DOSE: T+ 0:00	3.6 g	oral	Mushrooms	(dried)
T+ 0:00	1 hit	oral	LSD	(blotter / tab)
T+ 0:00	few hits	smoked	Cannabis	(flowers)
T+ 3:00	few hits	smoked	Cannabis	(flowers)

BODY WEIGHT:

185 lb

Throughout my relatively short history with psychedelics thus far, I’ve had a number of unexplainable experiences with LSD, psilocybin, DMT, and DXM, but never what I’d consider a ‘bad trip’. This pattern of luck shattered last night, leaving me in the grips of a terrifying experience that I still cannot wrap my head around. To fully understand this experience, I feel it is important to detail the context surrounding it.

My mental health is something I often fear for, and while psychedelics have taught me many important lessons, they have begun to produce increasingly sinister vibrations with each time I trip. These sinister undertones primarily emerge on the comeup of an experience, often manifesting in the form of vague, ill-defined imagery of maniacally laughing faces, glaring eyes, and sharp tendrils moving back and forth slowly. Attempting to say with certainty what causes this phenomenon would likely be impossible, though I believe it could be due to my persistent lack of sleep. My relationship with sleep has been spotty at best for nearly a year now, a fact which is made apparent by my occasional bouts of hallucinations and extreme paranoia. Still though, I thought very little of this and attempted to ignore it so as to avoid a trip taking a turn for the worse. Obviously, though, it grew too intense to ignore and culminated in a sudden and hellish experience that has left me shaken since it happened.

It was 8:20 P.M. and the sun was long gone from the sky. I had just finished eating dinner and prepared myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich stuffed with 3.6 grams of mushrooms and a single tab of acid. This was a combination unfamiliar to me, though I was well acquainted with the substances on their own. I went on a short walk to kill time before it began and then settled down in my room under the warm cover of a blanket. I noticed the first effects around an hour after ingestion, and the subsequent comeup maintained a remarkably slow pace, leading me to believe the trip would be anticlimactic and uneventful. So, I went into the adjacent room where I had already prepared a pipeful of weed and took a few solid hits before returning to my room to relax and enjoy the rest of the experience. I spent the next couple of hours listening to Townes van Zandt and Herbie Hancock while watching the inside of my eyelids. I loved every second of it and found myself feeling fully at peace. The more I allowed my mind to drift off, the more it felt as though I was being held in the arms of someone behind me. I felt an intense love for everything around me.

Around 1:15, the effects of the mushrooms began to wane slightly and the acid was still going strong. I decided I would return to the other room and smoke the remaining grass in my pipe to extend the peak of the trip and resume the blissful state I was now coming down from. After three or four pulls from the pipe, I suddenly felt extremely fatigued and lightheaded, as though I were about to faint at any given moment. I quickly straightened the desktop up and set my alarm for the morning before heading back into my bed, worried I would pass out. I buried my head into my pillow to try to relax and rest my mind for a bit. When my eyes closed, I was near immediately overwhelmed by what I was witnessing. A floating head of Ronald Reagan (no clue why) soared across my field of view, mockingly laughing as it passed.

Then, my vision went entirely dark before the word ‘Lucifer’ appeared in glowing white lettering. This sent a rush of fear into me, despite never having been a religious person. What followed was a brief, but seemingly endless onslaught of horrific, sullen imagery and incoherent, dysphoric thoughts about impending death, fear, and speaking to extraterrestrial beings. I cannot fully recall what conclusion was reached through these thoughts other than a vague sense of terror and complete loss of sanity. I was oddly unphased by this at the time, only finding it mildly odd, but as I continue to try to wrap my head around the experience it becomes more disturbing and strange. Despite having taken the acid only five hours earlier, I then went to sleep around 1:30, as I knew I would only grow more shaken by the experience the more I thought about it. It is now 16 hours since I first ate the acid and mushroom sandwich, and I am relatively back to baseline, although the nonspecific paranoia and confusion remain.

Exp Year: 2021	ExpID: 115137
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 17
Published: Jul 6, 2023	Views: 365
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Mushrooms (39), LSD (2), Cannabis (1) : General (1), Difficult Experiences (5), Glowing Experiences (4), Alone (16)