DOSE: T+ 0:00			Pharmaceuticals	(daily)
T+ 0:00			Pharms - Risperidone	(daily)
T+ 0:00	2.3 g	oral	Syrian Rue	(ground / crushed)
T+ 0:15	11 g	oral	Mimosa tenuiflora	(tea)

BODY WEIGHT:

165 lb

Just a note: I am on three perscription medications for bipolar disorder and high blood pressure: Lisinopril, for high blood pressure, Lamictal, a mood-stabalizer, and risperodal, an anti-psychotic. I did a lot of reasearch to make sure none of these would interact with the ayahusca, and none did. I took my normal daily dose the night before the experience and before bed after the experience.

Preparation:
I ordered two 28-g bags of mimosa hostillis and one 28-g bag of Syrian rue. I was hoping for a 2.5 g dose or rue and an 11 g dose of mimosa. I was unable, after a short search, to procure a scale for any reasonable price. I decided to “eyeball” the amounts. In retrospect, this was a very stupid idea, and I was very, very lucky.

I emptied the rue as evenly as I could on a plate. I cut the pile in two halves, which I estimated at 14 g each. I then cut one of the halves in half to equal what I thought was 7 g. I then cut one of these piles in half for 3.5 g. I then cut this last pile in thirds, and removed two of the thirds, or about 2.3 g, as the dose. The rue was ground in a coffee grinder. I thought at first the seeds would be too small to grind, but I was wrong and I got about an even teaspoon of powder out of them. I placed this rue powder in a small cup awaiting ingestion.

The mimosa, being cut into strips of bark of differing lengths and thicknesses, was impossible to even estimate a dose while whole, so I immediately ground the whole bag. Some of the bigger chunks were hard to grind and had to be crushed with a blunt object before being placed in the grinder. In the end, I got a huge pile of purplish-red vine powder. I spread this out as evenly as I could on the plate. I cut it in two halves, about 14 g each. I put one half away for a rainy day. I cut the other pile in two halves, about 7 g each. I took a bit more than half from one of the piles and added it to the other for an about 11 g dose. The dose was, bunched up, about the size of a golf ball and a half. I do not know how much I truly ingested. Knowing my eyeballing skills, it was probably much more or much less than 11 g. One day, when I get a scale, I will weigh the remainder and subtract from 28 to figure it out. I highly, highly suggest that everyone use a scale during preparation. What I did was VERY stupid and could have caused disastrous effects.

To cook the mimosa, I put it inside a woman’s stocking, so I would not have to fish the plant material out later. I tied off the end of the stocking and made sort of a mimosa teabag. I took a small pot and filled it almost completely with tap water. Into the water, I poured most of a pint of lime juice to make ascorbic acid. I used more juice than I had intended, and probably more than I needed, but this turned out to be a good thing when ingestion came around. I used so much juice the water became very white. I mixed it up with a spoon, dropped in the mimosa “teabag” and put it on the burner on high.

I let the mimosa come to a boil and let it stay that way for one hour. Every so often I gave it a stir and used the spoon to squeeze the bag and get some of the juice into the bowl. At the end of the hour, most of the water was gone, and what was left was this syrupy purplish-reddish ooze. I let it cool, took out the stocking, and wrung it out to squeeze out every last drop of liquid back into the pot. I then put the pot back on the stove and let it boil a while longer so I would not have so much liquid to ingest. I ended up with about an ounce and a half – less than I planned and more than I would want in the future. Boil yours down to an amount you can swallow in one gulp, you will see why in a minute.

I poured the mimosa tea into a plastic cup. There was a lot of gooey residue in the pot that I tried to scrape up and put in the cup. I got most of it there. I covered the cup in plastic wrap and put it in the fridge to wait for ingestion (about 48 hours later).

Set:
I prepared myself with a tyramine-free diet for three days. The day of the experience I did not eat anything. I was very excited at the prospect of drinking the tea. I have very little experience with psychedelics. I had done shrooms a few times, the last time was the only time I had eaten anything like a significant amount and I had a hellish experience. That had been about 2 years ago. Recently, I have been smoking salvia relatively often, with varying degrees of intensity, but nothing like the trip that was to follow. I used to have a serious problem with mood-altering drugs. I snorted Percocets on a daily basis, which I would wash down with vodka, and I smoked pot constantly. This landed me in a rehab over a year ago. I have been off mood-altering drugs ever since, but have had an increasing interest in tripping again, despite my previous bad experience. I did a lot of research on ayahuasca and its effects before deciding to try it. I ordered it and the salvia at the same time. I had two very bad intense experiences on salvia, and had convinced myself I should never try the huasca, and if I did it would be AWEFUL. Suddenly, though, the time for it was right. The setting would be right and safe and I felt ready.

I had a sort of nervous excitement going into it. A friend of mine from my old school, who is FAR more experienced in psychedelics than I am, had tried huasca recently and had a successful yet horrifying experience. (See “Just a Psychedelic Frothy Foam” by Eric, that’s him) I told myself that my experience would likely be a bad one. I was determined to “go with the flow” whatever happens. Eric told me “she will show you what you need to see” and I took his word on this, and decided that I would try it, good or bad. I entered the experience with a nervous-yet-determined state of mind.

Setting:
I could not find anyone at my shitty university to agree to trip with me, no one around here is really into that sort of thing. I decided to trip at the school on the Saturday night before Easter. Not being Christian, I did not go home, but the vast majority of the school did. I was almost completely alone on a beautiful classic Connecticut university campus. I hate my school, but, when empty, it is aesthetically gorgeous. There were some people on campus here and there, but none who knew what I was doing and few who knew me at all. I was, for all intensive purposes, alone. The majority of the experience ended up in my dorm room. It is a small dark room for three people. My two roommates were, of course, gone. My bed is a loft, you have to climb to get in it and watch your head once you’re up there. The walls are a sort of off-white brick and around my bed they are covered with cut-out pictures from Playboy magazine from the 1960’s and 1970’s.

The experience:
This is my experience from what I can piece together in my memory. It is now just over 24 hours from the experience, and I know that some of my memories of the experience are hazy at best. Take anything I say about where I was when with a grain of salt, because I don’t completely remember. What I do remember very well is the emotion and the types of things I was seeing all around me.

T+0:00: Ingestion took place at 5 p.m. I put some of the rue into my mouth and washed it down with water almost like a pill. It was EXTREMELY bitter. I almost gagged, but I was able to get it down. I decided it would be easier to swallow the rest in water, so I filled the cup and drank down the powdery water. It tasted horrible but was tolerable.

T+0:15: I drank the mimosa tea. I swallowed about 2/3rds of it in one gulp. I was able to swallow this first bit before the taste hit me. It was a good thing that I used so much lemon juice, I think, because it tasted mostly like drinking straight lemon juice, but with the awful bitter aftertaste. If lemon juice can rot, or if you can make juice out of rotten lemons, this is what I think it would taste like. The second sip, though much smaller, was far harder to get down, because now I tasted the brew. I chased it with water.

T+0:30: I start to get nervous and restless. Nothing is happening yet. After trying to watch various movies or listen to music in the room, I decide to go for a walk waiting for the effects to kick in. I brought a plastic bag with me in case of vomiting. (I had a waste basket in the room ready for such an occurrence) I started to get very nervous as I walked. I started to curse myself, calling myself an idiot for drinking this stuff, and in a deep fear of what was to come. Every so often I reminded myself, even before the trip began, that whatever happened it would end. I sat down on a bench in the middle of campus. A feeling of nausea was ebbing and flowing.

T+0:50: Sitting on this bench the first visual effects are seen. A mountain in a state park across the street from the school looks as if it had been painted with watercolors, the trees seem to blur together. A garbage can sitting next to me starts to morph. As I breath, it breaths. The edges on the top of the can seem to extend a bit and come back in. Some bright colors seem to appear around its base, like when a prism appears in oil spilled on asphalt.

T+0:55: I start to get very nervous sitting on this bench. At times I am able to calm myself down and remind myself that whatever happens, I planned to just roll with it. I walk back to the dorm, because I start to feel nauseous and decide that even with the few people on campus, it would not be good to start vomiting in public. I also decide that I really want to vomit to prevent the trip that I was starting to understand was about to come.

T+1:00: I get back to the room. I sit down and start to calm down. I no longer am getting any real visual effects, just slight inklings of something happening here and there- nothing I could really put my finger on or remember. I go to the bathroom to pee. While leaving, I look at myself in the mirror. My eyes are almost all pupil, my irises are barely noticeable. The colors of my tie-dye shirt seem to twirl together. My body looks as though I am in a fun house mirror. At this moment I realize that this is for real, and I tell myself “you ain’t seen nothing yet.” For a short while a shitty song with a chorus line “you ain’t seen nothing yet” gets stuck playing over and over in my mind, but this soon passes.

T+1:10: I decide to go outside again, to kind of walk and try to forget about what was happening to me. I go along the side of the dorm and sit on a bench facing a creek behind the building. Across the creek is a baseball field. I think I see someone walking through the field. He begins to glide across the field – his legs look like one blur and he glides easily through the chain fences that are on the field. I do not know if he was real or not. I start to get nervous again and start to walk again.

T+1:13: There is a small parking lot facing the door to my dorm building. I walk towards it. There is a girl or woman there in a bright green shirt who closes the trunk on her SUV. Her shirt is pink in its purest form, and her whole body seems to make a perfect arc with the trunk of the car. She closes it in slow motion... it seems to take 10 minutes for her to close the thing. I walk past her. The visuals start to become more frequent, and I decide I will be safer in the dorm. Some bare trees on the way back seem to stretch out like something out of a Burton film.

T+ 1:20: I sit in a chair in the room. I get nauseous one last time and try to vomit into the basket. I make one last heave, and nothing comes out. The nausea leaves me instantly with this last vomiting attempt and does not return. I look around the room and see all sorts of visuals around me. Some scratches on a leather chair in the room come to life. They come out of the chair and start to swirl in beautiful visuals. I start to pass my fear and enjoy myself. I decide I will sit and enjoy the visuals as they come. Every so often I open my eyes, take in another scene, close my eyes, and let it transform in my mind. There are lots of “melting” visual effects with my eyes closed.

T+1:30: Things start to get more and more intense very quickly. One of my roommates, who has no experience with any drugs besides alcohol, may be coming back from work. For a moment I worry that if he does come, I will have no way of communicating what is going on to him. I remind myself that whatever happens happens, and I will go with the flow. I start to get nervous again and I put on some Grateful Dead to calm me. I realize the trip is coming in waves, and that I was in one of the valleys with some more control over myself, yet I can barely work the computer with the music on it, so I choose the first show I click on: the second set of 5/8/77. (Those who know the Dead know that this was a very cliché show to pick, but it ended up serving me well) I am able to skip the beginning of the set where the audience is told to “step back” and I start immediately with Scarlet/Fire. I turn off the lights, and decide to ride out the storm in my bed.

T+1:35: My reality has disintegrated. I lie on my bed and become a part of it, and a part of the music that flows around me. One of my pillows is extremely soft and seems to engulf my entire being into this gentle softness.

For the next hour or so I peak, and I will describe it here as best I can, in no particular chronological order, because I do not remember the order that it happened.

I gain full control over my existence. I first notice that I have control over my sense of time. At first every moment seems to last an eternity. I am filled with a sort of indescribable bliss and ease, and I do not want it to end, so I am able to expand each moment as long as I want. In a way, it never ended because each moment was an eternity in and of itself. Occasionally, fear would strike me again, but every time I was able to snuff it quickly and return to my blissful state. I start to get curious about this control of time. The peak comes in waves. At times my physical body is completely incapacitated, at other times I can use it. During one of the lows, I lean over to my alarm clock and press the button that makes it display seconds. I cannot read nor understand the numbers, but I can see them move and can tell when each second changes. I have complete control over how fast it takes for each second to pass. At times I stretch each one out so it lasts forever. At times I rush through the seconds, making them move extraordinarily rapidly.

Lying on my bed I am able to travel in and out of my body. Whenever in my body, I am completely absorbed by the music and the softness of the bed around me. The music seems to reach out from the past and somehow know exactly what note I want to hear when. When I leave my body I am able to travel within my own memory. I was able to choose almost any experience from my past and GO there. For a while, I relived every happy memory available to me. I did not want the good feeling to end, so I stretched it as long as I could. Each moment lasted an eternity, each memory lasted an eternity.

When in my body I saw amazing visual effects. As I said, the peak came in waves. At the high points, there was no difference in my visual perception with my eyes open and my eyes closed. At these moments I was often unsure if my eyes were open or closed. At the lows, I would sometimes like to keep them open, and see the room around me (with the lights off it is dim, not totally dark) and see everything transform. I wave my fingers in front of my eyes and they stretch for miles. Everything I see blends and melts together in a beautiful colorful painting. At times I would keep my eyes closed, and see amazing 2-dimensional abstract visuals.

T+2:30: The descent from the peak begins. I do not want to believe that it is ending, but slowly I again become a slave to time. I remember several times during the dropping period I took a trip to the bathroom, and each time the visuals on the way were progressively less noticeable. I was still tripping very hard, but nothing like what I had felt for the past hour. I played with the music on my computer, and felt in amazing control when I was able to adjust the volume.

T+3:00: The effects are all but gone. I look in the mirror and see that my pupils are still huge. Visuals again come and go in short waves, but I know that the intense part is behind me. The next hour takes a very short amount of time, during which I sort of mill around the room trying to squeeze out what little effects I could. I think that what I was experiencing was actually more intense than I had experienced in the hour leading up to the peak, but I was now used to the effects, and they seemed pale by comparison.

T+4:00: All of the main effects have left. I start to get my ability to communicate back. I have to tell somebody about my experience. I can read again and I go to an online Dead-related chat room and try to tell some people there what I had experienced. I call up a friend of mine simply to have a voice to talk to and prove to myself that I really can communicate. I look in the mirror and see that my pupils are still huge, but they return to normal by T+ 5:00. I get filled with a strange sort of peaceful boredom. I was exhilarated by the experience I had just had, and I was unable to fix my mind on anything for more than a few minutes... nothing could hold my attention.

I was very tired and tried to sleep, but I suddenly got a second wind and was wide awake. Later in the night I took sleeping pills and slept very soundly.

This peaceful boredom lasted until just about T+24. With every moment that passes, I forget a bit more of the feeling of the experience. Without a doubt, that peak was the best feeling of my life, and with each passing minute it seems more distant from me.

I know I will return to this drug again, but I do not want to try it for some time. I was lucky that my experience was good, and I was aware the entire time that it could have been awful. The set and setting were perfect, and if I try this again, I will once again need it to be perfect.

Exp Year: 2005	ExpID: 41788
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Mar 29, 2005	Views: 30,225
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Mimosa tenuiflora (74), Syrian Rue (45), Huasca Combo (269) : Alone (16), Combinations (3), General (1)