Karl's Bad Trip
This will be the first time putting the experience into words. In a recent post, I alluded to a mind-shattering hallucinogenic experience that put the brakes on my psychedelic explorations. It’s been about 25 years since that night and I can remember it like it was yesterday. They say time heals all wounds, but that’s nonsense. It’s only recently that I can bring this up without a full-blown panic attack.
Set and setting
I was a teenager, bored in my room on a Tuesday evening and dreading another day of school. My parents were downstairs doing whatever parents did in the 90s without iPhones and Facebook. I had plans to sneak out that night and go to my friend Andy’s house. He lived on the other side of our suburban neighborhood, a ten-minute walk, at most.
Evening turned to night and eventually the house went dark. I crept downstairs, avoiding the creaky steps, and slipped out the backdoor. Worried about the cops that occasionally patrolled the neighborhood and would almost certainly escort me home with a curfew violation, I kept to the shadows of front yards, hiding when I saw headlights.
Andy had a troubled home situation, the exact details of which I never found out. I only know that he lived with his grandmother, who rarely left her bedroom. His room was at the front of the house and I entered through an open window.
It was a messy space, clothes strewn about and a bare mattress on the floor. There were some posters on the wall and everything smelled of cigarettes and weed. The light from the ratty yellow bulb pooled like piss in the center of the room. There Andy sat with a plastic bong and one of those jet lighters that sounded like a welding torch. He gestured for me to sit down, telling me that I was going to love this.
When I asked what it was, he just said, “It’s really strong.” At this point in my life, I’d already had a little experience with psilocybin and lesser substances, so I didn’t think much of it. I also assumed (incorrectly) that Andy had done this stuff already and knew what it was.
To this day, I don’t know what the substance was or how he got a hold of it.
I wasn’t nervous at all, and after bullshitting for a few minutes, I scooted up to the bong and Andy readied the lighter for me.
Part 1: The Trip Up
I remember the first hit clearly. Andy pulled the bowl and I cleared the bong. It tasted dark and synthetic. He would tell me later that I took a second hit, but I don’t remember it.
I looked up from the bong and the room was dark. Andy wasn’t there. I glanced down and in front of me was a single lit candle. I closed my eyes and called his name.
When I opened them again, I was somewhere else. From here on out, when I say “I”, know that I’m using the term for convenience. “I” was no more; Karl wasn’t even a distant memory. I was a field of consciousness with a 360° field of view. I had spatial awareness and felt that I was vaguely spherical.
I was a short distance above a perfectly flat mirrored floor. It reflected a clear blue sky illuminated by an unseen source. In perfect rows and columns, stretching out into the distance in every direction were small Romanesque pillars. Topping each one was something resembling a human eye. It occurred to me that I was just one of the countless eyes.
My awareness expanded to take in more of this place. I looked into the distance and expected a horizon, but it didn’t exist like I expected. There was no terminus. Everything in every direction went on forever.
At that moment, I grasped the concept of infinity.
Seconds were aeons. Time meant nothing. I just was and it was good.
Then I began to feel a vibration and sensed a presence of indescribable enormity. The difference in size between whatever I was and this other thing was so incredible that it made me feel a strange, primal fear. The vibrations grew stronger and then there was movement.
The mirrored plane upon which I rested shifted and began to rotate. As it moved, it became transparent. Beyond it, in a grid-like pattern, I saw innumerable other mirrored planes bisecting each other in every direction.
It was at this point that I broke. Complete psychotic break and I’ll explain why. What I had been witnessing up to that point was infinity. What I saw then was something more than that and my mind couldn’t take it. There can’t be more than infinity, it doesn’t make sense. Logic shattered and so did my mind. I couldn’t fathom what I was witnessing.
Quick aside: Andy later told me that I was writhing on the floor and started screaming, “There’s millions of everything forever.” I suspect it was at this point in the trip.
Part 2: The Trip Down
The experience became one of complete and utter existential terror. It was hell. I wanted nothing more than the void. I needed nonexistence. This had to stop. Now.
It dawned on me that I had a body, somewhere, at some time. I couldn’t figure out how to get back, which only added to the madness.
Then the entity appeared.
It was recognizable as a face, but it wasn’t humanoid. It was as if it was being pushed against a membrane of some sort. It somehow came from beyond that maddening space of infinity+, superimposed over it all.
At first, it just seemed to observe me as I burned in my psychic hell. Then it began to speak to me. I couldn’t understand what it said. Its speech became more urgent and I sensed its growing impatience. The impatience turned to anger, which then became a palpable feeling of disappointment.
The realm took on an oppressive atmosphere, as if the very substance of the space (non-space?) was rejecting me. The entity stopped speaking and simply willed me away. It was like being launched out of a cannon. I knew intuitively that I was returning to my body. I opened my eyes in Andy’s room.
The aftermath
I was sick and terrified, face down on the dirty mattress, clinging to it like a life-raft in raging seas. Andy was standing as far away from me as possible, wringing his hands with a look of terror on his face. His grandma banged on the door, yelling about noise. He yelled back, “Bad trip, it’s just a bad trip, go away!”
As the drug wore off, I had a couple of flashes where I would leave the room again, shooting off in some unknown psychic distance, before being slingshotted back. I was still in the depths of madness, crying and panicking, begging to just stay in my body.
Finally, the movement stopped and I knew that I was back for good. I sat in silence while Andy just stared at me. I couldn’t look at the walls without seeing some of the images from that other place flowing down, so I just stared at my feet. Before long, Andy suggested that I get home and get some rest.
It had only been about five minutes since taking the first hit, but I felt like I experienced multiple lifetimes.
I crawled out the window, stumbled into the middle of the street, and vomited.
I made it home undetected, showered and crawled into bed. Sleep wouldn’t come. I somehow managed school that morning, putting my head down in every class. Back then, nobody cared. I think they all assumed I was a burnout anyway.
After all these years
I’ve never been the same. I was fundamentally changed that night. In my ignorance, my arrogance and naïveté, I went somewhere I wasn’t welcome. I wasn’t prepared.
For that transgression, I have a psychic wound that will never quite heal.