DOSE:

3.25 g

oral

Mushrooms

(tea)

BODY WEIGHT:

155 lb

With summer dragging on and on, and our living rooms becoming one of the few cool sanctuaries available to us, we decided to perform some 'communing with the other' this weekend. Having 'attempted' to quit smoking with my girlfriend, T, Wednesday night after the GbV show, my nefarious, nicotine-stained habit was definitely still in mind (and between fingers, unfortunately), especially as our tandem failure to 'slay the dragon' became more apparent with each day, each moment that passed. Anyway, Saturday night came, and after C got home from work, we brewed up some tea. My own glass contained about 3-3.5 grams of the 'wittle boo monstahs,' and the others' doses were right around this amount, too, give or take a gram. Exchanging excited glances across the dim, candlelit room, we drank, and then sat back, waiting for as C likes to put it, 'the field to come down.'

It began after about 20 minutes, with a realization that there were now giant shadow insects, 'grasshoppers of the ether,' if you will, inhabiting the living room ceiling above our heads.

'Look at those shadows!' exclaimed someone, an observation which at the time set off a wave of drunken panic in my mind, as in, 'Oh, shit, I'm piss drunk and stranded and how am I going to get home now?' This I recognized as the first pangs of fear and frustration from my ego as it realized it was about to take leave of itself, AND ME, for a while.

It was at this point that the tremors began, first in my thighs, and then continuing up into my stomach and back, as the first quantities of psilocybe snaked their way through nerve endings. 'I think I want to lay in my bed,' I heard myself saying, which was strange, because the bed was T’s not mine, and I usually referred to it as 'the bed' rather than as a personal possession: this was a brief and minor detail, but sticks with me now for some reason.

C said something like, 'I'm not moving… They get you when you close your eyes...That’s when that thing threw that lightning bolt at me last time.'
I wasn’t sure if I knew what he was talking about, but I was feeling fairly certain at this point that I didn't need to hear his spiel at this time in my own trip, as it was just coming on, and I was feeling very weird myself right then.

In fact, it was when C said something like, 'You're either gonna go through it with your eyes open or your eyes closed - and I’m keeping my eyes open.' and began to talk again about the entities with lightning bolts that I felt a strange urge, and exclaimed, 'It's official: I am FEELING IT.' It was official. I was going to bed.

By the time I made it back into the bedroom and lay down, the tremors had begun to turn into actual shakes, and were starting to make me nervous. Almost as soon as my head hit the pillow, though, I heard a strange voice say something to the effect of, 'You can relax now - it's just your stomach. It'll be all right.'

Huh? I wondered to this strange voice, and then relaxed almost immediately when I focused my eyes to the darkness both in the room and in my head, and saw them. Everywhere were tiny jeweled, spider or elf-like creatures: floating through the air, crawling the walls, roaming the nether regions of my skull. I raised my hand in the dark and it was awash in these small, shimmering hyper-organisms.

It was at this point that my conversation with them began. By this time, the trembling having subsided, I noticed the knot in my stomach tightening, an uncomfortable feeling to be sure. I thought I might be getting sick from the mushrooms or some thing: the feeling of taking that last soggy, chunky gulp of tea now came back to me, and this intensified my sick feeling. Fortunately, they began to speak again.

'Y'know that you’re not feeling sick, not really anyway,' they said. 'The feeling you are feeling is the truth of your existence; we are showing you what is at stake here in this life, what you have done and are doing wrong, and what you must do to feel better...'

(At this point, I noticed the colors of the entities more closely - they were red, blue, yellow, purple, and gold, as well as other colors which I cannot name here now; I also noticed that they spun clockwise and all together at one point, and then in beautifully syncopated patterns at another. With Tortoise and Bardo Pond playing softly on the radio, I realized that the music was triggering an intensification of my interactions with these hyper-beings. As the music got softer and clearer, so did the beings; as it got louder and more dissonant, the beings seemed to back off into the darkness, and the 'psychedelic drunk' feeling came back like gangbusters.)

Anyway, the beings then clued me into what was going on inside of me: the pain and discomfort I was feeling and associating with the mushrooms or with digestion or something, was in fact the pain my spirit was feeling because of my smoking habits. The beings explained quite simply to me that smoking cigarettes was a waste of my time, energy, and most importantly, my life, and by continuing in this behavior I was perpetuating cycles of fear, greed, and disease which reached both through and beyond time and space (at least as we commonly know them). I realized that what the beings were trying to clue me into was that my smoking was supporting the dominator culture that persecutes the mushroom, its 'children', and all of us as well; while some of my discomfort was no doubt the result of the actual physical act of smoking, my spirit was in pain too, it was obvious to me now.

'What to do, what to do?!?' I wondered as I lay in bed.

'We will show you,' they said back almost immediately.

At this point, the entities changed appearance again, turning into bluish, gold bits of light, less defined than before, and proceeding to 'paint' whatever it was I looked at; I say 'paint', because that’s what it looked like- paint flowing onto various surfaces (although the most beautiful paint I'VE EVER SEEN!!!) as I passed over them with my gaze.

(At this point in our story I feel it necessary to inform the reader that I've made my living as a housepainter for the last several years; the source of this paint imagery..?)

I started to get the feeling that the ghostly painting going on in my room was surrounding me in some strange way; I didn’t feel threatened, as I realized this pent-up feeling I was beginning to develop sitting there in the dark was simple ego-dissolution. The color-beings began to multiply and crowd around me almost as soon as I realized what I was feeling. 'We will take over from here,' or words to that effect, were pretty much the last thing I heard from these beings that night. Almost as soon as I’d heard this hyper-dimensional message, the painted surfaces began leaping off of themselves and congregating in the air, casting off a strange blue glow. As this fuzz ball of psychedelic energy materialized, I felt it start to cover me, as if it were a ghostly sheet covering my deceased body in the morgue or something; strangely, I felt no fear, dread, or even much discomfort as this thing, this shroud of or by or from these hyper-dimensional space aliens, covered me, wrapping me like a newborn child...A NEWBORN!!!

A non-smoking newborn. 'Hmmm,' I thought to myself after laying there a while longer. The elf shroud blanket had vanished, as had most of the space aliens. My hallucinations became less coherent staring into the dark, and for the first time since laying down, I noticed the sound of other voices coming from the other room. Then, T walked in to see if I was OK, and I could tell by the look on her face that she too was 'feeling it'. Also realizing how thirsty I was, I decided to return to the living room and the others. The entire experience in the bedroom had lasted less than a half-hour.

We stayed up for a few more hours talking, raving, and tripping, until it became time to quiet down and retire to the wispy comforts of sleep; C and S left, taking much of the past hour’s heavy conversation with them, thankfully. T and I got into bed almost as soon as they left. I talked to her about what I’d experienced as we lay there, and then noticed that I was putting her to sleep. So be it. I decided to shut up, and closed my own eyes, content to fall into the lull of the transdimensional laser light show still playing (although much more dimly than before) in my head.

Looking back, I am definitely of the opinion that the psychedelic drunk trip I had was due to high levels of psilocybe in the mushrooms; C and S (esp. C) seemed to be having a much more visionary, cerebral trip, like that from mushrooms higher in psilocin (we had eaten two different batches) than I was anyway, and some of C’s words after I returned from the bedroom struck me as having a distinctly visionary flavor to them; as T and S's smaller doses began to wear off, and my own as well, it seemed to me that C's conversation, both the speaking and listening of it, were directed by or at something entirely 'other' than the rest of us in my living room.
I'm sure C will relate this to the rest of us as indicative of us not 'taking an active dose,' and therefore not having a true visionary experience.

I don't know about all that, and don't really care much either, especially not being directly affected by such theorizing: I know what I saw, felt, etc., that night and I now feel more ready than ever to take on the dominator cancer plant that has been my master for going on ten years now.
As C said during our living room rave-session, 'This stuff is powerful medicine!!!! It can cure smoking, or IT CAN CURE CANCER!!!'

After that night, I'm inclined to believe this more than ever.

1 July 2001, 8:07 am MDT
Somewhere in Colorado.

Exp Year: 2001	ExpID: 7910
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jan 7, 2004	Views: 46,929
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Mushrooms (39) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Entities / Beings (37), Mystical Experiences (9), Glowing Experiences (4)