DOSE:

5 ml

oral

Mushrooms - P. cubensis

(dried)

BODY WEIGHT:

155 lb

In the spring of 2022, I was pretty depressed. I was seeing someone, but they were out of state. I was in a strange bind of having superficial friendships but having too much schoolwork to deal with to strengthen my connections with people, or at least that’s the excuse that I gave myself. I also had too much schoolwork to deal with to pursue my passions and hobbies to the fullest extent that I could (another excuse). I felt that I had very little to look forward to and that my day-to-day was just really lacking.

At this point in my life, I had taken many psychedelics. I was also a pretty consistent stoner, and I had tried some alcohol here and there. My first experiences with psilocybin were pretty tame, I had gotten a bag of shrooms from a run-of-the-mill plug in my city that I met through a friend. I had a decent experience, but I took them somewhat compulsively and in small doses here and there, never really giving full attention to it. This was back in 2020. I was still serious about their spiritual aspect that was described by all of these books and mentors, however, so I developed a pretty hefty obsession with trying to get the best quality product and experience the ‘mystical’ episode that you get from a stiff hit of this stuff.

I did some ‘research’ and decided, for better or for worse, that the only way to get the most reliable product was through the dark web. Over a few weeks, I built up the know-how of this underground marketplace and worked up the courage to order something. I shipped a series of batches of ‘liquid mushrooms,’ right to my front door. The resulting vials reportedly had 27mg of pure psilocybin in them. Needless to say, pure psilocybin mixed with citrus is a surefire way to get some bangin’ results. I had many riveting moments with these vials. I mostly tripped on them alone in my bedroom.

I worked part-time at a small grocery store. I knew that the guy who ran the meat counter was a purveyor of psychedelics. I purchased five dried grams from him. Or I should say, from his mom, who grew them. The shrooms didn’t look half bad. Albeit the ratio of stem to cap was a little bit on the stem side of things, but I couldn’t complain. The smell of these shrooms was not as disgusting as one needs to expect them to be. A pungent-smelling batch is a hallmark of a capable mushroom companion. So I was just a tad thrown off by the whole situation, but I figured taking them all at once could still lead to some different perspectives, some shifting of the narrative, and some keen interrogation of unnecessary patterns. I’d had a fair amount of bombastic group trips at this point, and I thought it nice to return to a solitary tripping state to get some good work done.

This was not nearly the case. I had been storing the shrooms in the same plastic bag that they were given to me, and I kept the bag in a small shrine that I had in my room. The shrine was filled with a small amount of consecrated and sentimental objects that I’d been collecting over the years. The shrine included things like malas, stones, and pictures of relatives. I kept the shrooms in the shrine because I was a little bit terrified of them. I’d already had a few nightmarish experiences with psychedelics leading up to tonight, so perhaps I thought that storing them there and waiting for the right moment would be the most respectful thing to do, and increase the likelihood that the trip goes in a positive direction.

I had the night of Friday, May 13th, 2022 all to myself. The only obligation I had the next day was a dinner in the evening. I prepared myself to tank all five grams of these mushrooms. I took the bag and haphazardly shook them into a blender, and dumped the now powdery contents of the blender into a cup. I spritzed some conveniently shoplifted lemon juice into the cup. I waited around ten minutes or so and poured some orange juice into the mixture to make it more palatable. I drank the mixture around 10 pm. I went upstairs to my bedroom where I had set up some nice relaxing music, and placed some blankets and a cushion on the ground. I didn’t have much of a plan at all besides sit and wait and observe and appreciate. I lay there with my eyes closed listening to the music. I don’t remember a notable effect on my body. Perhaps I felt lighter and thinner than I normally would, but I was primarily greeted by the faint whispers of auditory hallucination and some visuals. The album I queued was roughly an hour in length. I think I sat there for a good 30 minutes before I observed these effects. The visuals weren’t as blatant as previous trips, they seemed very transient, but they were still there. A lot of these initial hallucinations were yellow, which is atypical compared to my previous experiences. The visuals were very soft and vapor-like, and I saw a great deal of sky imagery.

But about 45 minutes into this seemingly tranquil experience, I felt a nasty onset of anxiety. I felt as if something was creeping into my experience that didn’t belong, but I didn’t initially panic. I figured it was just a mere fleeting symptom of the shrooms integrating into my system. After all, I had taken a lot of them, and had used a lemon-tek method, so it was bound to be an energetic experience to begin. But the anxiety did not let up. And I couldn’t let it go. About an hour into the trip, the anxiety transformed into some real discomfort. Not physical discomfort, like nausea, but psychological unease. I took issue with some of the things that I was being shown. Right then and there I resolved that I wanted out and for the trip to be over and for my evening to return to its previously tranquil state. But that was not at all possible, for I was completely locked into this experience.

This was in between 1 and 2 hours into the trip. The room was completely dark, except for the computer screen. In the backdrop of my eyelids, I was in a physical landscape that resembled some macabre mixture of an old brick town center and a graveyard. The music I had queued had ended and was now playing some recommended material, but it hardly mattered because the voices and the cries and moans of the diabolical creatures were overpowering all of my senses. I felt some sort of invisible presence that was taunting my squeamish self. Whatever this presence was, it had a very, very intricate method of psychological torment. It would create beautiful, dazzling arrays of neon-crystalline beings, like giant pink silhouetted elephants and fuzzy sprites and shiny dancing green ghouls. Once my attention was completely captured by these animated creatures, the presence would slowly dismember and crush the beings with unimaginable geometric movements so powerful that it squeezed alien-like screams out of them. The residual organs of the beings would then morph into a completely new group, ready to die an agonizing death all while only ever knowing innocence.

I had ended up in a death factory that was so sinister that the facilitator of the killing had absolutely nothing to benefit from the creatures except the satisfaction of controlling their formation, only to curtail their growth and blast them into an unimaginable hellscape of pain and suffering. The presence had so much bandwidth that it achieved all of this while taunting me directly. Every time I had an adverse physical reaction, like rolling around, opening my eyes to try and avoid it, or forcing the headphones into my ears, it would laugh. Not only would it laugh, but it made sure that the intervals of the creatures' suffering shortened and that their deaths became more gruesome.

I was 2 hours into the trip at this point. I felt an unimaginable sense of guilt and shame. I was in a deep state of psychosis, but the small part of my logical sound mind that survived knew that I had ended up here and was being shown all of this horrid information because I had initially rejected the experience in the first part of the trip. My depressed and selfish self refused to take part in the trip because I couldn’t let go of a small inconvenience. I think the worst part of the situation thus far was that I wasn’t being personally targeted or victimized, rather I dropped in on some ulterior version of hell and was being forced to sit back and watch vivid scenes of torture. This trip burned me because I was still there, awake, cognizant of all this happening, and I could do positively nothing to stop it. I wasn’t being directly attacked, but I was constantly under threat of being mutilated just like these creatures. I would say the peak of this trip was underway at this point. I stood up, looked around, and noted an impending sense of paranoia. Under all of the chaos, I knew that I was on drugs, so I wasn’t fully out of commission. Just extremely high.

I heard people enter the house downstairs. They were talking, and making a good deal of noise. They sounded the slightest bit belligerent but overall energetic. I had vowed to take the trip solo but I was completely blindsided by the experience thus far, and I wanted to do away with it so badly. I knew deep down that some sort of human connection might benefit me, but I also knew that I didn’t want anyone seeing me in this state. This must have been the weakest I’ve ever appeared to my friends because even my stone-cold ass could not deal with this anymore. After pacing for a bit I went downstairs. My three roommates and one of their girlfriends were downstairs. Everyone was either high or drunk. I did my best to cobble together a coherent thought to describe what was happening to me. It didn’t take much to come across because my bewilderment was already written across my face. I could tell because the second I put my disgruntled foot down on the bottom step of the staircase the whole house went quiet. I said, “Guys, I’m having a terrifying experience. I took a lot of mushrooms. Way more than I should have. Help.”

I went around the room and lovingly hugged each one of them. It helped quite a bit. But the trip was still rampaging. They had sympathy for me, yet their celebratory energy completely differed from mine. So I made sure to keep the gravity of my expression to a minimum, and that didn’t work too well. I ended up sitting on the couch curled up into a ball in a blanket while my roommate comforted me. I could only squeeze out very superficial lines of information about my situation. After some time on the couch, the temporary distraction of human contact faded and I was hurled right into a new phase of the trip. This was in between 2.5 - 3 hours in. I had an extreme, obsessive sense of paranoia, specifically imagining an army of police officers and emergency vehicles storming their way through the city en route to my front door. I vividly imagined this happening, all with my eyes completely open, while my roommates assured me that this was not a possibility.

Then the trip adopted a completely new tone at the 3-hour mark. It was so incessant that I really couldn’t communicate with anyone else. The unnamed presence from before came back with a vengeance. It used the blank and dimly lit white wall in front of me to project a plethora of racist/ bigoted iconography, like swastikas and confederate flags, flashing across my field of view at a tremendous speed. My mind tuned out the light conversation around me and was instead filled with very dissonant and demonic tones, like pure sine waves clashing with one another, while the presence laughed manically and said things like “This is you!” and “What have you done!?” I don’t remember much of my physical surroundings at this point because the flagrant attacks were so overwhelming, but I was told later that I was whimpering and shying away from the wall as if threatened by it. The roommate’s girlfriend thought that I was singing to myself. I was completely overtaken by the drug, and it seemed as though it was exacting a harsh interrogation on me unwarranted. I lay there in confusion. Strangely enough, my sense of time had not distorted in any way, I was still there, intact, merely witnessing a catastrophic event. To this day I honestly cannot theorize why racist symbols appeared.

About 40 minutes of this intense flash of thought loops and hateful messages passed and the effects were starting to lessen. I began to enter the 4th hour and started to come down. I was still in a psychosis. Everyone there with me was sobering up too, and two of the roommates headed off to bed. The roommate with the girlfriend was still there consoling me. The girlfriend headed off to bed. The final roommate got a glass of water and headed off to bed too. I was still completely afraid and paralyzed. But I can’t blame them for leaving, they were exhausted, and honestly, at this point, I wasn’t showing any obvious signs of struggle like I had in the past hour. But I was again alone in the dark. I started whimpering to myself and still hearing the cries and the tones and the demonic laughter, but I wasn’t so much seeing anything anymore, just feeling the tremendous weight of what just happened.

I gathered the strength to go back upstairs to my bedroom. I turned on the ceiling fan and light. I lay there on the now rustled pile of cushions and blankets with my whole body face down and head turned, staring into the various furniture in my room. Now at about 4.5 hours, the hallucinations had ceased, but my vision was still exceptionally blurry and murky, and I could still hear those tormented noises off in the distance. I remember having a compulsory urge to twitch my whole right leg. My leg twitching rocked my whole body. Rocking my whole body that way was strangely comforting. Somehow, seizing on the floor like a lunatic helped me shake off the effects of the trip. I lay there for a solid while before drifting off into a half-awake half-not type situation. I remember waking up from this awful dream in a dazy sweat at around 9 in the morning. I was no longer tripping but I had some wicked afterglow and I felt so very drained. I went right back to sleep and got up around 5:30 pm, just in time for dinner.

I felt pretty strange after this trip, not because it messed me up, but because it seemed to have merely no lingering effect at all. It was such a transient experience that I couldn’t take much away from it. I had gone in to have a wonderful time and reignite some passions because I had felt pretty down beforehand, but my initial rejection of the effects made me spiral instead. It goes back to that timeless Psychonaut adage ‘You don’t have the trip you want, you have the trip you need.’ And I guess I needed to find out, through provocation, that my worries in life are self-created, and that choosing to be down all the time is a pretty irresponsible way to conduct life.

Exp Year: 2022	ExpID: 117792
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 20
Published: Apr 7, 2025	Views: 15
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Mushrooms - P. cubensis (66) : Various (28), Therapeutic Intent or Outcome (49), Personal Preparation (45), Entities / Beings (37), Difficult Experiences (5), General (1)