Bicycle Day
Destiny tends to pool around psychedelic phenomena. “A peculiar presentiment” came to chemist Albert Hofmann to revisit in the lab LSD-25, one in a series of synthetic ergot fungus compounds that had been shelved five years prior. Nor was Hofmann a stranger to such mystical sensations, like Romain Rolland and William Blake, he had as a child succumbed to radiant and euphoric trance states while wandering the fields and forests of his native Switzerland; these oceanic visions convinced him of some “unfathomable reality" hidden within the everyday. Following his presentiment that LSD-25, despite “uninteresting” lab results was in fact “peculiar,” on April 19th 1943, in the midst of war, he dosed himself in a “self-experiment” with what he believed to be the smallest amount, a micro-dose; it turned out to be a macro-dose. Feeling weird he left the lab to bicycle home through the alps on what would be the first ever acid trip. The world wavered and contorted; he thought he had a demon; he thought he was going insane. Once at home he laid on the couch and tried to stop the “demonic transformations,” with an exertion of will but could not; he thought he was dead. Yet he still knew he was in an experiment. The doctor was called for and his vitals were checked; there was nothing wrong with him. He began to calm down but when closing his eyes: “Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux.” Only the next morning—outside after a spring rain, his mind calm and lucid, his garden now shining with the same radiance from his childhood—did he realize he had discovered the most profound and potent of psychoactive molecules. He would later claim that acid had discovered him.
from the graphic novel Bicycle Day, (2019) Brian Blomerth
