A Lack of Mental Preparation Leads to Utter Confusion
Mushrooms
Citation:   Albion's Child. "A Lack of Mental Preparation Leads to Utter Confusion: An Experience with Mushrooms (exp892)". Erowid.org. Nov 13, 2000. erowid.org/exp/892

 
DOSE:
100 oral Mushrooms (dried)

This was my first time and I had done a lot of reading on the subject--I knew that it would be a lot different from being stoned, that I needed to mentally prepare for my trip, that you can't control it when it starts, that you should be relaxed and that you should carefully plan your trip.

Well, I fucked that one up.

I had just returned from spending the weekend with my dad and (owing to certain personal problems upon which I had been dwelling over the weekend) I wasn't in the most pleasant state of mind; in fact, I was pretty knackered physically and mentally.

I'd only been in the house for ten minutes when a college friend called me to ask if I wanted to come over and have some shrooms (it was eight-thirty on Sunday evening with college the next day). I had never had them before and knew that it wouldn't be wise to take them under the circumstances, but I did anyway.

When I arrived we bought some yoghurts to mix the shrooms in and decided to take ten at a time until we could feel something, then we would stop and enjoy it before taking any more. We had decided to follow advice and take no more than forty. After two or three yoghurts, the most I could feel was a mildly stoned sensation coming in waves roughly every 10-15 minutes and lasting for about four or five minutes each. We decided that some tea brewed with mushrooms would be a good idea to give us a feel for what it was like and had 20-25 each in a cup. After about an hour nothing much had happened (two and a half hours after we had begun eating the yoghurts); I could feel that something was different but nothing noteworthy.

By this time I had become annoyed because my friend was feeling the effects and seemed to be enjoying them. I decide to pile twenty-or-so onto a sandwich and eat that to see if I could start feeling trippy. After half an hour I had another (just cheese sandwiches with shrooms and pickle) and about an hour after that I had a third. I had taken roughly 100 mushrooms and could feel nothing more than a pleasant warm feeling and extreme comfort. Me and my friend had been talking to each other constantly for about four or five hours about things we had never discussed before--I noticed that when I smoke pot my mind shuts down after a while, but with these it was very sharp and alert (if not making too much sense).

About 5-6 hours after eating the yoghurts I decided the shrooms hadn't really worked and went to bed. Before I left the room we were in I noticed an indication of what was to follow (although I didn't recognise it as such at the time): the table lamp which was providing the light suddenly shot out a beam of soft, golden light straight into my eye--it was like those toothpaste adverts where the guy's tooth twinkles. The light wasn't just light, it had 'magical' qualities. I didn't really register this, I just thought it had looked cool but I probably imagined it.

Now, if someone would have said to me when I was little, 'don't annoy bees, don't eat thistles and don't be so stupid as to imagine you can go to sleep when tripping,' I'd have been fine, but no such advice was ever advanced to me. I had no idea the extent of expansion my mind would undergo; I imagined incredible things, nothing I previously considered inconceivable, but just obscure things in odd contexts. As the trip wore on and I became more restless, wondering why my mind had gone into overdrive and worrying that I had gone too far, taken too much. The fear that had been at the back of my mind had been confirmed: all the shrooms I'd eaten had been working, they had been building up and now the floodgates had opened. I once read that a trip is the opening of all the filters in the mind that usually prevent bad/insignificant things from being noticed. I don't know if this is true but it certainly felt that way. I couldn't think about what I wanted, I had to just let the trip run its course. Some interesting sensations I experienced are as follows:

-I was trying to read a book to send me to sleep when I noticed that the red in the quilt was the deepest, darkest most beautiful shade of red I had ever seen. I began to drink it in through my eyes and the sheer intensity of the colour caused my eyes to ache, as if the colour was forcing its way into my head. I put the book down to concentrate on the colour but when I looked at it the second time it had become a dull orange. This really scared me and I became disoriented, I thought maybe it had something to do with the book so I opened it again and, sure enough, the richness of the colour returned.

-I leaned back in bed and stretched my arms out. My vision clouded and yellowed so it looked like one of those old oval photographs and my head felt like it had just become a foot wider at each side. My limbs all felt like they had detached themselves from my body and then everything snapped back into place.

-I thought for a short while that the bed was a raft floating down a river in China and that I was about to slip off and drown. ‘Nonsense,’ I thought, and stretched my legs to the bottom of the bed to prove that I wasn’t falling off. My mind just kept making my legs feel shorter and shorter until I was convinced I was going to fall off and be drowned. Then, I think, I started thinking about something else and the river, foliage and raft all turned back into the bedroom.

The effects were still coming in waves, but this time I felt like I was tripping for thirty minutes and normalcy returned for only five. I can attribute this to the way my mind was trying to fight the trip and occasionally getting the upper hand. If I had prepared properly, taken the correct amount and been less apprehensive about what the fuck was happening to me, I could have enjoyed the trip and perhaps floated along with it instead of trying to swim in the opposite direction.

After about five or six hours I awoke from a half fucked/half normal state to find the words, 'it's only a drug' written in very large letters all up my forearms--perhaps next time I won't need to rely on such spurious calming techniques.

Exp Year: 2000ExpID: 892
Gender: Not Specified 
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Nov 13, 2000Views: 15,234
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Mushrooms (39) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Difficult Experiences (5), First Times (2)

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