Update: My school's health and counseling center sent out an email about how some people have died from 25i. Erowid will tell you the same thing. So, be aware that there are risks when you engage in risky behavior. This email was sent in the aftermath of someone taking probably 3+ tabs and running around naked punching windows and going to the emergency room. Anyways, be safe.
At around 11 am a little bit of card-stock and paper towel sat on my tongue. The taste was a special kind of bitter. My tongue numbed gradually, and I sat around waiting for the 25i to kick in.
The girl I was tripping with was feeling sick, so she went to lay down for a while. After having the papers in my mouth for about 40 minutes, my body started anticipating the trip. My legs felt weird temperature differentials, and mild tingling traveled around the surface of my skin.
About an hour after taking it, we went outside together. She felt sick enough that she decided to throw up. We're pretty sure that it was mild food poisoning and unrelated to the drugs. In the bathroom, we had our first visuals. The perpendicular white lines from the grout between tiles rose up to knee level and moved, shook, brightened into a mesh of light. Then, it turned into horizontal rain, still just drops of light, falling towards me and past me, still at about knee level. Em came out of the stall and also had some kind of visual associated with the lines. Right before we left, the horizontal rain suddenly started falling up, which was really disorienting and intense.
Em's come up was very abrupt. Almost as soon as we left the bathroom the grass was breathing for her, and she could "build new spaces" in the air. After sitting outside for a while, the grass started breathing a little bit for me, and I saw some geometric patterns in the conglomerate concrete. She saw "rivers" in the concrete, and saw shadows in the grass even though it was overcast and there weren't any shadows. She also felt very cold, while I felt especially warm and shed most of my insulating clothes. Apart from the small visuals, I had an overwhelming desire to eat a spider that was crawling on my hand. So I did. I thought it would make me understand it better. I don't think it did. For the rest of the day, spiders were confiscated from me.
We moved locales, to sit under trees. We began in a bunch of orange leaves, lying around and talking with our friends. Her trip was pretty much in full swing. I still didn't see much unless I relaxed into it. I had trouble finding that mental state while stimulated by people around me. Finally, a bit more than a full hour after taking the first dose, I took another tab and ate the rest of the paper towel that it had been wrapped in. So, at this point I had 2 full doses, plus whatever had leaked off of what Em had taken.
After having the second dose in my mouth for a while, everything started shifting. I was sitting in the leaves and bees were flying all around me. The bees ended up with tracks behind them, dark shadows that followed them. It made it look like 5 bees were a swarm, and it was really beautiful. My hands also had the shadows, as did other quick-moving objects. I found a leaf that was scarred all over. The scars began a time loop, making the leaf shrivel and shrivel but never fully die, and never really be reborn. The scars were just always getting deeper and longer. The lines on my hands did the same, as I held the leaf.
Our friends who weren't tripping left, and things got deeper. Eventually I swallowed the second dose, and we moved out of the leafy area. Standing in the middle of the lawn in front of ODB, I noticed that my perception of space was very changed. I couldn't tell how far away things were, or what size they were in relation to thing things around them. I couldn't tell whether they were in the same plane as other things, and sometimes trees or buildings or even people would seem nearer or further away. I didn't realize how different everything looked until Em showed me her "sobriety box." She'd been taking pictures of things with her iPhone, and I had teased her that they wouldn't look the same later on. She hadn't explained, but she was actually using it as a control for how she was seeing the world. Looking through the iPhone, everything looked like it's mundane normal self. Then I could see how fucked my perceptions of size and shape really were. It worked for both of us, which is interesting. At this point it seemed that the intensity of our trips were about equal. I saw the field of grass on a time loop just like the leaf, except instead of dying it was blooming. Flowers were growing. When I told Em, she saw it too. In the sky, I saw strange patterns in different iridescent outlines. The patterns closest to that style in the real world are the giant pictographs in the desert that can only be seen from an airplane. They were mostly random geometry, but sometimes I thought I saw Kokopelli in them. The trees looked like they were made of ornate Chinese dragons. They definitely wiggled. There wasn't any definition in the leaves anymore, and branches looked like whole creatures.
Hugh called to tell me that he had my car keys. The phrase had no value to me. I couldn't see the path of 'he has my keys and wants to give them to me.' At that point Em took the phone, thinking she could figure out what to say. She ended up just telling him that we were tripping. This was a symptom of future communication problems.
We stayed in the field for a while, and at this point the intensity of my trip surpassed Em's. At certain points I saw the world melt away and all I could see were the geometric patterns, even with my eyes fully opened. I tried to stay grounded, but I wonder what would have come of letting go.
Old people were going to a concert on campus, so we decided to stop scaring them by retreating to the canyon. We were going to pretend to be normal. I could not pretend to be normal without having a purpose, because without a purpose our choices made no sense in a rational world. And our purpose could not be to run away from the people, because then we would have failed our deeper purpose: not to scare them. Em couldn't figure out why I was having so much trouble. As we approached the blue bridge, I realized how distorted things really were.
The bridge is at least 50 feet long. It looked no more than 10 feet long. I had no more depth perception. Everything was made of purple, orange and green. Sight, smell, taste, and even some sound were all connected in a way. We called the flavor of the situation "dragon" early on, to simplify things. But in my head I called it Braze. Dragons are brazy though, so it works out. The canyon looked more tropical than usual. Leaves were larger in proportion to branches, and there was none of the pleasant northwestern decay that usually defines forested areas. Bark became shiny and pointed, fractal and growing. Spaces opened up.
At one point Em said that she saw the leaves on the water glowing. That made them turn into points of light on a glass surface, and suddenly the shapes started overwhelming everything else and my vision detached even further from reality. It passed, and I was back.
We were in Chittick for part of it as well. It looked like moss was growing out of the ceiling Growing out of the ceiling in weird paisley shapes. The cieling is made of fibres glued together and painted white, and they have no rhyme or reason to their patterns put on 25-i they looked ordered and teardropped and swirly. That was one of the last things to fade, about 12 hours into the trip.
I took a whippet, because I wanted to know what they hype was about. It didn't do much. But after asking to borrow a cracker, people got very excited.
~The rest of this post was written much later.~
Their excitement began a darker part of the trip. It made very clear that they were in a different realm than I was. I could not understand why they felt the way they did. They offered us all kinds of stimulus, one kid said "hey, let's take shrooms right now!" It was uncomfortable for me. I didn't want to be around sober people. But Em did.
The visuals faded, but didn't go away completely. I laid on the grass outside, while Eric spun poi, and Adam hula hooped, and Sean played guitar. Em stood over me nervously. Her visuals were gone. People kept asking her if she was done tripping. She had started to say yes, mostly yes, oh no, there's a little bit again... But she was gone. She looked afraid of me. We felt so far away from each other now that I was still tripping hard and she was not.
It started to rain and people moved inside. I didn't move. I laid in the grass and got wet. My friends were worried but all I wanted was to lay in the grass. Everyone went inside and I could finally start crying.
Even as I was crying, about nothing in particular but mostly about not understanding other people and feeling so far from them, I had a lovely little moment. I started laughing through my tears, because it was raining, and I was sitting in the grass in the Pacific Northwest while a boy played guitar and I hugged my knees and my dark hair got wet. It was so silly, so out-of-a-stupid-movie, so exactly what you'd expect... It got to me. I laughed and cried.
My worries became more acute. A friend who had taken 2 tabs of 25i the day before found me and was very worried. He took me inside. "Does anyone have a blanket?" he asked. "Don't get me a blanket, I don't need a blanket" I said. "it's not for you, it's for me" he said.
That hurt so badly. Here was irrevocable proof that I was so far removed from him that I could not understand his intentions even when they seemed so clear. He seemed fine, he shouldn't need a blanket. I looked wet, cold, sad, and helpless. Of course someone would try to get me a blanket. But no, I was wrong.
The idiot lied to me when I was in no state to deal with things that weren't true. In all fairness, he did it out of goodwill, but it still hurts to think about how awful I felt.
When he had the blanket, he gave it to me. I realized that he had lied and I was so angry. Then I sat in a corner and watched the wool of his jacket grow into strange patterns. I watched the hair on my legs grow into the same patterns, grow and then shrink.
While inside, where people were talking, I ran into a serious problem. Irony and sarcasm were totally inexplicable to me. Someone would say one thing, and mean another, and everyone else would understand and I would not. It was torture. I could see feelings, but then the words would contradict them.
But gradually I accepted that there were things I didn't understand, but I remembered what it was like to understand and I decided that I could rebuild it all.
My friend had told me to try spinning while tripping. I took the fans out to the front lawn, where I felt like no one would see me and I could ride out whatever was happening.
I talked to myself, and spun fans. I learned my favorite move that day, tripping at the end of the dusk. I had felt like the move was possible for weeks, but my arms kept tangling. It just worked itself out though. I can't wait to spin while tripping again.
The silhouette of my fans against the orange night sky stuck with me. I still associate that image with my trip as strongly as all of the other shit. We coined the trip "Stereotrypical" because of all of the paiseley and purple and orange and jungle-feelings. But that part was me alone working with myself. Laughing after all of that crying, and putting things back together again. Telling myself to be patient with myself. Getting my legs back again.
When I went back to Chittick, wet and tired again, Em was back. She had gone to the Hotcake House. She looked like she'd seen a ghost. Apparently her trip had not been over either. At the restaurant with some of our dormies, she'd also felt very in touch with people's feelings, but she saw them expressing other feelings than what she saw. She felt suppressed anger and resentment. Paranoia is certainly part of this, but I honestly believe that the feelings that we saw that confused our interpretation of things were there. I think they were real.
Anyways, we holed up with my best friend and talked about it more. I was still seeing the patterns, I saw them until I went to sleep. My face didn't look normal until the next morning, but my friend said that the morning after his face had turned into a goblin, so I considered myself lucky.
I left out a few things, like confusion with hierarchies and seeing some people looking older, or younger. But that's the jist of things.
Would try again, would recommend. Then again, I get off on shit like putting myself back together again.
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