DOSE: T+ 0:00	1 glass	oral	Alcohol - Beer/Wine	(liquid)
T+ 0:00	1 cig.	smoked	Cannabis	(plant material)
T+ 1:00	18 g	oral	Mushrooms - P. cubensis	(fresh)
T+ 11:00		smoked	Cannabis	(plant material)

BODY WEIGHT:

170 lb

The mushrooms were eaten at a friend’s house, a cheap and nasty furnished student bungalow. I knocked on the door, late by about fifteen minutes still wearing a shirt and tie, my bulging plastic satchel crammed school-childrens’ exercise books plus a bit of weed and 60g of mushrooms which I’d ordered off the internet which felt so wrong and yet so cool! I had been feeling tired but had managed to turn myself off for about thirty minutes on the bus-journey there so was feeling quite rested and looking forward to a bit of substance abuse.

Present were three good mates of mine from University, plus someone’s boyfriend.

CB – “off the booze”, doesn’t do drugs, prefers adrenaline sports

NS – quality mate and occasional stoning buddy

MA – maniac junky, friend and dealer

Boyfriend – MA’s boyfriend, seems like an experienced drugs user

Boyfriend offered me a beer. I accepted, somewhat reluctantly, and found a place to sit. The TV was on, showing I think The Simpsons. NS started skinning up, we used some of my skunk and some of his. We then, for about 30 minutes, passed around spiffs. We had a few on the go but the passes and the tokes were quick, in that time I reckon I’d only had about one medium-strength king-size. The atmosphere was relaxed but keen, we were all looking forward to the shrooms and were perfectly comfortable. The atmosphere was good, the air smokey, as I like it.

I didn’t feel fantastically high and decided “everything in excess!” so loaded my pipe for a hit. I did this twice but the booze prevented me enjoying the cannabis in the way I'm used to. By the time we were watching Pulp Fiction on CB’s play-station I was quite fuct, in a jittery, weird but subdued way. I was by now, in my stoned state, well into pulp-fiction and had a cannabis-dampened friendly dispute over the small change required for the pizzas with NS. CB and MA then went for pizzas and I was left with NS and Boyfriend. Pulp Fiction had never been so good – robbing restaurants is such a good idea! I can’t remember what the other two were doing but I was probably talking over it.

The pizzas arrived. I’d rather stupidly, in my stoned state, ordered one which had loads of mushrooms on, CB seemed to appreciate the irony. We’d decided to split the 60g four ways, between me, Boyfriend, NS and MA. CB just ate his pizza, typically sober. With perfect timing the over-dose scene came on as we were stuffing our faces with magic mushrooms and plasticy pizzas whishing they hadn’t been so tight with the tomatoes. NS didn’t like the texture so he gave some to me, I’m not sure how many, it was more than just a bit. We sat around “coming up”, MA and Boyfriend were doing their own thing, MA rushed off eventually B/F to go and see if she was alright. The time was now about 10 or 11pm.

Which left me and NS, each to a comfy chair and somehow slobbed out. By this point I was having a mad, introspective trip. It was deeply personal, rather downbeat, but had many genuine insights. The trip then turned to one with shut-eye visions of patterns, like brain tissue or strings of genes, as an experience they were as much physical, mental and emotional as they were visual. Everything seemed coherent and as though it all somehow fitted together, though what everything was I wasn’t sure. I then had lots of fuct but not entirely nonsense thoughts about my place in humanity. CB had by this point gone home, I remember him packing up his playstation and being obviously bemused by the whole scene. There was some madness sounding out from MA’s room.

During this period and for only a short time I felt heavenly, a sensation of absolute love, of total bliss. Perhaps the mushrooms may have been acting on the same part of the brain as Heroin or MDMA. I don’t know, I’m not a scientist. It was slightly guilty glow, I felt sleazy for being practically passed out and feeling like that but the only other feeling I had was one of love, peace and acceptance and these were much more powerful.

I then got up, spoke to NS, and wandered into the kitchen, my eyes beaming, my nerves buzzing, the light seemed great. I felt like command and appreciation of language was in some way more inspired, doubly fluent, my appreciation of things and sense of humour were increased, I felt as though my trains of thought ran quicker, stopped at more stations and operated down more lines. It was like going down to the station and going on a load of train journeys until I ended up in Cambodia – under the sea then across Eurasia.

I felt happy and philosophical. B/F popped out of MA’s room and told us she’d “had a bad shroom”, I was delighting in learning yet more of the jargon of shrooms-users, such as “coming up”, so I made my way to NS, put on a knowing face and made an appropriate head nod/shake thing and said, tongue firmly in cheek, “bad shroom” as though the phrase meant lots to us and we both knew exactly what it meant and had been on bad trips a thousand times.

This kicked off a mad, philosophical and creative time which lasted until 10am the next day! Everything our minds felt or thought seemed to be in detail, our clarity, depth and vision as thinkers felt strangely extended. Amongst may other things, we founded a Temple of Reason in one corner of the lounge and established a Republic of Labour in the other. The two merged at about 5am. Then we discussed the idea of history and our place in the universe. We recorded the story of Pandora’s Box on one of the spent pizza boxes in case they became the only surviving human artifact in the universe. At the end of it all we felt as though we understood the world and ourselves much better. And I think we did, that it wasn’t just a sensation.

I had hallucinations at around 3am and so did NS. I saw a clock bulge and its surrounding wall bulge out like a saggy bubble, people in photographs switch around, the plaster marks on the ceiling danced like people and the chimney-wall jittered and fractured. Someone had hung above the electric fire a copy of that famous picture of American builders in the 1920s enjoying sandwiches and sucking back smokes whilst sitting on a steel girder “half-way above the clouds”. Having decided, when I was eating my shroom-pizza, that they looked as though they were having some weed and pizzas, they now, five hours in, began to move their heads and whatever they were holding and the whole photograph became more beautiful, much more a work of colour and shades than a work of objects and lines.

Throughout the experience, with the exception of the “coming up” my bladder and gut felt tight and flexing. I couldn’t piss and was confused as to whether or not I wanted to or needed to. I couldn’t read the signals and wasn’t sure what was happening. I thought I might be dehydrated but my mouth wasn’t dry. I had a pint of water but this didn’t make me want to go and made no difference to anything. But I got used to it after a couple of hours, before which I was walking around asking “Where the fuck’s my fucking piss! Oh man! Where’s it fucking gone!”. But in that state of mind I was soon distracted although to begin I was worried I might wet myself, like a smackhead. But when I did manage to piss it was a tiny amount and very concentrated. By about 2am I’d decided to stop trying, I didn’t want to flush anything out. It was probably just the body reacting to something in the mushrooms. Who knows.

I also, at the very start, began to question the wisdom of what I was doing, I felt I’d gone too far, had too many, done something stupid. But once I’d learnt to appreciate the effects I came to love it.

The come-down was good. It started after the hallucinations, at about 4-ish, we were still in the same mindset, but calmer, less intense and less psychedelic but we agreed that our visuals were still quite trippy. Our handwriting was definitely impaired! We were by now recycling the old jokes we’d always bring up during stoning. We stayed up, our bodies tired but our minds fully engaged until about ten in the morning, talking and thinking. At this point I noticed the unpleasant gut-clenching feeling and as I remember my face started to twitch a little, I felt truly wasted, as never before, and I used to be a heavy drinker, used to getting trashed. But everything seemed so clear, I felt fully conscious. During the come-down we lost sense of time and didn’t feel up to moving around much. We decided a bit of weed would help and I think that gave us a smoother ride, the effects of the high/onset of the weed synthesised with the decline of the mushrooms and I, certainly, felt much happier like that.

We slept for 3 hours, or something like that, we woke up at 1pm the next day, my body felt limp, perhaps because it felt so tight the night before. The mental effects had gone. I had some bacon and popped out for a sandwich. We had a spliff in MA’s room, listened to a CD, I had a cig. We then went our separate ways for Easter.

Exp Year: 2004	ExpID: 32240
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jun 19, 2007	Views: 5,128
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Mushrooms - P. cubensis (66) : General (1), Glowing Experiences (4), Small Group (2-9) (17)