DOSE:

3 g

oral

Mushrooms

(tea)

BODY WEIGHT:

160 lb

I made mushroom tea out of three grams of old mushrooms. I had brewed two grams of the same mushrooms some weeks earlier and the effect was unsatisfactory, so I figured that three grams should be enough. Indeed, they were.

I dosed at 1:00 PM, changed into my swimming gear, while listening to “Heavenly” by Dyloot. This song, which is majestic hard trance, was the soundtrack for the remainder of the trip.

I left my house on bike at about 1:30 and went to the pool. The Junior National diving championships were going on there (this was at a major university) when I arrived, although rec swim was still happening. I remember being fascinated with these beautiful athletes (all 18 or younger) who were diving off the 10-meter platform. Not only were they aesthetically pleasing to look at, but they were scoring 8’s and 9’s (they were almost as good as Olympic athletes, and no doubt some of them were probably going to the next Olympics).

I got in the water, and it was beautiful. Everything I saw was echoed like a Van Gogh painting on the inside of my eyelids when I closed them. My body took a few minutes to loosen up, but when it did, the effect was amazing. Swimming had become a fight with my body to get it to do what I wanted it to. But this time, any mind/body separation dissolved. My body was an extension of my psyche and did exactly what I wanted it to do, flawlessly.

I remember at one point looking up at one of those young athletes on the diving platform and remembering what it was like to be that age and have trained so long and hard for an event, and then feeling my body uncoil and do its thing, as a simple, fixed, action. Then, I pushed off the wall and went into a beautiful and graceful butterfly. I visualized myself swimming, with the peaks of the waves around me swirling in psychedelic oranges, yellows, and reds.

I managed to get all the way through a relatively challenging workout without missing very many sendoffs. As long as my head stayed in the water and I didn’t have to talk to people, the trip was beautiful. When I tried kicking with a board, there was too much sensory input, so I abandoned that and kicked without a board.

At some point, the normal endorphin trip that I experience while swimming and the mushroom trip merged, and my suspicions that they had always been one and the same were confirmed. The swirling colors that I see while I swim were the same that I saw on the mushrooms. It’s just that the endorphin trip during swimming is generally less intense.

As is generally the case with exercise, the trip was pretty short and by 3:00 I was landing. My theory is that hard work increases total cardiac output, meaning that more blood will be filtered through the kidneys and the liver. However, it was an amazing experience, and I hope that I will be able to experience it again one day.

Exp Year: 2002	ExpID: 16498
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Apr 19, 2018	Views: 766
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Mushrooms (39) : General (1), Public Space (Museum, Park, etc) (53)