DOSE: T+ 0:00	2 g	oral	Mushrooms	(dried)
T+ 0:00	Half glasses	oral	Alcohol - Beer/Wine	(liquid)
T+ 0:30	1 shot	oral	Alcohol - Hard	(liquid)
T+ 2:00	1 cig.	smoked	Tobacco - Cigarettes

BODY WEIGHT:

150 lb

I've taken mushrooms once before. But after this last trip I just experienced, I realized that the first trip was absolutely nothing.

The trip was nothing like I've ever felt before. I've heard people describe trips as 'spiritual awakenings' or 'seeing the truth of the universe,' and I admit, I have gotten that idea on a few other drugs before. But this was the first time that I actually felt like I had a 100% pure spiritual experience.

As a little background, I'm generally a robotripper. I take DXM about once a week, which I've been doing for the last six to eight months with an average of two weeks off between a couple of those trips. And three days before I took mushrooms, I took a 600 mg dose of DXM. This turned out to be an incredibly important factor of my shroom trip; during my dex trip, I hit third plateau and was stricken harder by the drug than I have ever been in my life, even on my highest trip of 720 mg. During the dex trip, I experienced what I can only describe as the tearing of the fabric of reality. Everything that binds my fragile connection to society was stripped away; I felt I was gazing into the nonexistence of time itself. I suddenly felt like I had lived millions of lives before, and that I was exhausted by living, and I felt that the only thing that would set me free would be death; reincarnation would be hell.

But enough of that. We're talking about mushrooms here.

My boyfriend, C, and I split an eighth, and I just made an estimate at the dose being around 2 grams. The mushrooms had been crushed up and put into large plastic capsules, 14 of them in total, and my boyfriend and I each took 7. We were waiting around at his apartment with two other friends, Josh and Laura, and were planning on going to a small friend party. This party happened to be at the house of a girl, T, that I had been in love with three years before, had then fallen out with, and was now friends with again; I didn't stop and consider how that would affect my future emotional state. My boyfriend and I split a beer and dropped a tab of Airborne, since his dealer had told him to take the mushrooms with vitamin C. I drank my glass and took all 7 pills. My friend Josh told me that it would probably take an hour to kick in, so I planned on driving over to my friend's house, since it was only about a mile away. C and I dosed at 10:45 p.m., and I was told that my trip should last about six hours.

We went to my friend's house with no troubles at all, and there we discovered that T and her boyfriend, Mike, had set up the house into a gypsy party, with Gogol Bordello playing in her giant living room, and loads of alcohol (vodka and rum) sitting out on the table. A little set up on T's house: it looks like an old-fashioned English boarding house from the 1600s, with a tiny kitchen and a connected bathroom, an enormous living room that is set up to appear like you're gazing into an old painting of the room in some ancient Roman villa, and multiple apartments on the second and third floors.

It was within minutes of entering the house that I began to get incredibly hot; at first I thought I was blushing, but then the feeling spread through my entire body, and I began to sweat. I told this to Mike, who told me that it must be the boomers.

My boyfriend, Josh, Laura, Mike, and I each took a shot of vodka, and within the hour my boyfriend was begging me to drive him to the liquor store for more beer (alcohol is his big thing, like DXM is mine). Generally, I'm not afraid to drive on drugs, but for some reason I instinctively handed the keys to Josh, who was merely lightly buzzed. The liquor store was only a few blocks away, across the bridge into the next town, so we got in my car, my boyfriend, Josh, his girlfriend Julie, and I, us girls in the back and the boys up front.

It was around 11:45 when we got in the car, and Josh asked me if I was feeling anything yet. All I was experiencing was the sensation that my contacts were fogging over, and it was making everything hard to see, as if I was looking through a blurred window (anyone who falls asleep in contacts and wakes up with that blurry, sticky vision will understand). Looking back, I realize that that was the beginning of the come-up. Every light we passed seemed blurry and star-like, somewhat similar to the way they looked when I had taken LSA, but much more blurred, smudged.

We played Of Montreal, and Josh and C went inside to the liquor store. Julie and I were dancing to the music, when suddenly I felt my legs go 'numb,' though that isn't quite the right word. They seemed to lose feeling and begin to vibrate at the exact same time; I had experienced this with other drugs, so I told Julie, 'I'm pretty sure I'm coming up now.' My shoulders also ached badly, but by the time my boyfriend and Josh got back to the car my upper body had gone numb/vibrating like my lower body.

The lights seemed to stand out much more brightly now; I had a hard time not staring at everything, and my eyes felt like they were ridiculously wide. Julie said my pupils were enormous, so I'm assuming the light-play had something to do with that.

It was around 12:20 to 12:30 when we got back to the house; Gogol Bordello was blasting from the living room, and everyone was sitting on the floor around the coffee table, drinking and talking. As soon as I entered the room, everything began to waver around me, as if I was looking through water at everything. My vision was rippling, and I stared at a blank wall and watched the ripples pass over it. Laura asked me if I was feeling anything yet, and everyone looked at me; I had a sudden burst of anxiety, and I started giggling and covered my mouth. Everyone laughed and said that must be it.

My boyfriend came in and sat next to me on the floor, and while everyone was talking and looking at this weird magazine of Halloween costumes - the little girls in it were dressed like sluts, and we couldn't stop talking about how ridiculous it was - he kept grabbing the magazine and throwing it in the air to the beat of Bordello. I was laughing, and felt pretty euphoric at this point; my chest seemed to open up, making breathing easy, and my body felt strangely loose and comfortable. At one point my boyfriend commented that he wanted to go into a dark room; he was covering his eyes, and I asked him why. 'The visuals get really intense in the dark,' he told me, and his voice was slurred, like mine was slowly becoming. I covered my eyes, but all I saw was the black dots behind my vision; I started to say that, but for a few seconds I suddenly saw flashes of brilliant, geometric-shaped lights. I took my hand away and looked at Julie in amazement, and tried doing it again, but all I saw were the white flashes of light that I see when I try to stare too hard in the dark.

Eventually we all got up and began dancing to the music. This is where I first lost track of time, and everything seemed to get faster and more frantic. Julie, T, and I were dancing around the living room like maniacs, and I felt as if we were at some ancient pagan festival. I acknowledged in my head that all the old parties that the Greeks/etc. used to have, where they drank or took drugs and danced around and felt like they were calling down the gods, was how I was feeling. I danced in a strange wiggly way, and my fingers kept spasming and bending in a rolling rhythm at the joints. I seriously began to feel like I was being possessed by a spirit or a god, but rather than feeling worried, I felt exulted, like I was drunk on power. I seriously felt like I had consumed madness, and I couldn't stop dancing crazily.

After a while I realized everyone else had gone into the kitchen, and I heard them laughing and talking. I went in there and found that they were smoking weed; strangely, I didn't even consider having any. I looked at my boyfriend, and saw that he had a strange expression on his face, with his hand pressed tightly over his mouth. His pupils were enormous, and he was looking around at everyone in an anxious way. He got up and left the room, onto the back porch where everyone goes to smoke cigarettes. I followed him out, and T, Julie, and Josh came as well.

The sky was a rich navy blue; the wind had picked up, and the trees were rolling gently in the breeze. I stared at the leaves on the trees, and as I stared, they all began to rotate in a diamond-like shape, as if each and every leaf was rotating counter-clockwise. Julie asked me what I was seeing, and I held up my hand and made the rotating pattern; I said, 'Everything's turning and going 'Naa naa naa!'' It seemed as if I could hear a happy, high-pitched hum coming from the trees. Josh laughed and said that I sounded like I was having a happy trip; meanwhile, my boyfriend was hunched over himself, covering his face and not talking. I bummed a cigarette and smoked, and I finally understood why people smoked cigarettes (I only do when I'm messed up, to balance myself out with nicotine): it was an incredible activity to stimulate conversation, while passing the time.

My friends went back inside. My boyfriend asked me to stay out there with him, but I told him I needed to use the bathroom. On my way in, he asked me if I was feeling anything yet, and I laughed at him for some reason. I had the line run through my head, 'It's against the rules to call attention to the fact that you're on a drug at a party,' and immediately after thinking that, I thought, 'There are no rules to anything.'

I went into the bathroom, and heard my friends talking on the other side of the door. Strangely, this was when I seemed to decide to have my spiritual experience.

I first started thinking about my robotrip from the few days before, and how it wouldn't get off my mind. I remembered feeling exhausted by living, and in the bathroom I thought to myself, Should I just eventually kill myself? Then I thought about how meaningless and pointless life seemed to be. Humans just chase after every goal they can, keeping their mind occupied so they don't realize how terrible living is. And then I thought to myself, 'The gods cursed humanity with the ability to think about themselves, the curse of constant thought, philosophy - ' and then a string of random words that all basically meant thought process. And then I thought, 'I know why my druggie friends take drugs. Life is unbearable to them. Drugs make living easier. I should just be on drugs all the time, and then life will be much more easier. The gods are so sorry they put humans through so much pain by being able to think, that they created drugs so that humans can take their minds off the pain for a little while.'

That realization made me laugh. I felt a rushing sense of wonder, amazement, and awe, and I started repeating, 'Oh, my god, I finally understand.' I leaned against the sink and stared down the drain with my face pressed into the faucet, and began repeating, 'I understand, I understand,' over and over again, laughing in wonder. I was speaking while staring down the drain, and when I thought, 'Oh, the gods are in the sewers,' I immediately rethought, 'It doesn't matter, I'm not talking to the drain, I'm just talking. Nothing exists, nothing matters.'

I felt like I had suddenly realized what all the Buddhist/Zen Monks had been talking about, when they say things such as, 'I am, and I am not,' or, 'Everything is, everything isn't,' and, 'Everything is nothing, nothing is everything.' When my mind began chasing labels, such as the word 'buddhist,' I thought, 'It doesn't matter.' I thought about my name, and then thought, 'It doesn't matter. It doesn't exist, yet it does exist, in a perfect equal state of nothingness, and I finally understand.' I also thought that there was no need to sleep, because our bodies are constantly rotting.

The idea that stuck with me the most: that our bodies are dying each and every second, and that our souls are waiting inside our bodies to be freed. Humans need to constantly engage in some sort of activity (which we all realized later that night when we got bored and super ADHD) so that they can distract themselves from the need for freedom in their souls. People kill themselves to free their souls, because they can't handle the pain of living anymore; other people, 'normal' or stable people, just focus their lives on getting from one goal to the next, to keep themselves from self-destructing. Humans should not sleep, because someday their bodies would be dead and their souls would be free. I kept thinking that if I could just stay awake forever, my flesh would eventually die and my soul would be free sooner than waiting a lifetime to die.

I came out of the bathroom, and just stood in the doorway, staring at my friends in utter amazement. They just kept glancing at me and talking, and nobody really said anything to me, until Josh asked, 'Look at that huge smile on her face.'

I wanted to tell them. I wanted them to know what I had finally realized, and I said, 'I...just realized something.' I said that about two or three more times, until finally I thought, 'I can't tell them this. They have to find it themselves.'

After that, everything began to take on a state of normalcy. What I had realized in the bathroom kept running through my head, but I was ridiculously calm about it. I had accepted my realization, and that was that. I had felt the wonder, and I knew it was there, and it didn't matter.

I went on the back porch, and heard Julie say, 'Eric's here!' My friend Eric, who lived in the neighborhood, had suddenly just shown up, and he was sitting there smoking a cigarette. The first thing he asked me was, 'So, how are the mushrooms?' And I laughed and replied, 'I... just... had a realization in the bathroom.' He didn't really ask anything else, but then he told me that my boyfriend was freaking out. I looked over at where C sat in the chair, and he was still hunched over. I tried talking to him, but he just kept saying one word, and then sliding into mumbling. His voice was slurred, and he couldn't seem to make sense of everything. I thought it was okay, because I couldn't make much sense either, so I went back inside to socialize.

A few minutes later T came to me and said, 'C just took off.' I ran outside onto the porch - wearing only my socks; I forget to put shoes on when I'm on drugs, probably because I prefer to be barefoot - and I saw him, way down the street, walking away very fast. I became extremely worried and kept asking her, 'What do I do? Did he say anything?' She said that he had just suddenly gotten up and left.

While I stared into the night, I kept thinking about how when people are on drugs, their friends tend to take responsibility for them. I was wondering how long C would be gone, and why I had the responsibility over him, but then I answered that thought with, 'Because he's on drugs.' I started thinking about the way my main social group operates; we take care of each other when we're fucked up on drugs, and eventually the night moves onto the morning and we just keep taking care of each other, taking responsibility for one another, forever.

I tried calling him a few times, but he either didn't answer, or when he did just mumbled at me or started laughing. I kept asking him if it was okay, and T asked me to see if he could come back because she was afraid of the cops coming by. It was the last Saturday before college started - we live in a major college town - and the cops were out in numbers that night.

I went back inside, totally worried, and asked Josh what I should do. Josh has done everything, and I always trust his advice. He told me not to worry about C, that he just needed to go chill out in a park somewhere.

Eventually C came back, and when I came out onto the porch he was covering his face, mumbling, and crying. He kept repeating that he was a weirdo, and I was telling him he wasn't a weirdo. Eric and Josh came out to smoke a cigarette, and I talked to them; they started making me laugh, but within a few moments I started crying. It wasn't like I was bawling or anything; I just felt tears pouring out of my eyes, and in amazement I realized I was crying. I held C's hand while we both cried together and I kept telling him I understood, and everything was going to be okay. I guess at some point I told him that he looked like Bob Dylan, and he got really freaked out by that because he thought that I meant that he WAS Bob Dylan.

Basically, my boyfriend freaked out, and I didn't. He refused to go back into the house with all the lights and noise, and eventually he got his roommate to drive him home - without me. I felt very left out, but in 20 minutes he began calling me and begging me to drive over to be alone with him. I told him I wouldn't drive until at least 4 a.m., which was when the cops usually backed off. He kept telling me that I had abandoned him, that I hadn't taken care of him, and I told him that he abandoned me. He later (read: when sober) told me that he felt as if he was being made fun of by everyone, that they all thought he was being weird and he just couldn't handle it, that he just wanted to be alone with me but I had ignored him. He's a difficult man.

My friends already thought it was 4 in the morning, but I checked my watch (very handy for drug trips) and told them it was only 2:30. Time had seemed to stretch on forever and ever, but when I finally checked, it seemed to snap back into place in my head, and I felt my brain trying desperately to clutch onto the ability to keep track of the time. Julie and T kept saying they were tired, and I kept telling them not to sleep, that they should never, ever sleep because they could sleep when they were dead. Mike ended up falling asleep, and I felt an immense sense of pity for him that I still can't explain.

I was no longer seeing the rippling waves; everything had become a bit more 3D-esque, sort of bubbled. I went into the living room and discovered that they were watching the movie 'Snatched,' and when I looked at the faces of the people on the TV they began to stretch and bulge in strange, monstrous ways. I mentally scoffed at myself at this point - I always get annoyed with myself when I start seeing really cliche things on my trips. But that was what I was seeing; and the sudden jumps between scenes that makes up that movie startled me every time, when I didn't pay full attention.

When I was paying full attention, I found myself absorbed by the movie; I kept laughing at it, and I found it to be the most hilarious movie I had ever seen. At one point I started laughing so hard that I couldn't stop, and then suddenly I was crying again, and I looked at all my friends in amazement.

I wish I could remember all the different conversations that we had, but I can't. All I remember is that we talked on and on and on about personal beliefs. My friend Josh is not a mean person, but when you talk to him he sometimes mocks you or seems to make fun of you in a very blunt way; when I'm sober I'm very sensitive to this, and I usually get mad at him, but this time, any time he made fun of what I said or questioned me, I looked at his words logically and gave him a logical response.

I remember blabbering on a few different times; my voice wasn't incredibly slurred, but I know I kept slipping into different accents, and a few times I got so wrapped up in what I was saying that I couldn't stop talking. This was met with moments where I just stared aimlessly and didn't talk, but at these times I found myself obsessed with the 'realization' I had had in the bathroom. Again, it still felt very normal to me, and every time I thought about it I seemed to just be confirming it to myself.

Around 4 in the morning my friend Julie asked for a ride home. I was the only one with a car, and I was also the only person who wasn't really drunk. Josh told me I was more sober than the rest of them, and I agreed; mushrooms seemed to be less like I was 'messed up,' and more like I had slid a filter over my mental processes, and was operating in my usual way through that filter. At first T told me it was probably a bad idea for me to drive, and I agreed; I have pretty good instinct for staying out of trouble, and the moment didn't seem right to me. But that had been an hour before 4, and now I felt like it would be okay to drive. After T had wrapped Josh and I up in multiple scarves and bandanas, making us look like gypsies, we went outside to my car to give Julie a ride home. I was also going to drive and pick up my boyfriend, who had kept calling me and begging for a ride back over.

When I went from the lit-up house to the dark, I couldn't see a single thing; my vision was entirely black when I tried walking through the shadowy areas around the porch. Eventually I just kept walking to my car, praying I wouldn't trip on anything. The world around me was suddenly incredibly 3D, like I was inside a videogame (I'm now thinking it looks a lot like Super Smash Bros, but I'm just trying to get across the idea of everything being larger than life, and bubbly or plastic or something). Driving was both easy and hard at the same time; the lanes of the road were miles wider than they should be, and everything seemed farther away than I thought it would be, but I managed to maneuver myself to a gas station to get gas.

Here I started getting delays - when I hit the button to get a receipt, I didn't hear the beep for about two seconds; the click of my car door handle didn't reach my ears for a few seconds after I had opened it. I have never heard of this happening before, and this was probably the one time I got truly freaked out. I got back in the car and told them that I didn't want to drive anymore, but I did it anyways; I had a hard time remembering to stop for red lights and stop signs, and they teased me for it. After we dropped Julie off, we drove over to Colin's apartment to get him; on the ride, Josh and I had a long and very rational, serious discussion about our pooping habits, which is probably the weirdest conversation I've ever had. We discussed how nice it is and how we like to meditate when we do it, and the like. It seemed very natural and logical to talk about anything, and I didn't have any sort of 'warnings' that told me not to talk about certain topics.

When we got to C's, he was babbling randomly, yelling, and laughing uncontrollably. I thought he was just really drunk, but when I asked him he told me he hadn't drank very much. He was SO messed up by the shrooms, much more than I was, and the only explanation for that that I can manage is that the DXM trip gave me a tolerance to the shrooms.

We sat at C's for a while and watched his roommate play Fallout 3, while we all talked about different stuff. C was just being obnoxious, and I found myself growing more and more irritated with him. While we were sitting there, I suddenly felt sensation come back to my legs, sort of the opposite of what happened in the car when I first came up and got that numb feeling in my body. I was scared I was losing my trip, and when the sensation came back to my upper body, I found myself tired.

We left the apartment a little after 5 a.m., and when we went outside, I realized that I had truly come off the trip; nothing seemed 3D anymore, and I felt more sober. But I seemed to have lost any sort of empathy; I got angry with my boyfriend for the rest of the morning, and when we later went back to my house around 6ish, my dogs, who always freak out when I'm gone for too long, simply annoyed me for whining and barking at me. I seemed to have a really blunted emotional affect coming off the shrooms, as if I had entirely lost my sense of empathy, and I'm normally a ridiculously empathetic person. C was still really annoying, and while I kept telling him to go to sleep, he just kept talking. Eventually I fell asleep, around 7, and slept fitfully until 2 in the afternoon. By then, I just felt groggy, and the most amazing trip of my life was over.

Two visuals that stood out the most:

1. My friend has a vase that sits in the middle of the table in her kitchen. The vase is shaped like a water pitcher, and is white with blue vines and petals all over it, in a very beautiful artistic pattern. While I stared at it, the petals kept unrolling, one into the next, and looked like they were reaching out to touch one another. I kept staring at it, and became obsessed with this visual; I lost sense of where I was, and I started trying to explain it to my friends. 'They're unrolling and feeding into each other, touching each other constantly.' My friend T laughed and said, 'What the fuck are you talking about?' and I looked around, embarrassed, and laughed, and moved away from the vase.

2. Walking outside at sunrise; the sky looked like delicious cotton candy. It looked touchable and edible, and the pinks and yellows and purples in the sky were soft and pastel. I felt like if I reached my hand up to the sky, I could scoop the colors right into my palm. It was incredibly gorgeous, and natural.

So that is my shroom trip. After my spiritual experiences, first on the dex and then on the shrooms, I feel like an entirely different person. I still have yet to stop obsessing over the things I realized on both trips; it seems to have taken over my mind, and I can't change back. Someone told me that I had experienced ego death, and it comforted me to give a word to it. I care a lot less about my physical appearance than I ever have in my entire life; flesh is malleable, and the only thing that is truly real is my soul.

[Erowid Note: Driving while intoxicated, tripping, or extremely sleep deprived is dangerous and irresponsible because it endangers other people. Don't do it!]

Exp Year: 2009	ExpID: 80808
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jun 29, 2021	Views: 3,040
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Mushrooms (39) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Relationships (44), Guides / Sitters (39), Mystical Experiences (9), Glowing Experiences (4), General (1)