DOSE:

215 - 235 seeds

oral

Morning Glory

BODY WEIGHT:

165 lb

This is the second time I’ve attempted a trip with morning glory. I have fairly limited other experiences with cactus, mushrooms, and cannabis. While this was not the most all-encompassing trip (I went much deeper with mushrooms than I was prepared for), it is by far the most glowing I’ve had. I remember thinking at multiple points during the trip that morning glory is the most amazing plant. I can’t remember many moments in my life where I’ve felt the kind of joy that I felt at a few points, and many memories that I hold very dear to me were felt with renewed depth and energy. If I still believed in God, I would feel quite firmly today that these experiences were directly from him/her. I feel I may have learned something very valuable in relation to religious ecstasy. I’ve studied this in the past since I used to be very religious, and did have some intense spiritual experiences as a Christian, though it ultimately fell apart for me. I mention this because what I experienced today related pretty directly to some of these moments. I’ll try to detail it as clearly as I can.

Duration of trip: about 6 hours

Since I’ve gotten in over my head a few times before, I tried to prepare myself for this trip in a few key ways. 1) I’ve found that I get very stressed out by social interaction when high, whether I’m smoking pot or tripping so I’ve recently tripped alone. I won’t recommend this to anyone because it’s not very safe if things do get out of hand, but I’ve had some very bad guides in the past and I find it very difficult to be around others during these experiences. So in this case I chose a time when I could be alone. 2) I tried to clean the house, do a little yoga and meditation, got through with everything I felt I might need to do, turned off my phone, and thanked the plant. 3) I also hid my car keys, just in case.

Seed preparation: I had some leftover seeds from my last experience, about 135. I’m pretty sure these were from heavenly blues. I combined these with about 100 new ones, which seemed to be of a different strain. These seeds were a little larger, rounder, and slightly fuzzy. I found some very similar seeds when in Hawaii once, and the flowers were bright pink. I was half concerned these might be from Hawaiian baby woodrose, so I tested 5 of them the night before, and felt a very slight buzz. So I decided they were in fact morning glory (they were labeled such when I bought them, but I was very concerned about what might happen if I accidentally took as many HBW seeds). The seeds were put in a coffee grinder, ground to a fine powder, then mixed into a bowl of vanilla yogurt and left in the refrigerator overnight. I ate very little the day of the trip, and consumed the seed/yogurt mix on an empty stomach.

6pm: After eating the stuff, I put on some good, happy sounding music (flaming lips at first), and went outside to sit on the deck and wait to come up.

7pm: After watching the light shift toward a golden color, I came inside after feeling a slight wave of energy. I watched a few john whitney films on youtube (I’m a big fan of experimental film and I wanted to see what it was like to watch some of the major visual music works while in an expanded state). It was pretty great, I felt much more enthusiastic about every little visual shift than I normally would have, though I wasn’t having too different an experience with it yet. I wanted to go and watch the sun set over the lake, but I wanted to make sure I came up all the way first. I was starting to feel a little gassy, but no stomach pains.

The light was starting to shimmer a bit, but it was pretty mild. I was starting to feel a little aching in my arms and legs, so I decided a walk might be a good idea. I mapped out a pretty simple route, just in case it hit me hard and I couldn’t find my way back. When I got outside, it felt so nice that I decided to go ahead and walk over to the lake. It turned out to be much farther than I thought, but the sun was about to go down, so I tried to find a good spot to sit and watch. There were a lot of people riding their bikes and walking their dogs, so it took me a while to find a good spot. I started getting a bit nervous that the moment I sat down, it would really hit me hard, but thankfully I found a small dock that was fairly isolated and had a great view. I was beginning to feel a great deal of euphoria while walking to the dock. I felt inexplicably happy, that everything was just as it should be. This ended up being a perfect spot.

8pm: I’d been sitting maybe 15 minutes when the first really powerful wave of energy hit me. I was looking toward the shore at some trees that were bathed in golden light just before the sun set. Now that my mind is quite sober, I remember this as a very spiritual moment. It was not particularly visual, though things were very bright and colors seemed to have a profound effect on me. I would describe the moment as primarily emotional/physical. I’m not sure if it was in my “soul” or mind that I felt this, or in my body. While I was still quite high, I wrote the following:

“I’m not sure if I’ll be able to hold on much longer to the sensation I felt on the dock earlier. It was pretty close to religious ecstasy, but also pretty close to sexual sensation. The sun was going down and creating amazing colors on the trees and the water. I was caught by a really intense wave of euphoria, and I felt as though I was going to explode. There was an intense urge to vocalize, though I didn’t out loud. I kept internally trying to give form to whatever the sensation was. The easiest verbiage to get a hold of was ‘oh god,’ which did seem to express something deep inside. Or I would think, ‘lalalalalala.’”

The moment I was describing felt like it rose out of something very deep inside. I wanted to sing, or to pray, or somehow vocalize out of the depth of what I was feeling. Soon the wave subsided, I repositioned myself on the dock and turned toward the sun. Another wave caught me. Of this I wrote: “The expression turned into a pretty clear glossolalia. I’m not sure if it was due to a deep urge that needed to express itself in that exact form, or if it was associative. I don’t know how much difference there is in this moment. It felt a little bit like everything was vibrating, or rather, like the physical forms of things were some kind of vibration. I knew at the same time this couldn’t be true….I’m starting to loose command of language at this point. Writing is getting much harder…”

My handwriting got really bad towards the end of that, since I was writing in the midst of another wave of euphoria after I got home. I do want to address a few things in that writing now that I’ve come down:

1) the experience of glossolalia is very significant for me because I used to speak in tongues regularly when I was a believer. The expression in this case was completely internal, not out loud, but I formed the same kind of random syllables internally that I would have used externally in the past. For those who have never “spoken in tongues” or heard others do so, in the churches I participated in, it pretty much sounds like trying to speak Hebrew without actually knowing it. My uncertainty with whether this was something primal rising out of me or an association with a previous moment of religious ecstasy that predated my use of psychedelics still isn’t clear to me. I think it was a combination of the two. Regardless, I was so overwhelmed with joy that I had to close my eyes and I started trembling. I started to see something with closed eyes that was a mix of retinal-retention and patterns growing out of these things (or perhaps being perceived within them).

2) While I wasn’t seeing anything overlaid with my own vision, I started to become very aware of visual moments in the landscape that felt like patterns. I saw this in branches of trees where the leaves appeared to be vibrations emanating from within the tree, or I was very sensitive to the reflections of slight waves in the lake on the trees. I felt that perhaps there was some kind of cellular vibration that resulted in the growth of the trees into that pattern. Simultaneously, I realized that this wasn’t the way plants grow, but that perhaps it was something similar. I think that everything appeared vibratory because of the waves that were approaching me, but it may be a normal quality of the seeds. I’m not sure. But even cracks in the wood of the dock appeared to be vibrations that must have resulted from something resonating at some point.

I think I sat on the dock for about an hour. The sun crept down behind the trees, and colors continued to be very intense. I started to see different separations in the gradations of light that appeared like “banding” in digital video codecs (sorry, I’m a bit of a geek.) It was all absolutely breathtaking. I felt each color in my body. There was something that felt like an empathy with the light, or the trees, or with something. It didn’t seem to be connected to anything in particular, but it was very powerful. My chest seemed to be pulsing with warmth and love. I wished everyone I’ve ever met could experience the same.

I made a rule for myself that after the sun had gone down I needed to find my way home before it got dark. This was a good idea, because I was much more impaired at this point than when I’d left. I could walk fine, but my thinking was starting to get pretty muddled. I kept thinking that language was failing me in my thoughts, that words didn’t seem connected to their objects, no word felt adequate for any purpose. I started getting a little paranoid when I got to the stoplight and had to walk across the street in front of people driving by, but ultimately I got home fine without any incidents. This is one of the times when a sitter would be very useful, in the case a neighbor decided to talk to me or something. In my previous MG experience, I felt that I could turn off the effects at any given moment if I needed, and then resume when I was ready. Later this evening that was true also, but that wasn’t the case at this point in the trip, which must have been the peak.

9:30 (I think): It’s pretty dark by now and there are lightning bugs everywhere. Everything is magical and lovely. I get inside and I feel safe. I’m starting to get a little tired so I make some coffee and eat some pizza. It’s so totally delicious and I’m still filled with joy. I decided to return to some visual music and got out my Jordon Belson DVD. This was an amazing choice at this moment of the trip. Every shift in light, color, and pattern was like a burst of ecstasy. I felt as though I was having intercourse with the film (not sure if I mean this in a physical or spiritual sense, or if there’s a difference. Anyway, it felt amazing.) I watched 3 or 4 of the films, and started to experiment a little. The films have amazing synthesizer soundtracks in addition to being beautiful abstract visual experiments, and I wasn’t sure whether I was responding to the audio or the visuals, so I started turning one off at a time. First I just listened to the music and closed my eyes, dimming the computer screen. I was moved (physically and emotionally, that is. I was twitching like I was reaching toward orgasm and felt waves of joy with each shift in the music.) Then I turned off the audio and just watched the abstractions. The effect was less than the audio, but I still was moved in different ways by the rhythmic shifts in the image. I had thought that I would see lots of patterns emerge out of the image, especially during the strobing moments, but instead I felt intense empathy with the image (the only way I can describe it that feels adequate). I decided to switch to some Stan Brakhage since most of those films are silent. I also had extremely profound responses to these films, which moved me the way dance-music might move someone’s body. I thought that this must be the way these were meant to be seen. Moments of visual symmetry were particularly powerful. I also felt like I was making love to these films.

After a while, I decided to experiment just listening to music in complete darkness. I put on some Ravi Shankar and lay down in bed. This was absolutely joyful. I also felt a need at this moment to make myself symmetrical on the bed somehow. I had some mild visuals forming kaleidoscopic forms on the back of my eyes, very similar to the Belson and Whitney films I had just watched. Like earlier in the trip, I felt an extreme joy with every sound. I started to think of my wife (who is out of town) and I’ve never felt more in love with her than at this moment. I started to recall various memories of making love with her, on our wedding night, our honeymoon, etc. I did this for a while and continued to feel totally orgasmic (or this was the closest association I had to what I felt anyway. It was a feeling of joy, love, empathy, and something like sex at the same time). I was curious to see what an actual orgasm would feel like since the term kept coming up in my mind to describe what I was feeling. The process of masturbating while listening to music was pretty great, but the actual orgasm wasn’t nearly as amazing as everything else during the trip. I’d actually say it was the low point. The interesting thing was, whenever I visualized sexual images that were symmetrical, they had the most power. Not sure what it was about symmetry, but it surfaced at many various points during the trip.

I can’t remember exactly what transpired after this, but the trip continued for a little while longer. I’d say it was totally over by about midnight, save a little afterglow. Overall, this was an amazing trip and I’m very glad I did it. I’m going to have to reflect a little more on the spiritual moments I had on the dock and elsewhere. I also am left feeling that MG has a profound relationship to love. Last time I had strong feelings for my wife as well. I do not discount this plant because it’s less visual than other psychedelics. It’s emotional/spiritual qualities are powerful and worth exploring.

Exp Year: 2013	ExpID: 100391
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 32
Published: Apr 1, 2020	Views: 3,269
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
Morning Glory (38) : General (1), Music Discussion (22), Glowing Experiences (4), Alone (16)