DOSE:

2.6 g

oral

Mushrooms

(dried)

BODY WEIGHT:

145 lb

Introduction:
Prior to my experience, I was reading other experiences online and found a scientific study of psilocybin mushrooms. This particular study (Morphological and Chemical Analysis of Magic Mushrooms, Japan) found on average that mushroom caps were 30% more potent than stems. It is every good scientist's (psychonaut's) duty to scrutinize and retest experiments to confirm or refute a hypothesis.

Naturally I found myself in a great position to test this claim, when I came across a particular sample of magic mushrooms. The sample was weighed, and determined to be 5.2 grams. The sample was split into two piles, one containing solely mushroom caps, and the other solely mushroom stems. The two piles were determined to both weigh 2.6 grams.

Hypothesis:
Magic Mushroom caps tend to have, on average, more psilocybin than the stems. This should correlate to an increased physiological response of the body, and therefore a stronger experience.

Experimental procedure:
The two piles of mushroom caps and stems are to be eaten one at a time, separated by a span of one week. One pile will be eaten, followed by the other a week later. Both experiences will then be compared to each other in terms of strength, duration, and physiological reactions.

Experiment 1:
T+0:00
I consumed 2.6 grams of mushroom stems from the first pile. After twenty minutes, my stomach began to rumble. It felt like my stomach knew something was wrong with what I just ate. Ten minutes later, I became slightly nauseous. This nausea continued for about two and a half hours, after which it tapered off.

T+1:00
The ballgame changed. I was watching the television, its luminosity seemed to increase, colors were blurred and aberration of colors were becoming slightly apparent. During commercials, bullet points of information seemed to move slightly in front of the screen. My roommate remarked on my eyes, noting dilation of the pupils, nearly 6 mm.

T+1:15
What felt like an electrical zap blurred my vision into an incomprehensible mess. My hearing was completely shot. I couldn’t feel anything. Indeed every one of my senses was overwhelmed by a wave of electricity. My head felt like a million bees were trying to escape through my skull. As soon as it reached my toes, it was gone. It ceased faster than the onset, which could not have been more than two seconds total. The feeling was similar to what I had felt when I went through withdrawal of the antidepressants Lexapro and Prozac in years past. Never the less it scared me at first, but somehow I was ok with it. Everything began to change again.

The first of the visual distortions began to make their presence known. The ceiling was a swirling mess of translucent smoke with patterns like that of an oil film on water. Every color my brain could imagine was on the ceiling, being stirred around by invisible hands. Some of it billowed toward me, while other parts made little troughs which appeared opaque relative to the slightly brighter peaks. I looked over at the clock, and could barely read it by squinting.

T+1:30
I noticed my body had a general numbness. I was beginning to peak, as the zaps my brain and I suffered through became more intense and frequent. At its maximum, I would say I had an “episode” every ten to fifteen minutes at its worst. I bet my friend that I could still solve a rubik’s cube even though I had eaten mushrooms. He scrambled it up and gave it to me – I solved it in 3 minutes flat.

I spent the next hour either pacing around the room in a nervous “I’m tripping out what should I do about this” kind of mindset, or watching TV. I would be sitting on a couch, feeling every single fiber of the couch running along my fingertips . I realized I was thirsty and got up to pour a glass of water. Its usual cool, refreshing attributes were replaced by neutral, almost uninteresting and slightly disappointing fractions of what I remembered it to be, like the water was some other substance. It felt thicker than normal, and drier than usual. It was so disappointing that I had to force myself to drink the whole glass. I knew that I needed to hydrate in case I forgot later. I went outside to the balcony and looked around my hometown, the lovely city of LA.

I noticed the freeway nearby my house, and saw hundreds of cars passing by every minute. How could so many people be going to so many places at once? After all every car had its own destination, and every driver was in his own little bubble. What were the chances that two cars adjacent from each other were going to the same place? I looked up at the stars and found that I was hallucinating random stars everywhere. Every time I went to look at the pinpoint of light, it would fade. My roommate again commented on my eyes, saying they were “huge”, measuring some 8 mm across. I decided I wanted to take a shower. I felt unclean, and nothing on TV was good, even on mushrooms.

T+2:30
I decided to take a shower. It was the best idea I had all night. Everything about my bathroom was suddenly different. It was as if I hadn’t ever lived there, and had to figure out how to do everything again, spatially wise. I made sure to wash every inch of my skin with the loofa I have, scrubbing passionately and slowly. The hot water pouring down my neck felt great, and as I turned up the heat, the colors around me suddenly got more intense. But there were no colors. My shower curtain is translucent white, and the hideously cheap shower is white fiberglass. I was hallucinating fantastic colors.

I got out of the shower and did the unthinkable: I stared at myself in the foggy mirror, with my gigantic dilated eyes. The fog played tricks on my mind, making my appearance in the mirror as an older version of myself, projected over my reflection. I looked like my dad, only with my hair and eyes. I looked strange, and older, with wrinkles everywhere and aged looking skin and eyes. I was so taken aback by this fact that I began to stare at myself. I watched my pupils get even bigger, and my hallucinations even more intense. Tunnel vision started to squeeze its way into my peripheral. I turned my head to look back at a semi normal reflection of myself. Whoa.

I wondered how my own observation could be so flawed and unreal. How many people had unknowingly eaten poisonous or psychedelic substances by accident and mistook themselves as demonic presences or angels, sent from a God or Hell? Is it possible that human observation is a limited tool, prone to biases and imperfections? Absolutely. After what I just observed, it was the only thing I could conclude. Was it possible that people saw supernatural events? Perhaps… But was it more likely that the tools they had to observe these “events” were altered by mind bending chemicals? I started laughing because I knew the answer to that question!

T+3:15
I started to play guitar. Everything about the guitar was wrong, except the sound – it sounded fuller and better than it probably really did. The fret board was both shorter and longer than I remembered, and my eyes did not believe what the guitar looked like. My fingers remembered how to play, so I started playing music. Perhaps power metal is not the best music to play when shrooming. I ended up playing guitar for almost 2 hours.

T+5:00
I noticed that the visuals and euphoria of the moment was fading. My pupils were still dilated, but not as badly as when I was peaking. I decided to call it a night at this point, because it was around midnight. It took a good 2 hours before I relaxed enough to fall asleep. My legs were restless, wanting to move and explore the bounds of my bed sheets. My mind wanted rest.

T+16:00
I awoke the next day exhausted both mentally and physically. I had a blaring headache made worse by the discovery of an empty Advil bottle. The visual effects had subsided dramatically, almost to baseline levels. My pupils had returned to their natural size, but everything around me still seemed slightly more vibrant. I had a headache that Ibuprofen could only blunt – my head hurt for the entire day.

Experiment 2:
Experiment 2 differed catastrophically in mood and setting. The original plan was to drive some 50 miles east of LA to my friend’s house. However my friend forgot the key to his house and we were forced to turn back to our apartment. We had no place to stay the night, and driving on any form of psychoactive substance is irresponsible. Some 3 hours of straight bumper to bumper driving later we were back at the apartment.

Before we had even left, my roommate drank some marijuana in the form of tea and somehow I knew he would forget something important. At this time, I should have realized how upset I was with my friend. I was frustrated not only with him but with myself because I forgot to ask him if he had everything. I decided to eat the mushrooms anyway in the apartment because I had been looking forward to it for a week.

2.6 grams of caps were ingested, while my friend ate his 3.5 g. I had no idea that a train wreck of a trip was waiting for me.

T+0:30
The usual nausea set in. It was much more pronounced and I was actually worried I was going to puke eventually in the night. The nausea did not completely disappear until the next day.

T+1:00
At this point, my friend was beginning to trip hard. He reported to me that his vision was very blurry, colorful and that everything was moving around. I was not even remotely tripping yet. I figured that maybe the mushroom caps take longer to digest than stems.

T+1:30
Around this time, I began the hardest trip of my life. Time scale goes out the window here for 2 reasons. The first, I was so upset now for some reason that I spent about a good 3 hours rampaging around, beating the floor with my fists, smearing chap stick on the walls, or yelling incomprehensible and rageful words about society. I couldn’t have read the clock on the wall even if someone yelled the time to my face ten times. At the time I didn’t realize it but the earlier mood of frustration was beginning to take a chokehold on my emotions, and therefore overall mood of the trip.

I began cursing the sky, the floor, and humanity with all of its flaws and stupidity. How could my roommate be so terrible at remembering the one thing necessary to enter one’s own home?! How can all of humanity be so good at being terrible? I wanted to punch my roommate. He had singlehandedly ruined my second experimental trip, and thus my “scientific” aspect to this study. Or had he?

I became frightened, paranoid of having a panic attack. Shockingly, I had a panic attack. Breathing into a paper bag seemed to offer little relief, and I felt like my heart was going to explode. I became scared that the cops would end up coming to my apartment and arrest me for, among other things, nudity (I was naked), disorderly conduct, and disturbing the peace. I was even more terrified that the cops would recognize me from somewhere and decide that I belonged in a psych ward. At this point I lost every will to live through the trip – I didn’t want to be in a psych hospital AGAIN! My frustration boiled over into me spilling a chronicle of everything miserable I had done in my life.

My friend, who was supposed to help did nothing but stare at me for being naked.

I started by admitting that I had attempted suicide when I was younger, and that I was scared of going back to the fun house. My dick friend (I no longer call him friend) offered no assistance whatsoever. He was weirded out that I was naked and was unwilling to comfort me, at the expense of him looking gay or something. So naturally, he sat watching TV and gave the occasional glance at me, face first on the linoleum floor, sobbing.

I remained that way for a good 5 minutes, and then pulled together into a fetal position for probably a good hour. I suddenly had the drive to tell my roommate that I was bisexual. Huge Mistake. His reply was the most defining character trait he has ever expressed to me. He said, and I quote, “Don’t turn homo on me, bro”.

I was devastated. Simply devastated. It was the lowest point of my trip and my life. Worse than the time I wanted to drink antifreeze and end my life. I had exactly one wish, and it was to have the police come in and take me to the fun house. I didn’t care anymore – I had tried to do my friend a huge favor by driving him around for 3 hours, only to have his “gratitude” returned to me in the form of homophobia and ignorance.

At this point in the trip, I felt that words were a grossly inadequate way of describing the level of hatred I felt toward my “friend”. He had fucked over my plan, kicked me in the nuts by offering no emotional support with my crisis, and THEN HAD THE NERVE TO TELL ME NOT TO BE BISEXUAL – like he was better than me. A third of me wishes that my “friend” will read my experience report and discover what an asshole he had been. The second part of me just wants to get away from him. The third part of me wants to murder him. I am still waiting for an apology – not that I am going to accept it. I don’t have acceptance of ignorant people.

Conclusions:
Whether or not any of my hardships had to do with mushroom cap versus mushroom stem potency is still inconclusive. If anything at all can be concluded from this study, it is that mood and setting are invaluably important to the overall quality and intensity of a trip. It is unwise, and borderline moronic, to knowingly take a psychedelic substance in such a mood like mine had been. As I saw, the two trips were incomprehensibly different. One was absolutely enjoyable and the other a total nightmare.

The second unfortunate conclusion I had from this study is that friends can totally turn on you when you need emotional support. In the week that followed this incident, several friends told my roommate to apologize. My roommates response: “Why?”

Why? Why should he apologize? How could this possibly be confusing to him? Once my friend figures that out that I’m angry with him, he will have come halfway to recognizing the issue, and will therefore be able to reconcile the problem. The reason I can never forgive him is because he doesn’t recognize that any issue exists in the first place. So naturally I am stuck. I avoid hating people – it takes energy on my part and is counterintuitive to my human morals of being nice – that is, treating others the way I enjoy being treated. But such depressingly hurtful and frustratingly ignorant actions are deserving of my hate. I used to hate only enough people to count on one hand, but my roommate deserves his place on my second hand.

My roommate will never be forgiven.

Exp Year: 2011	ExpID: 91095
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 19
Published: Oct 25, 2022	Views: 698
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