The first time I tried it was with a musician buddy. We met in jazz band. He was a transfer spring senior year, and we hit it off, and instead of playing with the band, we jammed out in the band closet and talked life and music theory.

While he was no guru, he had some experience, and he was one of the few and first people that had access to real LSD-25 (he was from a hippy town in CO). At the time, I was extremely interested in being able to see the world differently. I was suicidal, and desperate to escape from this internal mental hell that I had been living with for years, and trying to escape by more destructive means.

The first experience entailed a sleep over. We each took one hit. It wasn’t that potent.

It really didn’t do much. We talked about life forever. Girlfriends. Family. Just life. Laughing. Listening to stories.

I was expecting mass hallucinations, but there was none.

Just colors. Everything had more potent color. Vivid. Almost a halo of rainbow. I had a giddiness.

But no hallucinations like I was expecting.

We walked some suburban woodlands for a bit and everything was magical and exciting.

I couldn’t sleep, and was hoping for the marshmallow dinosaurs and electric zebras to manifest, but they never did.

The whole experience changed what I thought of psychedelics. I thought it’d be a more visual experience, but it ended up being much more psychological.

8-12+ hours in total.

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My first time on mushrooms I was in a group of best friends. My friend and I had ventured into Florida cow pastures, donned in camouflage, the days after rainfall and had picked a pound or more. The Internet was crude back in 05, but we found resources for safely identifying them.

As a group of 7, we divided evenly and consumed. Probably 5 shrooms a piece of varying size. They were not dry. We ate with brownies and milk.

It was intense. Hilarious. Colorful. At times overwhelming. Smiling. Laughing. Confusing. We walked, we talked, we looked at the moon and stars, examined frogs and flowers and grass and trees.

All in all, a lot of bonding. It was an amazing experience.

4-6 hours in total.

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Dosage is approximately 100-150mcg per tab. If it’s older, and not well kept, potency will diminish. Liquid is harder to determine, but one drop is approx the same as one tab.

If you take 1 tab, don’t expect anything dramatic. Mostly a body trip. But depends on mindset.

If you take 2 tabs, you will have a more powerful experience. More visuals.

As you take more, the trip is more intense. With that intensity comes a lot more unpredictability.

Your mind produces all kinds of images and connections, and you can get absorbed in those manifestations, for better or worse.

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For any trip, set aside the day.

For LSD, it takes about 30-90 minutes for the initial effects to begin.

There is a period where you begin to peak— anxiety heightens, excitement peaks, things begin to jitter and perceptions loosen. There is usually an uneasiness, a giddiness.

This state is dose dependent, but usually lasts between 2-6 hours.

After the peak, the come down and “reintegration” can last another 6 or more hours. This period the mind is no longer “peaking” with energy. It’s making sense of the new perceptions, and integrating them back into a functional whole.

There are major perception changes on a trip. Senses. Time. Space.

Things and perceptions warp, and you gain an awareness of how flimsy and unreliable our perceptions really are.

When you go to sleep, you wake up as though nothing happened, except that you have memories of this experience that resemble a powerful dream.

There are no negative side effects, other than how powerful the experience was, how deeply it affected your notion of reality.

I usually feel very refreshed, as if the world was anew. Like the cobwebs have been cleaned and the fog lifted. There is a clarity.

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One thing I always tell others and remind myself is that the entire trip is a manifest of my mind.

It’s not outside me, it’s inside me. As a result, there is no reason to lose control.

Do not react hastily to thoughts and feelings and perceptions. Accept them. Embrace them. Reflect on them. They are you. They are apart of you.

You possess them. Do not let them possess you.

Do this, and you will never have a bad trip.

I have safely tripped more times than I can count. Well over 100, with dozens and dozens of people.