m on the second floor of a structure that is known as a house.
Mom: WHAT DID YOU TAKE??!
Me: I didn’t take ANYTHING! The only thing that was TAKEN was my sanity, livelihood, and it appears my clothes!
Mom: (Screams my name again and pleads for me to stop)
Me: You’re not even real. I’m sitting in my bed. This is fun isn’t it? Any more questions?”
Mom: Oh my god…
This literally went on and on for im guessing a good 20 minutes. I was completely out of my mind but what I was doing seemed to make perfect sense. I was answering her questions with logic and my own questions about her since I “knew” she wasn’t real. I scared the fucking shit out of my mom. I feel really bad that she had to see me like that. I wish I had stayed at my friend’s house…
It was now probably 3 hours or so after I dosed initially. At this point my mom had called my dad and he was on his way home. My mom had given up trying to handle me in this state and had gone to her room to wait for my dad. I have virtually no memory of this part. The only thing I remember was a surprisingly sober moment where I walked down to my basement, got a water out of the refrigerator, and then sat down at my keyboard and played “Moonlight Sonata”
My next memory was me back on my bed which further confirmed my belief that nothing was real, with my dad’s voice now yelling at me, saying the exact same things that my mom did, but of course without all of the crying and emotional bullshit (he had much experience with psychedelics when he was younger and he knew his shit on the subject) I didn’t see him at all while I was in the room which led to the next catastrophe.
The next thing I know I am in the back of my mom’s car and we are driving. I have no idea where we are. I don’t recognize the roads that I drive on every day. More importantly, I don’t remember leaving my room, which once again reinforces my indisputable logic that this was not real, I was imagining it. I realize I can’t move anywhere and I discover that my Dad is holding both my arms very tightly. Since I never saw him in my room, I instantly am fooled into another insane though loop of self-deception. This one however was a lot worse. It went something like this:
HOLY FUCKING SHIT! Another god damn trick! Now the drug is taking the form of my Dad!
Since I am driving on an endless looped highway in my mind, I realize that the stakes have been raised since I failed to break out of the thought loop when the drug was impersonating my mom. Now, I was on the road that would lead to the end of me! I have to get out of this car! RIGHT NOW!
We were driving down the highway at 80 miles per hour and I suddenly start trying to push my Dad off of me and open the door and jump out. He grabs me by around the neck to stop me from getting the door open. I elbow him but he gets his arm around me and holds on really tight, trying desperately not to hurt me. In my state of mind, being grabbed and physically restrained was like trying to put out a fire by pouring gasoline on it.
I started screaming and fighting for my life. I was kicking and squirming around, trying to get some leverage so I could get out of his grip and get out of the car so I would be back in my room. I kicked my dad away and started pounding on the window, determined to break it and fling myself out. My dad grabbed me again and this time put me in a wrestling “arm bar” where the side of his arm was pressed into my face and nose. The pain was almost unbearable (due to how much I was struggling, there was literally nothing else my dad could do. I’m 19 years old, as tall as he is, and he taught me how to wrestle years ago)
I realized that I couldn’t beat him though and decided that I needed to employ deception to escape from this just like the drug was using against me. I became very calm, turned to my Dad and told him that I was sorry and I acted like I was completely calm. He gradually loosened his grip and then just held my hand. After a few minutes he let go of me. I waited for about 30 seconds then lunged for the door. I got it open this time and was about to jump out when he grabbed me by the neck and pulled me back into the car. I tried this stupid stunt at least three times before I gave up.
Another reason that it didn’t occur to me that what was happening might actually be real was my complete lack of physical sensation. When my dad would grab me, it would hurt for a second but then quickly fade and there would be no marks or bruises on my arm. (There really were but I was just to fucked to see them.) This seemed impossible to me, which cemented my logic that everything was fake and I was still in my room.
The next thing I know, I am sitting in the waiting room of a hospital. I knew that I was in a hospital (specifically Frederick Memorial Hospital in Maryland) but I was under the impression that I was still in my room and I was now peaking. I though that this was the final test the drug was going to throw at me. To me, here was the scenario as I saw it: I was sitting in the hospital, waiting to be led to the morgue. My Dad was sitting next to me and he looked so defeated and sad. (In real life, he was completely exhausted from fighting me for an hour and disappointed in the situation, as well as scared for my well being) I though that the drug was showing me my death, and showing me my dad’s sadness resulting from losing his son. I could not let myself be taken farther into this hospital! It would be the end of me.
I stood up and attempted to walk out of the waiting room. My dad jumped up and grabbed me. Security ran over just as my dad got me under control. They walked away as my dad sat me down and returned to where they were originally standing. This seemed so absurd, such a pre determined sequence with no negative repercussions. (Everyone knew what I was on, my Dad had told them I took acid and he said he had it under control so security returned) In my mind this was not possible. I would have been arrested and restrained. So I tried to run out again. Same result. I knew that I would have to be clever. I said I needed to use the bathroom but my dad insisted on coming with me. I went in for a few seconds and looked for a vent or anything to climb through but had no luck. I tried to run out the door but was caught. I told my dad that I just “needed to go out to my car in the parking lot” because I though if I could just get outside then I would be back home. My dad just shook his head. I knew I had failed to escape and was running out of tries. My dad was just shaking his head because I was claiming that I drove here by myself, which was absurd, but I just needed a split second to make my escape. I tried several more methods of getting out including acting like I was going to get a pamphlet on depression then slipping out the door but was stopped by security.
Eventually my Dad told me straight up that the police were going to have to get involved if I didn’t calm down. This stopped me in my tracks because it didn’t make any sense. This was the first time that I had heard him say something different. (I was starting to come down slightly) I stopped fighting really quick after that because I knew that no matter what was going on and what was real, police were bad. I calmed down and just sat there, waiting to see what would happen next.
My name was called and my Dad led me back to the first room you enter, where they take your information, insurance, and give you a wristband with your information. I cooperated for a while but when they told me that I was going to be staying the night, I again became panicked and was a total pain in the ass.
I removed the blood pressure gauge from my arm and once again claimed that I just wanted to run outside to my car for just a second. They refused and the nurse called over security who told me once again that the police were going to be involved if I didn’t stop. They were very serious and their tone of voice sent me into one of the scariest moments of the ordeal.
It suddenly dawned on me why I was in the hospital and why there were huge gaps in my memory, the last clear memory being me in my room. I must have gotten in my car, driven away from my house, and surly caused an accident where people died. That explained the gaps in my memory and how I went from my room to the hospital. I had killed people. In my drug-induced negligence, I had gotten behind the wheel and because of that, I had killed someone. This realization hit me so hard that I almost fell over from a panic attack. I knew that I had done this and all these scattered memories from the past few hours were the result of me going insane because what I had done. I knew that my brain had created all of these fake memories to shield me from the terrible realization that my life was over. I was in a state of denial, my brain still trying to prevent me from coming to terms with the fact that I was going to wake up in the hospital and be informed of what my actions had caused. I knew I was going to jail for manslaughter. I was in the hospital because I had gone insane and was not yet fit to stand trial. That’s why security was watching me so closely and wouldn’t let me leave! That’s why I was being restrained this whole time!
H.O.L.Y S.H.I.T.
At this point I began hyperventilating uncontrollably. It felt like my heart stopped beating and I was afraid that I was just going to pass out. This is the scariest moment that I have ever had on drugs. Luckily, one of the nurses realized what I was thinking after I asked her how many people I killed when would I remember and assured me that nobody was hurt. Thank god.
I was led away from my Dad and told to change into the hospital gown. This task seemed as complex as diffusing a bomb. I want to stop to point out for a second here that at this point, I wasn’t hallucinating anymore really. I was still in a state of complete mental confusion with no idea that I was actually in the hospital. I just could not shake my logic away that I am still at my house.
For the next few hours in the hospital, I slowly gave up on trying to escape. I realized that I was never going to get out of the hospital because my mind was still playing tricks on me. There would be these really weird occurrences where I would be able to predict exactly what the nurses would say and ask me periodically through the next few hours because my mind was still so behind my input that I was living a staggered existence. In real life a nurse would come in, hook up the Iv’s ask me questions and leave. For me, I wouldn’t even be aware of the time they actually came into the room. I would imagine it happening a few minutes after it actually happened which is why it would play in loops in my head if I didn’t cooperate. The event had actually happened already and so I would just be in this endless loop of refusing the Valium and Ativan that seemed to go on for hours when in reality, I already had taken the pill and been given the shot.
The point where I started to realize that I had ended up in the hospital was probably around 7:00 at night. A doctor came in and explained to me that I was having a bad trip and that I would be staying here until I calmed down enough to go home. I was still tripping so hard that I didn’t believe that I was in the hospital but it began to dawn on me that maybe I was going to wake up in the hospital tomorrow. I was a day behind in my brain. I still had no sense of time and I was surprised by how brief my visit in the hospital seemed to me. I lay in bed with my eyes as open as they could go and just stared at the wall. It seemed like 10 minutes later, the nurse came in with my parents and said that it was Midnight and I was free to go home.
I apologized to my parents many times. My mom actually made a joke referencing my insane counting from 1-4 when she found me in my room. I looked at her in horror. “Holy Shit! That was real?” I realized that everything that I had though wasn’t real after I had left my room was completely real. I really fought my parents, tried to jump out of a car, said some really embarrassing things as well as removed my clothes, and I made them have to sit in the hospital with me for hours. I felt terrible after that.
I was worried for a while that this meant that I would never be able to take a Psychedelic drug again. The day after the incident, I realized that all this ordeal had did was give me the upmost respect for hallucinogenic drugs and crushed my idea that I was immune to the bad trip. It can happen to anyone when they get out of their league. I had read plenty about people blacking out and reporting similar things that I did while having no awareness of the actions in real life. I just dismissed this as if it would never happen to me. I stand here today saying that I am an idiot. I assumed that I could take it, let alone take it and be okay in front of my parents. I will never make this mistake again.
If you have read this far, I thank you very much and I hope you enjoyed this report. Its been about 2 months since this happened. I have taken the same tabs about 10 times since then, never taking more then 2. I will not take 3 again unless I am completely sure that I will be alone for 12+ hours. I probably would have been okay on the 3 if my parents were not home or I had stayed at my friend’s but that not the choice I made and I should have realized. Thank you again for reading and I wish everyone here the best in their journeys!