DOSE:	5 g	oral	Mushrooms - P. cubensis	(tea)
			Syrian Rue	(tea)

BODY WEIGHT:

150 lb

I wrote up my first magic mushroom experience under the title Rescued from Hell. That was 5 years ago. A few months after that I took 10 grams with a sitter, and since then I've taken 2 to 5 grams several times on my own, and microdosed off and on.

A year ago, I decided I wanted to take 15 grams, with a sitter. My intentions included spiritual growth, personal growth, learning and healing. It's worth mentioning that my spirituality is strange, lonely, mystical and direct; I don't have a guru or teacher because no one knows what I know or where I'm going, and I'm not a guru or teacher because no one in their right mind would want to.

I couldn't find a sitter, so I signed up for a group ceremony. There was a whole lot of symbolic meaning and synchronicity around this that relates to so many different aspects of my life, I don't want to explain it all here except to point out that it was a major part of my "set."

I'll pick up the story the day before the ceremony: On a city bus on the way to an appointment, I missed my stop and ended up changing busses in a part of town that I usually avoid, where dozens of people live on the sidewalk in tents and the police occasionally come along and destroy all their tents. As a kid, I was led to believe that these people were homeless because they were crazy. As an adult with housing instability myself, it occurred to me that they might be crazy because they're homeless.

I had misunderstood the directions to my appointment, so I wandered around, asked directions of someone who refused to talk to me, then asked directions of someone else who looked it up on her phone and gave me mistaken directions. By the time I found the place, I was more than an hour late for my half-hour appointment, so I didn't even knock.

On the way back to where I was staying, I found a free grapefruit, so I took it with me. In the morning I included it in my breakfast and thought fondly of the person who'd sat for me on 10 gram day. He had done some assays with pomelo and harmala for psilocybin potentiation, and he said it was like having three times the dose of mushrooms for twice the duration. Neither harmala with psilocybin nor pomelo with psilocybin had that effect, it was a three-way interaction. He said substituting grapefruit for pomelo would have a similar effect, whereas orange, lemon or lime would not. I thought this was relevant symbolically but not biochemically, because I didn't have access to harmala. (WRONG.)

The ceremony was a few kilometres away from where I'd missed my bus stop, along one of the same streets. I'd never been there before. I arrived around 4:30, and so did five other participants. The facilitator, whom I'd met only via email, talked with each person individually about their dose. He capped mine at 5 grams because he hadn't worked with me before. When I heard that, I was glad I hadn't asked for 15 grams out loud. I asked for 5 grams. He said he'd make it as a tea with honey and Syrian Rue, then measure out the doses. I was well aware that Syrian Rue is Peganum harmala. I don't remember having any conscious thoughts about the grapefruit. If I did, I immediately decided it was irrelevant because so many hours had passed and I'd had lunch more recently than breakfast, so I must have already metabolized it. (WRONG.) I remember interpreting a picture on the bathroom wall as an indigenous priestess facing away from me, looking at a full moon, wearing a blue robe and holding a staff. I think it was the first time I saw her that I thought, "There's someone who survived the night."

We drank the tea around 5:30. I don't remember much about the beginning of the trip, it's blurred with my memories of other mushroom trips. The facilitator was playing music, that's his way of holding the space. Often he works with another musician but that night they were busy, so it was just him.

I remember that one instrument gave me a pleasant body sensation, similar to laughing or crying or the kinds of shaking that happens when I'm processing trauma or coming out of shock. I don't know the name of the instrument. It was a piece of wood spun around on a string about a metre long, and it made a fluttering sound.

I remember receiving a clear and convincing instruction to move back to the place where I grew up. That made symbolic and emotional sense, but didn't make any logistical sense in waking life. It was not an audible voice, it was a thought that landed in my head and made itself at home there. I thought it came from the medicine, or possibly from the spirit of the land where I grew up. It said I wasn't being a good human to that land if I abandoned it.

I had my usual mushroom nausea, which feels different from motion sickness or food poisoning. It was a tingly feeling in my gut, as if my intestines had acquired a tactile sense that they don't usually have , then felt overwhelmed by the complexity of sensation and suggested to my brain that we might want to vomit. My brain said, "Let's not," and I used deep, slow diaphragmatic breathing to avoid vomiting.

What I remember clearly as being unique to that trip came after quite a lot of familiar mushroom-trip stuff that I remember only vaguely. I found myself lying under a bridge, tripping out, unable to remember how I got to that place or that mental state. By "tripping out," I mean I was perceiving space and time as bouncing around, as if my brain couldn't do linear geometry right then. I couldn't consistently track the position of my own body, and time was happening in cycles of 5 or 10 seconds each. Time felt continuous, not disconnected, but I couldn't mentally track it beyond 5 to 10 seconds into the past or future, sometimes only 2 or 3 seconds. The "bridge" looked like an endless, shifting arrangement of metal bars arranged in triangles, painted yellow, shifting across my field of view at a pace that matched my experiential time cycles. Every few seconds, whatever I was looking at moved around into a different configuration, without ever stopping or jumping suddenly, or even slowing down or speeding up much. There was a dissonant, mechanical background noise, loud enough to be really annoying but not loud enough to hurt my ears.

In retrospect, I had walked under a large bridge a few days before this ceremony, and the yellow bars matched what I'd seen looking at its underside, and the noise was like the sound of traffic, deepened and amplified when I heard it from under the bridge. In the moment, though, the triangles and the noise filled my whole world, I couldn't think up the possibility of water flowing under the bridge or rock or trees or anything outside this noisy, industrial-feeling place. I had the thought that I was under a bridge because I was homeless. I was aware of lying down with a blanket over me, which I think came from tactile and kinesthetic senses of my body in waking life in the ceremony room.

I was shifting between lying under the bridge and lying on a mat in the ceremony room, with other people on their mats and the facilitator playing music. Both realities were equally valid, as far as I could tell. Both felt shifty and unreal in similar ways. The music and the noise carried over partly from each reality to the other, sometimes. Both felt moderately stressful, and in retrospect, I think that's because both lacked connection to the non-human world of trees, water, sky, etc. If I could have named this for myself at the time, I might have turned my attention to the non-human world outside and might have had a much gentler trip, but I didn't notice what was missing, I just had a sense of ongoing stress, especially in the world where I was lying under a bridge.

I was having such intense deja vu that I have no idea how many times I shifted back and forth. I think there were events that happened once in the ceremony room in waking life that I experienced as happening several times. I remember spending at least as much time in between the two realities as in either one, but it's possible that I spent substantially more experiential time in the one under the bridge and just can't remember, either because it was repetitive or because it was traumatic. The person I was lying under the bridge was aware of the possibility that they were dying as well as tripping, since they had no memory of how they got into that state and no specific expectation about what state they'd get into next. For most of the time that I remember in that reality, dying was a decidedly appealing option. Staying alive was taking more and more effort in a way that was uncomfortable, and it seemed that if I relaxed, I would die, and being dead would be more relaxing. I don't think the discomfort was pain. It was something about the noise, the disconnection from nature that I couldn't name, and a kind of overwhelm that I remember also from lower-dose mushroom trips. Things happen at the pace of magic mushrooms and I can't possibly take a break from experiencing them, and that gets tiring, even when there's nothing unpleasant about the content of the trip.

I had a realization that all spacetime was made of endless numbers of tiny tetrahedra tessellating in 3- or 4-dimensional space. The triangles under the bridge represented the tetrahedra. There was something about perpendicular dimensions, quantum physics and free will... every corner of every triangle was a choice. It all made sense at the time, and it was not comforting. It meant that I had free will, but every time I made a free choice, I would go along one edge of a triangle and another me who was equally real and equally me would go along the other edge of the triangle from that corner and be stuck experiencing the world where the opposite choice was made.

I remember a very long sequence of choices to live or die under the bridge, where living was hard work and essentially useless except that dying meant someone else (who was also me) would be stuck living in that body, and other people (also essentially me) would find a dead body and have to deal with it and would feel shocked and grossed out. I mostly chose to live, to spare the other selves, but I think I also had multiple experiences of giving up and dying, thinking I really deserved that break and simultaneously aching with compassion for whoever was stuck being the homeless person under the bridge. It wasn't regret or guilt, because I knew I'd held on as long as I possibly could. It was an existential sadness, noticing that there was always more suffering and I couldn't protect other people from all of it, even by taking it on myself. There was too much. The tetrahedra were bending, moving and growing with a multidimensional complexity that I couldn't track. I was sure there were larger patterns to it. When I noticed it more visually, it was the yellow metal triangles under the bridge. Somehow that mapped on to the quantum tetrahedra, which I experienced spatially, maybe even kinesthetically, as if I was made of them and not a human body.

I was aware of the ceremony room, and also aware that I was mid-trip and busy dying under a bridge, when the facilitator said he was dealing with an unusual level of physical pain from a chronic condition he'd mentioned at the beginning of the ceremony, and he might need to take a break. This had enormous symbolic meaning to me, because I'd noticed a trend over several years that when I show up for therapy or energy healing work, the "container" breaks, therapists get upset, healers can't work with me. He talked to the others --- they were coming back to normal waking consciousness before me, I still couldn't talk --- and then played another song or two.

Then he said he was considering going to the hospital. I perceived a scenario where he went to the hospital and died, and another where he stayed and kept playing music and we all joined in signing, and the singing generated the energy field that he needed to heal his condition. There was another scenario where he went to bed and didn't die ... and maybe others, I don't remember. I remember that my sense of time was still so nonlinear that I couldn't organize these scenarios into past, present, future, real, possible or imagined. They were all real, and we also had a choice, but it was a group choice, as to which scenario we would create. I tried explaining that, and also tried singing, but I don't think anyone joined in. I still couldn't track the parts of my own body clearly. To sing, I took a deep breath and let it out while tuning in to the music that was supposed to heal him (music that I could hear, and I didn't know whether anyone else could) and hoping my voice would do something that would help somehow. I was still shifting among realities more than once per minute, I think. In the reality where there was a ceremony room and some other humans and a facilitator considering going to hospital, those other humans were no longer lying down, they were sitting up and talking, debriefing or problem-solving or something. I think it was about midnight. I remember crawling past them to the bathroom, thinking that they weren't seeing me and that this must be how ghosts feel. In retrospect, they probably saw me just fine, and just didn't talk to me because they were busy talking to each other and I was obviously crawling to the bathroom. I didn't try walking at that point because I still perceived the room shifting around like a rubber ship in a giant storm... somewhat less predictably than a rubber ship in a giant storm.

Most of them drove home. The facilitator went to hospital, and also didn't go to hospital but just went to bed, both scenarios were real as far as I could tell. The only person left in the ceremony room besides myself was a participant whom I'd perceived from the beginning as an extremely Straight White Male Dude. He asked me how I was and I heard my own voice say, "I'm hearing voices no one else can hear."

He said, "You're still tripping balls, I can tell," in a tone of voice that implied he knew everything I knew, and a lot more besides. I was amused rather than offended, because I was so sure I was learning and understanding lots of important, mysterious things that he never would. He held my hand for a while, which felt very helpful and friendly. My body awareness was still kind of piecemeal. I could feel any part of my body that I paid attention to, but couldn't track my body position overall. I was not uncomfortable physically, I actually felt relaxed and enjoyed the overall tingly feeling that I associate with mushrooms. My tactile sense was exaggerated, one might say, if one were to take my everyday sensations as a baseline. I was tired, emotionally drained and worried about the facilitator. He had a toddler. In at least one reality I was aware of, he died that night, and he had a toddler. @#!$!.

I was really, really tired of the ceremony room, having been there almost as long as I could remember. As soon as I could walk, I went to the door to try to get outside. I was still perceiving multiple realities as simultaneously real, though I was no longer accessing the one under the bridge. When I got to the door and couldn't figure out how to open it, I perceived an equally real but suddenly unattainable self getting out into the fresh air. I leaned my head against the doorframe. Now that I was able to think about the outdoor, non-human world, it was obvious that I missed it and needed it. Straight Male Dude came into the hallway. I remember saying, "I'm the one who can't figure out how to use a doorknob." He opened it, and I asked him to leave it ajar to make sure I could get back in. However annoying it was to be stuck indoors, I knew that being stuck outdoors while I was still high was dangerous.

Fresh air felt wonderful. I remember a sense of relief, and feeling happy to see some familiar stars, the crescent moon and a planet (I think it was Jupiter). It was too cold to stand outside for long, so I went back in and waited for the medicine to wear off. It seemed to take a very long time, and I felt bored and lonely, no longer in touch with other realities but not oriented enough in this one to feel empowered to do anything. Straight Male Dude fell asleep. As soon as I felt sober enough to navigate outdoors, I left him sleeping and started walking back to the place where I'd been staying. It was at least 5 km. I still had noticeable time dilation, so I knew it might seem to take forever, but I also knew that physically I could do it. Walking would keep me warm enough. Anyway, I was so, so tired of that room. Instead of putting on the perfectly adequate outdoor clothing I'd brought with me, I wrapped a blanket around my shoulders and put my boots on with no socks. This is very unlike me, it shows how desperate I was to leave the room, and it shows that I was still noticeably high.

After a few blocks I stopped to wrap my pocket handkerchief around my foot, which was developing a blister for lack of a sock. I noticed that the blanket was dark blue, with a wolf on it. I felt a bit like I was becoming the priestess in the picture, "the one who survived the night."

After walking most of the way, I was very thirsty, so I asked a stranger for water. It was about 1:30 AM, seven hours after taking the medicine, and the stranger could tell from the way I talked that I'd "taken something."

I went to bed around 2 AM. I woke up in the morning feeling sober and physically well, though worried about the facilitator who, in at least one of several equally valid realities, had died in hospital.

Like, @#$*&. He had a toddler. Whether or not it's the reality I'm in, there's one where he died ... because of me, because when I show up, the container breaks ... and he had a toddler.

I still have the impression that the wolf spirit walked me back to my room that night. The fact that I'd gotten familiar with the street names the day before when I missed my appointment was just one of many helpful coincidences that made a strong impression on my very impressionable mind. I also suspect the wolf spirit of leaving me a grapefruit so that I could have my "15 gram equivalent" experience.

On other mushroom trips, even on 10 grams, I'm generally close to normal waking consciousness after three and a half hours, and consistently sober by 5 hours. The only other time that I took longer than expected to come off mushrooms, I'd consumed some reishi earlier in the day, which I later learned/heard is also a psilocybin potentiator. I would use potentiation again if my supply of psilocybin mushrooms was scarce, or if I wanted the equivalent of a very large dose. However, I would want a sitter for at least 8 hours, and certainly wouldn't do it in the context of a ceremony where everyone else is taking mushrooms without a potentiator and having a shorter trip.

Exp Year: 2022	ExpID: 117610
Gender: Not Specified
Age at time of experience: 31
Published: Aug 30, 2025	Views: Not Supported
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Mushrooms - P. cubensis (66), Syrian Rue (45) : Guides / Sitters (39), Therapeutic Intent or Outcome (49), Combinations (3), Small Group (2-9) (17)