DOSE:	repeated	oral	Mushrooms - P. cubensis
	repeated	oral	Vitamin C

BODY WEIGHT:

140 lb

This is not just a single trip report but rather a small collection of experiences (four to be exact) which makes up the whole of my small involvement with shrooms to date. I feel that together these experience make up an interesting progression, from subtle, barely noticeable effects the first time, to fairly strong and intense ones the most recent time.

Now before I start I guess some personal background information is in order so here it goes, I’m a 18 year old guy and as an only child I am fairly good at amusing myself, growing and consuming both mushies and weed is a pastime, albeit an unconventional one. I have recently stopped smoking pot but I’m looking forward to a new batch of Texan strain shrooms as they are supposed to be fairly potent. I live in Canada a fair distance from any great urban centres, in other words in the woods, which suits me just fine except, well... it is small town so there is a fair share of red necks, people who, if I talk to them, come across like this: “I hate black people, gay people, foreign people, hippies, and people from Quebec, and I love Stephen Harper” (Big “C” conservative Canadian PM).

I do my best to avoid and ignore these people and luckily I live in a “pocket” of much more interesting people, artisans, old draft dodgers and quasi hippies. I do not consider myself to be much of drug using person and the heaviest stuff I’ve ever touched was E, which had such a tiny effect as to render the experience unremarkable. I don’t drink alcohol and I’ve basically quit smoking pot so that leaves mushrooms as the drug of choice, as well as life which is really one big trip and I try to take life with a grain of salt as being too serious is only going to wreak the experience. I mean just consider for a moment the action of say driving a car or holding a conversation, if I think about it everything is really fucked up in so many ways. Things like that are what make life so trippy, anything and everything can be a trip.

Life on Earth is simply a matter of crazy coincidences and we spend way to much time dwelling on the trivial and not enjoying what an insane deal we have here. Anyhoo, on to the mushroom experiences.

Experience #1:

My first involvement with mushrooms came during the summer of 2005 at a funky music festival in fairly close proximity to where I live. Now I’m going to try and set the stage for you so picture this if you will: this festival is fairly small at around 2000 people and it is hidden away in the forest far enough away from any major road as to be extremely peaceful. Now when I say forest I mean it, I am practically in the Northern shield with lots of evergreens and maples towering over my head. The space is fairly large with a main clearing on a hill, a large stage at the bottom and many smaller clearings spreading off like fingers from the base of the hand with the tents tucked away in these smaller clearings.

Some clearings slope down into a tranquil valley while others rise slightly off into the woods beyond. The whole place is very relaxing and perfect for tripping which is exactly what many people do. The great thing is that with the kind of people the festival attracts I could walk around naked on acid and not get a whole lot of weird looks. Tons of people are smoking dope and everyone is dancing to the live music, going to the workshops, or chilling around the numerous campfires singing and playing music. The security is volunteer and relaxed and there isn’t a cop in sight. All in all a nice atmosphere for a trip.

I arrived on the last day of the festival seeing as all the camping passes were gone and all we could get were day passes. The last day is traditionally the craziest with the biggest acts and the most number of people, also many chose to trip on the last day as a fitting climax to the event. I met up with some friends who were looking for mushrooms and started chilling and smoking hookah and pot with them (I smoked pot then) at their campsite in the woods at the end of one of the clearings. I had no thought of doing mushrooms at that point but the hunt was successful and they managed to purchase a large bag of shrooms and I ended up buying a gram.

The group doing them consisted of myself and six others: M, B, C, S, T, and P as I shall call them. Some others were drinking or smoking pot. I am remembering this almost a year later so exact time is a guess, but I would say we took them at about 7pm. I was fairly stoned by this time and I didn’t think the shrooms tasted bad at all, while some other people found them quite unpleasant. We moved to another campsite at about T+1:00 smoking the hookah all the way, by this time I was plenty high, but I couldn’t feel the shrooms which was disappointing considering the others were really starting to feel them.

Another person, E, was also looking for shrooms and she purchased about the same dose as I bought and we ended up chilling due to the fact that the shrooms were not really doing what we expected. It ended up that we just couldn’t keep up with the other shroomers who were rocketing around full of energy and exclaiming that there were faces in the woods and that the lighted stage looked like a trippy city. E and I ended up siting and talking at the original campsite and I found that I was not completely baseline as I felt entirely and totally at peace and relaxed. E, as far as I could tell felt similar and we exclaimed how peaceful it was and how the trees seemed to almost blend in with the sky but not in a very psychedelic sense. We left that campsite and moved to the campsite of one of my friends, A, from the GTA who I never get to see but I wish I could more often because he is one of the coolest people I know.

Anyway we ended up eating whole wheat bread with nothing on it and exclaiming about the texture and coolness which was on of the trippiest things we encountered. A came to the campsite and talked for a while about his own shroom experiences and how much life rocks. In the end E went off to bed at about 3am and I went to sleep in A’s tent at about 4am as I missed my ride home. Lucky the security wasn’t heavy as I had no camping pass bracelet on. This ended up being a very minor trip but a great learning experience. I was at peace with everything and that is quite a feeling.

Experience #2:

My second experience was slightly more effective in delivering a trip as I observed the infamous breathing of objects and a few other things of a psychedelic nature. Once again I shall set the stage: by this time it was winter and a fairly thick layer of snow covered the ground with a layer of ice on top of that, this ice being the result of freezing rain, a particularly nasty phenomenon for those who have never experienced it, it is what it sounds like with super-cooled rain freezing on contact with anything. The setting for this experience was B’s house and S attended along with R and myself. R ended up not doing any shrooms which left B, S and myself to ingest the sketchy looking fungi. They tasted quite crap-a-licious and we were sceptical also of their origins and reasoned that they might not produce much of a trip.

Once again I am not quite sure of the time but I would say we took them at about 8pm. We stayed the first couple of hours in B’s room which is fairly trippy in itself with lots of posters etc, in other words a stoner’s room. We took some bong hits and settled back to see if these little shrooms would take effect.

At about T+ 1:30 I began to feel some interesting energy pulsing inside of me, not much but it was there. Later on I started to see subtle movement within some of the posters. S and B were envious as they could feel basically nothing, but that changed. As I stayed virtually a little off baseline they got higher and higher. They were laughing at everything and starting to exclaim how they could definitely feel the mushrooms. We decided to venture out into the night in search of trippy surroundings, which proved fairly fruitful as S exclaimed that everything had changed into the iTunes equalizer and that he was definitely tripping.

We plodded around the woods and fields behind B’s house having snowball fights and getting hit in the face by branches we couldn’t see. In the end B and S lost their sense of direction and I managed to lead us back to the house. Although the woods may have tripped B and S out I faired better inside. The CEV’s were fairly intense but the whole experience was nothing to write home about. One thing of some interest was the appearance of my deceased grandmother who’s face appeared in front of me while I had my eyes open. She didn’t say anything and only remained for a second but her appearance caused me to ingress more and think about her life, our relationship and her very sudden death.

Most of the trip inside I spent lying on B’s bed and thinking until I fell asleep, end of story. This trip had elements that were quite intense but most of it was simple and fairly rooted in reality. Now this next trip on the other hand cranked the volume up quite a bit.

Experience #3:

This third trip was much more of a intense experience. By that time(early spring) I had managed to grow a few small “Z” strain mushrooms and one day I arrived back from school(at about 3pm) to find that the veils under the shrooms had broken off meaning that they were prime for the picking, I also had free reign of the house until later that night so I decided to try them out. I preceded to remove the four shrooms from the cake and consumed them with some orange juice and a capsule of vitamin C. My best guess as to the weight of the mushrooms would be about 1.5 grams if they were dry, I can only speculate, but the dose was not huge.

After consuming the slightly slippery feeling but otherwise fine tasting shrooms I began to build a fire in our stove as it was still fairly cool outside and we heat our house with wood. After only about 30 minutes I began to feel the first alerts and I knew that I would finally experience a more intense trip, especially nice when the shrooms are my own and the experience is a culmination of a month or so of work and waiting. As I continued to feed and tend to the fire I could feel amazing energy building up inside by body, beginning deep within my gut and pulsing out through my whole body. This exited me very much as I could tell that, even though the dose had been small, the shrooms were potent and I was in for a ride.

I had now better describe my loft as I spent the majority of the trip within it. It is built into my room and it is quite possibly my favourite place to spend time. I have my sound system set up with five fairly large speakers, a quite decent Yamaha receiver and a Stanton turn-table(records rock!). The space is fairly small with room for two single size mattresses and a bean-bag chair. On three sides I can look down into the rest of my very cluttered room and on the third side the wall slopes up to meet the ceiling. Covering the untreated wooden railings I have a full size Canadian pot leaf flag and some Tom Thompson artwork(not original of course, I would not like to venture a guess as to how much the original “Jack Pine” painting costs). I have on the wall a collection of incredibly trippy pictures of Earth from space as well as some artwork of my own, also quite colourful and trippy. There are multi-coloured string lights circling the space as well as a fibre optic light and a TV with a DVD player in the corner.

As I began to feel the beginnings of the trip I raced up into my loft and put Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” album on then raced back downstairs to check on the fire. When I once again climbed into my loft the first song of the Pink Floyd album, “Shine on you Crazy Diamonds” was just reaching a crescendo. This song knows that it starts off slow and in a few minutes it builds up quickly with a rise in volume and powerful drum beats. I entered my loft at just that point and was hit my the music and also the sudden intensity of my trip. I felt entirely peaceful and relaxed as I watched the loft pulse and breath. The most striking element was the absolute intensity of the colours as well as the detail of everything around me. Touching something was a sensual experience and the colours were so beautiful. The pictures of Earth from space began the contract and expand and appeared completely 3D. Everything moved a different way with its own unique rhythm and flow.

I decided to watch “The Last Waltz” by Martin Scorsese which is the documentation of The Bands’s last concert, good stuff. The funny thing was the movie turned out to be the least trippy thing I encountered that evening, everything around me was going crazy but the movie itself was grounded quite heavily in reality but was still a joy to watch as always. At one point during the movie something interesting did happen in that Garth Hudson’s head started to shift around and morph but that was about it. I eventually left the loft during the movie and went to the washroom. Upon looking in the mirror I found that my face was behaving quite interestingly as various parts of it were floating in different directions, eyes and mouth going one way, cheeks another way. This did not bother me at all and I found it quite fascinating, in fact nothing during the whole of the trip was frightening at all.

After I left the washroom I headed back downstairs to get a drink or something but ended up blown away by the most intense body buzz I had ever experienced. My upper body felt light as a feather while my lower body felt 100 times heavier, crazy. I was still able to move around quite freely and I revelled in my surroundings. Outside it was getting darker and I could see the ash tree practically dancing as I stared at it.

Back to my loft I went touching everything in sight and enjoying every minute of the trip. I continued watching the movie and staring around at everything in my comfortable surroundings. At one point I reached over to pick up my paintball marker (I play tournament paintball, and no I don’t dress up in camo and wear war paint, I wear a jersey and lots of paintball specific gear and play on inflatable airball fields with other tournament players), I found that my toxic matrix, which is normally flat from the feed-neck back, was quite literally bent and undulating which was quite a sight to behold. The film eventually ended and so did my fairly short but intense trip and I was startled by the abrupt end to the trip, luckily it left a fabulous after-glow which made any activity pleasant, even doing the dishes.

Another point of interest was the lack of a mile-a-minute thought process during the trip itself, I basically had an amazing trip with all the deep thinking coming right after it ended, weird but cool. I eventually went to bed after my mum came home and it ended up that I didn’t have any kind of negative hang-over which was nice. This experience was quite the intro to a more involved trip experience and I was ready for another.

Experience #4:

This experience is the latest and greatest of my shroom trips. It has been almost a year since my first experience at the music festival and a few months since my last trip. My Texans started to pin on a Thursday, and in five days their veils had broken and they were ready to be picked. I measured the wet weight of my dose at almost a quarter of an ounce, and my estimation on dry weight would be about 3-4 grams. The location for my trip was to be, once again, my house. From the moment I got up until 6pm I had the house to myself and I was eager to begin the trip. At 10am I ate about half of the mushrooms with some lemonade and a vitamin C capsule, and while I could handle the taste of the mushrooms the texture was quite unpleasant.

After ingesting I proceeded to eat a small breakfast and then moved downstairs into the much cooler (literally) basement as it was about 40 degrees Celsius out with the humidity (I believe 40C translates into the low hundreds in degrees Fahrenheit). While waiting for the first signs of a trip I listened to some music and surfed the net for a little while until, at about T+0:45min, I felt the first alerts in the form of mild waves of energy coursing through my body . I also felt slightly light headed, but not nauseous at all. I decided some Beatles music was in order and so I put “1' into the CD player (“1' is a collection of every #1 hit ever released by the fab four) The next 45mins or so were very intense as the trip really started to hit me.

I can only describe the feeling as being one of great lightness, as if gravity had loosened her grip over me ever so slightly and I was free to move however I wished. I did not feel tired or stiff in any way and it was as if I had been given the ability to explore this new side of reality without restraint, and what a side it was! It was as if someone had turned up the volume on my perception of the world and nobody was enforcing the “normality” rules anymore.

I tied on a Paintball Junkies headband to keep my fairly long hair out of my eyes and sat down in the den to observe my surroundings and listen to some tunes. Now the speakers in the den are on either side of the couch and as I sat listening to the Beatles I could feel the whole room vibrating from the bass and the windows in the living room were stretching and distorting in quite an intense way. The morning light was pouring through the windows giving a sun-drenched quality to everything around me. I moved from the den into the rest of my house and started to examine the distorted nature of everything around me.

I began to ask myself all kinds of questions about human existence and I found that I had satisfying answers to most of the questions. The question and answer session turned into a full-blown internal debate and it was ended when I returned to the den to find a quite amazing sight before me. In the den there is a painting by a local artist and I found that it had become extremely trippy. While everything around it remained fairly “real” the brush-strokes had become completely fluid and colour from one area bled into another effortlessly as if it happened all the time. The whole painting was a sea of shifting colour and texture, and what made it especially trippy was that, at that moment, I was completely clear-headed and everything around the painting, including the frame, was completely normal looking. It was one of the most realistic hallucinations I have ever seen.

The sense of normality around the painting did not last long. As soon as I shifted my attention away from the art-work everything in the room started to move, the couch started to roll like the ocean and the sconces started to slide down the wall towards me. I switched the music to “Dark Side of the Moon” and lay on the breathing couch staring at the shifting painting overhead. One thing I really enjoy about mushrooms is how much of a juxtaposition the whole experience can be, it is a wonderful feeling when I am completely clear-headed, rational, and relaxed even though everything around me is breathing, melting, or otherwise going crazy.

After a while I needed to use the washroom so I got up and went upstairs into our very trippy bathroom which is decorated in such a way as to remind one of the ocean, which might sound tacky but in this case it works. The main colours are deep blues and greens with all manner of ocean related objects lying around. There is a very old fashioned claw foot bath tub and tons of other cool stuff such as old glass buoys and art pieces of the sea. One such painting, also done by a local artist, shows rocks as if through water, and when I stared at this painting it might as well have been real. The water shimmered and moved and the whole thing appeared three dimensional and I found this to be the case with all the artwork in the bathroom.

After exiting the bathroom I went up into my loft and would have tripped there for hours if it wasn’t so damn hot and humid. I ended up putting on some sunglasses, which turned everything a very odd yellow colour, and headed outside for a change of scenery, expecting to be blown away by the heat. I was pleasantly surprised to find it quite bearable out until I noticed the sun was behind a cloud and the second it came out from behind its cover it became extremely hot out. I could not however go back inside as it was too beautiful a scene to be missed. It seemed as though everything was twice as big as it should be, and five times as stunningly beautiful.

Due to the large amounts of rain our area had received earlier every living green thing was flourishing. The sumac gave a tropical air to the landscape with its rich green colour and the oak, maple, and ash trees towered above me with thick undergrowth below. I walked around bare-foot drinking in the immense beauty around me until I could no longer bear the heat and headed back inside. Once inside I consumed the remaining mushrooms with some pickles, which by the way are very intense to eat while tripping. I then moved back outside to bring in some laundry and found that while doing so the intensity of my trip sort of diminished. It seemed that while I was focused on the task at hand I could do it easily and enter back into my trippy world after I was done.

I spent most of the remainder of the trip watching Casablanca and found myself analyzing every single detail, every look, and every line of dialogue. My trip ended fairly quickly at about 3pm and I was perfectly sober when my Dad came to pick me up at 6pm. My best guess as to the seemingly short duration of my trips would be my very fast metabolism as it seems most people trip for about 6 hours while I only trip for about four. This experience simply reinforced my ideas about life, how we fit in (or don’t) and how there is still beauty and happiness to be found amidst all the shit in our world. Blue Skies (the music festival in experience#1) has once again rolled around and I will have shrooms a plenty and an open mind, strange days await.

Exp Year: 2006	ExpID: 54899
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Aug 9, 2006	Views: 21,422
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Mushrooms - P. cubensis (66) : Various (28), Music Discussion (22), Retrospective / Summary (11)