DOSE:		oral	Amanitas - A. muscaria	(fresh)
		smoked	Cannabis	(plant material)

BODY WEIGHT:

62 kg

The following events took place in the late summer of 2004, in the town of Sofia, Bulgaria. My friends S and P had gathered some fly algarics in the woods outside town. We had graduated high school four years before that, and were still enthusiastic and naive in our dealings with drugs. Neither of us three had ever taken anything more potent then a hash cookie.
Anyway, P would join us later, but me and S had met in a small public garden, and ingested a raw mushroom each. I was a student in anthropology and S - in psychology. We ate the mushrooms with honey. What to do now? It was the afternoon. Lets take a trolley to the center of town, and walk about stoned! Great idea! As I said - neither of us had any experience with the stronger substances, and our only point of reference was marijuana and hashish. We thought it would be the same, but more intense. How wrong we were...

As our trolley reached a park near the center, we got off and went to lie on the grass. S felt uncomfortable processes in his stomach, while I was quite euphoric. An airliner flew above us - kabloow! After 5-10 minutes S felt fine, and we continued on foot, on our quest to walk about town. By this point I was beginning to take down my experiences on a small note pad. Of my notes, the first two pages were decipherable, after that - just squiggles. To return to the park - by this time, I was feeling that my skin is alive - in the sense that as I walked, my clothes touched and rubbed thousands of points upon my skin and this no longer was below my threshold of consciousness, but to the contrary - I enthusiastically felt it and wrote it down. Also, my attempt to get some musical orgasm failed completely. Although I stuffed earphones into my ears and played 'Master of Puppets' at full volume, I still could hear everything else going on around me, including mine and S's footsteps. 'My senses are greatly magnified' I thought, 'how great!'. Minutes later, a snow-like interference appeared in my visual field, very similar to the 'snow' on TV. Half an hour later something in me gave. I told S - 'my ego just collapsed. You lead, I'll follow'. And from then on he was the guide of where to go and what to do (he was not so smashed as I was), while I was an automata, following him.

In brief - here are the stages of what happened to me:

1) Initial euphoria, amplification of senses;

2) 'Snow' interference in the visual field.

3) Sense of 'loss of ego'

4) Loss of coordination (later S told me, that I tried to play some music, and stuffed in one ear and earphone, and into the other - a cigarette)

5) Catatonic inner battle. For a considerable time I could not move or speak, but sat immobile, while within me raged a battle between what I perceived to be 'myself' and 'my ego'.

Short representation of inner struggle:

Ego: So, you want to be rid of me? We'll see about that. Since you were born I organized your world, made you sane, adequate, and what do I get in return? Ungrateful swine!'
Me: Argh! Whimper!
Ego: I can do anything I want with you. I can make you open and close your eyes, I can make you speak or shut up, I can make you move or keep you immobile. I can make you fall unconscious, and I can make you wake up.
Me: Bazonk! Tinkle. Blap.
During this time, everything I thought in language, became immediately the territory of the internal enemy, thus if I wanted to keep 'myself' separate from the internal enemy, I had to think without words, quite a difficult thing. Later S told me that I just sat immobile, with muscles twitching on my face and arms. But inside me a complicated compromise was being made out. If I could prove, that I was not an utterly worthless piece of crap, I could keep a deal of freedom from the internal controller. But how to prove my value? In the end, I moved a little, in order to write with an unsteady hand something, which S and P (who had just arrived on the scene) - should do. If they take the trouble to figure out what I was doing, and actually did what I asked them (it was something small, like saying a word) - this would prove that I have enough value to them, and thus I was not an utterly insignificant piece of crud. And they did figure it out, and they did do it, and the compromise worked out! I could again move and even speak!

6) Thin lifeline to the body. After I became capable of movement and speech, P gave me some pot. It helped, because it brought a feeling of familiarity to the whole situation. Nevertheless, I was still 'spaced out'. 95% of my being was somewhere out there, floating in a vast fragmented cosmos and I was connected to my body with a thin lifeline. I could control it to walk and to talk, but as if from the outside.

7) The return. As we sat in yet another park, by this time it was evening, I gathered my willpower and decided to finally return to my... To my senses. To my body. To my reality. And I did it - I felt my essence rushing back into my limited little body/reality. It was an unpleasant feeling, as if suddenly I had put on eyeglasses not intended for me. As if suddenly the senses were muffled, and I watched life through a thick glass. The second I returned, I stood up and begun vomiting. This I did at intervals for the next hour or two. Sometimes on all fours, to the delight of all romantic couples and old ladies in the park.

8) The aftermath. It took me about a day to come back to a socially adequate manner. But, upon my 'return' my intellectual scalpel begun mercilessly dissecting anything in view. After returning home (and crapping and puking for a while) I tried to calm myself by re-reading Ringworld. I couldn't. Instead of relaxing and floating together with the plot, my mind kept analyzing Niven's style, plot structure, and real Earth races, used (as it seemed to me) as models for his aliens. I think the puppeteer seemed Japanese to me, or perhaps Chinese. Cartoon network also did not help - I saw not cartoons with characters and plots, but simply animated movements. Completely uninspiring.I could feel the real people who had made them. And the girls - sex appeal disappeared completely. Girls (as well as everyone else) were just lumpy twisted rotten sick descendant of apes, clothed in ridiculous combinations of materials and colours. In a broader sense I 'never came back' (as in believing again completely in the everyday reality) , in a narrower sense - I was fully 'returned' only weeks later.

I know now, that we did this completely unprepared, without respect, without realistic expectations, and that it could have turned into a complete disaster for everyone involved. But in spite of its nightmarish content and intensity, the trip was one of the most important events in my life, and I am grateful that it happened. It changed my perspective, expanded my world and taught me much. When on the next day P asked me how I would sum up the experience, I replied - 'a horrific meeting with myself'.

Embeca Hipara

P.S. Somewhere around the middle of the trip, I suddenly realized that death is real. I felt as afraid as I had never been before. I pondered - there must be some way, a compromise, to not go insane from this knowledge, that death is real. In the end, I had a quick vision, something like two orbs approaching each other, accompanied by a flood of relief. I had realized why death should not be feared. To this day I try sometimes to recall what exactly I had realized, but I can't.

Exp Year: 2004	ExpID: 76099
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Nov 2, 2017	Views: 5,377
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
Amanitas - A. muscaria (70) : Various (28), Mystical Experiences (9), Difficult Experiences (5)