It is about 3.20 pm when we finally put the tabs under our tongues. The small piece of cardboard has ‘1P-LSD’ printed on one side; it’s a legal form of the drug, set to be illegal by the end of the month, which metabolises into LSD once in the bloodstream. The effect should be the same.
Knowing the trip was a possibility I have dressed as sensibly and middle class as possible in blue jeans, a shirt and linen jacket. I thought if I looked innocuous, then I could get away with odd behaviour without arousing suspicion. After all, unless drunk, I am one of the most innocuous people I’ve met.
So I’m sitting in this linen jacket, looking across the garden table at Amos. Tabatha and Lysander each take a tab of LSD and one of their own 1P-LSD. This is to be Tabatha’s second trip in two days. As I look across at him Amos begins to laugh. I ask him if he’s high and he says he’s not yet. But he continues to laugh. At this point I’m not sure if he’s high and doesn’t know it, or he does know and is lying, or if I am high and so can’t understand why he is laughing. I have never felt so entirely unsure about why someone is laughing. After around thirty seconds of pondering this, I too, begin to laugh uncontrollably. Amos and I have a habit of attuning to each other. We lock eyes, realise how ridiculous the situation is and bellow even louder than before for minutes on end. Everyone around the table, including Matt, who is not partaking, is laughing to some degree. This dies down, and I realise I am starting to come up. At some point we all swallowed our tabs.
We start walking out through Jericho towards university parks. Jericho is the most understatedly beautiful area of Oxford. It has a quiet vibrancy, with wonky, characterful streets and gardens kept to please the eyes of walkers-by. As we wander through, I notice a yellow buttercup sprouting out of a drain along with some grass. As I notice the yellow, a yellow filter comes over my vision and everything is tinted. Further along I see a red flower and the yellow filter fades to red.
We walk along Walton street, and past the Blavatnik school of government – an imposing circular plate glass building, which looks like a stunted wedding cake with misaligned layers. We see our reflections in the repeated panes of curved glass as we walk by and we look ridiculous, our bodies looped and wonky. The curved glass may have made us look ridiculous anyway, or it could be the acid, or both. At this stage it is impossible to tell, but the effect is rather unpleasant yet funny.
Further down the street, Tabatha goes into the Co-op to get us some water, or at least attempts to, but I don’t recall if she actually gets us anything. Amos realises all he’s had since breakfast is a few pints of beer and a tab of some unknown drug, which apparently is equivalent to LSD. We both feel mildly sick at this point and decide to try to get some food as soon as possible. As far as I remember, despite us being in the middle of town and passing over 30 corner shops and food shops throughout the day, we never resolved this issue and didn’t eat anything until late in the evening. Luckily, we stopped noticing our hunger after a while.
We traipse down a small path leading into some seemingly endless meadows. Along this path my hearing goes for the first time. Everyone’s voice become distorted, particularly Amos’s, which sounds as if it is being spoken over a crackly public announcement system. At this point Amos is seeing rainbows everywhere he looks and is laughing and screwing up his eyes. I begin to wonder if I’m not really getting that high and ask Lysander, otherwise known as ‘Captain Sensei’, if I should take another tab. I see a University Security Services car coming down the road and get very paranoid that they’re coming to see us. Luckily they’re not.
We eventually settle behind a hedge in a field and lie on the grass, which is quite uncomfortable and full of insects. Tabatha is waving her hands around in the air and there is a kind of liquid or plasma trail that follows her fingertips. It feels quite nice to look at this. She says the world looks so geometric she actually feels a bit sick, and demands to the world ‘can it not be a bit less geometric?’ I pick a daisy and stare at it closely. It becomes incredibly geometric and sucks me into its centre; I have to look away because it is too intense. I then close my eyes and see all sorts of patterns, particularly in the form of growing dendrites, which replicate and grow into ever more branches. We are listening to Beyoncé’s new album ‘Lemonade’ on Tabatha’s portable speakers although Amos and I are completely unaware of this. Amos asks what language it is in and I say ‘I think it’s in Hindi or something.’ Tabatha laughs and tells us it’s Beyoncé, and we ask, sincerely, if it’s being played backwards. Through the mush I eventually hear a sample of staccato strings that I recognise. I tell the others that she’s using somebody else’s sample, but they don’t believe me. I remain certain of this nonetheless.
Still lying on the grass we chat about not very much. I light a Marlboro Red and the sight of it in my hand is both comforting and ominous. It looks entirely different from usual, like an extension of my body which has gone numb. It is the most dependable comfort one could ever reach for, and yet a courier to doom. It is my last cigarette, a fact which is both comforting and alarming. At this point, I feel that there is a thin transparent liquid through which everything is moving, both objects and sounds. Everything would leave a wake in the liquid and the liquid is acid itself. The liquid carries with it a sound like cicadas in a forest.
We get up and walk back through the fields and paths to Uni parks, and it is now quite sunny.
We wait for Tabatha to have a pee in a public toilet and there isn’t much to say while she is away. We are getting to the point where the majority of our attention is focused on comprehending the new reality our brains are presenting us with. I certainly can’t think of much to say other than ‘look, there’s Adam’s crane.’ Beside Uni parks is a construction site our friend drunkenly broke into in order to scale a crane. As we move through the park, a man walks past me with an enormously long neck. He looks absurd. At first I think he just has an enormous neck and then I realise the chances of that are pretty small. We decide to walk back to the house, although I’m unsure why. Tabatha goes into another Co-op in Jericho on the way back, and we wait outside the shop on the other side of the road. I look up Walton street and my sense of depth perception has gone. It looks as if the road ahead is broken up into layers which are on top of each other instead of behind each other, like the background of a film set. While it’s disturbing to see a familiar street appearing so different, it looks incredibly beautiful in the hot sunshine. As we wait, trying not to look too suspicious, we see a middle-aged man on the phone, about to get onto his bike. He is looking at me. I am worried that he might be calling the police to report us for looking suspicious. This thought probably makes me look even more suspicious, and he appears to frown at me before eventually cycling off. I look down at the hot tarmac as a wave passes underneath it, causing it to bulge up like a bubble right in front of my feet. Jesus. Tabatha then comes out of the shop and I don’t think she has even managed to get any water. God knows what she actually did in there. As she comes out she passes our friend Anna, who happens to be walking up the road and briefly says hello. We have no idea where to look.
Instead of going to the house we head to Port Meadow, where we sit down on a small grassy mound away from the main paths. We look out onto an enormous expanse of land, water and sky. Shafts of light leak down from the gaps in the clouds. We feel like enormous Gods surveying our heaven. I look down at my legs and they seem ridiculously small. Yet I am colossal compared to the grass. We all agree that we are giants compared to the grass and ants compared to the sky. It really does feel like heaven. The sky looks bigger than I’ve ever seen before. It is as if we’ve walked into a parallel realm. I have never been to Port Meadow before and so it’s hard to tell if it really looks the way I am seeing it. We are perched on a mound, which seems to be quite far away from other people, but it’s very hard to tell if they can see us or even hear what we are saying.
After chatting for a while, Amos asks me if he is controlling the words I am saying. I assure him that he’s not, but he is convinced that he told me to say that. I then say to him ‘there really isn’t any way I can convince you of this.’ That seems to help him realise he is just imagining it. At this point Tabatha mentions that she’s booked a punt for a few hours’ time. I’m not really in the mood to do anything so public, or requiring such fine motor skills, as punting.
In Port Meadow I begin to have very odd thoughts. I start to realise that there is something like a question, but which can’t be expressed in words, which is itself something like the answer to the mystery of life. Visually I can understand it as something similar to the corona of the sun during a solar eclipse. There is a black disk obscuring the truth and I can just see the glow from its edges. I’ll never be able to convey this thought in words or in images because I’m not experiencing it visually or verbally, like we usually experience things. It’s in some intermediate space for thought that doesn’t usually exist. Acid is known to cause synaesthesia, a condition all children are born with. As an adult, when sober I feel as if my thoughts are categorised into different forms, possibly because different areas of the brain dominate in their creation. On acid, I no longer feel this is the case. Thoughts are intermingled. In childhood and adolescence, the number of connections between neurones decreases and the important connections are strengthened, causing the loss of childhood synaesthesia. It also probably splits thoughts into categories. Patients on acid given MRI scans show that all areas of the brain are switched on at once. One of the things you end up doing on acid is looking back on your childhood to work out why you are who you are today. It’s possible to get an insight into your childhood when your brain is back in its childlike state of interconnectedness. So I never find out what this ultimate truth or question is, and I can’t articulate it to the others though my urge to discuss it is strong. In fact I can barely articulate any of my thoughts, probably because they aren’t verbal in nature. You can’t read a painting or a game of football, but that doesn’t mean they’re not real.
It gets quite frustrating, thinking so many odd thoughts and not being able to tell anyone. It feels very isolating.
Still on the mound in Port Meadow, I start to feel anxious and want to tell the others I’m worried I am having a bad trip, but then realise we are all responsible for the mental welfare of the group. I have to take the hit and get over my bad trip alone, because if they know I am having a bad trip, it will probably be contagious. I have a suspicion Amos is having a bad trip too and is scared by the thought of us both being trapped in our own mental hells without being able to admit it to each other. I tell myself to get over it and I do manage to, to some extent. Still annoyed by the geometric patterns, Tabatha says ‘I just need a big blob of colour, a big blob of solidness.’ I think I hear Lysander then say ‘I’m just a big blob of sadness’, although in hindsight I think he actually said “solidness”. I’m now worried that Lysander might also be having a bad trip.
I thought I’d be able to convince myself that any uncomfortable thoughts and hallucinations were just because of the acid, but the experience becomes so real and all-encompassing that you have no idea what’s the acid and what’s reality. I also can’t imagine the trip ever ending. I think I have now possibly gone mad, and will be forever.
We walk back from Port Meadow to Lysander’s house in Jericho. It’s early evening now and the canal is beautiful in the amber sunlight and so is the Florentine church beside the house. I go to the toilet and look in the mirror. I have quite long hair and a beard and it looks as if my whole face is covered with hair, leaving only a small space for my snub features to fit into. I think I look so ridiculous that I shouldn’t be seen in public, like some sort of small furry creature. I sit down with Matt on the sofa and watch football with him. I’m sure the screen is distorted and none of it makes any sense. He asks me if I’ve been in the bathroom laughing at my ridiculous genitals. I surmise that must have been one of Matt’s experiences when he took it.
We then go to get the punting slip from Tabatha’s flat in North Oxford. We spent an hour on Port Meadow discussing how we would achieve that simple task, which seemed so complicated for some reason. Amos is walking beside me on the pavement and his arms and legs seem long and floppy. I tell him how weird he looks to me, prompting him to ask ‘is it because I’m foreign?’ On the way there, we have to cross the busy Woodstock Road and I’m pretty sure Tabatha almost gets run over. I’m unable to judge how far away or fast the cars are, but Lysander must have also thought she was going to be hit since he pulls her back from the road. I think if I were to witness her die in front of me while on acid, I would never recover from the trip. Amos, Lysander and I wait outside the flat while Tabatha goes in to get the slip. She emerges from the hot, dark flat red in the face and sweating as if she’s been caving. At this point I think Lysander is very, very high. While Tabatha also took two tabs, she isn’t as high because she already tripped the day before, meaning she’s built up a resistance. On the walk to the Cherwell boathouse in Summertown, Lysander begins narrating a higher trip than we are actually having by contemplating things like ‘I wonder what the wall tastes like.’ Tabatha seems annoyed by this and tells him to stop. The closer we get to the boathouse, the heavier my sense of dread becomes. Just before we turn down the lane to the river I stop and say I really didn’t want to go punting, but the others insist and we press on.
While there’s nothing I want to do less than get in a punt, I also can’t argue that I didn’t want to do it, because I’m worried doing so will cause our trip to spiral downwards to disaster. There is a wedding in the marquee of the boathouse restaurant, so there are lots of people milling around. I’m scared that the boathouse staff will notice I’m high so I stay away from them and let the others take over. We then get into a boat and I think it’s Tabatha who starts punting. I’m facing Amos and sitting beside Lysander. The Cherwell is calm and strangely beautiful. As we punt it seems as if I’m at a ten-degree angle to reality. Going downstream, we eventually reach a tree that has fallen across the river, but curves up towards the sky at one end, creating a gap for boats to pass through. As we near the fallen tree, Lysander begins to act strangely. Tabatha asks him if he’s alright and he doesn’t give a straight or coherent answer. From the minute we got on the punt I could tell something bad was going to happen and here it is, materialising right in front of me. She reassures him, saying ‘you’re okay babe.’
He replies, ‘Well, that’s what people always say, but what if you’re not okay?’
While this is a pretty terrifying thing to hear, I feel as if he’s breaking a silence we were all holding for fear of upsetting each other, so it feels as if a weight has been lifted off my chest. I think he’s also standing up against a flaw of British culture: that no matter how awful you feel, you have to pretend everything’s fine so you don’t burden anyone else. Sometimes we’re not fine, and that’s that.
Now drifting even closer to the tree, Lysander claps his hands together and says, ‘We’re okay now.’
He is trying to snap himself out of it. But to no avail. We reach the tree, the bark hypnotically geometric, sucking me into it, and Lysander says we need to get off the punt. I am concerned he might jump into the river or that one of us might fall in. At this point he gets up and sits behind Amos, massaging his shoulders and whispering in tongues into his ear. Amos can’t really move and Tabatha is occupied calming Lysander down so I have to take the punting pole and try to get us back to the boathouse as quickly as possible. Before doing that, I have to stop us from getting pulled under the tree by the stream. I honestly believe that if we go under the fallen tree we will die. I’m usually quite a competent punter, but unfortunately all the laws of physics have changed. I’m at the peak of my trip at this point and so the pole doesn’t even look straight. As I’m getting familiar with the new laws of physics, a punt full of girls of indeterminate age passes under the tree, coming upstream. I casually say good evening to them despite the fact that they are emaciated, their hair is falling out, their skin is grey from radiation sickness and one of them is clutching a dead baby to her chest. I’ll never be sure if they were girls or young women, or if there was even a baby or doll there at all. I have to put my fear behind me since I am the only person who can get us back. The desperate situation gives me a breakthrough and I realise the deathly state of the girls was just a hallucination, as is the back of Tabatha’s head, from which her hair is also falling. We eventually arrive at the boathouse backwards, but Lysander is too scared to get off the punt.
Shaken by the experience, I think we all want now to head for company, so decide to go to pre-drinks in our friend’s flat. We walk in and don’t say hello to the people pre-drinking at the table. Amos gets us some tomatoes to eat. Lysander goes to the window and I stupidly ask, ‘Is he going to jump out?’
Mike is trying to have a conversation with me, but I’m not really managing to keep up. To explain my behaviour, I tell him I’m on acid. He asks, ‘What acid?’ Apparently we all seem sober. I can’t believe that my internal state could be so different without it showing.
I pick up a glass of water from a basin in which dirty dishes are soaking. I rinse it out a few times to get rid of the Fairy liquid, but can still see bubbles. I think they’re probably a hallucination, so I drink the water anyway. I suspect I’m also hallucinating the taste of Fairy liquid, but still ask Mike if there were bubbles in the water, which he confirmed there were. Chris then offers me a slice of chocolate cake that tastes disgusting. Amos seems to really enjoy it.
The sun is setting and the others are going to the club, so I have to leave the flat. I ask Mike and Amos to walk me home since I’m not in a good state. Extraordinarily, Amos is feeling pretty happy and is seeing rainbows again. I know I’ll be in my flat alone, since my two flatmates are out. I don’t want to be left on my own, so I ring on a friend’s doorbell. She comes out of the shower in a dressing gown, with a big spot on her head which I take to be a hallucination. I explain to her that I’m on acid and don’t want to be left alone, and she agrees to come up to my flat. After chatting with my friend, who also can’t tell I’m high, I get a call from Tabatha asking if I wanted to come to Jericho to watch a film. The walk there in the dark is quite scary, but the film, Samsara, is perfect for acid. I am properly coming down now and starting to enjoy the acid again, now that I’m a bit calmer. Lysander is much better too, and looks much happier.
I woke up the next day after some trippy dreams. I was relieved to have survived the trip without anything bad actually happening. For a while I no longer gave a shit about anything. I’d just had the most intense experience of my life and I thought if I could survive that, it showed I could get through most things. Over the next few weeks I continued to find trees more appealing to look at while colours remained brighter and more vibrant.
Jordan Greene is a pseudonym. He could be one or (especially on acid) more than one person.
