So you're going to take LSD. You've got some, hopefully from a reliable source. You've heard a variety of reports about it, some of which must have attracted you. You have an idea of the kind of experience you're looking for, but you're apprehensive lest you have a "bum trip."

What you may not realise is that the kind of session you have depends very much on you. Perhaps you have a friend who is experienced with LSD to guide you. This is good, but nevertheless, no matter how good a guide your friend is, you will have to do most of the work yourself.

Work? Can getting high be work? Yes, a psychedelic session is very hard work, although you may do it sitting quite still and quiet. You may have to do an overhaul of your whole philosophy of life, including areas that you haven't examined for years, if ever. You may be faced with choices or decisions which will be difficult to mke. Your way of life, your habits, your relationships with others will all come under scrutiny. By the time the session is through you will be very tired.

Is LSD then no fun? Is it not enjoyable? You have heard that it is an ecstatic experience. So it is, or can be. But this is a very different kind of fun from any that you know about, from ordinary recreation or other sorts of drugs. Going into an LSD session with the idea that it will all be a lark, a carefree "high", is a mistake that leads to some bad session games.

Should you take LSD at all? This article does not answer that question, not knowing the answer, and suspecting that you have your mind made up anyhow. There is no physical or mental condition known to be a definite counter-indication to LSD in all circumstances. I would not want to turn on (a) a person under 18 or (b) a person with a history of psychosis, but I would not dogmatically say that such a person could not have a good session under guidance.

I believe that a healthy adult can have a safe and beneficial psychedelic experience, provided he knows what to do and his expectations are not unrealistic. Some of the common unrealistic expectations are: (1) that LSD will cure something; (2) that LSD will give you psychic powers; (3) that you can have a super sex experience on it; (4) that your LSD experience will be like your friend Joe's, or like some experience you have read about; (5) that it will be like marijuana, only more so; (6) that if you don't like it you can always take a tranquilizer and shut it off; (7) that LSD will improve your memory or I.Q.

If you are approaching an LSD session with any of these notions as baggage, get rid of them now. LSD is not magic. It will not make you smarter, or give you any special powers. Your experience will be your own and unlike any of which you have heard. LSD gives you a new perspective on your life for several hours, and since it is your life you will be looking at, it will not be like anybody else's session. LSD is not much like marijuana at all, potheads' boasts to the contrary notwithstanding. The session may or may not help "cure" some of your psychological problems, but you can't count on it.

One hears a lot about "preparation" for the LSD experience. You may wonder what sort of preparation you should undergo. Actually you have been preparing all your life, and those many years of preparation will outweigh anything you can do in a short time before the session. Being told to prepare for a session is a little like being told to "prepare to meet your Maker" a few hours before you are going to be shot.

If there is any last-minute preparation for the LSD experience, it would be in the nature of refreshing in your mind the things that are dearest and most sacred to you. Think about the things you care about, the people you love, the things you hope to do with your life. Try to clear your mind of negative emotions — resentments, jealousies. A good conscience is the best preparation you can have.

On the technical side, preparation consists in making sure that the physical and social conditions of the session are as they should be. Decide well in advance who is going to participate in the session. You should all know, like and trust one another. The more you have shared of life in common with your session-mates the better. Until you are very experienced you should avoid what their sexual relationship. A two-person session is This is especially true for unmarried couples, no matter what their sexual relationship, A two-person sessions is very difficult, because it puts the whole burden of social interaction on the two people. Talk is difficult on LSD. This is no problem in a group, since the group can sit quietly and nobody will be embarrassed. But in a two-person group a silence becomes awkward. Unhealthy hang-ups on what the other person is thinking and games of "mind reader" result. A relationship can be badly strained when two inexperienced people take LSD together. For your first several sessions stick to three or four member groups. Groups larger than five are to be avoided.

If none of you are experienced it is a good idea to have a friend along who does not take any LSD.

All participants in a session should get together beforehand and agree on the time and place, and composition of the group. All should agree to stay together for at least ten hours. All should have enough knowledge about LSD to be able to avoid bad session games, and should agree not to play them.

The place chosen for the session should preferably be someone's home, if possible a place that is familiar to the members of the group. Make sure you can stay there undisturbed for at least 16 hours. It should be clean, attractive and comfortable. It is a good idea to have mattresses and cushions enough for everybody to have a place to lie down if he wants to (though sitting up is best for most of a session). Blankets and handkerchiefs should be provided. If, music is wanted it should be quiet, melodic music, nothing loud or weird, and it should not be played during the second through fourth hours. Privacy is essential. Nobody should be allowed to come in or go out during the session. It should be possible to go to the bathroom without venturing into public territory.

Do not hold a session on a beach, in a field or woods unless again you are very experienced. There is too much opportunity for disorientation, fear occasioned by meeting strangers, physical discomfort and games of Where's Harry. By staying in a familiar room you have the physical environment taken care of and you don't have to concern yourself with it; confusion and distraction are minimized.

You should arrange to have both the session day and the day after it free.

In addition to providing a suitable setting for the session, and approaching it in a tranquil state of mind, you should know how to avoid certain pitfalls. These are such that one might not be aware of them without knowing something about what sessions are like. Almost everybody sooner or later slips into one of these traps, but if you have been told about them in advance you can get out quicker.

When told what not to do in a session, many people ask, "Why — is it dangerous?" Most of these "session games', with the possible expection of "Get me out of this", are not likely to be dangerous. I advise not playing them, not because they will hurt you, but because the session will probably be pleasanter and more rewarding if they are avoided.

"Get Me Out Of This"

"Get me out of this" is the worst of all session games. In its most severe form it can turn a session into a nightmare for everyone involved. But you don't have to play it, if you make up younr mind not to.

It may take the form of a feeling of losing control, of not being able to keep track of your thoughts, of the idea that something is going on that you don't understand. The sense of losing control is in part illusory: you are in complete control of your body, if you had to use it, which you usually don't, since you are only sitting. You may not be quite in control of your thoughts. Actually, of course, you never are, even when you're not on a drug, but on LSD you seem to have more thoughts going faster and less logically. Your thoughts easily go off on a tangent, so that you may lose the sense of continuity, and moment seems to follow moment without the usual thread of sense connecting them. This can be bewildering, but it is not bad or dangerous, and can actually be quite fun if you don't fight it.

The reason you can control your body while your thoughts are racing on this way is that your body moves so much more slowly than your mind. For instance, if you were to get up to go to the bathroom you would think of a great many unrelated things while crossing the room, but when you came to take each next step you would remember what you were doing and take it. To you it would seem as though you were taking an incredibly long time to cross the room, but to an observer you would be moving at about your normal speed. It is important to remember that the sense of incompetency is an illusion, and if you do have to do something, to go ahead and do it, without worrying about the excessively long time that it seems to be taking.

But to get back to the game of "Get me out of this" — there may come this time, early in the session, when you feel uncomfortable. At this point you may think: Why did I ever get into this? I was happy enough the way I was, I don't want to get high! I want to come down!

Now the one thing you must not do is shout "Get me out of this!" Because the more you fight it, the worse it gets, and the longer you fight it, the harder it is to shift gears and go with it. Furthermore, by trying to enlist other people in the fight, you make the problem much stickier. Anything you do that affects the world outside your head is a lot harder to undo than the things you only think. If you think "Get me out of this" you can quickly remember that this is the wrong way to go, and correct yourself. But if you yell "Get me out of this!" you'll upset all your companions, and have them solicitously buzzing around you — and you don't want that.

If you persist in this game, it can snowball, You'll feel worse and worse, want even more to get out of it, provoke more anxiety in your companions, causing you to feel even more confused and helpless, and so on.

Your friends can't get you "off" LSD before it runs its natural course. Asking them to bring you down is as practical as asking your fellow passengers on a transatlantic jet to stop the plane and let you off in mid-flight. To terminate a session prematurely requires massive doses of a sedative given by injection, and amateurs are not in a position to provide this. Taking a tranquiliser or sedative orally can do more harm than good, by leading you to pin your hopes on being brought down — hopes which are not fulfilled, and which keep you in your bind of fighting the experience. Once you have started an LSD session you have got to go all the way through it, come hell or high water. If you can't make up your mind to this beforehand don't start.

What should you do then, when you start to feel scared or unhappy? Well what would you do in a non-drug situation that was scary and unavoidable? You'd try to be as brave and cheerful as you could be, and to keep up your companions' spirits as well as your own. The same approach can work wonders in the LSD session. Holding hands around the circle is a good way of communicating courage and support. In the LSD state you can change your mood very quickly. Here, as with physical action, there may be an illusion of incompetency. You may think you're so frightened or so depressed that you couldn't possibly smile, or get to like the experience. But just try for a moment to take your mind off your own anxiety and think of your friends around you, and you'll be amazed how quickly you'll feel much better. This sounds like a platitude from Sunday School, but somehow those Sunday School truths are truer on LSD than just about anywhere.

If you're simply not up to being brave, the other thing you can do is to Collapse. Just put your head in your lap, and abandon yourself to whatever-it-is. You can't go wrong that way — and you'll soon find that whatever-it-is isn't going to hurt you at all.

The typical duration of an LSD session is 12 to 18 hours, plus four to eight hours to sleep it off — perhaps a little longer if an excessively large dose is taken. Even people who freak out come down on schedule, feeling like fools for having made such a fuss about their fear.

People having their first session are especially susceptible to the belief that they will not come down — this goes for those who are having ecstatic experiences as well as for those who are scared. Probably this is because they have not learned to take into account their altered sense of time. Another common fear is of dying. There are various reasons why people get the idea that they are dying during a session, but you need not get hung up on this if you just remember that nobody has ever been known to die of LSD — and it's been around for more than twenty years and been taken by hundreds of thousands. No lethal dose for humans has been found, even though people have taken as much as ten times the usual full dose.

Some people worry about losing control and doing something wrong or crazy. This is an illusion. In reality it is just the opposite — it takes a certain amount of will power to do anything at all. You don't have to worry about what you'll do. The easiest thing is just to sit there, and in most cases, that's exactly what you should do. LSD doesn't take away your knowledge of right and wrong or your control over your actions.