DOSE:

2 g

oral

Mushrooms

BODY WEIGHT:

125 lb

This was my second experience with a psychedelic substance (the first I tried was LSD), and I was quite excited to enter that ill-defined, wondrous realm again. I had heard that mushrooms were actually better than LSD, because it was less of a roller coaster experience. I have to say that, looking back, I both agree and disagree with this. I will attempt to explain why.

At the time, two friends and I were hanging out in one of their dorm rooms, and we decided to each take 2 grams of dried mushrooms. We carefully weighed out the dosages using an electronic balance, and each of us started munching the admittedly bad tasting mushrooms. I chewed each bite thoroughly in order to release all the chemicals. I had also not eaten all day (it was around 10 PM at night when we ate the mushrooms) in preparation for this experience.

After about 15 minutes, I started feeling the ascension I had felt when I took LSD before. It is a sort of lifting feeling, as if my head was quickly leaving my body, and walking to the bathroom was slightly more effortful than while sober. I came back to the room and sat down on the bed. At this point I had a strong urge to lay my head down on the pillow and close my eyes. Psychedelics tend to make me extremely lethargic, and so it was hard to get up and walk around. I lay down, and closed my eyes.

I immediately began having closed eye visuals. The best way to describe what I saw behind my eyelids is a mixture of looking through a kaleidoscope and looking at a moving MC Escher drawing. There were more dimensions than I could count, and everything was moving in a circular, yet progressive fashion. I had a sense of seeing a story or journey, yet every time I tried to track the change in the patterns I saw, it would change inexplicably, and I would not be able to grasp the moment of transition.

I enjoyed the closed eye visuals for a few more minutes, and opened my eyes to find that one of my friends was starting to ascend as well. He got up and walked around, commenting on the immensity of the space around him. We started laughing uncontrollably. We were at once aware of how silly we were being and feeling, and also aware that we were about to journey somewhere that would be truly special. I think this combination produced the hilarity that was a theme of the entire night.

At around one hour into the experience, I began to have open eye visuals. These were completely different from the closed eye visuals, and I can’t say which kind I preferred. The open eye visuals were definitely less reflective, but more intense. We were still in my friend’s room, and there are two beds, one on each side. As I looked at my friend sitting on the bed across the room, I felt like there was an unbridgeable chasm between us, and I could never reach him again. The light above his head produced a startlingly bright glare, but it wasn’t unpleasant. Rather, I felt that the full potential of the light had been unleashed into the room. As my friend talked and looked at me, I found myself staring intently into his face, because his eyes had multiplied, so that he now had from 4 to 6 different pairs of eyes, and lips, one above the other. As he moved his hands, duplicate hands followed in their paths.

The open eye visuals became more and more intense for the next hour or so. We decided to walk down the corridor to another room, where there were 4 or 5 people playing a video game. The TV screen became a tunnel made of successive screens, and all the screens had a strange rainbow static making up the edges. We sat down in the room, and a few people were talking and gesturing. This became too much for me to handle, because all the sounds and sights were so much more enhanced, and so I could not process this magnitude of sensory stimulation. We left the room quickly, and journeyed back down the corridor to my friend’s room.

It was now 2 hours into the experience. I sat back down on the bed, and this was when the truly mind-altering thoughts began to roll through my head. I distinctly remember feeling like not being of the physical world anymore. When I touched my body parts, I could not remember their functions. At one point, I explored my face with my hands, and everything felt infinitely foreign to me. I found my lip piercing, and as I turned the stud in my lip, I thought that the stud was holding something together on my face, so I tried to unscrew it to release whatever it was holding. Thankfully, nothing came off. Everything physical around me seemed to serve no purpose. There was only space, and my body felt at once minuscule and gigantic. When I looked down at my knee, it felt very far from me. I felt that the physical dimensions that encompassed me were being twisted in a way that my mind could only comprehend on mushrooms. This was truly confusing, and filled me with awe.

I began to think about what I usually felt to be important in my daily life. On mushrooms, however, the importance of these things fell away. I did not care about my physical appearance anymore. I did not care about how I conversed with others, I did not care that sober people were secretly laughing at us.

My mind was at once comprehending the experience, yet I was consumed by something so foreign that I could never hope to understand it.

Around 4 hours into the experience, my friends and I started to find many things utterly hilarious. My friend took his shoes off, and the other guy made a big deal of this; he insisted that these were not the same shoes he was wearing before he took them off. Somehow, I understood what he meant immediately, though I could not logically explain this. I think this was a theme of the night: we understood things completely, but these things could not be rationally proven. This was truly amazing.

We laughed and laughed, and at around 5 hours we started to come down. This was not too unpleasant, though I missed my enhanced state of mind. Everything started to look normal again, so I was slightly disappointed. We were still amused by many things, and we became talkative.

Finally, we were pretty much sober at 7 hours. We reminisced and tried to figure out what we had just been through, but we found that we had descended or come out of a place incomprehensible to our normal consciousness.

Overall, it was an awe-inspiring experience. This was one drug that I believe truly altered my mind.

Exp Year: 2011	ExpID: 90646
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: 18
Published: May 19, 2021	Views: 490
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