DOSE:

2 g

oral

Mushrooms

(dried)

BODY WEIGHT:

150 lb

Anything can happen on a trip. A psychedelic trip that is. I was soon to discover this truth in moments to come, as Braden alluded to the fact that the time for which the drop was planned to occur, 8:00 pm, was upon us. I tried to ameliorate my nerves the only way I knew how, breathing deeply. Conversing with the other psychedelic explorers, who were all in attendance and eager to partake in the consumption of the amorphous looking fungus, was the only thing keeping my mind off of the trepidation I was experiencing. There were 7 of us, in 10x14 foot dorm room, with one bathroom, two mirrors, and one goal, to see how far we could go. For such a small dose, only 2 grams each, we were all (surreptitiously) terrified, perhaps this was due to the fact that we fasted for the entire day and drank a preponderance of orange juice, among other fluids, in an attempt to “strengthen the effects”. After weighing and allocating the mushrooms amongst us, we ate them with chocolate. Apprehension was thick in the air.

As a group, we adhered to a loosely accorded set of stipulations, which included staying indoors (until we felt “under control”), permeating positive vibes, and most importantly, not doing anything stupid (all of which would be violated inexorably). Boisterous chit chat welcomed the brief come-up, which preceded an urge to lay down on the floor, so we followed the mushroom’s instructions. At about the 30 minute mark, I began to feel as though I looked anemic. I rolled around anxiously, from my stomach to my back, as if to try and ward off the negative emotions that were starting to manifest in my body. It was at this moment, with the group splayed out on the floor in the center of the dimly lit room, something ineffable happened to Braden and I, but no one else. After lying on my back and staring at the ceiling for several minutes, watching hallucinogenic strands of DNA double helix dance in and out of my field of view, I glanced to my left and descried Braden playing a game (leap frog if my memory serves me) on his phone. My despondence was instantly and totally cured after what happened next. The only way I can delineate what Braden and I experienced, which lasted on the order of seconds, is by analogy. It was as though, momentarily, the privacy of our separate minds lost its mutual exclusivity, insofar as I was aware of his thoughts while he was aware of my being aware of his thoughts. The mutual awareness of this breach in each others head space happened seemingly contemporaneously. It was as though something previously separating our thoughts from collaborating, was lifted.

I liken this experience we had to that of being lost in a dense forest on a planet of which you are the only human inhabitant, and knowing that the last thing you would expect to find, is another human. Then suddenly, out from behind a tree, you see your friend, and he sees you! But before he and you can come to the realization that you are both co-inhabitants of the place you originally thought to be devoid of other human life, the image fades, and you awake from what was simply a dream.

This experience of the mutual awareness of each others thoughts ended as quickly as it started leaving Braden and I in state of “what the fuck”. As magnificent as the experience was, it was also fleeting. Our attempt at describing what had just happened to our fellow explorers was esoteric at best. It was human to human telepathy. Everyone else, however, was completely enmeshed in their own personal experiences in the moments following Braden and I’s mental contact.

At this point, we were embarking on the most exhilarating point of the trip: the peak. Everyone in the room was in a heightened state of elation. So much so that some of them could be seen rolling around on the ground like children in a shallow ball pit. at Mcdonald’s. Those that weren’t trying to free themselves from the clutches of the floor were standing upright, myself included, propounding ideas and uttering phrases that would have sounded like glossolalia to any sober person in our presence. Phrases such as “what is what?” and “trees!” were as enthralling as they were perplexing. Somewhere during this time I remember telling myself that I had discovered the role and scope of trigonometry; It felt as though my brain was in the process of being upgraded to that of a heuristic super-computer.

We had passed the point of no return, and while this fact liberated my fellows, it began to render my previously plucky spirit hopeless. I engaged in voracious etymological discourse with Braden as we clawed at grasping what topics like ‘meaning’ and ‘time’ meant. While everyone besides Braden and myself became a blur, we sought to extirpate any misunderstanding of the world we once new and loved, in light of a newer, stranger world of which we were but guests. I began pacing the room as my thoughts converged on ideas I had never supposed, ideas more strange than I thought possible to suppose. The walls were melting, the floor was a magnificent flow of lava, and visible sound could be seen emanating from the speakers that hung about the walls. Yes, I could see sound. I could also taste color. Any thought that entered my stream of consciousness could be spontaneously interpreted through a multitude of different senses, as a sort of synergistic interpretation of the outside world took center stage. The profundity of my human experience had been accelerated to a magnitude that was almost too much for me to handle. I felt as though the drug had begun to extort my perception of myself inasmuch as I started to forget fundamental facts about myself. I didn’t know it at the time, but my condition could be diagnosed as the dissolving of my ego.

The turning point in this trip was fostered by my pejorative attitude towards those of us who wanted to leave the safety of the room for an outside adventure. “What if they were discovered? The authorities would immediately know we took mushrooms! We would be condemned for this!” I said, as a sort of soliloquy, knowing it was a futile effort to try and stop them. The mushrooms were impinging on my ability to speak, or use my legs for that matter. The drug had attenuated my motor skills to such a degree that I could hardly walk. It was all I could do to utter one single word of contention to Braden in hopes that he would act as a voice of reason for those who were clearly in danger. Unfortunately Braden was as immobile as I was, as he was glued to a chair and enslaved by a feverish mission to untangle his earbuds.

At this point we were well past the peak, but the nightmare had only just begun. I became an agent of philosophy as I started doubting every single thing there was to doubt. I began doubting that which was the source of my sanity. “What if I was insane, would I know I was insane? What if my entire life had been perceived through the lens of a mad man who only thought he was sane? What if this drug was making me realize this fact about myself?” I thought. I began pacing the room voraciously, wondering what on earth was happening to me. The thought of a “bad trip” was put on the table of my internal monologue. “Oh shit” I thought, “this must be what a bad trip is.” My sanity was slipping through my fingers like grains of sand. Not only was I losing touch with reality, I was gradually losing every sense of who I was and this was utterly terrifying. The thoughts I was having were irreconcilable with what I was experiencing.

Almost at a yell, I exigently asked Braden to tell me what we’ve done. “What are we on?!” I asked. “We took shrooms!” Braden exclaimed, a foreboding tone in his voice that was unmistakable. Braden finally relinquished his attempt at untangling his ear buds. He too had little dominion over his fine motor skills and like a new born baby dear, he stood up and walked lankily into the bathroom to do what I could have only guessed to be the perusing of his face in the mirror. I swiftly rounded the corner after him and saw him leaning head-first against the bathroom mirror, laughing hysterically at himself in a crazed pitched that suggested he had gone mad. With an irresolute glance at my face in the mirror, I too understood the maddening affect that a mirror can have on ones experience by the examination of my own face. There was my face in the mirror, but whom was looking upon it was mysterious to me (paradoxically). On the account that I was inexorably forgetting details about my life resulting in, or from, the dissolution of my ego. The recognition of my face was at the top of the list of things that were no longer familiar to me. The mirror viewing of the strangers body, whom I was locked inside, ushered in the next phase of the trip.

Braden and I frantically made our way back into the foyer of the room, only to promulgate the others who still remained with an invitation to look at themselves in the mirror. Braden was doing most of the talking at this point as I didn’t know what I was supposed to say, given the state of turmoil in my now fragile self perception. The quintessential “I’m going to be this way forever” feeling plagued my thoughts. It was at this moment that thoughts and feelings become one and the same. With my last remaining bit of intuition, I thought it best to sequester myself in my bed so I could figure out how to survive this lapse of sanity. As I laid in my bed, the incessant doubting of that which exists was literally causing me physical pain. I was sliding into a mental black hole from which nothing could escape, not even my sense of self. As I squirmed and contorted on my bed, tugging at my sheets and kicking my legs, I probably appeared to be having a full blown seizure, or possessed by a demon. Luckily I wasn’t, but my subjective experience was that of a mind attempting to seize anything it could that would connect my being to reality. Thinking became of process of trial and error; I tried to reconcile any and every thought I had with that which could create a mental path back to my believing that I hadn’t died. But there was no esperance. I experienced wistful memories of when I was alive, but these mental images were truncated by futile attempts at identifying my current perception of myself with that which still exists in the “real world”, whatever that was. “If thou eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shall surely die.”

Vexation pervaded my lost sense of being as a single recognizable thought entered my mind. “If I’m dead then why haven’t I transcended into heaven?” The only thing clear to me at the time was the degree to which I was suffering from the hellish torment of having my soul extirpated from my body. The place my consciousness now resided was not heaven, no, it was a voluminous pit of darkness or perhaps it was nothingness. Evidently, what I was experiencing was entirely unilateral, as no one else in the group reported having a similar experience in hindsight. Contrarily, my conscious torture was not quite over. My convulsions atop my mattress stirred little concern amongst the others; they thought it best to let me be, and that the only solution to whatever my issue was was time. They proceeded to enjoy the duration of their experiences together, while I lay on my bed in a state of mental anguish and conscious disarray. At one point in the night, from the confines of my mattress, I evidently pissed myself (unbeknownst to me at the time). And this was most certainly due to the fact that my mental faculties, which took precedence over my physiology, were as confused as I was, which is to say, they didn’t know a toilet from a mattress. I have very little recollection of what happened after soiling myself, but what I do know is that at some point, amidst the conniption I was having on my bed, I must have fallen into a deep sleep, of which only the sun beaming in through the window would awake me the next morning.

I awoke to a state of mental clarity of which my mind had never before occupied. A sort of reaction had taken place inside my brain and body the night before, that much I knew for certain. As I spent the moments after I awoke trying effortfully to piece together any shred of what happened to me, only bits and pieces of my experience remained. To this day I am still treated to small memory flashes of novel insights I obtained from that fateful night. A profound sense of acceptance washed over me as if I had come back from hell with a second chance at life. Such acceptance I had never before felt. I was also enlightened to the stark fact of there being more to the human experience than I had ever anticipated. The preceding night was my first lesson in this understanding. There is just simply more. Deeper and deeper realms of understanding, empathy, compassion, and love. Before that night, I had never known what is was like to extricate oneself from the jail cell that is one’s sense of “I”—this “I” being an illusion at best. These mushrooms, these things, whatever they are, forced me to realize aspects of my life, and the nature of reality, that I could have never surmised. Before this experience I was a body experiencing the universe, after, I felt as though I was the universe experiencing life inside a body. My most profound realization bestowed upon me by this experience was this; we are always on the fringe of oblivion.


The mushrooms forgave me, now I shall forgive the world.

Exp Year: 2014	ExpID: 110676
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 18
Published: Jul 5, 2025	Views: Not Supported
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