The worst part of a bad psychedelic trip isn’t seeing things that aren’t there. It’s believing things that aren’t true, with a certainty you’ve never felt about anything in your life.
I remember thinking, at the beginning, that I was having a great time.
I’d taken LSD with two friends at an apartment. We’d put on music, turned down the lights, and settled in for the night. After about an hour, the walls started breathing. The carpet looked like it was flowing gently beneath my feet. Colors were brighter. Music sounded incredible. I could hear individual instruments I’d never noticed before.
Everything was funny. Everything was beautiful.
And then, for reasons I still can’t explain, something changed.
I was looking at one of my friends when I noticed his smile seemed strange. It was too wide. His eyes looked unfamiliar. I knew it was my friend, but suddenly I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong with him.
He asked if I was okay.
I said yes.
Then I wondered why he’d asked.
Did I look strange? Was I acting strange? Had I said something embarrassing? Was everyone watching me?
I tried to dismiss the thought, but it kept coming back. Every time I looked at my friends, I became more convinced they knew something I didn’t.
I could hear them talking in the kitchen. Their voices sounded distant and distorted. I couldn’t make out the words, but I was absolutely certain they were talking about me.
Then I noticed the clock.
It said 10:42.
I looked away, tried to concentrate on the music, and checked again.
10:42.
I waited what felt like an eternity.
10:43.
That’s when the real fear started.
I suddenly became aware of how strangely time was passing. A minute felt impossibly long. Every thought seemed to contain another thought, and every thought led back to the same question.
What if this doesn’t stop?
I told myself I’d taken a drug. I knew how drugs worked. Eventually, it would wear off.
But another thought immediately followed.
What if you’ve permanently damaged your brain?
And then another.
What if this is what insanity feels like?
I tried to remember what normal consciousness felt like. What did I usually think about? How did I normally experience time? What did it feel like to be me before tonight?
The harder I tried to remember, the further away it seemed.
I went into the bathroom to splash water on my face.
That was a mistake.
When I looked in the mirror, my face didn’t look like mine. My skin seemed to shift and crawl. My eyes looked enormous. I watched my expression change even though I wasn’t moving.
For one horrifying moment, I felt like I was looking at a stranger.
I backed away from the mirror.
My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my throat. I became convinced I was having a heart attack. I put my fingers against my neck to check my pulse, but I couldn’t count the beats.
I went back into the living room and told my friend I thought I was dying.
He told me I was okay. That I’d taken acid. That it would wear off.
For about five seconds, I believed him.
Then the thought came back.
What if he’s wrong?
I asked him again.
He gave me the same answer.
And suddenly I had the strangest sensation that we’d already had this exact conversation. Not once, but hundreds of times.
I could remember asking him. I could remember his answer. I could remember remembering his answer.
It felt as though reality had become stuck.
I tried to explain what was happening, but every time I opened my mouth, the words disappeared. I would start a sentence and forget what I was trying to say halfway through.
My friend looked concerned.
His concern terrified me.
If he looked worried, that meant something really was wrong.
I became convinced that I had broken my mind and that everyone in the room knew it.
At some point, I stopped believing I was simply having a bad trip.
I thought I had discovered something terrible about reality.
I can’t even explain exactly what it was. Something about consciousness, time, and the universe being an illusion. I had the overwhelming conviction that I’d stumbled upon a truth human beings weren’t supposed to know.
And now I couldn’t unknow it.
Every time I tried to think my way out, I ended up back at the same terrifying conclusion.
There was no escape.
The most terrifying thought was that I was going to be stuck in this state of mind forever. Not just hallucinating forever, but thinking this way forever.
I couldn’t remember what it felt like to have a normal thought. Every thought I had turned into another terrifying question, and every attempt to reassure myself somehow became proof that something was terribly wrong.
I tried to imagine waking up tomorrow, eating breakfast, going to work, having a conversation with someone, but I couldn’t picture any of it without this horrible feeling following me.
It was as if my brain had discovered a new way of experiencing reality and permanently forgotten the old one.
I wasn’t just afraid the drug wouldn’t wear off. I was afraid that even if it did, I would never be able to escape the way my mind was working right now. That I would spend the rest of my life trapped inside this exact feeling, remembering that I used to be normal but never being able to get back there.
I remember sitting on the floor, holding my knees, begging my friend to make it stop.
He kept telling me I was safe.
But the words meant nothing.
Imagine waking up from a nightmare, except you don’t actually wake up. You just enter another nightmare in which you remember the first one. Then another. And another.
That’s the closest I can come to describing it.
I wanted to sleep, but closing my eyes made everything worse. Behind my eyelids were constantly shifting shapes and faces. My thoughts were so loud they seemed almost physical.
I couldn’t escape into unconsciousness.
At one point, I became convinced I’d already died and that this was some kind of punishment. That I would spend eternity sitting in this apartment, having the same thoughts, asking the same questions, and experiencing the same fear.
I wasn’t afraid of dying anymore.
I was afraid that dying wasn’t possible.
Hours passed. Or minutes. I genuinely couldn’t tell.
Eventually, something began to change.
The walls stopped moving quite so much. My friend’s face looked normal again. I could follow a conversation without losing track of it.
I looked at the clock and watched a minute pass.
A real minute.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt relief like that in my life.
By sunrise, I was exhausted. My body felt as though I’d been running for hours. My friends were asleep, but I sat by the window watching cars drive down the street.
People were going to work. Someone was walking a dog. A garbage truck stopped outside.
Everything looked so ordinary.
And I was incredibly grateful for it.
But the experience didn’t entirely end when the drug wore off.
For days afterward, I kept thinking about that moment when I became convinced I would never be normal again. Occasionally, I’d catch myself questioning whether reality felt right, and a little of that same panic would return.
What disturbed me most wasn’t that I’d seen the walls breathe or watched my face change in the mirror.
It was discovering how completely my own mind could turn against me.
Before that night, I thought fear was something you experienced when something dangerous happened.
Now I understood that your brain could manufacture the danger, convince you it was absolutely real, and then take away your ability to believe anyone who told you otherwise.
I had spent hours begging to return to a reality I’d never appreciated before.
And for a while, I genuinely believed I never would.