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Me and P, one of my closest friends- also a deeply trusted and reliable tripping partner spent the night at the house of another friend of ours. We smoked a fair quantity of cannabis and were both rather high when, at 4am or thereabouts we cycled to P’s house so he could photograph the sunset for a project he was working on at the time. The plan was, as soon as this was done, to proceed to a large and beautiful park many miles away that neither of us had ever been to, and ingest two Da Vinci Code blotters each. My girlfriend rang me in a pretty distressed state during the course of the night, and I very nearly didn’t trip, fearing her negativity would effect me, as we are so close. We also came close to tripping in the vicinity of P’s house rather than making the long journey, and so this trip was fairly spontaneous.

Upon getting to his house, he couldn’t find his camera, and so after a brief interlude of listening to music and just chilling out, we set off. Myself having dyspraxia, and therefore being pretty useless at directions I was relying on P, who somehow managed to gauge from a 10 second look at a road map how to get all the way from his house to the park. The cycle took us about two hours, perhaps a little longer, through dark and deserted city streets. We got to the area in which we knew the park to be located, and began to ask people where it was. I believe it was the third person we spoke to who actually knew where it was, and after another 5 minutes cycling we were there. Walking in was like entering the garden of Eden. The sun was still rising, through an almost cloudless sky, and the fields were covered in frost, reflecting twinkling light, giving the effect of dancing fairies all around us. We locked our bikes up, and proceeded further into the park. I took the acid out of my bag, and we put the blotters in our mouths. They tasted bitter, which is often a sign of research chemicals, but after three experiences with them I am almost certain they truly were LSD. Almost immediately after swallowing the blotters I felt a familiar restless giddiness, and a grin plastered itself onto my face. After eating the acid, we walked through the woods a little further until we came to a big fence with an apparently locked gate. Rather than climb it, we simply walked around, at which point we saw a lake to our left. We proceeded to its edge, where there was a bench, sat down and each put our headphones on. This was when I had the first visual effects- a brilliant red light was seen with eyes closed. While beautiful, it also evoked an incredibly mild panic reaction in me, so I opened my eyes. The sun was shining on the water, making it look like a pool of molten gold in the midst of a great wilderness. At this point I closed my eyes and saw a gang of very angry looking people from San Francisco (I some how knew that’s where they were from) staring at me. I stared back at them, and when I tried to focus on their faces to see who they were, they got scared and disappeared. Pretty strange stuff, but I immediately defeated my mind demons. As a few dog walkers came nearby, we walked away, not wanting to go out of our minds in front of sober passers-by who would almost definitely not be particularly understanding of our cause.

We walked up a large dirt hill, which evoked for me strong memories of childhood days spent in Norfolk in the countryside around my grandparent’s house. At the top of the hill, we found a fairly small but very densely forested area, into which we passed. The acid came on stronger, and the land around me began to ripple very noticeably. Once in this densely-wooded area, we resumed music listening, sitting on a large tree stump. P began to make robotic noises as he moved, in a fantastically innocent and childlike way- looking at him, he truly became like a small and careless child at play, which I’m sure is how he felt at that moment. After jumping around pretending to be planes and generally fooling around like children for awhile, P said to me (I cannot remember the exact words) something along the lines of “thoughts are the greatest vehicle”. I immediately grabbed my ipod, put on a song by “The Moody Blues” called “Thinking is the Best Way to Travel” and put the headphones on his head, as I thought it would fit perfectly with his train of thought. About 30 seconds later this was confirmed when he repeatedly shouted “Yes! YES!” with an enormous grin on his face. At this point, due to a hand-knitted scarf he was wearing, and a small stubbly moustache, my friend began to take on the appearance of a French explorer deep in some outlandish wilderness, which I found utterly hilarious. This image of him continued for much of the experience. We remained in this wooded area for another 30 minutes or so, playing in the leaves and walking between trees. At one point I saw a perfectly formed, rotating Aztec mandala on the trunk. Shortly after this, we saw green tropical birds in a tree, wondered if they were real for a while, and decided they probably were since we both saw them exactly the same. My visuals evolved into symbols and writing, with the symbol Aum being prominent as with every acid trip I have had since a certain time I saw giant, golden Aums in the sky.

After a while, despite being perfectly content, we decided a change of scenery was on the cards, so we ventured out into the vast, sparsely-treed fields of the park. All the trees looked identical- perfect in their symmetrical beauty. Resplendent examples of the organic fractal web that is nature. Upon emerging, P and I both felt like lions in the African planes, and began to talk very happily about this. I remember feeling a very strong, but gentle presence to the LSD- the femininity and softness of the experience became more apparent, as in previous experiences LSD had seemed more like an internal telescope than a presence. The many trees I could see still looked totally identical, perfectly formed specimens of life and we soon found one to climb and sit under for a while. After a short while, we moved to a different tree which became our base of operations for a good hour or so. I had brought Timothy Leary’s “Psychedelic Prayers” with me, which is basically just a slightly edited “Tao Te Ching”. I remember opening it on a passage relating to the pulse of life, and the source, which fit perfectly with both me and P’s mind state at the time. Shortly after consulting the book, I had a hilariously cheesy and pleasant visual. I saw me and P running in slow motion, jumping ten feet in the air and performing the cheesiest high five imaginable. It was fantastic, and when I told P about it, we did a slow motion high five in reality. After a while we left our tree and base, and I remember a sudden overwhelming feeling of perfect contentedness, balance and bliss overcoming me. I had felt this once before, during my first acid trip (me and P on that one, as well). It’s hard to describe, but it just feels as if something clicks into place, inside me and in the universe, and everything is just perfect. I then pass into a very warm glow of love and happiness, which I associate with Buddha and the “Buddha Nature”- the inherent blissful awareness (awake-ness, if you will) that is a potential of all things. This must have been around the 6th hour of the experience- that time after the peak when I am still solidly tripping but everything is peaceful and controlled- at least in comparison to the hectic rollercoaster of the peak. Sometime around this point, P turned to me and said, laughing, “I never really understood it till now. It’s a whole spiritual thing.”

We walked around discussing many things, and at times I just spoke complete crap for periods of time, laughing at one point when I realised “Wow, I can think these things and not say them.” I’m sure this was a little annoying, but P wasn’t bothered by it. P said “Wow, all these people look like pigs”, upon seeing various dog walkers and families, to which I replied “Careful, there- that’s how the Manson family got started.” It was all in good humour though, and neither of us was either distressed or murderous. Yo ho ho. We listened to a song called “A Quai” from the “Amelie” soundtrack, and it was incredible. P, who was using an MP3 player that plays songs in a random order, came across “The End” by “The Doors”, and I suggested we play the song in synch and listen to it on our separate audio devices. I delayed this for about 5 minutes by talking ecstatic nonsense about philosophy, Buddhism and religion. I recall saying at one point “God exists and does not exist at the same time- it’s just two ways of seeing the light of pure awareness.” (quite possibly less coherently than I put it here). Anyway, I finally shut up and we listened to “The End”. During the song, a tree we were leaning against began to emit a rainbow haze (comparable to when a water spray or waterfall does the same thing), while patterns and letters appeared on its trunk. I saw Aum symbols, some random letters that didn’t spell anything, and the word “Love” very large and clearly evident. I’m not sure if there were any actual carvings on the tree, but I don’t think so. The song was absolutely beautiful, and I came to understand it in a new way. The “Father I want to kill you- mother I want to fuck you” no longer meant to me anything to do with Oedipus or death, but seemed to represent the destruction of the ego. Despite the many stupid and drunken things he did in his life, I really felt a connection with a genuinely mystical side of Jim Morrison. The song ended, and we walked around some more, still talking. After “The End” finished, I remarked that we were “hardcore soldiers” for making the cycle journey- adding “the type of hardcore soldiers who can run around naked with flowers in their hair” I then tried to explain the story of the 1960s to P, summarising it as “there were two guys- one was a suit-wearing constipated ass hat, and the other was a cool guy (Nixon and Leary). The cool guy ran around naked with flowers in his hair and there was fuck all anyone could do about it, so they all got angry with him.” I started cracking up very hard when the phrase “Willis has lost his stick!” popped into my head, for no particularly good reason. Sometime around this point, P began to relieve his bladder, and I didn’t realise and kept trying to talk to him, while he just turned around to avoid me seeing anything inappropriate. He must have done three full circles before I realised and walked a safe distance away while we both cracked up. I got mildly paranoid when a police car passed incredibly slowly (seemed that way, anyway) on a road passing through the park, but this quickly passed when I realised we had nothing on us and weren’t doing anything remotely threatening- we were a little strange at most.

We walked across most of the park, through woods, hills, fields and several football pitches, and began walking along the road at one point for a while until a violent honking made us get back to nature, where things make sense. We decided at this point to begin to cycle home, and on the way out of the park we passed a mother with a curly haired little boy, who looks almost 100% how I did when I was about 5. He said something to me, and I kick myself that I can’t remember it because it was so absolutely fitting. I think he laughed and said something along the lines of “Happy now!”, but I know it was deeper than that. I laughed along with him, and said “Grow up to be a philosopher.” I’m not sure if I confused the hell out of his mother or if it was actually remotely appropriate to what he said, but she just smiled and kept on walking, while me and P proceeded towards our bikes.

This is when one of the strangest things that has ever happened to me occurred. I started talking about how things were just too perfect, and one very slightly bad thing would have to happen just to balance things out. I described in detail to P an image of a man sitting under a tree, gaining all the wisdom and enlightenment that it is possible to achieve, walking away smiling, then tripping over a root and falling on his face. I brought my backpack round to my front, looked at the zip, and it broke at that exact second, despite the fact that I hadn’t been touching it. Whether I subconsciously registered the broken zip before hand then imagined the whole thing, I don’t know, but I just laughed at the time, then realised I was wearing tie-dye under my jumper, and took my jumper off. Some school boys walking past pointed and laughed at me, and I just found it so hilarious that I didn’t care in the slightest, especially since once of them looked like a member of Busted. A little while after I put my jumper back on, however, since someone acting a little strange gives no immediate hint of just why, but tie dye makes people more likely to put 2 and 2 together. We cycled past a big housing estate, and a guy a few years older than me and P who was walking ahead of us, kept looking back at us every two seconds, for some reason, which made me a little uneasy. We cycled for about 5 minutes, to another park we had passed on the way, at which point it became highly apparent that we were just far too out of it to get home without getting either lost or run over. We found a nice spot in this park, sat down and resumed the music. We put both our headphones on the floor, next to each other, playing different songs, and the ensuing mess of sound was actually incredibly pleasant. I was very clear headed, but still experiencing feelings of pure love and contentment, as well as getting some visuals. I kept drawing rainbow Aums in the air with my finger- the trails were so long I could actually see the entire image form and stay there for a few seconds. A few moments after, I mistook a log for a large Alsatian, and spent about two minutes looking round for its owner before I realised the dog was just a log. We proceeded towards the entrance of the park and sat down in a little ditch. A police officer, presumably on duty patrolling the park walked by and said “All right, lads”, in a perfectly friendly way, while looking to see what we were doing (must have looked like we were rolling a joint, I suppose). By this point we were coherent enough that we weren’t doing anything suspicious, and since the guy seemed friendly, despite his police uniform he didn’t bother us in the slightest. We remained for maybe another 30 minutes, then began the journey home.

Not long after getting back on our bikes I realised my jeans were totally shredded at the bottom, but I just didn’t care. I tucked my jeans into my socks (which I should have done before, to avoid the ripping, but never mind) and we began to cycle. My senses were truly enhanced rather than distorted at this point. I could see individual hairs on the heads of people walking 20 metres ahead of me, and could see the movement of every single car, bike and person in the road and on the pavement. Cycling was surprisingly easy, though rather strange, since I was still tripping- cars passing me by made very strange noises that sounded like a plane taking off, and at one point I saw a huge skyscraper take a deep breath and then release it. Strange that such hallucinations could still be occurring while I was able to navigate traffic in a busy part of a huge city. We saw a strange road rage incident shortly after leaving the park. Two cars ahead of us were honking at each other, while the drivers made threatening gestures at one another, which just seemed outright ridiculous. Why in the name of fuck were a bunch of pale ape creatures operating wheel-machines and grunting at each other? We made a wrong turn at some point, which served us excellently as it gave us a beautiful view of a glorious golden sunset. After watching this for 20 minutes or so, we got back on the right track, and cycled back towards our home area. We went by Parliament on the way and it was really comical seeing this huge building guarded by dozens of police officers- we decided to pretend to be pretending to be civilians. It made sense at the time, so shut your beak. We cycled back to my house in the end, I cooked us a vegetarian Korma, we watched about 20 minutes of “Monty Python: The Holy Grail”, then P fell asleep. I went on my PC since I couldn’t sleep, signed on MSN and spoke ridiculous nonsense at my girlfriend who was very understanding, and eventually went to sleep. This trip was a truly spiritual learning experience for me, and made me realise just who I am and where I’m going. What other people say and do to me no longer seemed significant- I can conduct myself however I want- I can be me. It really reaffirmed love as the core reason for our existence.

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