DOSE:

2 g

oral

Mushrooms - P. cubensis

(dried)

BODY WEIGHT:

200 lb

Profound First Trip

A good friend of mine who began cultivating psychedelic mushrooms gave me 2 grams of dried Golden Teachers from his first ever flush. I was very appreciative and decided to extend the dosage using the “lemon tek” method so I could make the most of his gesture when taking them. I’d never done mushrooms before so this was an exciting first step as a psychonaut.

I chopped the mushrooms into small bits, and let them soak in a few tablespoons worth of lemon juice concentrate for about 15 minutes. I then added water to the glass, about a third of the way full, drank the juice, and chewed up the mushroom pieces which were rubbery and tasty (as earthy as any other culinary mushroom would be).

There is one caveat, and since it was my first time I’m not sure if it had any meaningful effect or not, but I smoked a medium-bodied cigar earlier that day. I purposefully chose a mild one to avoid having a lot of nicotine in my system. For reference this was about 5-6 hours earlier.

I decided to take the mushrooms about 20-30 mins before bed. I wasn’t sleepy, and I knew I would prefer to simply go to sleep after tripping. It was about 10PM, and the bedroom was dark except for a few small slivers of light from the streetlamps outside.

There was also the low hum of white noise from the air conditioner, due to it being a summer night. My wife was already asleep and I lay on a separate mattress on the floor on purpose so I didn’t wake her, in almost silent darkness, a setting as close as I could create to match what was recommended by the late great Terence McKenna.

I felt the mushrooms coming on around 45 mins after ingestion. As I lay there, patterns that overlaid my vision formed quickly while my eyes were still open. These patterns were incredibly tiny and detailed in their intricacy.

There were a few different patterns presenting themselves, almost at will, whenever my eyes were kept open. There was a pattern that resembled tiny stained glass windows oblong in shape, or similar to a closeup of those old CRT type screens.

Another pattern looked like parts of a single celled organism (the nucleus, mitochondria, etc.) There was another pattern of conjoined lines that resembled the Nazca lines, but equal in length to each other, like carbon fiber. Yet another pattern was basically a pixelated overlay across my field of vision, a low resolution graphical display, that faded quickly and eventually became another that resembled bubbles, or rather hundreds of tiny Venn diagrams. All of these patterns were intersecting perfectly in their geometric placement, forming a seamless fabric no matter where I looked.

Those smaller patterns didn’t seem to move very much, but when the effects of the mushrooms became more pronounced I closed my eyes and the first visuals that presented themselves were also geometric, but staggeringly kaleidoscopic and fractal in nature. They were moving and folding inward onto each other with incredible precision and timing, and within each fold there were other patterns that fit perfectly into the larger superstructure. These were all three-dimensional patterns, and I thought to myself that no algorithm existed that would be able to simulate the permutations that I was witnessing at that moment, although they did remind me very closely of patterns in videos from the Demoscene (a type of state of the art VFX programming).

I kept my eyes mostly closed for the remainder of the trip from that point onward; the patterns expanded and became larger, eventually stretching into multiple layers of shapes that laid themselves out in front of my point of view, holographic in nature and translucent, like giant schematic diagrams being viewed up close.

Then, I heard it. A faint and then growing and very noticeable drumbeat, or a chant almost that sounded uplifting and happy… in fact, whimsical would be the correct word. It made me smile, and I can’t ever remember smiling that superlatively before. I felt myself nodding from side to side to match the music. I laughed so much and was smiling so hard that I felt my face would break. Without intending to, I pictured my own cheeks comically if not cartoonishly smiling, and I thought of some of my workmates who also smile in this jolly manner and they seemed to materialize in my visuals.

Then I began to see where the chant originated from. There were these small beings walking by in a straight line, either playing trumpets or some similar instrument, but marching to the beat and creating it nonetheless. Their faces looked like those of elephants without trunks, and with rounder cheeks; playfully marching around in circles, not taller than little elves or gnomes I would wager.

The beat was so happy it felt like I was part of the march, and I was now moving with the beat and feeling euphoric. I felt my body being pulled upwards every time I smiled, and that same pull was a harbinger of any visuals that were about to happen whenever I leaned into the mushroom’s effect. An effect that I would later realize came in waves.

I felt the “presence” of the mushroom make itself known. It was talking to me not with words but with feelings, like a gentle introduction to its own world where language was shown and not spoken. I simply understood the messages as they materialized into my consciousness.

I began to hastily ask it questions: “Who are you? What are you? Why am I here?” I realize these questions sound cliche and silly, but at the time I was so dumbfounded that I was trying to make sense of what I was contending with.

The mushroom began to show me random visions of people I knew, and it began to play the chanting music again, and I was opening and closing my eyes in between waves of visions, only to realize that the mushroom was playing the role of a trickster in that moment by bringing me in and out of the vision world that it was inhabiting for the moment behind my closed eyelids. It was trying to tell me that I shouldn’t be asking so many serious questions, that I should just enjoy the trip and not overthink things.

When this realization hit me, I immediately understood the message, and the direction of the trip started to change into a largely story-like introspection and journey of self…

I saw a point of light when I next closed my eyes. I opened my eyes and the light vanished (I was curious about the visuals), and closing my eyes again the light returned. It was in front of me and moving upwards, pulling me along with it somehow. Other points of light started to appear and join it, floating around and rising upwards. I felt my body being inextricably pulled along with the lights. I was lying, and my head reached up, my neck stretched and I was arching my back trying to move along with the points of light that seemed to be both traveling next to me and within me. They were congregating at the top of my head, and I was reminded of the chakras and the points that they inhabit along the body.

By this time I was fully stretched out so much so that my face was looking up towards the wall as I lay flat on the mattress. I caught up and was now moving along with the points of light as they made their way to a point just above my eyes in the middle of my head. I then broke through to some sort of vantage point that in the moment seemed to be the control plane of the universe and all things. It was like a transparent dome, and outside I could see a large creature that looked somewhat like the Queen from the Alien movie franchise, or a similar giant insect-like creature that was organizing and moving plates of… reality, or some sort of similar substance, that all fit together like a flat puzzle.

This lasted only for a few seconds. The creature noticed me and I was then returned to the lower “plain” along with the lights. The other lights faded away and there was only one light remaining. This is where another epiphany happened: the remaining light was both in front of my forehead and also within my forehead. It was the strangest feeling of parallax, and this light I understood to be my own light. Everyone has a light, and this one was mine. This understanding sunk in and made me feel a deep sense of belonging and emotional self-worth that I honestly never encountered before.

Whatever self-esteem misgivings of myself I had growing up until this point seemed to vanish. I felt like I too was important in the grand scheme of things. The mushroom showed me how to turn on and off this light that shone from within my crown; toggling it by letting my hand touch my forehead (which I did a few times to turn the light on and off). It was strange, and the light was slightly offset to the right, not entirely centered.

This message and this light repeated itself a few times until I deeply understood it, and the mushroom then moved on.

I started to feel like my view of reality was being brought down to its basal forms. My face for the next 30 minutes of the trip switched between just a handful of expressions that were purely primate-like. I was lying down for the entire trip, and at this stage my hands curled up slightly, I started to place my index finger on my lips in an exaggerated expression of curiosity. My mouth was rigidly making vowel shapes with my lips (O and A shapes mostly), and my brows were heavily furrowed as I took in this new information. The closest analogy I could think of was this episode of Stargate SG-1 when O’Neill was infected with the virus that caused him to start devolving and his features became like that of a caveman.

In this state of primate-like gesticulation, I was mouthing and repeating whatever lessons that the mushroom was speaking to me, words, phrases, nodding heavily when I understood something as the visions changed.

And the visions changed. They became tightly synchronized with the waves of euphoric feelings and the same pulling sensation that allowed me to visualize the light of my crown chakra earlier. I was being taught language, like a primate learning to speak for the first time. My mouth was opening wide as the mushroom was teaching me how to vocalize sounds. I was actually silent during the trip, but it felt like I was making primal sounds and understanding where language came from throughout the journey to becoming a human.

Speaking of becoming human, the next vision was of an embryo-like shape in a dark canal, from the vantage point of an umbilical cord. I asked the mushroom if it was me as a child, and it let me know that this was me, this was my origin, from primate to human embryo and coming full circle, and that it was there and knew my entire history even before I met it. This was extremely profound, as I seemed to intuit that it was showing me this (as well as the light) to gently tell me that my life had purpose, and that childhood trauma was nothing to be ashamed of.

After seeing that, the light returned as if to again remind me that my life mattered, and that I had a light inside me I never knew about, or never felt important enough to notice.

I tried to summon the pulling sensation again (by smiling, or imitating the caveman faces), to re-experience the light and the other visions, which I did once or twice but I realized they were fading away; followed by an understanding that they were all lessons that I didn’t need to re-experience or relearn once I internalized them.

At this point it was almost two hours after ingestion, and after all this the trip was subsiding and fading away, and I was coming down. I really had to pee, and I got up slowly. I felt like a giant human being in a miniature world, or more like a 3D human exploring a 2D headspace as the contrast between darkness and light in the room was low, and everything was being blended together. I felt like a shadow.

I picked up mundane objects and observed them carefully, I looked outside the window at the storm and lightning outside, that seemed to flash in slow motion. All sounds were muted and seemed far away. The walls were expanding and the small lights of random electronics in my apartment glowed with extra ambience as if they were twice as bright or more.

After peeing I drank some water, holding the glass in amazement at the foreignness of the object, and walked around aimlessly for a few minutes before realizing that it was time to head back to bed, clumsily but careful and feeling light and expanded, like a ninja whose body was made of marshmallows.

As I lay down I looked over at my wife on the bed (I slept on a mattress separately so as not to disturb her during my trip). The wave came again as I reached out in her direction, and the message given to me was that her light was far more spiritually developed than mine, and that mine will eventually shine brighter now as I’m aware of it, that my light means I too have self-worth that I never ascribed to myself. That recurring lesson healed me little by little every time I was reminded of it.

I felt tired, but still euphoric, I yawned with my mouth open larger than usual, trying sheepishly to reenter the “expanding drop zone” that I associated with the magical visual place of patterns and lights and the jolly creatures. But alas I couldn’t access it any more, save for the faint reminder that I had absorbed my lessons and it was time to rest.

The last thing I remember was the mushroom giving me one final wave in which, when yawning myself to sleep it was telling me that this is how I learnt to speak, and this is how language works, it’s an inhalation, and a breathing coupled with sounds.

This was the final little lesson, and I found myself drifting off quickly asleep, with a warm mellow feeling of euphoria; the touch of the sheets under my body felt amplified and welcoming. The next morning I woke up having not dreamt, but feeling the buzz of calmness and the aura of profound meaning in every little action that I took. I couldn’t stop smiling all day.

And I could not have asked for a better first trip… from the unknown to the unknown… as McKenna used to say.

Exp Year: 2024	ExpID: 118328
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 37
Published: Sep 6, 2025	Views: Not Supported
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Mushrooms - P. cubensis (66) : General (1), Glowing Experiences (4), First Times (2), Alone (16)