Sean, an old friend of mine, swore by a story much like the one in the OP which happened to him in the 70’s.
The plan of the night was to take acid, go out on the town with friends. He was at home waiting for friends to arrive but they were running late. He decided to drop his acid while he waited. (Thinking about this now, there was some element of the story about the acid. But I don’t remember now.)
An hour or so later his friends arrived and they went out dancing. He was tripping from the acid and found it hard to get around - but he said he had a great time even though the club lights were surreal and his visuals were all messed up. They ended up back at his place and as people started to come down they just crashed where they sat.
The next day Sean gets up to a house of half-awake, half-asleep people with dirty dishrag feeling acid hangovers. He tells them what a great time he had and they should go to that club again. His friends give him a funny look and tell their side of the story.
They arrive at his place the night before and find him tripping hard on the couch. They can’t snap him out of it, but he seemed ok, so they just decide to stay at his house and drop and keep an eye on him. Sean spend the entire night on the couch.
That’s pretty much the story I was told.
Given Sean was a big-wig producer for Casablanca in the 70’s, and had a ton of cash from his projects -Kiss being one of them- he had a million stories of extreme party situations. I’d hear some of them and think “yeah, right. What bullshit” only later to hear the story confirmed by someone else.
So, is it true? Hard to say. But knowing this guy, I’d suspect it was.
I’ve taken acid so I know the effects at low doses. (I never wanted to take so much I’d blow my brain out.) But some of the trips were pretty wild and involved just sitting and staring at things - and that was one hit of good stuff. I could see dropping 6-7 hits or more and having a total mind trip.
I think the story is possible.
Psychologist here. If it were true that x acid trips = legally insane, my licensing board would have made me learn it when I had to learn the rest of state law relevant to psychologists. I also teach an alcohol and drug detection and intervention class at the doctoral level, and assure you that this idea is nonsense.
Not at all credible in my experience. I am well aware of the effects of very high doses and lots of my old college friends were too. It just doesn’t work that way. Maybe he was on something else.
Yea I do find it a little hard to believe. A friend of mine accidentally took ten hits of acid at one time, apparently because some other friends of his thought it would be funny to give him that much just to see how he would react. (It was his first time) Needless to say this stuff absolutely blew his mind but he said that it was similar to an overwhelmingly strong shroom trip, although he did swear off acid after that night…
Well, you just wrote exactly what I was thinking, so I guess I just won’t bother.
This could very well be true.
I have taken a lot of acid in my life and I have to say there were definitely some times I was really out of it.
Sometimes you would just feel funny and laugh your ass off.
Sometimes things would get distorted.
Sometimes I could see things that really weren’t there as clear as I can see my monitor right now.
I even had some shared hallucinations with a good friend of mine.
BTW : I don’t think it is the quantity of acid, but more the quality.
I have had batches that always gave me strong visual trips with lots of clarity.
Then I had another batch which just left me unable to form a cogent sentence or to even move my body.
I have had trips so muddled I could see in 2 different realities at once : one (reality) which was the forest I was trying to walk through, the second (hallucinations) a big see-through bar with see-through people in it.
It was really had trying to convince your body that : yes, you can walk through these “solid” object, as they are clearly an hallucination.
It took me about 30 minutes to walk a particular stretch, which was actually about 10 metres long.
All believable. I can believe that he had a trip about dancing at a club or whatever. The part of the story that doesn’t seem credible to me is that the next morning he didn’t know what was real and were was the effects of the drug. This might happen for little details or whatever but not, I don’t think, for the entire night.
It was a dark and stormy night.
No, really, it was.
My then boyfriend and I decided to take some acid to celebrate my birthday. We were at a local amusement park and the weather was terrible. It started to rain and I promptly put up my yellow umbrella to keep dry. I kept telling my boyfriend that he was getting wet and to please come under the umbrella. He just laughed and laughed. A couple of hours later I looked all over for my trusty yellow umbrella getting more and more annoyed because I could not find it. My friend looked at me strangely and said I never HAD an umbrella. To this day I would pass a lie detector test swearing I had one.
I think that the story is indeed possible if there were only one of them. Two people having the same trip? Not so sure.
I’ve done acid a lot more than six times and look how I turned out.
The story is bullshit. Acid does not make you forget where you are you are or make you see things that aren’t there. The hallucinatory aspects of an acid trip tend to be greatly exaggerated in pop culture and folklore. Like others have said, you get vivid visuals when you close your eyes. With your eyes open, you may see some mild distortion of lights and colors and sounds may become louder or more intense but that’s about it. You don’t actually “hallucinate” in the sense of seeing things that aren’t really there and you don’t believe that the distortions you see are real.
The notion that a group of people could be sitting in their own driveway and believe they’re at the airport watching planes is not remotely consistent with any experience of hallucinagens I’ve ever had or witnessed. I can believe something like seeing airplanes in the distance and thinking they’re closer than they really are but that’s about the extent to which acid will distort perceptions.
These kind of stories always sound like they were made up by people who have never smoked a joint, much less tripped on acid.
Sounds like the same stoner “lawyers” who think an undercover officer has to identify themselves if you ask “are you a cop?” Oh shit! Why didn’t every criminal in the history of time think of that?
I always heard that it was 10 times or more dropping acid to be “legally insane” but can tell you this is absolute BS. I had to have a full MMPI 2 psychiatric evaluation during which I was totally honest with the doctor and divulged that I had done LSD at least twice a week for the entire period of my junior and senior years in high school (why do ya think they called it “high” school?) – way more than 10 times, if you’re keeping track – and I got a totally clean bill of health. In fact, my evaluation states “Patient is free of any psychoses, neuroses or pathologies” While my family may disagree, I do have it in writing that I am quite legally sane.
Just to get to the OP original question - YES, this is an Urban Legend. YES, I have heard it before. The very same thing happened to “the older brother” of an old high school friend of mine.
That same friend of mine knew of a girl who dropped acid while babysitting. She was supposed to put a roast in the oven at five and the baby to bed at six…
High doses meaning what and what year?
I know the acid we used to get in the 80’s was much stronger than what we got 8-9 years later. Hearing about acid these days and it sounds like it is about 1/4 of what we used to get. His story would have taken place around 1974-5.
I’m not going to argue for this guy because I wasn’t there. I only know what I remember form his story. Sean talked alot but he wasn’t a liar. He did enough on his own to not need to make anything up. I know he and his friends used to do some crazy stuff. All those stories of what rock stars do in hotels,. he helped create some of those stories.
What’s really amazing is when you find someone who’s been smoking pot for around 40 years and still believes that crap.
I agree with Hajario and Diogenes. I imagine that if you did a ton of acid, you might start hallucinating, but I’ve only met a couple of people who claim to have hallucinated (horns on heads and flowers with faces). Never happened to me and I’ve been to maybe 40 Grateful Dead concerts.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t trust myself driving. Riding a bicycle on the beach though, is completely another story.
I’ve never taken acid, but, like many other drugs, doesn’t “your mileage may vary” particularly apply here? Perhaps acid doesn’t do those things to you, but I’d wager that it does for other people. For example, with marijuana, I seomtimes experience auditory hallucinations (this also happens to me occasionally when I’m extremely sleep-deprived): I hear complete songs with full instrumentation and arrangements and hear them exactly as if a radio were playing in the room. Except the music only exists in my head and is completely original. It’s a beautiful feeling when it happens, but I don’t know anybody else who has this reaction to marijuana.
So I don’t understand how people can say with complete confidence that LSD does not and can not cause certain specific reactions when people have such differing reactions to drugs.
Well, first off : thanks for implicitly calling me a liar.
Second : Your story is bullshit.
Just because you have never had hallucinations doesn’t mean they don’t happen.
I have seen people that weren’t there, I have seen the leafs in a tree change into yellow raincoat-wearing munchkins and a whole lot more.
Some people I used to trip with also didn’t hallucinate most of the times, but some did some of the times.
(I did most of the times)
Most of them were completely shocked the first time it happened to them, because they were only expecting the mild distortion you mentioned.
Trust me, it is a completely different ballpark but it is the same drug.
Heh. Same thing happened to me on prom night. No, winter formal.
I always spelled it “cache”, but now that I think about it that doesn’t make much sense. Does anyone else spell it “cache” in their head?
“Just a website”? His friend is just a confirmed bullshitter. Which one wins? And I don’t know who Brunvand is, but the fact that he’s teaching anything probably gives him more cred than your husband or his buddy. No offense.
But it’s very easy to confirm the comparisons I made on the very website I linked to earlier, in experience reports written by people who have dropped acid; that gives each of them as much credibility as hubby’s buddy, and much greater strength in numbers.
Sure it does. It shows your husband that his buddy is full of shit, and is one of those stoners who thinks he’s got his shit together but really just arbitrarily pieces together hearsay he’s picked up and presents it as fact. Good for him for possessing such confidence, but I wouldn’t trust him further than I could throw him.
IME, odds are if you hear the exact same trip about a drug in several different places, it’s a UL. Many drugs, psychedelics especially and synthetics more so, have “themes” that occur in most or all highs. Dextromethorphan has the famed “Robowalk”, magic mushrooms have the thought loop, salvia divinorum has “salvia space”, LSD has the destruction of the ego, marijuana the feeling of understanding and connectedness. Even some hallucinations have features that are shared exactly; for example, many salvia smokers note that they experience an imaginary conversation with the plant itself, which often takes on a motherly personality (hence the plant’s nickname, Lady Salvia). But for multiple people to report having exactly the same trip, that’s usually pretty sketchy. Just like anything else, the pushier, the more fake.
Then again, probably the best policy about acid is to assume everything you hear about it is blatantly made up and passed on to blithering idiots who soak it up like sponges. IME at least 98% of what you hear about acid is bullshit.
I’ve never heard of acid hangovers, and acid is not one of those drugs that encourages you to go to sleep, anyway.
Bullshit. Acid doesn’t shatter peoples’ sense of true vs false. You might as well say that nicotine “may” keep some people up for weeks, and cover it under YMMV. No, sorry.
I have. Percocet, too. (On the Percocet I thought I was stoned and listening to Radiohead–neither was true, and I figured it out after two songs or so.)