The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 115 of 125
Why some trips are good and others bad
Mulling it over afterward, however, I saw that it did allow me to reframe the question of why some people had “good” and others “bad” trips. All along Grof had maintained that the typical order in which the matrices tend to manifest is BPM 2, BPM 3, BPM 4 . . . and only then BPM 1. Surely one could argue that this sequence was based too strictly on his personal clinical experience with severely traumatized individuals, already in many, if not most, cases substantially regressed, and that such would not necessarily be the case with the fresh-faced teenagers we once were? Perhaps in many instances of recreational LSD use, the first trips tended to be BPM 4, and only in later sessions did the drug begin to eat through to the darker realms of BPM 3 and BPM 2? Obviously that’s no more than a suggestion; but understanding why some people have positive experiences straightaway while others have nightmarish ones will remain a key issue if we are going to try to reintroduce psychedelics as a major countercultural force.