Many many times, all a long time ago. For about three years it was my favorite thing, but after that it didn't do much for me. Not because the drug wasn't wor

Many many times, all a long time ago. For about three years it was my favorite thing, but after that it didn't do much for me. Not because the drug wasn't working, but because it wasn't showing me anything new anymore. I did it a lot for those three years. Often enough to discover that taking it more than about once every four days was self-defeating, because I built up a tolerance so fast. You can have what seem like revolutionary ideas and profound realizations, and later discover that they were no such thing. That experience is common enough to be a running joke. You can have legitimate revelations, too, but you can also have those without a drug. It seems to me like the main effect it has on inspiration is it temporarily disables some of your machinery of categorization. For a little while, your thoughts and feelings and sensations don't stay in their lanes, and the resulting mishmash can offer some new looks at things that you might not have experienced otherwise. I think that's probably mostly randomness at work, and if you want that, there are other ways to get it. It feels like amazing cosmic revelation, but that's probably at least partly because of the way it amplifies your emotions. That amplification is probably also a cause of bad trips. Bad trips are rare--according to the medical literature in 1978 when I wrote a paper about the subject, they were somewhere around one in a thousand--but I can testify that they are very unpleasant indeed. It's about six or eight hours of unadulterated terror and hopelessness, so be advised. I don't regret my experiences with it. On the other hand, I don't miss it, either. I am glad that responsible researchers have lately managed to start studying psychedelics seriously. They seem promising for treatment of alcoholism, depression, anxiety, and maybe some other things. There might also be a place for them, wisely and judiciously applied, in making the lives of some healthy people better. I wouldn't recommend doing what I did with it. I was lucky, but not everyone will be lucky. There's some interesting stuff about LSD and psilocybin that you can find by googling for something like "LSD OCEAN personality traits". A few researchers have tried measuring the Big Five personality traits before and after psychedelic therapy. They have generally found that psychedelics move some of the trait scores significantly, which is a big deal in personality research, because conventional wisdom is that nothing other than horrific trauma makes much difference in the Big Five. (The big five correspond to the acronym OCEAN: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism--all measurable personality traits that tend to remain pretty stable over time.) Some papers claim that psychedelics cause lasting shifts in the traits. This one: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/acps.12904 ...claims that they significantly increased O, C, and E, left A unchanged, and decreased N. If true, that's probably a further reason for caution. Those reported changes might seem good (they seem pretty good to me), but if it's true that the only other thing that makes significant changes in the Big Five is horrific trauma, then maybe we ought to regard a drug that can do it with some wariness.