DOSE:	5 g	oral	Mushrooms	(dried)
	repeated	smoked	Tobacco - Cigarettes
		oral	Tea

BODY WEIGHT:

74 kg

Alice in Shroomland

I'm 26 and I live in Belgium. I've been smoking pot for about ten years. Going up to Holland for provisions has become a trimestrial habit. Other drugs I have experienced by free will or by dismay: cocaine, smack, methadone, speed, tranquillizers. I am also at times a heavy drinker. Though I speak of experimentation I must admit that my consumption of these drugs stems rather from a compulsion of self-destruction. Or so I have been told, and indeed the events in my life do concord to confirm this interpretation. To my regret of course. Because I am presently becoming aware of the flaws of such an attitude towards life - an attitude of victimization of oneself, an unhealthy relishing in one's own degradation, a certain taste for decay and loss. Forgive me this digression, I do not wish to talk about myself but simply establish a context.

Enter the mushrooms. They are little and they look evil in their little plastic bags. I do not know the latin names and I only had the choice between three sorts: cubans, hawains, mexicans. My friend, who has tried just about everything available under these latitudes, without being however of a particularily spiritual or scientific nature, advised me the mexicans. He said they were the friendliest, the less agressive. So I went for the mexicans. An apprehension had been tugging at my gut since we decided to go to Holland that afternoon and it was getting more insistent. As if the process of ingestion and assimilation had already begun, as though it had begun the moment I decided to buy this stuff, which inevitably meant that I would take it. I was henceforth functioning on automatic pilot and this would be the case until this adventure would be over. Puritan natures are like that: they can't get rid of the conscience that they are in the act of commiting a sin. Pagans speak more frankly, they call it fear. Both acknowledge the danger.

No psychological or spiritual preparations whatsoever. Boiled water, added the shrooms, waited twenty minutes, infused with tea, no sugar. My girlfriend accompanied me. We went on the net looking for song partitions as we drank. Five, maybe ten minutes passed when I started to feel a little weird. Physically. Sensually numb. Neither pleasant nor really unpleasant. Strange and irrevocable. I went to lie down in the bedroom. Coltrane was playing on the stereo. Challenging music I think, nothing tripping or psychedelic. My girlfriend started feeling weird too and came to join me. We giggled somewhat about what we were feeling - a kind of heat, a warm cloudy caress. We giggled some more. Then the music came to an end. We put on something else, something brazilian, a kind of spectral bossa, sad and profound to me. We were both fascinated by the colours of the shadows that came from outside through the window. Dina even saw them move in a slow vibrating way. We were in each others arms and I did not know which arms belonged to who. The distorsions the drug created started to become unpleasant. The colour of flesh, hers and mine, indisposed me. I started to feel scared. Things were getting out of hand. I feared to look at her in the face though when I did so nothing unpleasant occurred. The trial had begun as I would come to consider this experience.

The feeling I was losing my mind, going crazy brought me out in the garden. It was night and it was cold and I had my jacket on. I was fighting to get back to myself, to come back to reality. I was fighting not to go mad, not to lose complete control. I was crouched on the ground hugging myself, looking at the wall that seperated our garden from the others - these walls reveal the paranoid nature of our civilisations. I heard a siren of an ambulance or a cop car in the night and the thought occured to me that Dina may have called the hospital. Absurd. I finally gathered myself together, stood up and gave a thumbs-up sign to Dina through the window, herself going through her own trip. I almost feel ashamed to drag her through these kind of experiences in which she spends all her energy worrying about me and my precarious existence. A friend from work who had already taken mushrooms once told me one should never take shrooms while with his woman. I asked him why. He said because you look too damn fucking ridiculous. I had not taken his advice, though now I acknowledged it were grounded.

The trip took went into a second phase. I needed to get out. I needed to get out and walk. All I took were my keys and I urged Dina to hurry up cause I really wasn't feeling very well. I really needed to get on the move. Couldn't she go any faster? Why did she need to take all that stuff with her? Why did she take so long to turn off the lights? She was tripping herself of course and trying to do things for the best as I later would know. And then we were out on the street. I passed my arm around her and we started to march. Where to? I had no idea, she had no idea. The important thing was to keep on walking, to stay on the move. Go and see someone? Go look for help? Impossible. It was simply impossible. it would not be playing by the rules. It would be a withdrawal, which at that point seemed unacceptable. No family, no doctor, no cop could be of any help. 'This is like survival!' Dina said and that seemed to sum up the situation perfectly. The streets no longer were familiar. The lights were strange and blinding. The porches of the buildings and houses seemed to recel secrets and mysteries that made me avoid their sight. The people we crossed, alone or in groups seemed absolutely unpredictible and dissuaded us from any sort of curiosity. We kept on walking. I had one arm around Dina's shoulder. My other hand was in my jacket pocket clenched in a fist. And then it struck me as something very important, something like a revelation. 'This is like a fucking fairy tale!'

Lost in the woods. We kept on walking. At times it was as though I had gained back total lucidity. Then a bit further it hit in me like a wave. It filled me with premonitions, apprehension, exhilaration. The sight of two men near the park made us laugh. One was walking a bike and the other carried an indication sign bigger than himself. The smile I felt on my face lighted my whole body and I did not experience a feeling of such sincerity in my entire life. The decorated coloured windows of a church filled us with admiration as we smoked a cigarette under a porch to protect ourselves from the rain. A group of girls passed by babbling and shed an impression of freshness and optimism. A drunkard approached and we fled instantly his company of contagious sadness. We could see him stumble on his path and mumble to himself as he wandered away. A man with the most corrupted and degenerate face I ever saw, driving a big Mercedes, honked and waved at us with a lurid smile. Had he gotten out of his car to aggress us, I'd have had to kill him I thought.

We were running out of energy. Just like in a video game. We needed to score some points, ammunition, cash, rest, energy. Dina had taken her bag with her so we had some money. We came closer to the animated part of town. Things were getting better though we weren't sure we were ready to sit somewhere surrounded by people. Things were still strange and weird currents were still streaming under the surfaces. We decided to enter a chinese restaurant, a cheap easy going place we've been to several times before. The effects of the drug were wearing off though my hand I smoked with still shaked a little. The chinese or vietnamese waitresses were young and pretty and yet there was something archaic about them, their expressions, the movements of their body. Don't fuck with me, something seemed to say, I'm a million years old. We ordered soup and tea. As I stirred the soup with the chinese spoon some gelatinous and smooth stuff came to the surface to float. Incredible! Chinese shrooms! We weren't hungry, we didn't eat. We just smoked and drank tea. We took a cab back home. Made some more tea, smoke some more cigs and went to bed.

Not exactly a bad trip. Not a good one either. But undoubtedly a positive experience. Would I do it again? No way, José.

Exp Year: 2001	ExpID: 11495
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 26
Published: Aug 5, 2019	Views: 775
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