DOSE:	3 g	oral	Mushrooms
		smoked	Cannabis

BODY WEIGHT:

170 lb

It was the first week of January, and I had just driven back to university after a much-needed winter break. Having gotten some goods for a friend—we’ll call him T—and myself, I was ready to enjoy the last few days before the spring semester engaging in psychedelic hooliganism.

I had bought $50 of what I had been told were mind-bendingly potent shrooms (twice as strong at LEAST). Normally I woulda been a bit sceptical, but I knew the two guys who hooked me up pretty well and knew they didn’t play around (e.g. one of them has since overdosed IV’ing Oxys). They told me that under no circumstances would they take any more than 3g of these shrooms, and I had to take their word for it.

The two previous times I did shrooms I was a bit disappointed (dosing as high as 3.5g) because the trips didn’t really compare to some awesome acid trips I had done. I watched several documentaries on Terence McKenna and he said that if you hadn’t dosed at least 5g, you hadn’t tried shrooms. Wanting the life-changing experience that I’d yet to approach experiencing with psilocybin, I figured dosing 3g of these shrooms would be about right. My friend T was new to the game, so he’d do only 1.5g.

A little before noon, T and I took our shrooms. He enjoyed the taste, I didn’t. About thirty minutes later, we were definitely feeling the psilocybin and a wave of intense nausea hit the both of us. We quickly packed a small bowl with some bud and smoked it. T’s nausea eased immediately, but mine did not. Five minutes later, I recall throwing up in my mouth, attempting to swallow it back down, and throwing up even more in my mouth. I sprinted to a trashcan and blew my lid. From the looks of it I threw up about half of the shrooms. Goddammit, that was almost $20 worth. I wasn’t about to lose that money and I sure as hell wasn’t going to miss out on a balls-deep trip.

I looked to the heavens and said “remember me” only to have some Native American shaman reply, “I will never forget you”. Well not really, but not too far off. What actually happened is I looked in the trashcan and slowly picked the stems and caps out of the vomit and put them in my mouth after feeling “told” to do so by the shrooms. It was a wildly spiritual experience.

The nausea began to subside and the shrooms really began kicking in. The body high was the greatest I had ever experienced. I was levitating an inch over the ground as I walked through my room, and I felt like I was glowing so intensely that I had a huge aura around me. Wood was extremely radiant and suddenly I began to see blue and purple stars shimmering on surfaces. Once the visuals started kicking in nice and hard it felt just like the time I did ayahuasca.

Suddenly, a knock on our door. Oh shit! Nobody else was back from break yet so we didn’t know who it was or what to do. We opened our door and were met by our RA (Residence Assistant). He told us it smelled like weed in the hall and that we had two hours to fix it. Thankfully he’s a super cool guy, so we hastily sprayed some Ozium, grabbed our contraband, and got the fuck out of there and headed to my car.

As we stepped outside, we were greeted by nothing short of a winter wonderland. The night before, it had rained an inch in marginally subfreezing weather and the entire campus and city of Atlanta was coated in an inch of ice. As we walked up a hill toward my parking spot, domineering organic fractals collided all across my visual field. The naked trees were giant icicles and when the sun caught them just right, the ice functioned like a prism and shot kaleidoscopic rainbows across my vision just like Dark Side of the Moon. We stood in awe as our city turned into a scene straight out of Fantasia. To say it was badass is a massive understatement. Everyone else was amazed at the beauty of the city too, it was like something on a postcard. We laughed at how awesome it was as we snapped lots of selfies with campus and the skyline in the background.

As we made our way toward my car, my headspace started getting really bizarre. I unloaded my pockets in the trunk before laying down in the backseat to finish off my half-eaten apple. T said he was going to go down the street to take some shots of downtown. Suddenly I lost my appetite and put the apple down. As I kept trying to claw my way out of this mindfuck of a thought process I simply began sinking more quickly into mental quicksand. Before I knew it my short-term memory was shot, and my long-term memory began to fade as well. When my eyes were closed, the visuals felt just like DMT. “Well, I guess I won’t be blinking anytime soon,” I told myself. I looked around my car and it felt as though everything was decompartmentalised. Clothes, food, CDs, trash and everything in my car became completely unfamiliar, and I simply saw them as objects. I looked at my phone and could not process what a phone was. I scrolled through my apps and they all looked completely foreign to me. I somehow managed to go on Facebook and Instagram only to not recognise my friends and even my family. It was like I knew deep down who some of them were, but my entire lifetime with them seemed like some artificial experience that had been cerebrally implanted by some higher power five minutes beforehand (solipsism). I looked down at my black plaid pajama pants and realised that I too was only an object and felt like my mind was completely separate from my body. I had experienced ego death before (LSD + DXM combo), but very differently from this. I was completely detached from my past and corporeal self, like algae surfing the tide or a dandelion being blown aimlessly in the wind. Inert.

My best guess is that I was in that state for about twenty minutes. Finally, I remembered my two other best friends’ names, D and J. I called them on my phone and asked them to talk to me and help me get a grip on reality again. As I had both of them on speaker, T came back and we all had an amazing conversation for about five minutes that brought me off my peak and back into a more sociable context. I finally felt comfortable leaving the car, so T and I went inside a nearby building for some water and to use the restroom. Within three hours I had come down and went to bed.

I can’t accurately explain how weird my headspace was, but it was like everything wasn’t adding up. I’d think of how two things in my life related and it was like 2+2 made 5. I became so confused as this continued happening again and again that I just lost contact with reality for a solid half hour. However, once I came down all the puzzle pieces of my life that weren’t fitting together started to reorient themselves and—contrary to what I had thought—my entire life fit together seamlessly, end to end. It was like having everything taken away from me, only to have it given back thirty minutes later. For months I had been struggling with dissatisfaction with my place in life, but having it all taken away showed me just how amazing my life really was. I had an afterglow for weeks accompanied by an immense appreciation for everything I had taken for granted.

Though it didn’t seem like it for a while, those shrooms knew exactly what they were doing. I gained an invaluable life experience and would trust mushrooms with my life.

Exp Year: 2017	ExpID: 110155
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 19
Published: Jan 2, 2021	Views: 289
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Mushrooms (39) : Therapeutic Intent or Outcome (49), General (1), Small Group (2-9) (17)