DOSE: T+ 0:00	4 g	oral	Amanitas - A. pantherina	(tea)
T+ 2:20		smoked	Cannabis
T+ 0:00	repeated	smoked	Cannabis
T+ 0:00	4 carts.	inhaled	Nitrous Oxide

This trip was my first attempt at experiencing Amanita pantherina. I have tried Amanita muscaria before at active doses on two occasions, five and four years ago, respectively. I have also made two attempts to smoke small amounts, but I didn't get anything out of them that I could say was definitely more than placebo. Aside from these unique fungi, I have experience with Psilocybe cubensis, DMT, Ipomoea tricolor, LSD, Argyreia nervosa, 2C-B, 2C-I, 4-AcO-DMT, 4-HO-MiPT, 4-HO-DiPT, 4-HO-MET, 4-AcO-MET, 4-HO-DET, DXM, ketamine, nitrous oxide, diphenhydramine, and a number of other hallucinogenic and non-hallucinogenic substances which are not as relevant to this report, aside from those in the GABAergic category. I am reviewing this list because the most striking feature of my experience was actually its similarity to other classes of psychoactives, which I had expected based on research and reading I had done, but not nearly as much as it had turned out to be. I have definitely gained a whole new respect for muscimol, for reasons which I will detail here.

After my first experience with Amanita muscaria, I had a hard time really piecing together how I felt about it. As on the visual side of things, there might have been some very brief flashes of hypnagogic imagery behind closed eyes, if anything. Mostly, the effects consisted of me feeling a little bit weirder and loopier for a short while, before fizzling out into nothing. For my second attempt, I got a bit stronger of a trip, but not significantly. My main effects were sedation and sort of an incapacitating body load, with some mild delirium in the dark or with closed eyes. This was actually incredibly similar to anticholinergic delirium like I've experienced with diphenhydramine, but with a little more warping and waving. Though, the whole thing was fleeting and hard to make much of. I believe I passed out before things ever took off beyond that point. Both of these experiences used mushrooms which had come from a probably low quality source, and no preparation was done on them before ingestion. This time, I had some Amanita pantherina caps that I felt pretty confident would be of good quality, and I made a tea out of them by boiling four grams in water for fifteen minutes. After letting it cool down a bit, I added quite a bit of honey and then drank the concoction, which really didn't taste that bad at all.

If I had any expectations at all going into this trip, the main one would have to be that I might find the experience more euphoric this time around. This was just a guess I had made based on the fact that I had become significantly more able to open up myself to several kinds of hallucinogenic mindsets and really make something of them in the several years since I had previously worked with muscimol. At that time even with serotonergic psychedelics I wasn't getting much more than stimulation and pretty geometric patterns, but nowadays most substances can send me into a complete visionary display with accompanying ineffable psychological and emotional states. Though, despite these thoughts, I had actually only intended to reach a dose which might make me feel sort of drunk this time around. I had read online that five to ten grams could be considered a normal dosage of Amanita muscaria, and I know that the Amanita pantherina is supposed to be more potent, but I figured that four grams should still keep me on the safe side. My biggest motivation for attempting this was actually to find a potential replacement for alcohol, which my body really can't handle anymore , not to say that I haven't been more curious about the hallucinogenic effects as well. But, I definitely wasn't expecting it to get that strong this time.

Within about five minutes after drinking my tea, I felt a little bit of nausea hit me. Considering that this didn't last more than ten or fifteen minutes and never got strong before fading away, I would be willing to bet that this resulted entirely from chugging the tea pretty quickly, and could be avoided in the future by just using less water. I would have to say that it was somewhere between T+0:30 and T+0:45 that the first alerts really started to make an appearance. It began with me feeling an anti-anxiety effect, a quieting of the mind, comparable to alcohol and benzos for me, but unlike either of them, I didn't feel my consciousness becoming clouded at the same time. I was experiencing a slight motor incoordination like alcohol which was causing me to make typos while texting, but I didn't feel psychologically disoriented enough to not fix them like I might have if I was actually drunk. I also seemed to have a slight painkilling effect which I can equate to alcohol but not benzos, and that was mostly noticeable because of how I kept bumping into things while walking or moving my arms around. The disruption of memory and feelings of strong inebriation that alcohol provide were not present, which stood out very much to me in the moment. It essentially felt like a lucid version of alcohol, and I found myself starting to enjoy it.

Around T+1:30, I was starting to feel pretty euphoric. At this point I had already decided that this was my favorite GABAergic drug besides alcohol based on basic pleasurable depressant effects alone; it was the only other one I've tried where I felt like I had a genuine body high and mental feeling of reward. I was actually feeling fairly energized in a way that I could also compare to alcohol, but without the heavy feelings of intoxication it actually resembled something more like a psychedelic in ways, which I felt was actually more eye-opening than just coincidental. I found myself moving around the house a lot, burning off energy, which is something I would *never* expect from something like a benzo. It is notable however that this locomotion was interrupted with phases of lying down like I was getting ready to fall asleep, a general laziness but without as heavy of a sedative pull like benzos can have, but rather more like a trancey one. Pretty much since around T+0:30 I had been listening to The Beatles nonstop, and while in trance mode zoning out to the music around T+2:00 I suddenly noticed the slightest flicker of a visual. It was the kind that you only notice for the split second in between coming out of a daydream and your normal vision focusing itself, the ones you can't even convince yourself are for sure real, but by that time you've already passed the point of no return....

I was no longer alone in the house around T+2:10, and I smoked cannabis for the first time in the trip around T+2:20. I was very much enjoying the pro-social effects of the mushroom, which were easily on par for me with alcohol. It was noted that I seemed very excited and talkative compared to normal. I had been a little bit apprehensive about getting high along with this trip, because I had realized lately that cannabis reverses the anti-anxiety effects of alcohol for me, which makes enough sense considering that I take benzos to reverse cannabis's pro-anxiety effects. I was afraid that this might make the trip take a more negative direction, but I figured that if I monitored myself I could at least keep the cannabis high less intense than the mushroom effects, so it shouldn't be too bad. Whether it was this smoking that set things off, or just the Amanitas climbing ever closer to their peak, I can't say. Shortly after the bowl however, I was starting to get a visual effect similar to spins after having too much alcohol, or like riding the edge of it. For a second I was nervous that this would come with an accompanying disorientation and sickness, based on past experiences in this sort of state, but luckily no such symptoms ever seemed to emerge. Rather, the 'spins' were actually starting to increase to the point that they were becoming spinning rings around my vision, which was itself expanding beyond normal limits. That was the moment I knew that this wasn't just going to be an alcohol-like dose after all.

I was starting to feel overwhelmed in a way which I would describe as technically dissociative, but more so in a way comparable to strong psychedelic trips. It was a sort of feeling of sensory overload which I had also experienced on my last full serotonergic trip, on 20 mg of 4-HO-MET. Actually, I was blown away by just how psychedelic this felt. The body high and anti-anxiety effects that I had been feeling on the level of alcohol, though the latter which had indeed been initially dampened by the addition of cannabis, had now started to reach a point comparable to typical psychedelic euphoria and loss of inhibitions. My mindset was also starting to twist and turn in some of the most complex, abstract geometric ways I've ever experienced, much of which again carried on from the spinning, but had evolved all the way to the point of increasingly severe distortions of rational thought and the perception of 3D space. Still feeling the need to get up and move, I walked around the house and noticed colorful patterns starting to form over every surface I passed. These seemed very psychedelic in nature, but at the same time, they seemed to be reaching a level of solidity, smoothness, and presence that I have only ever observed before on deliriants, like higher doses of diphenhydramine. I had actually anticipated something like this coming from full trip doses, but seeing it still really amazed me. More and more I became intrigued with the effects the mushrooms were providing me, and it was only going to continue growing from there.

Shortly after T+2:45, another companion came over to hang out with me while I tripped. This had actually been the plan originally, only it was just to be while I was 'drunk' then. Because of this, I found myself conflicted over the fact that I really wanted to go inward and exploring the rising hallucinogenic effects, but I figured that this time I would just have to explore the social side of this experience. I actually think that this is one of the areas where the Amanita really shines, because it essentially has all of the social lubrication of alcohol even when you're that far away from reality. I found myself acting loopy and carefree and full of laughter in a way that actually also compared a lot to psychedelics as well, but the general emotional mindset I had undoubtedly gave it an alcohol-like flavor. Actually, even though in a cognitive or perceptual way I still felt quite lucid, my thinking patterns were starting to become disrupted to a point resembling deliriants as well. To those who may not be able to relate, imagine those kinds of nonsensical trains of thought you get while rolling around in bed, not quite awake, not quite asleep, not quite dreaming but your mind is still working. That is the kind of logic that overtakes me on deliriants, and on these pantherinas the alcohol-like stupor had worked its way up to this level of disorder as well. This actually made me feel even more open socially, but I had other interests as well.

We were smoking more cannabis while watching Netflix, and at some point I knew I just had to close my eyes even just for a second to see what was going on there. With eyes open, what I was mostly getting were colorful distortions and patterns indistinguishable from ones produced by serotonergic psychedelics. It was not the entire spectrum of serotonergic hallucinogenic effects, but what was present was spot-on. As I mentioned before, these visuals were also being enhanced in a deliriant-like way, but beyond adding to the dissociation of the experience as whole, I wasn't really tripping hard enough for that delirium to break through strongly into reality. With eyes closed, I was immediately faced with geometric imagery comparable to psychedelics, but nearly instantly the choppy dream-like imagery of deliriants started flashing all throughout the mathematical shapes. Just as I'm familiar with on anticholinergics, each of these 'flashes' was also accompanied by segments of delirious thoughts which could be the base of hallucinated conversations and events beginning to form, but I wasn't allowing the trip to take me that far out. I have to say though that I was incredibly tempted to meditate, as I cannot imagine a better state of mind to induce an out-of-body experience than this. It essentially felt like being on a psychedelic with which you could also reach immersive hypnagogic imagery in seconds, given the right set and setting, and probably have some pretty mystical lucid dreams. It's no surprise to me at all that people will use these specifically to enter dream states, as I surely will attempt to in the future.

Back in the external world, I had the idea to try inhaling some nitrous oxide along with these mushrooms, to see what it would do. To stay cautious, I chose to only load four chargers into a first balloon and see if a second seemed worth it. Honestly, while I do remember the dissociation and confusion becoming more intense, I don't recall anything being particularly notable about it, and it actually did cause amnesia to emerge specifically during the balloon. On top of that, I was not sweating at any point on the Amanitas alone, and I never sweat from nitrous, but the combination actually made me start sweating pretty quickly. This weirded me out a bit, and I decided that these two hallucinogens really may not have the best of synergies after all. Once I came out of it, I put my supplies back up, not intending to attempt this mix again. The one positive thing I can say about it is that it calmed the tremors I was experiencing. I have heard that tremors can present on Amanitas before, but it may be worth noting that I didn't start getting any until after smoking cannabis, and cannabis can sometimes give me tremors on its own. It did seem like they were a bit enhanced in this state though, but not even necessarily as much as they have been for me many times on 4-substituted tryptamines. This effect of nitrous oxide inhibiting tremors is also true for me on serotonergic psychedelics, so it was kind of expected here as well. It's unfortunate that the nitrous kind of made this mushroom trip more uncomfortable for me instead of more euphoric , but I also found that either just being in a well-lit environment or closing my eyes and unfocusing seemed to limit any tremorgenic activity, so I wasn't too bothered by it.

Around T+4:30, my companion who had come to hang out left to attend to a prior arrangement. This gave me the ability to retreat to my bedroom and try lying in bed in the dark for a while. I knew that it still hadn't really been that long since I felt like I started peaking, but it had sort of settled in to the point that I felt like things may be starting to wind down in terms of the really heavy hallucinogenic effects. Given that, I wanted to at least try to salvage as much of it as I could to be better prepared for next time. First I tried to keep my eyes open in the dark, but that was when I realized that this didn't seem to be an incredibly wise decision in relation to tremors. I turned the light on and laid there in a relaxed state which was nice, but the brightness behind my eyelids I felt was also sort of keeping things from fully developing. Finally, after I felt like my body was going to remain calm enough again, I turned the light off again but while keeping my eyes closed and get myself situated under the covers. This time, I was overtaken by visuals very suddenly. There were two different forces at work here, the psychedelic and the deliriant as I've been saying. On the psychedelic side of things, I was seeing visionary imagery unfold in just the way I might expect it to on a tryptamine. Colorful designs, objects, and entities were materializing in front of me and were very flowing, and they were following my traditional serotonergic structures of focusing on erotic or feminine concepts. On the deliriant side, surfaces were breaking up into grid lines and sliding around or moving towards me very rapidly, and frantic lines were being drawn all around my field of vision which pushed and transformed the psychedelic visuals that it traveled through. This was also accompanied by the flashes of delirious dream-like imagery as I detailed earlier.

During this state, my mindset was one of a mixture of incredulousness and feeling a bit overwhelmed, the latter mostly because of how fast it all was moving. I am fairly well experienced with meditative visual states on both psychedelics and deliriants, and this undoubtedly contained several hallucinogenic elements that I had *only* ever seen in those two drug categories before, respectively, and only individually. This muscimol trip was like a chaotic tapestry being woven by both of them simultaneously. I have attempted a mixture of psychedelic and deliriant twice in the past, once mixing diphenhydramine with Psilocybe cubensis and once with LSD, and there is something flawed about the combination.... Both times I could tell that the trips wanted to mix, but there was too much standing in their ways; certain things would combine, but other things would fight against each other. The dysphoria, sedation, and physical side effects produced by diphenhydramine would dramatically reduce the quality of the psychedelic trip, and prevent the visuals from fully evolving. On the other hand, I felt as though the nootropic effects of psychedelics would actually prevent some of the delirium from developing as well, so each time the whole experience was actually less than the sum of its parts, and quite disappointing. Muscimol, as I now know, is the answer to this problem. If you were to take all of the most desirable aspects of both psychedelics and deliriants and combine them into a single compound, you would have muscimol. The level to which the Amanita experience is this is uncanny.

Most of the rest of what I experienced during this trip was too abstract to describe, and trying to do so would make this report unnecessarily detailed anyway. Not too long after I finally emerged from meditating in my room, I ate some delicious cereal for dinner and ended up passing out due to the lingering sedative effects. By this point, the main part of the trip was definitely over. I probably could have extended it further if I really wanted to, but it didn't really seem worth it by that point. The last thing I say about what these mushrooms did to me is that they did indeed make my dreams seem crazier, but I can't really remember what they were about; the cannabis could easily be to blame for that. The next day, I had no aftereffects of any kind, until I smoked some cannabis late at night and seemed to get tremors more easily than I might have otherwise. This may not happen to someone who is GABAergic-naive, as this began happening to me the day after alprazolam as well after I used it a number of times as prescribed years earlier. The tremors in this case abated as I let the high wear off, and did not return. Today, my reaction to cannabis seems to have returned to its pre-Amanita state.

I have been re-reading many Amanita muscaria and pantherina trip reports that I have seen over the past several years but had long since forgotten about, and with my new perspective on these mushrooms they have been quite fascinating. My opinion is that muscimol is truly worthy of being called a psychedelic deliriant, and in fact that I could not possibly think of a better description for it. It seems to me based on my own few experiences and what I've read that much of the variance in what effects people get out of it probably exists for the same reason that people have such varying responses to serotonergic psychedelics: it really comes down to how ready you are to open yourself up to different levels of the experience. If someone is capable of letting go without fear, the psychedelic effects of the Amanita may show themselves much more easily, whereas if someone is not, like I wasn't years ago, the experience may be dominated by primarily deliriant effects, which really do not require the user to be prepared in any way. Regardless of how you are, I can only recommend approaching this powerful hallucinogen with extreme caution, at *least* on the level of how you would treat an anticholinergic deliriant. These mushrooms are capable of not only shattering your concept of self and reality on the level of any traditional psychedelics, but also sending you into total madness on the level of deliriants at the same time. If you can't take steps like recruiting trustworthy trip sitters to be 100% prepared to face to the consequences of complete and utter insanity and take full responsibility for your actions, don't even bother thinking about taking Amanitas. Seriously, they're not for you. At the very least, if you just want to stick to low doses, do yourself a favor and keep some close friends or family around for your first few times to see how you react, and you'll thank yourself later if the muscimol hits you way harder than you expected.

Personally, I am definitely interested in seeing more of what this amazing substance can do. With this trip, muscimol now ranks among my top favorite serotonergic psychedelics as the best hallucinogenic experiences I've yet come across. I intend to take it many more times, with a very reasonable amount of time in between each trip, and generally either staying in lower doses or working my way up *very* slowly. I believe that getting to know this mushroom intimately is going to be the way to figure out the absolutely perfect dosage to use for myself to get exactly what I need from the experience, so I want to do this right. If there's one piece of advice that you truly take away from this trip report, please have it be to do the same. Treat the mushrooms right, and they'll treat you right in return.

Stay safe, friends. <3

Exp Year: 2014	ExpID: 105030
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Aug 6, 2018	Views: 5,856
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Amanitas - A. pantherina (71) : Various (28), Glowing Experiences (4), Combinations (3), General (1)