My first trip report.

This is a trip report about my first trip report.  A little meta.

Also this discusses severe depression in some amount of detail.  I'm mentioning that so that if this topic is upsetting to you, you can decide whether or not to read it but you'll be forewarned either way.

So we did write trip reports back in my high school years.  And that's when my usage of acid is limited to.  So I was already part of a psychedelics discussion group where we wrote trip reports, by the time someone offered me acid.  And what strikes me all these years later is how easy it is to write the wrong trip report.  Because the most important thing that happened to me didn't even rate a mention, and unimportant things were elevated to weird levels of significance.  This wasn't an effect of the psychedelics, it was more an effect of the expectations I had of tripping and trip reports from looking to others.

So here's the reality of what my trip looked like:

I was as severely depressed when I began taking acid, as I ever have been in my life.  The night I tried it for the first time, I had been contemplating suicide.  Not just thinking about it idly, but planning out the details of how to haul myself from here to there and do this and that to my body to get this done effectively.  Nobody else had any idea.  Including my friends and everyone involved with getting things -- I don't think they would have, if they'd known.

When I took the acid, there were other acid newbies around.  That was the whole point that day, was a bunch of new people were all trying it for the first time and I was going to be one of them.  We split up though so I was only with one or two other people most of the time.  Their experiences were so different from mine I was baffled.  I didn't think I felt anything.  That seemed like a crappy thing to report back to people -- "I didn't feel anything."  I wondered how to make it work.

Things changed though.

Things definitely changed.

Because you don't have the thoughts I was having, and forget them in a hurry.  I'd been having those thoughts in various forms for a long time.  I couldn't get out of those thoughts, no matter what I tried.  Even trying to get rid of them seemed to make them worse.  But you don't forget severe depression quickly.  You just don't.  You don't forget it at all. It's there every second of every day and it's misery.

I forgot it.  I not only forgot I'd had these thoughts that night.  I forgot such thoughts could exist.  All of the depression had vanished.  Not just that.  All memory of the depression had vanished.  All memory of the thoughts involved, the feelings involved, the lack of feelings involved, the point where I lamented that I had a survival instinct because I'd concluded that I didn't want the world and the world shouldn't want me either. And all the steps beyond that -- I don't want to trigger anyone, but I want people to know that this wasn't a lightweight thing, I know the territory I'm talking about.  This went on for years and defied the best efforts of me, my family, a whole team of psychiatric professionals, and a number of different approaches to therapy and medication.  None of that did a thing for my depression.

Then I took acid and... gone.  Gone without fanfare, though.  I felt good.  I felt nice.  I felt relaxed and calm.  Neutral.  Happy.  Regular feelings.  But I didn't feel some sudden onslaught of normal emotions.  It wasn't like the scene with the corn kernel in that online comic about depression, although I wish it was because that was a great story.  What happened on acid didn't make a great story, a good story, or even a story, as far as I could tell at the time.  When I was writing my trip report, I wasn't even aware that depression had happened, so I was also not aware it had gone away, and that this would later be what I considered my biggest positive takeaway from psychedelics.  So I couldn't write about it.  I hadn't noticed.

The closest I can describe it is, imagine you're in a pretty visually busy place.  Lots to look at.  You are casting a shadow and you notice the shadow on the ground.  Eventually you look over and the shadow is gone.  The light source changed and you no longer cast a shadow.  But you have no idea when your shadow disappeared.  Only that it happened sometime between now and when you first came outside and saw your shadow.

I don't know when the depression disappeared.  Only that it disappeared sometime during the earlier part of my first trip, because it was long forgotten by the time I was questioning whether it was working or not.  But the depression had been so severe, and it disappeared so thoroughly, and with such total forgetfulness for what it had been like or even that it had been like anything, that it's easily the most noteworthy thing that ever happened to me on psychedelics.  I don't always talk a lot about it, because as a depression treatment I think psychedelics are extremely risky.  But severe depression is extremely risky as well.  I don't know if I'd be here if I had been allowed to follow my plans through uninterrupted.  They were complicated and involved new details about how to prevent myself from accidentally surviving.

And... here's where it gets into what writing the trip report was like.

As far as I could tell, there were specific elements that went into a trip report.  You didn't have to have all of them, but you probably had at least one of the main themes covered in trip reports if you tripped at all.  At least, that was the theory.  So there were some things that you might see a lot of if you read enough trip reports:

• Anything derived from the eight-circuit model of human consciousness
• Abstract philosophical ramblings
• Psychoanalytic thoughts, especially as applied to oneself or one's... traveling companions, shall we say?
• Descriptions of anything from visions to hallucinations
• Descriptions of deep spiritual experiences
• Mention of 4th, 5th, 6th, etc. dimensions
• Mention of other planes of reality
• Bad trips that teach you something useful about life
• Quotes from famous psychedelic people: Leary, Shulgin, Hofmann, Ram Dass, McKenna, Kesey, Huxley, Lilly, and any number of famous beatniks, hippies, and the occasional jazz musician or something.  (To this day I love me some good Shulgin.  Sasha or Ann, take your pick.  Big fan.)
• ...and so much more

So I can't speak for anyone else who was tripping back then, but I was BSing my trip reports the same way I'd BS my teachers on an essay question of an exam.  So that's the mindset I was in when I wrote my trip report: Essay question.  And what you do when you don't know the answer to an essay question is you at least try to make it look like a good essay that you've seen before (if you're not cribbing off your neighbor already in class) and you hope your teacher doesn't see you have no clue what you're talking about.

Which is unfortunately how I approached trip reports.  Which makes sense given my age at the time all this went down.

So my first trip report did not report the most amazing thing that ever happened to me on psychedelics.

Instead it waxed profound about things I didn't understand to begin with.  Which included a hilarious moment where I thought I was seeing these 4th dimensions and stuff because I have bad vision that acid somehow corrected a bit.  So I eagerly put THAT in my trip report.  Some musings on life and death maybe for good measure and hopefully profundity brownie points.  I also didn't appreciate what it meant to be a hard-head, someone who a drug just naturally affects less than it does other people.  

But really the thing that belongs in my trip report.  Truly belongs in my first trip report.  Is the stunning effect on my depression at the time.  In retrospect, it was my first day on psychedelics and yet was by far the most amazing thing that ever happened to me on them.  It wasn't flashy.  It was the opposite of flashy.  In fact, that's what makes it still seem so miraculous to me.  The way severe depression, the kind with a genuine and nearly active suicide plan attached, just quietly vanished so thoroughly I didn't even notice.  I was happy to learn of research vindicating my experiences there because back when this was happening for me the research didn't exist and nobody believed me when I finally told one of my shrinks.  He was not happy with my drug use already so he wasn't inclined to see any positive side to it.

But now they know it can really do this.  And that when it works, it works so well that people who've experienced it do use words like miraculous.  How else do you describe wanting to end your own life, knowing how that will affect your loved ones but not being able to pull out, and then having that disappear in a heartbeat without a trace?  I wish I'd been better at writing trip reports back then.  I'd have written about this, and I might remember more of that first trip.  As it is I have to decipher what actually happened from my fudged-essay-question trip reports, which isn't always straightforward.

But however my views and habits may have changed, I will always be grateful for the MONTHS of instant depression relief that LSD afforded me.  I have a feeling that to make it really stick, I would've had to learn some things from those shrinks I'd been seeing about managing psychiatric and emotional problems, so I would know how to fight the depressive thoughts if they returned.  But as it is, I may owe my life to that experience.  I wouldn't tell someone to go out and do this, it seems like it could so easily backfire.  I've heard they're coming up with protocols for treating depression with psychedelics and I'm excited, I find that really promising and hope it helps a lot of people.  But those protocols can't possibly involve the only "protocol" I followed back then: wait my turn for an eyedropper, get so much acid spilled on me that it scared the dealer, and then wonder WTF was going on.  (Luckily I'm an acid hard-head and could competently handle ten-strips as a high school kid, because from what I'm told they really screwed up my first dose and that could've gone badly.)

So my old trip reports, while interesting from a "WTF was I thinking again?" standpoint, aren't very revealing of what happened, because I fudged them like a hard essay question.  To remember anything from my days in the world of acid, I have to just remember.  What I wrote often bears only a vague comical resemblance to what actually happened.  So I was totally willing to claim I had any number of profound experiences.  But the most profound thing I ever experienced on drugs, an instant several-month remission of dangerously severe depression that I was later hospitalized for, didn't even rate a mention somehow.  But I do hope that as a tool, they find a way to safely harness that effect, because it could save someone's life.