My First Acid Trip

 TRIGGER WARNING: Suicide.

This is the story of my first acid trip. If you are going to try psychedelics, please read my harm reduction guide first so you don’t have a bad trip: https://johnnybelgium.blogspot.com/2022/09/johnny-belgiums-psychedelic-trip-guide.html

Club 27 is a group of famous musicians that died when they were 27. Most of them died from drug use. That includes alcohol. I’m in a different club 27. My life began when I was 27 years old because of an LSD trip.

My mother was a certified schizophrenic and never got the help she needed because she was too paranoid. My father had issues too. Long story short: I had a crappy childhood.

I think I had a mood disorder before the acid cured me. I remember having panic attacks in kleuterklas (school ages 3 to 6). Sometimes I was really really angry without an apparent cause. I didn’t know how to talk to people. Like many boomers my parents thought children raised themselves and didn’t need to be parented and socialized.

As a teenager I was fucked in the head. I was afraid of being bullied so I became a bully. I made fun of people and when someone threatened me I would go berserker and start punching like a wild beast. I rejected friendship because I was afraid of rejection. I rejected love in general.

I had some traumas along the way. When I was 16 my dog froze to death in the winter at my mother’s house, which triggered a psychotic episode that lasted weeks. When I was 21 a girl killed herself and that triggered a psychotic episode that lasted a year (Read About Valerie Here). I didn’t realize they were psychotic episodes. No one knew.

I had panic attacks almost every day. It was like having a heart attack while hot liquid metal gets injected into your bloodstream. Sometimes the panic attack had no apparent reason. Sometimes a TV show or article would trigger an attack and then that would get stuck in my head. I would spend all day ruminating about what triggered me. For years. Trying to reason it away by debating people in my head. Over and over and over.

I spend hours dreaming up scenarios where I would get women to reject me and prove just how shallow they are. I was an incel before the word "incel". I would develop all sorts of theories about women.

I would have bouts of depression. Whenever I came across something to do with suicide, the colour would drain from the world and within seconds I would be in a deep dark hole of misery. I think I had PTSD from the girl that killed herself.

I didn’t know how to act around people. I was very insecure and talking about myself would give me a panic attack. If someone asked me a personal question my heart would be racing. I never tried to start conversations because I didn’t know how.

I didn’t have a friend in the world in my early twenties. I lived with my father and brother but we lived like we were strangers to each other. I was a ghost. I felt like killing myself and fantasized about it. But I had experienced what darkness that suicide brings. If my older sister ever had kids, I reasoned, I didn’t want to be that uncle that killed themselves way back that they never met. I didn’t want that darkness in the family history.

I should have sought professional mental help. All the mental health internet pages would warn that some people are “malingering”: faking it or fooling themselves. That made me afraid that a psychiatrist would think I was faking it. And maybe I was. I didn’t know how to explain it. I didn’t have the vocabulary to express my feelings.

To burn off all the stress I worked out at home. One fateful day I was going to pick up a second hand exercise rowing machine in Amsterdam. My brother, who is 6 years younger, heard about it and wanted to go with me. Because: “If you go to Amsterdam, you have to buy weed!”. So I picked up my rowing machine and that evening smoked my first joint. I was 26 years old.

Because it was so expensive I held in the smoke to get the most out of it. Which made me puke. I watched a movie (Sky Captain Of Tomorrow) and it was like I was in the movie flying an airplane. 

I started smoking with my brother every weekend. At one point we were enemies but now we became best friends. We would smoke weed and watch shit and have a great time. My father and I turned a bedroom into a theater room, slash bedroom. I tried growing my own weed. I was getting pro at being a stoner.

In a way it was medicine. I would still have panic attacks but it was like it was only happening to my body and not to my mind. My bouts of depression became a lot milder. It was like I became resistant to my feelings. I became an observer of my own mind. 

Weed brings people together. I started hanging out with the stoners my brother knew. I drove them around. I started making friends. I still meet them to this day. I finally started to become a social human being. My relationship with my father was also better. My EQ was improving.

I was far from cured though. I would still ruminate about stuff. I would still not start a conversion and didn’t know how to hold one. Self consciousness was overloading my working memory. Weed is medicine but an imperfect one. Weed also hampers my concentration. I would zone out and miss a lot of things.

Then came a fateful encounter with “The Medicine Man”. I was working in the Volvo factory. Me and The Medicine Man were locked up together in a small chamber, working on the naked chassis of Volvo cars. The Medicine Man had Polish roots and made his own hardcore music which he played in our little room. It was a cacophony of extremely loud noise. When you are locked up together, chances are you’ll get into a conversation. And he was asking me all sorts of personal questions. He must have realized I was some kind of mental case. Painfully shy. Or on the spectrum. When we were talking about weed he offered me the drug that would cure my PTSD, or whatever my problem was. He offered me LSD. I told my brother and he had done it before and he said this was a golden opportunity. So I bought 3 blotters. The Medicine Man wasn’t a dealer. He made no profit selling me the acid. 

So there we were in the theater room I built about to drop acid. The set up was a couch and a giant projector screen with a surround system in what was actually a very small room. We sat about 2 meters from a 2 meter wide screen. Kinda like IMAX, but different. There was me, my brother and a friend of his from school who was a stranger to me. We ate our acid like good boys. It was a sunny and hot Saturday or Sunday Afternoon. It was the first day of the rest of my life.

We started watching a BBC Earth Nature Documentary with David Attenborough. It was in fact the first one in the “EARTH” series. Which has become legendary ever since. After some 20 minutes The Stranger asked “What is this that we are seeing?” None of us could decipher what we were looking at. It had begun… (In retrospect it was a Snow Leopard hunting a goat on the side of a mountain.) If the acid kicks in in 20 minutes, it’s a big dose.

So at one point we were watching a herd of elephants. And I guess I asked the question “where does life come from” because the history of life began playing in reverse like a vision. I saw evolution (Replication, Mutation, Combination, Selection) play out in reverse. I went all the way back to the beginning of life and then I saw how the solar system got formed. In reverse. 

I saw the big bang in reverse and went all the way back to the beginning of the universe. There I saw how the universe had begun.

I saw visually, how the paradox that there should be "nothing", yet here "I" am thinking, exploded into the big bang.

I interpret that vision now as: “nothing is impossible”. I don’t mean “everything is possible”, but that the idea that I had that there should be “nothing” doesn’t make sense. We know there is “something” and the fact that there is “something” means that “something” makes perfect sense and that “nothing” doesn’t make sense. Nothing can never be. There was always something. If ‘nothing” was logical, I wouldn’t be here thinking about “nothing”.  Life is amazing but life was always going to happen because life makes perfect sense because we know there is life.

When I saw the beginning of the universe, the script flipped and I saw the big bang again but in fast forward. I saw the galaxies form and our solar system and life on earth. It fast forwarded all the way to me sitting on the couch watching an Attenborough documentary. And I realized that I am the universe that has become conscious of itself. And everyone I meet is the universe. We are all parts of the universe.

We Are The Universe Become Conscious.

I did not sense that there is one consciousness. Instead I was very aware that I am an ape that knows about the universe. On a planet full of amazing intelligent and dexterous apes. We all understand only our parts of it. We can't read minds. I have to communicate the universe in my head to others. I have to communicate and share my mind. Show my personality. Drop the masks. I have to talk to people. And they won’t hate me for it. 

The Stranger was having a challenging trip. At one point he said to me something like “I’m a fake and nobody likes me”. My reaction was to have a laughing fit because I was once in his shoes and now I realized I was cured.

The next Monday at work I met The Medicine Man. I think he was kind of spooked. I was a different person. I was no longer shy.  I had gotten instant charisma. All the lessons integrated.

I was cured from my mood disorder. No more daily panic attacks, no more depression, no more anger at the world. I realized my constant ruminations about politics and women were bullshit, and I was the problem.

My mind was suddenly clear. Tabula Rasa: a clean slate. I had no problem talking to people and sharing personal things. Perhaps I became a little too open with people, lol. Now I over-share. But that is what Lucy told me to do and no one gets angry at me for it. I am grateful to be alive and to be the universe that is aware of itself. I love living!

Peace!