This is an account of my first experience with
magic mushrooms. I ingested
about a
gram (it was about a quarter of an eighth ounce sac) blended into
pink lemonade to hide the taste. My friend Neil took the same amount. I drank
the lemonade too fast though which gave me a little stomach discomfort and
started to worry me about the inevitable onset of
nausea from the
toxins
in the mushrooms, but I quickly put this out of my mind. (Actually the nausea comes from the
psilocybin trying to get rid of toxins already in your system, but I didn't know this at the time.)
After 20 minutes
I still wasn't feeling any different, so Neil and I went upstairs to smoke
some
weed, to prevent nausea and perhaps jumpstart the trip. After a couple hits
I knew it was about to begin. The air conditioning had been on the whole time
creating some vibrations through the floor where I was sitting, which I had
paid no attention to whatsoever, until suddenly I could feel the vibrations
moving all through my body and up into my brain. I wanted to be outside
surrounded by nature when the trip started, so Neil and I went out onto
the strip of lawn behind my apartment complex and sat at a picnic table.
I started to notice some slight size and distance distortions, but was still
waiting for some "real"
hallucinations. I was a little impatient, so I
decided I would attempt to see something of my own volition. I stared at
the grass and demanded that waves appear, and lo, there were waves as if
the dirt underneath had turned into a
viscous liquid. This was quite
entertaining, but I was starting to feel very
paranoid as well since the
area where I was sitting was visible to some of the other apartments, so
we went back to my apartment along a path that had very recently become about
10 times longer that it used to be. (I have a feeling the paranoia was caused
by the weed, but I'll have to confirm this next trip)
Once back inside we watched some tv for
a while.
Seinfeld was on, and it was the funniest thing I've ever seen,
especially with all the extra colors.
The strength of my trip was increasing linearly, and as it did, so did my
sensitivity to light. So I went back upstairs to my room, closed the blinds
and turned off all the lights. The light coming from my computer monitor
was all I needed.
At about this point my sense of time was completely askew. I'm not sure
about the correct
chronology of the rest of my trip, but I'll try to tell it
in an order that makes sense.
I started playing "Into the Fourth Dimention" by
The Orb, and sat in the
comfy chair and just let myself wander. I closed my eyes for a while and experienced
some interesting, but not particularly strong, visuals, kalidescopic and in time
with the music. I think it was at
this point that one thought started
infinitely looping in my head, "How am I
going to describe this to my friends. How am I going to describe this to my
friends. How am I...". When I opened my eyes again I started experiencing some
light
synesthesia to the beats of The Orb. I was staring at my ceiling and
watching the color and intensity of the light change in time with the music.
I think it was at this point that I realized my face was contorted in happiness
(
tryptamine is a precursor to
seratonin) and I made a conscious effort to look
normal.
All the while, Neil was intermittently having a
bad trip. This was his
second time doing
shrooms, and a lower dose than the first time as well, but
he still seemed to be having trouble getting his mind around the strangeness
of the trip. I had to keep reassuring him that everything was ok. "Man,
I think I'm going crazy, this is scary" "Dude, just relax and enjoy it. It'll
be over soon anyway." He went and threw up at one point, ("I think I'm gonna
yack. Yeah, come with me while I yack, ok?")
and then sat on my stairs
drawing and writing for a while and seemed to be better. I had no stomach
problems whatsoever until I came down again, most likely thanks to the weed.
At one point the phone rang. Neil and I looked at each other.
"There's no way in hell I'm answering that," I said, and that's all the
discussion that was needed for that matter. I've answered the phone before
stoned out of my mind only to find out it's my mom on the other end. That
I can handle. But even though I could still speak clearly and coherantly
while on the shrooms, I didn't want to have to deal with whatever it was that
whoever it was wanted.
My room had become a very comforting place, much like my room as a small child.
The indirect lighting appeared to be
radiating from the walls themselves as I
stared at the posters on my wall. A sense of
euphoria overwhelmed me.
I felt as though I had
literaly traveled back through time to become a child again. Nothing was
being taken for granted in this state, I looked at pictures as if I had never
seen them before, every detail new and vivid. I soon found that with some
concentration I could zoom my vision in on objects. My poster of the
Earth
started to loom over me and I began to orbit it like an astronaught on a
space walk. The clouds were circulating, and I believed I could see the
rotation of the earth as I orbited.
My poster of
H.R. Giger's
Anima Mia was just as interesting. All its intricacies
made it take on an incredible sense of depth, and it started to come to life
before my eyes. (note: if you're the sort of person who likes Giger this
probably won't freak you out) All the
phallic creatures and feminine forms
were writhing about in what had recently become a very deep landscape which
radiated a soft and pleasing light. As I concentrated on the poster, its
perspecive relative to the wall seemed to change and the image within the
black borders leaped out at me as if it was a
portal into another dimension.
When the sun finally went down the light level in my room became perfect.
Neil was still kinda freaking out, so I sat him at my computer and told him
to go to
erowid.org and read about shrooms to calm him down. While he was
doing that I jumped up on my bed, moved the pillows to the wrong end, and
encircled myself in a wall of blankets. My room became a
conglomeration of
all the rooms I had through my childhood (in fact the bed is one I've had since
I was 7, so that probably helped). My thoughts wandered back to all my dreams
as a child, all my hopes for the future that I had back then. I fondly
reminisced about the stories my parents would make up to tell me before bed
when I was very little, and the way I envisioned them at the time came back
to me with incredible vividness. A lot of memories were coming back unbidden
but welcome. They were all clear and quite vivid, but I would have been
hard pressed to put them in order at the time. It was like I was looking
at time all at once, like how the aliens in
Slaughterhouse Five do it.
There was no
chronology, I realized that all time that has happened already
is always there, but we can only see the new time that's always being created,
as if time is nothing but a painting that's always being worked on, and we can
only see the part under the brush unless we know where to look. Well.. that
sounds pretty silly, but
it made perfect sense at the time.
With the incredible
time dilation it seemed like a whole day had passed since
I ate the shrooms, when in fact it had only been about 3 hours total. I was
coming down by then, the visions were gone, but the sensitivity to light,
and feeling of well being were still there. I sat and watched a visualization
plugin for
xmms until I was grounded again. At about that time my friend
Przemek called and I told him what we were doing, and that we still
had half a bag of shrooms left. He thought that sounded like something his
roommate Ryan, another friend of mine, would enjoy, so Neil and I headed over to their place with the bag.
Ryan ate the whole half an eighth (mostly stems though) and I watched over
him until he came down again. Then I went home and had the best sleep of my
life, with numerous, vivid dreams.
For almost two weeks afterward I felt great. I took nothing for granted, every
time I looked at the sky I was overcome with its beauty, in everything I looked
at there were new qualities I had never noticed before, or else just stopped
noticing long ago. It was like being reborn as a child, but still retaining
all the knowledge I've aquired in this life, as well as a little intelligence
boost.
I felt completely centered and at peace with the world, like
a
zen master.
For anyone considering trying shrooms, I highly recomend it. As long as you
begin your journey with a clear head and no fear of it, you will almost
certainly have a
good trip.