DOSE:

4

oral

Mushrooms

(dried)

BODY WEIGHT:

60 kg

I am thrilled not only to have finally taken my first sacred step with the blessed fruit of the earth, but also to have the opportunity to share with open souls my experiences xx

Here are the notes from my first trip, which I took solo at home yesterday for the purposes of meditation. In true me-style, I took notes. As I went along. Ha.

First of all, I've been Googling the amount I did and can't seem to find it anywhere, let alone whether or not it was/is considered a 'high dose' (for a first time or otherwise). All I can find are doses by the gram, or however many fresh mushrooms. The fresh numbers seem sooooo high (30, or 60, mushrooms, etc)! So maybe I didn’t do much at all, being that I ingested 4 dried shrooms (exact species unknown - I procured them from a trusted friend). But anyway. A dip of the toes into (pretty much) hitherto-unchartered waters is still a substantial step, I figure.

I started the day in a less-than-ideal state of restedness, thanks to my dog who, from about 3 – 6am at least, transformed into the most frightfully-vocal werewolf-wannabe at the occurrence of this full moon!! Yep – a lunatic, literally, lives outside my bedroom door, and I was up and down like a yo-yo trying to pacify him in various ways.

Once (wearily) up, I had a very light breakfast, then waited a good couple of hours for it to go down. Then (oh and how I couldn’t wait by then!! Excited…) briefly lay in the ‘before beginner-level Iyengar yoga class’ crossed-legs-on-back posture, before blessing the shrooms and eating a couple of them. Then of course came the wait for them to sink in; I had organised a bit of a ritual for while that was happening too (using affirmations/visualisations etc.). Listening to the playlist I had especially made (not consciously realising at the time that a sample of the lyrics was “be still… no ill… let go…”/”breathe in now… breathe out now…”/”close your eyes and let the thoughts pass” – from 3 separate songs). Come to think of it, this was all pretty effective in itself.

Then I figured the trip was actually taking a while to sink in. So about an hour later I ate a third shroom (I cut them with chocolate and washed them down with tea – was a nice way to do it!). This started to have SOME effect I think… in fine black and white pencil drawing, in my mind’s eye, appeared an Alice-type character, with legs developing/evolving into quasi-mythical-looking ‘angel’-type wings. Said wings turned out to be on top of/’in’ big shoes – giant’s shoes. Still women’s shoes, but shoes that need filling. Funny… a recent preoccupation of mine has been the ‘women in jazz’ thing (thanks to an all-woman band I have recently joined), and John Coltrane’s Giant Steps came up in conversation with someone (again, a fellow female musician) the other day. Out of these giant shoes steps a gradually-evolving spider; leg-by-leg stepping out and fearsomely walking towards the person (me) looking at it. Looking me right in the eye. I guess that’s the “wherever you go, there you are” point proven… we all bring with us our dark/menacing/fearful side.

By the by – I somehow couldn’t get rid of those annoying pop-up ads on the YouTube tracks I had chosen, and the voiceover for one of them said “… a personal trainer for your brain” and “see what your brain can do” or thereabouts. Although I could hardly have been considered ‘high’ by this point, I still lol’d.

I can’t recall what time, or how long after the first lot, I decided to get it over with and, due to not much effect, ingest the fourth and final shroom, but I think it was after this that I lay on my back on my bed ‘seeing’ a kind of lace-pattern: cream or white lace on the already-cream ceiling. First it was ‘squares inside squares’, then a pattern like that ‘fishnet-but-not-really’ tights pattern. Then more intricate lace appeared – geometric angels? My recent thoughts of Hildegard von Bingen coming through? The geometric wings were moving slowly, and the image was very 3-dimensional (or perhaps even implicitly infinite). Kind of like there was a ‘vortex’ in the middle of it. Perhaps the further/deeper opening-up of the pineal gland… A suitable accompaniment for this was the outro of Steven Wilson’s ‘Like Dust I Have Cleared from my Eye’. Later in the day I listened to this outro again but with no visuals appearing… must have been ‘end of trip’. As the trip subsided, the patterns on the ceiling got wider, with less ‘subdivisions’ within them.

One insight I gained is that by no means do the shrooms make me still. As my 'dealer' mentioned to me a few weeks ago, I would have to make myself be still in the first instance. In fact you even have to LET yourself shroom; just sit there.

I have to wonder though, how much of this stuff would I be capable of ‘seeing’ anyway? My mind really is capable of going a myriad of weird places all by itself – I have weirdo dreams and a generally-good imagination, and I’m also a pretty bloomin’ open ‘vessel’ (cf. the philosophy of klezmer musicians) for music/Spirit to be brought on through, particularly when I’m improvising. Also, was I shaky because of what I ingested, or was it because I didn’t eat much today, in the name of the shrooms sinking in and my actually getting a trip? Did the ceiling ALWAYS look that 3D, like the concave underceiling of a circus tent or something? Were the blinds in my room actually ‘moving’, or was it the effect of my having removed my glasses?

However, there were effects that I definitely suspect WERE ‘effects’ per se. I’m not specifically talking about the mild stomach cramps, but when I sat down to hopefully do something to relieve them (lol), I looked up and saw that the seashell picture on the soap dispenser looked curiously like a mouth and that the shell directly below it looked as if it was being spat out by the first shell. And the floor tiles in the bathroom, instead of just being their usual varying shades of pale orange, were now waxing and waning orange and blue. Morphing shapes. When I went to cut up and eat the last shroom, I noticed that even the knife marks on the chopping board looked somewhat geometric.

And the amusing bits. At one point I wanted to make myself a cup of tea, using one of the awesome Chinese ‘tea balls’ I recently bought (the ones that bloom into a flower in the water, and when it’s fully bloomed that’s when you drink it). Not only did I see – or make myself see? – the unfurling of the flower’s leaves as ‘insect legs’ sometimes (“whoooaaa, man… we’re all one… the plants and the insects are the SAME” :laugh: ), but I came to realise a bit late that it was probably not an ideal moment to christen my new ‘Summer Heights High’ mug: what I now realise are shadows of the letters used to make the title, at the time actually bore a striking resemblance to a rudie-nudie lady. I guess if your mind is of a certain nature to begin with, well, need I say more? I lol’d. Considerably. Likewise when I looked at one of the posters on my wall – part of said poster featured some waiter-guy from my recent gig-venue, making a rather naff “here it is” gesture towards one of the advertised attractions. This amuses me at the best of times – enough said. Down on my yoga mat I lay, on my back, laughing and seeing more cream-coloured geometric angels.

Now we come to the bits I had ‘expected, but that didn’t happen’. I had thought the ornaments on the kitchen wall would start dancing or something, but they didn’t. Maybe I made the colour scheme in said kitchen brighter with my own imagination. I dared to look at already-freaky pictures in the almost-hope that they would make me scream or something, but there was no effect whatsoever. The main effects I found were on the blank canvases, like my cream-coloured ceiling. I watched the YouTube video for Philip Glass’s Geometry of Circles (which commenters always liken to psychedelic music and visuals), only to find the patterns were rather more ‘basic’ than what I had already ‘seen’ in the eye of my mind. Also the colours in that video were far bolder than what I experienced – the most colourful it got for me was faint, pastel-coloured, tiny ‘cross-stitches’ on the ceiling.
I also looked at supposedly ‘psychedelic’ art that accompanied a YouTube of the Grateful Dead: fractals in magnificent colours, which made me go “nup, that is SO not shroom visuals”. I think that might be more acid-type visuals. However, later on in the video, geometric patterns appeared, which struck me as more shroomy.

The biggest ‘disappointment’, though, was when I went outside for the much-anticipated nature walk. Maybe this was a case of building up the trip too much in my mind beforehand. I was looking forward to‘seeing/feeling the life within plants’, but I really didn’t feel more than I would normally. That said, though, I consider myself to be pretty tuned into nature in usual everyday life anyway. And maybe, again, the dose was too low… upon taking myself outside for said walk, I do recall thinking “ah well, not feeling terribly ‘altered’ at the moment, but let’s go outside nonetheless”.

I didn’t really experience any ‘auditories’ either… I do understand, though, that not all music is appropriate for a shroom trip; even if you put on music that you usually love, not all of it will be ideal. Duran Duran’s ‘Rio’ has a killer sax solo that I love listening to time and time again, but for these purposes I think the whole track was just too ‘full of information’. Jean Goldkette is kick-arse just after your morning coffee has gone through you (heheh), but I didn’t dare put him on this time.

There was, however, a BIT of the ‘spiritual insight’ I had also hoped to experience: on the kitchen table were some magazines. On the cover of one was Lady Gaga and some of her friends. I repulsedly turned it over, in favour of another magazine that had on its cover the young Australian actress Eva Lazzaro – “this is the REAL beauty! Unaffected…” etc. A more ‘honest/childlike’ beauty… hence my FB update quoting Deepak Chopra: ‘remain childlike’. Insights of a more general nature were thoughts like “I have so many different friends of MULTI-artistic disciplinary bents – so lucky”. Reflecting on how this music workshop I went to in July 2009 was really the beginning of a significant growth journey for me and several others in one of my ‘circles’, in my instance leading me to this trip (which I NEVER would have guessed myself as doing, if you’d asked me back then).

So… all-up, glad I did it, and it was a good ‘introduction’ I think, but maybe next time (and there will be a next time, most likely – as in, I am open to it!) I’ll dare take a little more… in fact this time, given the rather-low dosage, I probably could have done it with my housemate home (I had chosen a time when she was going to be away). Compared to what my mind is capable of manifesting, this was actually a little tamer than anticipated. At times I found myself thinking “so I cancelled out on a movie date with a friend for THIS?!”. I also think I was significantly influenced by the visual experiences I had had over the last few days: I had spent a bit of time inside the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, featuring exhibits by the likes of Len Lye (now if I find out HE never ingested any psychedelic substances, I will eat my proverbial hat!), and attended the opening of an art exhibition of a friend of mine who specialises in rather fantasmagorical, extroverted zombie/cartoon-type images.

Thank you guys, again, for reading ♥

Exp Year: 2012	ExpID: 96781
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: 34
Published: Apr 17, 2020	Views: 684
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Mushrooms (39) : Music Discussion (22), First Times (2), Alone (16)