DOSE:

2 g

oral

Mushrooms

(dried)

BODY WEIGHT:

66 kg

Rather unexpectedly I managed to acquire psychedelic mushrooms for the second time in my life, years after my first experience. I found a friend to watch over me in my room while I tripped, and he also took some notes of the things I said and did which I’ll be using as a memory aide for this report.

Beforehand I cleared out my room almost completely, putting most things into drawers, covering my wall mirror with a thin towel and left only the mirror light on, providing a dim ambience to my room. I collected a few items to play with during the trip (most notably a few colourful patterned ties) and prepared a music playlist to listen to as I tripped.

0:00 I eat the mushrooms. They don’t seem to taste as bad as I expected. Once I’m done, I begin anxiously chatting to my friend while I wait. I feel excited, but anxious – I always am when I’m inexperienced with a substance.

0:30 My headspace feels different. That subtle feeling that something isn’t quite right about it. I relocate from my swivel chair to my bed, deeming it the wiser location.

0:40 As I was trying to find one of my playlists for the trip, I suddenly felt a bizarre sensation akin to this one effect seen in some movies – my laptop is centered in my vision, and it feels like it’s zooming in towards me while my entire periphery zooms out. Around this time I laugh as I realize that I remember this exact, unique headspace from years ago.

0:50 I’m rapidly being catapulted into the trip – I was intermittently laughing at the various bizarre feelings overcoming me, I look at one of my ties and I feel like I’m seeing the pattern for the first time in my life, completely unique and indescribably beautiful. Staring at my monitor over a few seconds the colours seem to intensify, the beige windows clock panel I brought up feels… not quite plastic, but much more solid than it should be.

From here for most of the peak my sense of time completely dissolves – I ask my friend multiple times throughout what time it is or how long it’s been since I took them, and each time the number he says seems impossibly small and I burst out in laughter.
When I close my eyes, over some seconds I begin to see intricate fractal-like patterns, though I’m surprised by how… “object” like it is? Here a pattern in my head forms out of a house, there components of faces (especially mouths?) form new patterns. Seeing disembodied portions of faces makes me feel a bit uneasy, so I would try to move my attention away from them.

A couple of times I notice slicing – the sensation of my visual field being sliced up into chunks, each moving independently of each other, though it lasted only a second or so both times.

My sense of body position disintegrates – I get proprioceptive tracers, and when I move my hand I feel its presence lag behind. I quickly move to one side, but it doesn’t feel like it stops – it feels like I throw it to the side into infinity. At some point I realize that a disproportionate amount of my body perception seems to be focused on the face and hands, and I wonder if it could be related to the somatosensory homunculus.

I get a mild degree of synesthesia, though at the time I didn’t realize how unusual that seems to be at such a relatively low dose. The first way it manifested was by touching my face – if I covered a portion of my face with my hands, the appropriate portion of my visual field would suddenly seem to have much more red and yellow in it. The second way was by music – the song that was playing seemed to affect the visuals, but in my impaired state I would only notice it after ages when the song would change, and all of my visuals would abruptly switch together with the music.

My short term memory is non-existent. When I try to tell my friend something, after about a second and a half I start completely trailing off, feeling like my words are dragging on and on into infinity, pushing me into a fit of giggling – it seems incredibly amusing to realize just how fucked I am.

At one point I felt like a portion of my consciousness was “pinched off” of me and it floated off into infinity, leaving me wondering something along the lines of “if that was part of me that floated off, then who am I now?”

I could feel my emotions change location. This… cannot be described properly in words. It felt like at one moment my happiness was localized here in my headspace, but then it suddenly moved to over there. It seemed impossible.

A couple of phrases from the notes that I cannot understand myself at this point:
“I’m aware of you but I’m not really aware of you”
“This music *waves hands* sounds like a CRT monitor is” (don’t even ask)

At some point I had to be lead to the bathroom, where I had to repeatedly tell myself to finish what I’m doing before my consciousness slips away into the flowing floor.

Multiple times I commented about my glasses – I realized that nothing in the world makes sense to me right now, but I could still understand the concept of why I need to take off/put on my glasses for seeing things better, isn’t that strange? The world is completely insane, and yet the concept of glasses makes perfect sense.

2:20? Something went wrong. In a thought loop I kept remembering that I can feel my body continuously twitching at random places, and in my head I imagined how an epileptic seizure expands from a single location in the brain until it becomes a generalized seizure. I had never had a seizure, and yet somehow at that point I got scared of getting one. I also thought about serotonin syndrome – psychs interact with serotonin receptors, what if they can trigger that as well? I recall for a split second feeling the most crystal clear, pure fear I have felt in my life. I vanished, but left me in an anxious state of being, and for what seemed like ages, not being able to communicate what’s wrong to my friend (in both my trips during the peak I have trouble initiating speech), I lied in bed attempting some sort of proto-meditative thing to calm myself down, where I would tell myself that I can control this, take a deep breath, and as I exhaled I would focus on my collapsing ribcage, which felt like it kept compressing on and on into infinity.

2:40? The peak subsides, I enter my much calmer plateau and regain control of my myself. From here on I slowly begin to regain my cognitive capabilities, the ability to follow a conversation, time begins to flow faster bit by bit (although it still feels ridiculously dilated for a long time), and after a while I start to want the trip to end. My friend leaves, and I am left in a completely and utterly mentally exhausted state as I come down.

The day after. I cannot judge if I’m unusually sensitive to mushrooms or not, but both times the trips to me felt incredibly intense and alien experiences, and I worry that I may be susceptible to HPPD. From the day after, I’ve been aware of some visual abnormalities, like stronger tracers (which subsided over a few weeks), strong afterimages, and this barely perceptible coloured “static” that’s most noticeable when I stare into the sky.

The trip was wonderful, but I’m left wondering if I should ever take psychedelics again out of fear that my visual disturbances could grow worse and start impairing me.

Exp Year: 2019	ExpID: 113212
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 21
Published: Jul 2, 2019	Views: 1,641
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Mushrooms (39) : General (1), Small Group (2-9) (17)