DOSE:

oral

Cannabis

(edible / food)

BODY WEIGHT:

180 lb

This account is the first of who-knows how many to come, a path that has led us to question much of what we thought reality to be. It was an accident really, that propelled us into what has been a journey and a dream concerning our lives, and how they are connected.

We took the long way to the farm on account of vague directions and even vaguer attention. Farmer wanted us to camp with him, but we only planned to go out for the evening.

We took a walk around the farm just after our arrival. Farmer handed Jim and I what appeared to be an abused fig-newton. It was his ‘candy’, he said. It was figs and raisins and dates… and extracted THC, the psychoactive in Cannabis. Farmer’s candy is made with what is still a closely guarded recipe. He told us we’d be staying the night and we nodded- we planned on leaving late. Little did we know that Farmer was right. I had had some prior experience with smoking Cannabis, and the experimentation every high school student has with alcohol. I didn’t think Jim had experience with anything, but he took the candy without seeming hesitation. They weren’t horrible but they wouldn’t sell on taste alone either.

After our walk I began to notice subtle shifts in attention span and depth of field. I felt as though I was speaking from far away. I remember asking Jim a question and then wondering if I had spoken at all. He said he felt nothing. My attention would drift without notice, and then when I became aware of it, I was unsure of how long I had been ‘gone’. My focus seemed to lock onto isolated quadrants, i.e. the plants directly around my feet as we walked, or a tree on the far bank, a spot on the water where the light flashed, etc. Everything else was perfectly visible, but like a camera with a shallow field of focus, one area was observed with perfect clarity.

Jim went off to do some thinking and meditate. Farmer said Jim was high, although I couldn’t tell. Ten minutes ago I had been laughing in hysterics, and now I had become very foggy, worrying that I would lose track of the young dog I had brought along, despite how close she stayed all night.

Farmer alerted me to Jim, now sitting some distance off staring out over the fields. I told Farmer that Jim was practicing a Zen meditation. Farmer found this particularly amusing. I was unsure. I was beginning to feel the first wave of a paranoia that gripped both Jim and I that night. If you like the candy, beware kids, whatever’s inside… is coming out! I worked on it for a few moments and got it under control, riding the wave and paddling up to meet the next one. We faced five or six of these ‘waves’ of paranoia over something or other. Each one seemed weaker than the previous. Farmer was there as the voice of experience, and experience has taught this psychonaut that it’s always good to have a ‘Tripmaster’; someone who has enough experience to go along with you for the journey, as well as cope with the ‘real’ world if necessary. That voice of experience was needed when Jim came rushing back into camp.

I saw him running from a long way off and he seemed to take longer than I expected to arrive. Not only depth perception was affected but perception of time as well. What we thought to be an hour was fifteen minutes, six hours only two. I was lying beside the camp-fire when Jim finally arrived.

When I first began to trip on the candy I took every opportunity to go pee and try and clear my head. I kept wondering that if we had knowingly and willingly induced this state of mind that was euphoric and fearsome at the same time, then why did the mind seem to constantly try to reassert itself to it’s standard frame of awareness? I remember thinking at the time that these could not be higher states of consciousness then, but lower, more primal states. After a good many other trips and ‘conversations’ with mushrooms later on, I changed my mind. I think what we experienced that night on our initiation was resistance. We go after an experience sometimes with a preconceived notion of what we will receive, when the truth is, we can only accept what we are given and transform it into what we needed all the long.

When Jim finally reached the camp he was frantic. He was dying, overdosing. He was having an anxiety attack. His heart was beating furiously and he couldn’t breathe. I wanted to tell him it was simply a rush, that my heart was pounding too, but my words seemed to come from a long way off and never made it past my lips. Farmer tried to reassure Jim that everything was alright, but this was Jim’s first experience with anything this strong, and he was not to be immediately calmed.

A lost tourist pulled up just then, and things got a little sticky. Jim felt he was receiving no help from our group so he rushed up to the car window of the man and asked him to take him to the hospital. Farmer, the Tripmaster, shooed Jim back toward the camp and got rid of the tourist, giving them directions and explaining that Jim was a newly diagnosed diabetic, and had forgotten his insulin. We would have to ride into town to get some from a local pharmacy. For one moment or two I thought we were going to spend the night or more in jail in Iowa!

Farmer talked Jim down and then took us for a walk. Jim rode that first big wave of paranoia and then began to see a point of clarity that he could operate from, and we began to talk and sort out what we were feeling and thinking. The waves seemed to stem from deep-seated fears or traumatizing events. These were new stretches of the horizon for Jim, and to rush into it with little or no introduction, and to such depths I cannot imagine. I tease him about it still, but never belittle.

I remember Jim handing me his soda bottle, asking me to hold it because he didn’t trust himself with it. I was barely able to hold onto my own, but took it out of reflex, painfully aware of the icy cold. I didn’t know Farmer very well at the time and at one time a distrust of him arose in me. It stemmed from the vulnerability factor, and not trusting myself this time, I placed my pocket knife in the car, only to retrieve it moments later in case I needed it. None of our fears were justified.

Periodically riverboats passed lit for the night now, and Farmer seemed to lose his mind whenever one passed us. He would leap out of his chair and run to the bank, once screaming at the Queen of Iowa. Hey! Can you hear me?! He loved the moon, the riverboats, the sacred circle he believed we sat in, and the people who lived here before us. Farmer would prove out to be a kind of mad mentor to us, a friend and gentle conspirator. He was Wendell Berry’s ‘Mad Farmer’ with a shaman’s rattle. Thanks Farmer, for everything.

We slept in the car toward the end of the evening. Sleep was fitful, and when we did leave the next morning we were not entirely clear of the effects. My attention drifted on the ride home. Once, we came to wonder how we had arrived on the top of some grassy hill, and had to turn around and find our foggy way back. Even after a nights sleep I was still foggy from the experience. I worked at night and sometime around six in the morning I knew I was clear. That would make the total run time about thirty-one hours of various states of altered consciousness, with the core intensity about six or seven hours.

I called Jim and we got together for a long walk and talk. He decided never to place himself in these states again. I felt somewhat the same on the tail end, but the more time that flowed between myself and the experience, I saw that I was more and more apt to experience and experiment again. Did we gain anything from that experience? I think so. We faced our deepest fears, the ones we pack around with us on a daily basis, and we came through to the other side. Like good travel, one always goes far from home, only to wish for our own bed again. And once home we begin to think back and long for foreign dust on our shoes once more.

This experience was had at a small, isolated farm just outside of a major city in Iowa. Jim is still pursuing his spiritual and intellectual curiosities, as am I. Farmer is still Farmer, and as far as I’m concerned that’s a good thing. I am planning to write more of these ‘chapters’, experimenting with LSA, Stropharia Cubenis, Mescaline, and Syrian Rue. I would encourage any potential or fledgling psychonauts out there to listen carefully to your heart, research like a scholar, and experience ecstatically.

Exp Year: 2000	ExpID: 157
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Aug 15, 2001	Views: 10,006
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Cannabis (1) : General (1), Small Group (2-9) (17)