Nearly 40 years ago, my buddy and I took acid. He was a pro–had us drink Jack Daniels in case there was too much speed in the acid. Laughing and singing, we walked to McDonalds and lost it: every employee was wearing a big, bright hard hat. They looked like the Doozers from Fraggle Rock. http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20101120181329/muppet/images/2/21/Doozerconstruction.jpg We laughed our whacked asses off, got food, went home.
Next day we went and they were still wearing the hard hats! “Acid flashback!” we said before convulsing in laughter. Turned out it was some dumb “let us build you a burger” promotion. Good trip? Bad trip? No harm, no foul, I guess.
They might fail, but then again so might your babysitter fail to keep things good. It is what is in your own head that matters most. Most trips are good, but it is probably much easier to make someone have a bad one than to ensure that they have a good one.
I believe, though, that eh CIA came to the conclusion that this was not a very useful interrogation technique. I think subjects just became incoherent, rather then telling the interrogators what they wanted to know.
Unlike physical torture, with a bad trip, the torturer cannot readily make it stop, and so cannot promise to.
That’s what I remember most about tripping…the laughing. Laughing so hard, and so long, that your cheeks actually ache the next day. Good times. I never had a bad trip, thankfully.
I’d say the key ingredient for a bad trip was first wondering, and then becoming convinced, that you’re never coming down. Very unpleasant.
ETA: I forgot to say that dropping during school was just asking for it - especially on a day when you’re being given an oral exam in French class. STUPID.
IME it is all about how the user contributes to their own experience. Intense paranoia? Go with it and enjoy the intensity. Fear that your heart is beating with an odd rhythm? Dance to it. Fear that the trip will never end? Whoa, cool, good drugs!!
The closest I ever had to a bad acid experience was my first time. The person who gave it to me was not entirely trustworthy, and I thought he had been duped when he purchased it. Ten minutes after ingestion, Nothing was happening and I decided nothing would. I was disappointed. Then BLAM! And I couldnt figure out what was going on. But it was still cool.
Oh, and sunglasses. Ascribe some magical properties to them and wear them.
I did have one pretty horrible experience but I don’t think it lasted long. Pac man style meteors comming at me before pac man was invented. Fortunately I was able to outrun them.
I only took it a few times, but the first time was the most visually beautiful experience of my life (still is, to this day). We went to the park, and the whole world looked like a Van Gogh painting to me. Then the ice cream truck came, and the music made me feel as if I were in a happy cartoon world.
The second time we stayed home, went out on an upstairs porch and finger painted directly on a large table. This was another amazing experience - totally immersive and magical.
Luckily I had a very strong grip on reality, so even when I looked down at my arm at one point and saw raw sinews, I realized it was the acid and just turned my focus to something more pleasant. If a person lost the ability to make that realization, I imagine tripping could easily turn horrifying.
The last time for me was over 30 years ago, but if I remember right, I would have a bad experience when some situation external to the trip itself would be bumming me out, and the trip would drastically intensify my hurt emotions, so that I would cry Niagaras of tears. But that only happened a very few times out of dozens of positive experiences. Generally, with nothing hurtful impinging from outside, it was all good. Or very good. Or fuckin excellent.
My mind being what it is, I welcomed whatever weirdness came along and never got freaked by the state of my own consciousness—but, as always, YTMV.
I agree that speed is inherently unpleasant, if only for the fact that it results in sore muscles.
If I tripped outdoors on a warm day, when I got a chance to drink water, I would quaff prodigious amounts all at once, it felt so good, even though I hadn’t been feeling severe thirst. My body just loved water better than anything.
Speaking of body effects, there were several things my body was not able to do at all when tripping:
*Sleep
*Poop
*Attain sexual arousal
*Digest any fats or proteins at all
The only food I could tolerate while tripping was fresh fruit, and believe me I luxuriated in its flavor. And water… there was no limit to the quantities of water I could pour into me. The other thing my body loved best while tripping was hatha yoga—the breathing, the stretches, the calming and relaxation—formed the perfect complement for the experience. Yeah, I was pretty physical with it as well as psychedelic. I don’t know anyone else, never heard of anyone else whose body processed it the same ways as mine did.
It would be so disappointing if that were true! The whole point of the research Leary, Alpert, and Lilly conducted in the early 1960s was how you could better direct your mind consciously to better places. As long as set and setting were optimized for that.
I think it is difficult to explain to someone who has never tripped. Connections are opened that were never opened before, and for me it was a permanent change in how I viewed the world.
To give you a simple example, it has been a very long time since I took acid, but I still see patterns (usually faces) in ordinary things like stucco, woodgrain or carpeting. Sometimes they even undulate slightly, like when I was on acid. “Solid” doesn’t mean the same to me, either. I always feel that everything flows and swirls, even if I can no longer perceive that movement.
One of the most crucial differences between a trip and a dream is the fact that, during a dream you are asleep, and thus receiving very little sensory input from the outside world, whereas during a trip a normal level of sensory input is available. Thus the brain creates the sensory experience of a dream out of “whole cloth”, whereas the sensory experience of a trip is more a sort of distorted or “reimagined” version of what the normal experience would be like. Dreams are relatively easy to forget and dismiss because they are not much connected to everyday reality. Psychedelic drug experiences, by contrast, show us our actual reality in a whole new light, and, as a consequence, are much more memorable, and seem (perhaps justifiably) much more significant and important.
Oh, and sunglasses. Ascribe some magical properties to them and wear them.
