DOSE:	2.0 g	oral	Mushrooms - P. cubensis
		smoked	Cannabis
	6.7 g		Mushrooms - P. cubensis

BODY WEIGHT:

177 lb

This was my first experience with psilocybin.

After obtaining 10.5 grams (one quarter plus one eighth of an ounce) of cubensis from an aquaintance of ours, my friend T and I went to our usual hangout bar to wait for our friend G to join us. After an hour of waiting, I couldn't take the suspense and decided to down about 5 stems with caps. It was about 8pm and my last meal had been about seven hours earlier. The taste wasn't as bad as I had been led to believe. It was a bit like chewing on paper.

By the time G showed up, about another hour later, everybody's face looked abnormally pink and I was giggling like a girl uncontrollably. Despite this, I was convinced that the shrooms were having no effect, although it was obvious to T and G that I was tripping. We stayed at the bar until 10pm, amused by my intermittent giggling fits that came out of nowhere, and then decided to go to G's house so we could all trip together. G hadn't touched the shrooms yet and T had taken only two or three and was showing no signs of tripping.

Once at the house, G tried to 'catch up' with me by downing as many shrooms as I had. I also took more. Days later, I weighed out on a laboratory scale as many dried mushrooms as I thought I'd consumed that night, and concluded that my total dose must have been about 2 grams. I don't know how much T took, but his trip would be miserable, while mine would be glorious. We also smoked some weed.

We drank some more at G's place and talked until G started to feel his shrooms kick in, and then G suggested we go for a walk in the woods. T was almost passed out on the sofa and didn't wish to join us. The neighborhood around G's house was quiet as we walked past the houses on our way to the woods, a few blocks uphill. Before we entered the forest, G asked me what time it was. I looked at my watch and it said 2am. It only occurs to me now that four hours couldn't possibly have passed since we left the bar. At the time, both G and I accepted that it was 2am.

We walked around in the woods for perhaps half an hour, enjoying the strange, distorted sights. Trees seemed enormous and loomed ominously over us, extending their branches as if reaching out to grab us. Shadows seemed longer and moved strangely. As we were walking out of the woods, G asked me again what time it was. I looked at my watch and stopped dead in my tracks. It was 1:30am - half an hour earlier than when we'd entered the forest. I asked G to look at my watch and he agreed with the time. We joked about time going backwards and said that in a few more hours we'd be back at the bar again.

On the way back to G's house, we walked around the neighborhood through some of the back streets. Nothing looked real. Everything looked perfect. Everything was beautiful. All the grass was a uniform green, and every blade was cut to the same height and there wasn't a single weed in anyone's lawn. None of the paint on any of the houses was peeling. We both stopped and stared at one house in particular. G said that it looked like a prop on a movie set. If we walked up to it and kicked it, G said, it would fall over. I thought it looked like something out of an idealized 1950's family TV show, and kept staring at the front door waiting for Beaver Cleaver's mom to open it and wave to us. Oddly enough, I still wasn't convinced the shrooms were having an effect. It all seemed so subtle and gentle on the brain.

When we got back to G's house, we woke up T, who was still on the sofa. He told us he had relived every negative experience of his life (not sure whether he was asleep or awake for this) and that he'd had a nightmare of a fat Polynesian woman sitting on his face. G decided to make pasta. As he boiled the water, I looked at my watch and compared it to the kitchen clock. It was 2am (again). Actually, it was exactly 1:52. I asked G to confirm this, which he did. We cooked the ravioli for about 20 minutes, then took our plates onto the front porch to eat and listen to music on a portable radio. We took our time eating and listened to several songs.

After eating, we washed the dishes, then moved to the back yard, where we sat on chairs in the grass. At least an hour seemed to go by since I last looked at my watch. I now looked at it, and it was 1:45 !!! The shock must have shown on my face, because my friends asked me what was wrong. When I told them, T confirmed that it was 1:45 on his cell phone clock. I began to freak, but in a delighted way. I began to wonder if the perception of time and time itself are the same thing, and if altering brain chemistry could actually change the time. I got nothing but weird looks from my buddies. Okay, so maybe I couldn't tell what time it was, but then neither could they. For several hours, the time seemed to bounce back and forth between one and two o' clock.

As we sat there in the yard, I gazed out across the neighbor's back yards. The space seemed immense, as if I could see half a mile across other people's yards. Off in the distance, to my left, I saw an enormous, beautiful mansion. Towering over everything, to my right, was an enormous oak tree that seemed the size of a redwood to me in my beshroomed state. I was in awe of the whole scene. It was SO beautiful! I told myself that I loved the earth and that I loved living here, and had to be careful not to show my buddies how choked-up and teary-eyed I was getting.

Then my watch finally made it past two o' clock and I started coming back to normalcy. By three I was back in reality again. Days later, I went back to G's back yard and looked again in that direction. It was not possible to see very far across the other yards. There was no mansion off to the left, only a garage. There was no towering tree. There was no beautiful scene. Only then did I realize just how profoundly the shrooms had affected me.

This was my second experience with psilocybin.

After my first exposure to shrooms, my friend T decided to give me all of his leftovers from that night. I weighed it on a lab scale and it was 6.7 grams in total. I had read that to get the maximum effect out of psilocybin, you need to go over 5 grams, so I decided to do everything I had in one shot. Around 7pm I walked into the bar where my buddies hang out. I had just swallowed the shrooms and had a grin on my face. When my friend G found out what I had done, he demanded that I give him my car keys, which I did. He was much more experienced with mushrooms and had never done as much as I just did.

About twenty minutes later, everything became UNBELIEVABLY colorful! Objects had a weird prism effect around their edges and people's faces were orange. Nothing looked real. Everything took on an almost cartoon-like quality. I was expecting to level-out, but instead I just kept going deeper and deeper.

After about half an hour, I went downstairs to the bathroom because I felt the urge to purge. I stood there, swaying back and forth, staring at the floor. Then I saw thousands of little white dots that began swirling. The whole floor started squirming as if covered in maggots. Then I exploded into the toilet in a spray of vomit. After that, my friends suggested I go for a walk. They didn't realize just how bad I was doing or they would have come with me. I wandered out of the bar, disoriented . A feeling of panic began to come over me, yet there was nothing really wrong with me. I just had the unexplainable feeling that I had just made the biggest mistake of my life, and this was only the beginning.

I wandered around the neighborhood and got hopelessly lost, even though I've lived here my whole life. The visual part of my trip was over. As I walked, the psilocybin began to squeeze my emotions out of me like water out of a sponge. My thoughts fixated on my father, and how my relationship with him had ended for the second time after a failed attempt at reconciliation. The pain I felt was like every painful experience in my life had just happened a minute ago. Love, loss, mourning, guilt, shame, regret all poured out of me, and I became irrationally convinced that I was about to die and needed to reach out to my dad one last time.

I stopped a stranger on the street. I was sweating profusely and my pupils were probably the size of dimes. I asked him if I could use his cell phone. This was really stupid since I was obviously tripping and could have gotten arrested. He gave me his phone, but I couldn't think of anybody's phone number to call, so I gave him back his phone and asked him to point the way to the town center. He told me to keep walking the way I had been walking. I thanked him, walked one block and was lost again.

Somehow I made it back to the bar and asked my friends to take me home. G still had my car keys and drove for me, while T followed behind us in his car. They stopped at a pizzeria to get me some pizza and water to bring me down. I don't know how much time had elapsed. I thought I had been walking for hours, but they said I had only been away from the bar for 45 minutes. As G drove me home, I asked him to take me to my father. He wisely refused. I asked him to take me to the hospital. Again, he wisely refused. Thank God for friends, especially friends with more experience.

Once they got me home, I took a shower and crawled into bed and that's when things REALLY got weird. I was tripping worse than ever. In the darkness of my room, I stared at the ceiling, feeling very cold. Then suddenly, I began to experience a 'loss of self'. I began to merge with the room. I could still feel my body, but didn't feel connected to it. It was as if I was feeling the sensations in someone else's body. I wiggled my toes and that brought me back, but incompletely and only momentarily. I still had emotions too, but they didn't seem to be MY emotions. It was as if I was dispassionately observing someone else's emotional meltdown rather than my own.

Faces appeared to me, of my parents, my grandmother, other people I had known in life. But I couldn't think of anyone's name, and I was overcome by the feeling that NONE of these people were real, or that, at any rate, none of them mattered anymore. I was beyond that world. I felt that my entire life had been unreal, an illusion, a dream. Now, for the first time ever, I was waking up from that dream and seeing REALITY.

I discovered, to my horror, that reality is a cold, dark, lonely void. I no longer feared dying because 'dying' doesn't exist, only the void exists, and I was now trapped in that void. This was worse than dying. I realized that the one overwhelming emotion that God feels is loneliness. I also believed/feared that I could never return to the world I had known. The void had swallowed me and would never let me go.

(Note: the darkness. cold and out-of-body crap probably could have been remedied by getting up, turning on the lights, and turning off the air conditioner.)

Shortly afterwards, I began to feel myself coming back to reality. In another hour, I was fine. Badly shaken, I got up and wrote what I had just experienced. All in all, my trip lasted six hours. I won't say that I'll never do shrooms again, but I'll show more respect next time. Now that I've tried 2 grams and 6.7 grams, I would guess that the ideal dose (at least for me) is probably 2 to 3 grams.

Respect the power of the mushrooms.

Exp Year: 2003	ExpID: 28211
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: May 7, 2007	Views: 30,416
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