The Acid Horror Picture Show

Well it's been almost a year of preaching my thoughts to a non-existent audience, and to celebrate I will share the beginning of a story I wrote. A story outlining my descent into an acid induced stage of lunacy. I never finished the final chapter as it contained so much it's hard to articulate, but maybe one day I will.

The Descent to Psychosis or the Ladder to Enlightenment

The following is a written summarization of a mindset that began following a bad acid trip, and grew to consume my mind during a trip more as trips went on. I recently learned of a theory on the universe which helped me put my thoughts into words and connect the previously unexplainable to understandable reality. The theory that I found is the ‘Zoo Hypothesis’, and is a response to the Fermi Paradox, which claims that there should be evidence of extraterrestrial life, simply because of how large the universe is. The Zoo Hypothesis states that the reason we are not able to find any signs of extraterrestrial life is because our whole existence is in a ‘cage’ like an animal at the zoo. We would simply be the animals we see at the zoo to these higher beings. 

First Trip

This was the first time I had an actual bad trip on acid, which occurred when I took whippets (N2O, laughing gas) as I was peaking. I was in a pitch black room, listening to Simon and Garfunkel’s The Sounds of Silence. I began to feel like I was getting constricted, every time I would move would relieve the pressure on my body, but it would quickly come back. I felt as if I couldn’t breathe when I opened my eyes, and saw something crawling up me (looked like the girl from The Ring, except she had no bottom jaw and was all black with jagged, rough lines). I jumped out of bed, turned the lights on, and sat down to try and calm myself down, by telling myself I was just tripping, it wasn’t real, and that I would be okay. I calmed down a bit, but had to call my friend for company the rest of the trip. The remainder of the trip I heard people talking when no one was around, something like how I feel auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia would be like. 

This trip didn’t push my mind into the final idea I will be talking about later but outlined how I went about my next acid trip.

Second Trip

After my last bad trip, I didn’t drop acid again for probably 6-7 months, but eventually decided I was comfortable enough to attempt the combination of acid and whippets again. This time however, I aimed to take precautions. Instead of doing it in a pitch black room, I turned on all my lights; instead of using ear covering headphones, I used smaller earbuds; instead of Simon and Garfunkel, I chose A Tribe Called Quest’s Solid Wall of Sound featuring Elton John. 

When I took the whippet this time, I didn’t feel constricted or anything like before, but instead I couldn’t see anything except for purple, with a rectangle made up of tilde’s (~~~~). I was inside the rectangle, like a prison cell keeping me captive. However, instead of bars keeping me captive physically, they kept my mind imprisoned by using things that are addicting or satisfying, such as drugs, food, money, sex, etc. 

After I realized the ways my mind was being held captive, I saw the box being pulled at from the corner, where I ultimately popped outside the rectangle. I was free. Free from captivity. Free from addiction controlling me. Free. But before I had time to enjoy it, I was ‘captured’ (I cant really explain it. I felt I was back inside the rectangle again, back under the control of the mystic beings controlling me. This became a loop I went through several times before I was able to break myself out of it and stop what I was doing. As soon as I was able to snap myself out of it, I sat down and just breathed, trying to comprehend what I just experienced. 

The mystic beings spoke through Elton John’s closing verse on Solid Wall of Sound, although to me it sounded like something entirely different, something I cant even begin to pronounce or explain how it sounded, but at the moment I knew it was the rules to my imprisonment and what the limits were. 

This whole experience before I snapped myself out of it took place in a matter of seconds, but for me trying to understand it, took months to even begin to be able to explain it. After this trip, I never combined acid and whippets again, and will probably never do whippets again. 

I had several successful trips after these, one of which I managed to quit smoking cigarettes cold turkey, as if I had flipped an off switch. I felt I was prepared to trip in New York and was excited to have a good time, but ultimately turned into being one of my worst trips, while also one of my best.

The Final Trip