I remember the exact moment when the walls of reality began to splinter. It wasn’t dramatic, like a shattering windowpane, but slow, creeping—a widening fissure in the foundation of my mind. One moment, I was simply tripping, colors sliding over one another like warm oil on a hot skillet. The next, the trip was tripping me.
It started with one gel tab. A standard dose. Then, about an hour or two in, I took another third of a tab—just enough to keep the ride going, or so I thought. We hadn’t tested it, which I know now was a mistake, but I had tripped before and always landed back in reality. I never expected this time would be different. But as the night unfolded, the weight of what I had done sank in.
In the beginning, it felt beautiful. Cosmic. I was floating in the gentle hands of the universe, feeling its pulse synchronize with mine. I told my boyfriend I would break up with him if it made him happy. I have no memory of why, only that I felt magnanimous in a way that bordered on omniscience. I was made of love, an unbreakable current that ran through everything. I was part of everything. I was everything.
Then, I wasn’t.
The shift was sudden and absolute, like the floor dropping out beneath me in some endless, bottomless amusement park ride. His words stretched into slow, taunting echoes, a looping distortion that never quite resolved. His pupils swallowed his irises whole. Then, my own thoughts turned inward, an ouroboros of understanding feeding on itself until there was nothing left but paranoia and static.
That’s when I heard the voice. Not outside of me, but within, like an idea so big it took shape, declaring itself in an unshakable decree: You did it. You unlocked the secret.
The perfect ratio of LSD to body weight. The magic number. The key that turned the tumblers of existence, opening a door that was never meant to be opened. My third eye—no, my entire being—was flung wide, and I saw the machinery of reality itself, spinning, grinding, indifferent. I wasn’t supposed to be seeing this.
Then came the fear. Not the kind you get from a bad horror movie or an exam you didn’t study for. No, this was a primal, clawing terror, a thing with no name and no form, only certainty. Something was wrong. I was wrong.
By morning, I was not the person I had been the night before. My boyfriend and my mother had to take me to the hospital because I had ceased making sense in any recognizable way. I was operating under laws of logic that made perfect sense to me but were nonsense to everyone else. I was speaking in riddles to questions no one had asked. I tried to wake up the way I had always woken up—splashing cold water on my face, squeezing my arms, slamming my head against the floor. But this was no dream.
The hospital was a purgatory of bleached walls and slow-moving faces, but my mind didn’t register it that way. The nurses’ eyes shifted away the moment I tried to meet their gaze, as if some unseen force dictated their movements. I knew what was happening. I wasn’t in a hospital. I was being studied. Observed. I had seen too much, and now they were waiting to see what I would do with that knowledge.
It got worse before it got better.
I lost control of my body. I wandered the hallways naked, convinced I had transcended modesty. I peed myself because I was sure my organs no longer followed earthly biology. I stared at my father and knew, beyond all doubt, that he was God. My mother was Gaia. The nurses were placeholders, non-playable characters inserted into my experience to keep the illusion going. The world was made of puppets, and I was the only one who had figured it out.
They put me in a psych hospital and pumped me full of the strongest antipsychotic they had. At first, it felt like throwing sandbags against a hurricane. But slowly, the winds died down. The static in my head quieted. My thoughts, previously scattered like a deck of cards thrown in the air, began to settle. I woke up one morning and realized, for the first time in what felt like lifetimes, that I was here.
But even then, I wasn’t fully back. It took six months before the delusions faded completely. Six months before I could walk into a room without feeling like I was being watched by something just beyond the veil of perception. Six months before I stopped waiting for the hallucinations to return, creeping out of the corners of my vision like cockroaches. Six months before I could look at my boyfriend and know, truly know, that he was just a man and not some celestial being tasked with testing my resolve.
The doctors called it a textbook psychotic break. Schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type. My grandmother had bipolar disorder, so maybe this was always lurking in my DNA, waiting for the right catalyst. Maybe it was the LSD. Maybe it was something else entirely, a cosmic roll of the dice that just happened to land on the wrong number that night.
All I know is that I will never touch a psychedelic again.
And sometimes, late at night, when my thoughts are restless and the room is too quiet, I wonder—did I really come back? Or am I still in the trip, still trapped in the dream, still spinning in that cosmic loop, unable to wake up?