DOSE:

4 g

oral

Mushrooms - P. cubensis

(dried)

It was around 9 PM on a Sunday night, and I thought it would be a great idea to take 4 grams of dried mushrooms alone in my dorm room. This decision was made on a whim, with very little preparation taken beforehand. My previous experience with substances consisted of two mushroom trips (one on 3 grams and one on 5 grams), as well as alcohol and heavy cannabis use. I lived in a suite with about 5 other people at the time, all of whom I considered good friends. Still, I knew they did not share my newfound rabid enthusiasm for psychedelics and may have been concerned or taken aback upon hearing me talk about them too much. Thus, I decided it would be best not to announce to anyone there that I was tripping. It had all gone smoothly the last time I did a high dose, so I figured I would be fine as long as I stayed in my room. Oh, how wrong I was.

I weighed out and consumed the mushrooms before heading to the bathroom, planning to take a quick shower before the first effects started to kick in. As I stood in the dirty, claustrophobic, dimly-lit communal shower I began to feel strange bodily sensations and mental fog. This happened within maybe 15 minutes of ingestion. I felt a bit uneasy but figured I would just hurry up and make it back to my room before anything crazier happened. Already, the trip was off to a destabilizing start. The mushrooms had kicked in much sooner than I expected, and the body load had an intensity I had never felt before. I put on my pajamas and decided to listen to some music as the effects ramped up. Initially, the music was nice and I was having an okay time. I then decided to replay the same song I had been listening to a few times. For some reason, this action flipped a switch in my head. What am I doing? I began to feel like I was going in circles, moving in a physical and mental loop in my tiny dorm room. I lost track of what I was supposed to be doing or why I was doing anything at all.

Oh no, I thought, I don’t like this. That’s when everything went downhill. Why did I take these? What have I done? Oh, I’m such a fucking idiot. I began to spiral. I got the sense that life was a huge cosmic joke, that I was going nowhere. The atmosphere became dismal and eerie. I was feeling emptier by the minute. I desperately needed a change in setting, so I turned off the lights hoping I might be able to relax easier. This didn’t work. I had informed my sister earlier that I was tripping and would call her if things got bad. I shouldn’t have placed that responsibility on her, especially since she had never tried psychedelics and had no idea what I was going through. Regardless, I called her and she picked up, said something like, “Oh no…” and looked at me with pity. To me, it looked like she had somewhere to be and I didn’t want to be a burden, so I told her I was fine (although I was very much not), she told me to hang in there, and I ended the call.

That didn’t help at all. I was suddenly alone again in my dark room. I felt nausea creeping in and the weight on my body was sucking all my energy. I felt numb, tired, anxious, and weighed down by a strange existential dread. This force was so heavy I felt like I was going to pass out. I didn’t have any trip killers, but I desperately wanted this to end. I strongly considered throwing up the shrooms and pulled my trash can towards me (although this probably wouldn’t have helped anyway as the psilocin had already entered my system). I didn’t, instead I sat for what seemed like an eternity in my desk chair as I gradually lost all sense of who I was. Looking out the gloomy, dark window did not help. Not feeling an attachment to my identity should have brought peace, but in this state it was deeply disturbing. I knew that I had to “let go”, but I had no will to let go, or to do anything anymore. It was like every ounce of hope had been drained from my being. I felt lost. I couldn’t make myself feel anything besides this anxious emptiness. I was no longer in control of my own mind. Time became unreal. I felt disconnected from the source of everything, and I was certain I had gone permanently insane. I was completely and utterly alone, with no life to look forward to and no ultimate purpose.

As this continued, I couldn’t even muster the strength to sit up in my chair, so I climbed onto my bed and laid down. I tried closing my eyes, opening them, looking around. Nothing made the feeling stop. Disorienting patterns were flowing on the walls. My own room felt foreign to me. I entered this weird limbo state where nothing was real outside of my disembodied consciousness. I didn’t see physical demons but felt malevolent presences coming and going as I sat in the dark, mocking and punishing me for my arrogance. It was an experience of eldritch horror, punctuated by overtones of a cosmic loneliness beyond human imagination.

I couldn’t make sense of the dimensions I entered. I closed my eyes and saw dark, lifeless, repetitive geometry flowing behind my eyelids. Black and white parallel lines stretched out into the void as far as I could see. I could look around in my mind’s eye and explore this space, but all I would find was the same eternal pattern. This was the physical location of hell. I had these convictions that I was dead and that I was truly alone in the universe, that the whole world was fake and in actuality there was nothing but me. What I perceived in my sober waking state as “reality” was not real and I had just pulled back the curtain to reveal the true reality: a dark, timeless void of empty space stretching out towards infinity. This was what the universe truly was. Every value, goal or hope I held for the future, every relationship, everything that drove me to live, became superficial and meaningless. I could only focus on how life had always been this way and would continue to be this way forever. This was my place, and I was going to be trapped here for all eternity.

After what must have been a couple hours, I somehow had the faintest idea that I could turn this around. I searched, “I’m having a bad trip”, not expecting to feel any better. I came across an animated video. The music, humor, bright colors and overall message helped ground me back into human reality. I decided I needed to surrender and accept how I was feeling. I had been resisting this trip since it started, telling myself that I didn’t like it and holding onto my ego. The video helped me feel amazing for a bit, like I had faced and conquered a demon, but the longer I spent in my room the more I slipped back into that same loop of existential dead. I decided that I needed to do something with myself. I was having inklings of needing to be somewhere, of “not being in the right place”, not sure how else to describe it. It was 12 AM at this point and I was wary of wandering around my college campus at midnight on drugs. Still, I decided to get dressed and go out, as I had an uncontrollable desperation to get out of this room. The idea of trying to act sober in front of my friends, who I knew were in the common room, was really overwhelming and something told me they were going to judge me intensely. As I passed them, I think I muttered something like, “I’m gonna go for a quick walk”. I couldn’t really make out the looks on their faces, but I could tell some of them were a bit concerned. They still had no idea I was tripping.

As I walked aimlessly down the road outside my dorm building, I felt worlds better than I did in my room, no longer tortured by the cosmic void, but I still felt lost and lonely and unsure of who I was. I also had no plan for where I was going. That was when I saw someone on a bike coming towards me. Paranoia initially kicked in and I started to freak out, but I soon realized it was one of my good friends who had been at a party that night. She happened to live in my suite as well. A familiar face at that moment did wonders for my mental state. She was heading back to the suite and asked me what I was doing walking around alone at midnight. She seemed concerned. I could hardly string a sentence together, but I remember telling her that I had taken 4 grams of mushrooms and was having a really awful time. I was embarrassed about this and assumed I was acting pretty strange. However, she assured me that I was acting normal and she wouldn’t have even known I had taken anything. This calmed me down a bit, but something still told me she had the strong right to be mad at me. I felt guilty, and I started shaming myself for being such an impulsive idiot. Now my friend had to take care of my dumb ass. She was pretty shocked at my decisions, but she didn’t speak in a judgmental tone or blow the situation out of proportion. She was really chill about it. I started walking with her back to the dorm as she walked her bike.

Eventually, as we walked and talked, my feelings of doubt subsided and were replaced by gratitude. I asked if I could ride her bike, and she agreed. I did a few laps around the courtyard in front of our dorm building. I felt like a little kid. Almost at the drop of a hat, my trip shifted in a positive direction. After this short bike ride, we entered the suite where I found two of my other roommates talking and watching Pirates of the Caribbean. I remember my friend who walked me home telling them in a funny, almost amused tone that she had found me wandering the streets on shrooms. Nobody seemed weirded out or angry, just concerned that I had decided to go outside in this state. They were surprised I was on shrooms and hadn't told them, and they laughed along with me about how crazy I was for doing this. We all had a good conversation and I sat down to watch the movie with them, which made for great entertainment. I finally began to laugh and experience the familiar euphoria as the effects of the mushroom dissipated. I felt so welcome, I can’t even really describe the feeling. I was in the perfect place at the perfect time; I was home.

I spent the comedown in deep contemplation. As I sat in the common room, I was overwhelmed with gratitude, relief, and love. I don’t know what might have happened if my friend hadn't found me. I thought about what a miracle it was that our paths crossed, and how grateful I was to her, and to the rest of my friends, for simply being there. This brought me to the verge of tears. They all showed concern and welcomed me so warmly. Of course they did—they were my friends. But for some reason, in my shroom headspace, this took me by surprise. I had been isolating myself. These were my closest friends, yet I still didn’t feel comfortable telling any of them I was tripping due to fear of judgment. But that judgment never came, or at least, was never strong enough to change the way my friends felt about me. What was I even afraid of? Of course they weren't going to disown me for doing shrooms. They cared about me. I thought about the cosmic loneliness I felt earlier. That was the fate that awaited me if I closed myself off, if I didn't accept my oneness with everything, including other people. I had been this way for most of my life, living in intense fear of social interactions until I began to branch out in college. Even after a year of great friendships there, I still held many insecurities and exhibited old tendencies to self-isolate and neglect my friends. I was hiding away in my room, knowing I was making stupid, shameful decisions, and this set the perfect stage for a negative experience. I think that the shroom was ultimately leading me to make contact with my friends so I could learn this lesson.

This trip was one of the most horrifying yet illuminating experiences of my life. After this experience, I was afraid to be alone. Every time night fell and I would find myself alone in my room, the haunting feelings of emptiness and non-existence would resurface. The world took on a negative twinge, the opposite of the rejuvenating afterglow I had after my positive 5 gram experience. For about a week afterward, I experienced derealization. I was disconnected from my surroundings, like an observer unable to interact with the rest of humanity. Life felt so depressingly meaningless for a while and I found myself questioning why I was here at all.

Exp Year: 2021	ExpID: 116461
Gender: Not Specified
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Mar 16, 2025	Views: 15
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Mushrooms - P. cubensis (66) : General (1), Bad Trips (6), Glowing Experiences (4), Entities / Beings (37), Guides / Sitters (39), Loss of Magic (34), Relationships (44), Alone (16)