DOSE:

1.5 g

oral

Mushrooms - P. cubensis

(dried)

BODY WEIGHT:

51 kg

Background: I, with my college friends wated to delve deeper into psychedelics. After trying LSD a couple of times, our next step was to try magic mushrooms. We sourced a pack of dried Penis Envy mushrooms. We knew of a junior who was willing to let us trip in his house which was in a residential estate pretty close to our college.

7:45 AM The group of 8 people that I was part of arrived at the house. The house was separate from the estate with a gated road of its own. We were in the house with the tenant, who was our junior, and his two housemates. The house was spacious enough for our needs and the best part about it was that it had a small lawn with mowed grass and trees along its perimeter. The rear side of the house had more empty land with vegetation extending into the distance. It looked vivid in the bright sun. We had been given a small room if we wanted to trip indoors.

8:00 AM We started by weighing the doses out. Our scale was not sensitive enough to do the job, so with a little bit of maths and approximation, we measured out a few 3 gram batches of shrooms, that we would split into halves, so that each of us could eat 1.5 grams. I picked my college roommate, who was part of the group, to split the 3 grams of shrooms with. He divided our shared 3g batch by sorting each mushroom into a group of its size like so - a few caps, a few small mushrooms, some medium sized ones, and then a few large ones. He divided each of these categories into two, and combined them to make a pair of doses.

8:30 AM Based on what we had heard, we expected the shrooms to taste vile, but when I took my first bite, I was surprised to know that it tasted pretty normal, like the culinary shrooms that I'm used to eating. I ate them with a few biscuits that I had preemptively bought. It was 8:33 AM and all of us had eaten 1.5 grams of the shrooms. We went to the lawn and walked about in the grass. That was when a friend, D suggested that we drink lemon juice. We had done some research and learnt about lemon tekking, which involves soaking the shrooms in lemon juice to make them more potent and easier on the stomach. However, our version of lemon tekking was simply squeezing a lemon into our mouths and swallowing the juice.

8:45 AM We started feeling a bit off. To me, things felt dreamy and I was getting drowsy. I sat on the grass as the psychedelic was creeping in. This continued till 8:52, and that was when we all could agree that it was hitting us. I was starting to feel the ground move in some way and the dream-like feeling become stronger. I also began to feel nauseous and I swallowed an antiemetic to be on the safe side. While we were casually sitting, I heard the gate of the property open and saw a stranger approaching. I became nervous. The man was a manager of the housing complex and was with his team of gardeners. They wanted to tend to the plants and water the lawn. They entered with a sense of authority and were not ready to listen to our request to let it slide for just one day. Because of that, we all had to move indoors, into the same room. I wasn't in the senses to remove my slippers and I simply walked in, and stood on a mattress laid on the floor with my slippers on. We sat wherever we got to, and waited for the effects to increase in strength.

I started to feel overwhelmed and agitated and was sensitive to sounds. The more we talked, the more overwhelmed we felt and I could see that in the way everyone would suddenly stop talking after starting a conversation. We played Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon. My friend D remembered that he hadn't taken a leak before eating the shrooms. He asked me if I could accompany him to the washroom as he couldn't go alone due to the effects of the drug. I agreed, and guided him to the washroom. As I waited for him, I myself was starting to feel worse, and I had to dash back inside. There, I sat on the floor in a corner of the room to make myself comfortable and tried to move my body to the tune of the music. The overwhelming feeling increased and I was getting agitated. There was tension in my body and my hands were cramping. I closed my eyes to ease the overwhelming effects and felt my face and hair with my hands, and continued to do so repetitively.

Music had acquired a new emotional and visual quality to it that comforted me, made me embrace it and use it as a crutch through the come up. I would move my body to the music in whatever way that felt good. Any pause in the music made me feel terrible. The effects became so strong that I had lost the ability to talk, move properly, and interact with the world. I would get up every few minutes and try to drink water and fall back down. It became so intense that I felt like I was going to die. I had totally surrendered to the substance. I thought of my immediate family: my mother, my father and grandpa. However, I didn't want them by my side. I felt like I was beyond the stage of goodbyes and these were my final few moments. "this is it", I thought to myself. "instead of fighting, I am going to embrace my death." I spent a few moments trying to understand the gravity of the situation all while I was on the floor squirming, with my hands covering my head.

I imagined myself dead in a hospital bed, or going insane in a mental hospital, or being in jail, and it all felt like a normal, expected outcome of this trip which didn't scare me. I thought of the child me, and how far I've come, and how this is the end of it all. At that point, I was reaching the edge of life and it felt like I was stripped of everything that made me a live human. I, just my consciousness, had entered an almost metaphysical realm, the equivalent of what a theist would call meeting God. I had the profound realisation that connections are what make us alive, what distinguishes us from a non living object. When we push ourselves to reach out to something- be it a thought, an action, another life form, anything. The drive to connect with things is what makes us alive and sentient beings.

Being on the edge of life, I was faced with a dilemma: is it better to let go, stay dead, or should I push myself to "make connections" and stay alive? When people say that I should let the psychedelic take control of me and just go with the flow, they never say what happens when I've done it all and have let it kill my ego. Is pushing myself to become alive again part of going with the flow? Or is it resisting? I realised that I had the universal spirit of life in me, to make connections. And after being shown this truth, it was time for ME to be in control, no matter how damaged I was. I made my thought process return. I tried to get up and look around. I felt like I was being given a second chance at life and I was very lucky to get it. I was being born again. I knew that I would gradually feel more and more alive, and I would have to prepare myself mentally and physically for it, like how the Egyptians prepared the dead for afterlife by stocking supplies in their tomb.

I wasn't sure whether I would return to life with complete mental stability. My friends who were concerned about me tried to talk to me and ask me what was happening. I cheerfully exclaimed: "I have died and I am now being given a second chance at life!" My friends started laughing on hearing these as my first cohesive words in the trip. I started to absorb the surroundings and came to know that my friends were wretching from the nausea. I was luckily not throwing up because of the meds that I had been taking at intervals. These intervals were way too short, as I didn't know that time was extremely dilated and the frequency at which I took them wasn't healthy.

All this while, as I was squirming on the floor, people were bumping into me, almost stepping on me, and so on. But after I was born again, it felt beautiful when people did that. Somebody almost stepped on me and apologized for it, and that's when I said the words "A man who has been given a second chance at life will settle for anything". I realised the beauty in being alive and getting to interact with the world and making connections. At that stage, I wouldn't mind if anyone even threw up on me.

~9:30 AM My friends, some of whom were in the lawn, were calling me outside. But I simply couldn't get up as I had not gained complete control of my body. When I managed to get up and walk to the living room, I saw my friends who were outside, entering the house. On seeing them, I tightly hugged them and wept. I also laughed hysterically at how I just went through this grueling experience of death and rebirth like it was nothing. And when I laughed, I realized how life is full of silly things that happen for no reason. At that point I was in what I can best describe as a state of anxiety ridden insanity. I felt dehydrated and opened my bag of supplies and started drinking from packs of the different beverages I had got: fruit juices and yoghurt smoothies.

I'd lie on the floor with my blanket, trying to put a finger on what the feeling was, and failing in the process. Was I seeing any visuals or hallucinating? Nope. Was I feeling anything that I expected myself to feel on shrooms? Nope. I thought that I was coming down at that moment. Time was extremely dilated, and I was stuck in a loop of drinking and lying down, thinking I was getting dehydrated. That's when my friend N made me get up and took me to the lawn. There, I saw my friends relaxing and I had a conversation with them. I became quite chatty and my feeling of insanity vanished. I felt comfortable around them and when I looked around, I could finally feel connected to nature. I couldn't see any visuals except for my vision breathing. But when I'd take a closer look at leaves, flowers, and other vegetation, I'd see more detail and beauty in them than one would normally see. I felt like hugging the grass and lied on it face down. But before I could reach cloud nine, the feeling of insanity and weakness returned and sent me back indoors. I kept getting these phases in waves, gradually decreasing in strength. At one point, I remember being indoors with my friends who were listening to music and muttering strange things that didn't make sense.

~ 10:00 AM I spent my time in a state of confusion. I couldn't understand what I was exactly feeling. I'd walk in the lawn, lie on the grass, talk to my friends about the experience, and sit indoors listening to music just fine. But I could tell that something was off in the way my brain was functioning. There definitely was a psychedelic feel to my perception. I spent the next hour or so coming down, thinking "WTF was that!?"

~ 12 PM Eventually, my friends started leaving the house. I had fully regained my ability to talk. My perception of time was back to normal. I came to realise the mess I was in all this while. I was dirty, exhausted, and hungry. I went inside the kitchen and raided it. I drank honey, water, ORS, and mountain dew. At one point, I even felt like cooking food. I controlled myself after reminding myself that I was still tripping and I hadn't come down. It was best for me not to make any rash decisions. Through the kitchen window, I could see my roommate climbing a ladder and I waved at him.

~ 1 PM I was sure that I had come down and I packed my backpack. I left the house with a friend who was also leaving. He drove me on a two wheeler to the college hostel.

As an afterthought towards the end of the trip, the revelation I had about connections being the force of life made sense. It is visible on every level. As carbon based lifeforms, we are alive because of carbon's tendency to connect with other carbon molecules that form complex organic molecules. Brain cells connect with each other and that allows us to think. The examples are endless.

I spent the rest of the day recovering from the fatigue and trying to regain my sanity. The trip had permanently affected me. It had blurred the boundaries between what I would consider a good experience versus what I would consider a bad one. It left me feeling dissociated with the world. I had a terrible headache that night. The feeling of dissociation continued for the next few days, gradually waning in strength. A week after the trip, I am still not sure if I am at 100% of the mental acuity I was at before the experience.

Exp Year: 2023	ExpID: 117180
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 21
Published: Aug 13, 2025	Views: Not Supported
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Mushrooms - P. cubensis (66) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Hangover / Days After (46), Music Discussion (22), Nature / Outdoors (23), Mystical Experiences (9), Glowing Experiences (4), Health Problems (27), Difficult Experiences (5), Preparation / Recipes (30), General (1)