DOSE:	2 capsls	oral	Unknown
		smoked	Cannabis
	2.75 g	oral	Mushrooms	(dried)

BODY WEIGHT:

80 kg

I roamed the surrealistic main street of a very psychedelic part of a north european capitol. In this 'free town' the entire main street is flooded with al kinds of herbs and plants with psychedelic effects. I bought a fair amount of high potent buds and some already rolled joints contained in plastic holders to protect them from being bent or destroyed. We agreed on finding some mushrooms too as we wanted to spark the following evening.

I was at first a little reserved to that plan as I have had both good and bad experiences with the psilocybin mushroom before. I am very sensitive to psychedelics in general as I easily hallucinate and also, strong psychedelics like LSD, Mushrooms and mescaline tend to give me both a struggle and joyous trips. But, convinced that this was the way to spend the evening, indulged with the sunshine and happy laughter in the group I decided to go for it. We found the mushrooms at a stand in the center of the street, the man answered some of our questions and also interested us in small capsules named Boosters, that would boost the high of mushroom by decreasing ones resistance to the mushroom. Indeed this was apealing to us as we were all experienced trippers, though I kept my second thoughts to myself and my doubts of these boosters. The salesman told us that the potent mushrooms originated from south america and that we should take caution in using them. As almost every salesman in this street tends to overstate the potency of their own product we nodded and were on our way. Before getting back to the festival we took two boosters each and then intended to await the 2 hours that were instructed to us before taking the dose of mushrooms.

On the one hour mark of consuming the boosters I felt somewhat like when drinking a lot of coffee without having anything to eat. I thought nothing more of it and the three of us went off to a concert at one of the smaller tents. We shared a big joint to make the wait a little less uneasy. On the two hour mark we had been listening to PJ Harvey and just smoking some. Then we decided to chew down the dried mushrooms with some water and heading towards the big stage. After 15 minutes from consuming the mushrooms I felt the initiating feelings of the mushrooms, the nausea, a little distracted and nervous. We sat down and I tried to talk as little as possible just concentrating on keeping the mushrooms in my stomach. I could feel that something very strange was happening but this was the general feeling I would have anytime doing mushrooms. As my friends wanted to move along I was having a strong urge to sit down but having to choose between being left alone or joining them I too went off heading for the big stage. I felt that the mushrooms were definetly going to hit very soon, I was confused because usually it takes between 40 minutes and one full hour for it to hit me.

On the 25 minute mark the ride began. I had the first blurring visual distractions. A hazy feeling of fatigue and loss of physical strength. There were some kind of deranged wedding ceremony going on at the stage and I remember being frustrated that the show wouldn't begin, if the music started then all the people wouldn't recognize my poor status of suffering from total paranoia. I walked just behind my friends towards the main stage when the vision turned two demensional, like an old tv set and then just flipped around, or upsidedown. It is hard to explain but it felt like my consiousness tuned out and my vision of that was like a malfunctioning television set. I was told that I knocked some guys beer over when I blacked out, cousing a minor irritation in the surroundings and someone gave me the bitter commentary 'Ecstasy' and pointed at me laying down in the grass. (told by my friend who stood up for me and explained that I had a medical condition and was not suffering from and ecstasy overdose).

I don't recall the next few minutes as I was taken in to the emergency room inside of the sound tower at the main stage. Laying in a primitive stretcher being asked 1000 times what I had taken or why I had collapsed I began to fear that this was it, I was caught and it was no turning back. I panicked and refused to answer the young man's questions, I just repeated that 'I don't know! I don't know anything!'. After my friends tried to get me back out but failed I felt left alone and I definitely didn't trust the yellow dressed festival workers. Their questions sounded like accusations and they refused to give me water. It felt like a liftime before I finaly screamed to the young man that it was 'MUSHROOMS!!!' and the question stopped. I was almost carried outside to a nearby road where they had, what seemed to me like a huge army hellicopter waiting. One of those big things they use in the Vietnam movies with guns and all. I was now sure that I was in the hands of the enemy, anything I would say they would turn against me and then kill me for it. I was paranoid and the visuals were so intense that I can't really tell what I saw. It was like being shot out of a cannon, fast and impossible to understand. I could only focus at a small area of the visionary field at the time, everything else became just a blured mixture of impressions and sounds.

I was shore that they flew me out to some prison far away as the flight were so long. I was being interrogated once again, now by these disguised nurses checking my pulse every two minutes and hammering my head with questions to which I still responded in the same manner, 'I don't know anything!'

I can't remember when I got to the hospital, I just remember feeling unable to walk and with the closed eyes I experienced some sort of postmodern hell while being led in to a quiet room to lay down. I refused at first, by principally I thought of the personnel as the enemy with the only interest of getting me to talk. The strong feeling of hunger and nausea made me powerless at this stage. I couldn't make anything out of their communication efforts, I just stared back at whoever was talking like I didn't understand at all, and to a point this was true. At first the nurses came in and started to ask me questions, I can't even remember what as everything was so distorted by the mushrooms. I understood little of anything and I managed to keep my eyes open just for short periods of time. The mistake was of course to keep them closed as the closed eye hallucinations were overwhelming and powerful at this stage. The confusion in my mind combined with the intensity of the situation made it impossible to get a grip on things. I saw big pumps and containers with all sorts of fluids boiling like in a mad scientists laboratory. Cords and pipes all transferred the fluids into my body and I was under the impression that there were terrible experiments being processed.

I was virtually fighting for my life convinced that the evil people had me head on. The open eye hallucinations became as strong as the closed eye and to a point were I couldn't tell the difference. In all of this time I was so afraid and tense, fighting to survive rather than to flee. I was not, as I usually am on the mushrooms, stripped of my personality or identity in any way. The other 'bad' trips I have had resulted in some sort of total loss of personality and history, where I was faced with having no past and no future, just the horrible nightmare of the present.

This time I knew exactly who I was, the confusion was why these bastards wanted me in the first place. Why had they captured me? I have not the courage to take on the nightmare of a bad trip in general, I tend to just ride it out in some quiet corner of my mind till I dare to open my eyes again, but this time was different, it was so much more real in the physical way. The fact that I 'kept' my personality helped alot after the first hour or so of total fear. When I stopped struggling for my life and when I somehow just decided to take it full on the discomfort vanished.

By this time I had developed a strange friendship with the doctor who had been in and out of my room the entire period of me being there. I thought they were pulling the old trick of 'good cop bad cop' on me and he was the good cop, laughing with me and talking, not understandable for me but in a friendly way. All along he did the funniest movments and then stared at me and I asked finally if he were just having me on for the whole time or what. The nurses walked by many times, sticking their heads in the door and asking questions which I never understood fully. Some of them I thought were sexuall invitations, but I disregarded them as well as I somehow classed them to be weird halucinations. Some other times the nurses would just roar at me or ignore me when I spoke to them. But this doctor, my ally in this place, was understanding and kind all the time. Sometimes frustrated that I didn't understand him and others just laughing with me when I asked things like 'those lockers are really different in color right?' and then looking at him like a little child who just asked his dad something.

I begun to keep my eyes open longer and longer as the hallucinations were quite interesting in this place. Sure, the walls were all floating in organic patterns and the circles in the ceiling kept me off for a considerably long time. I saw the shapes of office furniture in in neon colors moving around without people moving them, they were not real but they moved and there were pencils and clamps, stamps and all kinds of office stuff just working by themselves. The roars from the other rooms became more of conversations and laughter, not the terrible screams that before haunted my mind. I was so far off with the visuals and 'psychological hallucinations' as I call them. It is more a matter of how you interpret what's happening rather than seeing real hallucinations.

The doctor came in for his next talk and I was sat up and talked a little, explaining who I was and where I was from, just like every other patient in the hospital, totally disregarding the feelings of refusal I had earlier. He said he wanted to give me some tranquilizers, just to calm me down he said, but I had to stop him.

He inserted what he called 'A port to your vein, just incase we'll need to calm you down', I was first refusing but got him to promise not to 'calm me down' if I behaved calm. He agreed and so he put the biggest needle I have ever seen in to the top of my hand, now being in the state where even a paper sheet would look crazy this needle was indeed something very far off. It looked like one foot long and thick like a straw but I trusted the doctor. He was after all my friend. Then he gave me what he said was 'salt water' becouse I was dehydrating or something. At first there was this rush, when he punched the water in, it was sparkling in the container he held infront of me, like soda but I felt easier afterwards. He asked me again what I had taken and this time I wanted to tell him but I just couldn't. I couldn't remember what it was but I wanted to help. He looked at me like he was disappointed.

'..you know, like dried ones you eat, they look like, I can't explain, maybe I could paint it for you?' I continued with exaltation. We were going to solve this matter within minutes I thought. He took a pen out of a drawer and gave it to me with a piece of paper and off I went. I don't know if he made anything out of the painting though I had a really good time, it was strongly interesting to watch the ink become something beautiful and creative on the paper the instant I touched it with the pen. This continued for a short while in his world, but it was nothing less than a week in mine.

The phone rang, 'oh lord, there's a phone in here' I thought, 'How did I miss that?' He talked for a few minutes and the exact time he hung up I remembered. 'Psilocybin!' I shouted proudly. 'It is psilocybin mushrooms, you know, they taste bad' I made a disliking face to show the despicable taste of the mushrooms. He looked at me, probably wondering why I couldn't tell him before the phone call came, he said:
'It was the lab, as you say it is psilocybin (following some strange words in what I perceaved as Latin)' I felt proud that I had remembered before he told me, like I wanted to show my will of cooperation or so. Still the hallucinations were strong, more real than I have ever before or since experienced. There were things popping in and events happening that I'm not sure really occured.

After the incident with the lab call and the painting that I got totally lost in, the main struggle for me was now to get out of the safe haven of this medical facility. Though the personnel and especially the doctor had treated me well after the 'experiments' stopped I had a strong will to get back to the festival. I had no fear, not even the risk of being reported to the police could get me off the wave of good feelings. I told the doctor that I bought the mushrooms in the country and that I also had smoked some buds earlier on the day, I felt that total honesty was the only way out for me. In regards, I was not really a dangerous demented person, just a young man suffering from a very hard trip indeed. Luckily, in the country of the festival, they have a more down to earth way of dealing with 'bad criminals' and 'drug addicts' than in my own country. I asked the doctor straight out if he was planning to sell me off to the proper authorities as I thought the mushrooms were not illegal in this country. He enlightened me that they were classified as narcotics but I needed not to worry as his only intent was for me to get safe and sound back to the festival. This underlined my liking of this man, he was nice and had a general kind nature towards others, even if they happened to be tripped out festival goers with a bad case of paranoia. But, there's always this but with the doctors, I had to wait until it was safe to let me go out again.

Bugged out by the wait I decided to ask permission to visit the mens room and was granted it. A nurse, who had been on duty all night followed me and told me that I could not close the door for the sake of my own safty. I agreed and the instant I got into the toilet I forgot my main objective. I was fascinated by the new surroundings and especially my own mirror image. After several minutes I heard the nurse asking me if I was done and it puzzed me a bit. 'Done with what?' I asked and got laughs in return.

I also, under the supervision of the nurse got to go outside to smoke a cigarette, I told her I really needed it after all the stress I had been under, 'I'm a regular smoker you know, I can't hold out much longer' as she too was a smoker she let me follow her outside. I tried to light the cigarette with my lighter that I still had in my pocket, I discovered to my surprise that I also had 5 rolled joints in plastic containers still in the pocket along with my bag of buds bought the same day. I thought to smoke one of these instead for a second but I decided not to push my luck any further so I smoked the cigarette and went inside.

The doctor came to visit me again and I had, after some of the most complicated mathematic sessions in my life calculated that I had spent somewhere between 2 and 3,5 hours in the hospital, that would give me a maximum of four hours total in the mushroom binge, which set me to realize I had at best one more hour to spend in the hospital. Now, the doctor did his funny movments again, and this time I could understand the reasons when explained to me, it was to check on my reflex ability which set me off to laugh yet again, 'So that's what you've been doing all along ha, I thought you were just fucking with me' I said and laughed loudly. The doctor was not as amused as I was but he took it quite well and smiled.

We discussed for a few minutes and I managed to insure him that I was capable of taking care of myself for the rest of the evening. He wanted to give me something to help me sleep but I denied that it would be needed and as I did not wish to stay the night. He said that he would arrange for me to get back to the festival. I didn't want to ask about the helicopter ride but I was curious of how to get back and how long it would take. He looked at me when I asked how long it was from the capitol to the festival, as I remembered it was a good one hour drive. He asked why I wanted the distance to the capitol when I was already at the festival area, just a 2 minutes drive with our emergancy car he said and looked puzzled at me. 'oops' I thought, 'better not let him in on all that helicopter flight stuff', 'No reason at all' I replied, just thought the car was in the capitol or something....' I tried to bluff him.

He came closer and looked straight into my eyes without saying anything. Just checking I guess, if I was still too far off to go back. I tried my best to look straight back but the halucinations were still quite strong, not overwhelming but definitely still strong. He said; 'I can see the mushrooms are still affecting you but they are not so strong anymore' and then he got interrupted by a nurse. I shook his hand and sincerely thanked him for his kind and friendly assistance and followed the driver and another kid with a broken foot to the car. It was amazing, I was tripping out of the hospital, happy and calm, sitting in the car with a glass wall protecting the driver and thinking of how to find my friends when the other guy asked what happened to me. 'The strangest thing man, just totally blacked out' I replied and told him I was brought in for too much alcohol and to much sun, he swollowed it and at the first chance at the gate of the festival I got away from him, the poor bastard was probably too stoned on morphine to fully comprehend my state of mind.

I struggled to find the tent where all my gear was at, I stopped only to navigate through the endles sea of people heading for the camp area and to smoke a joint. I was peacefully and blissfully aware of my good fortune. Pure luck had guided me straight to the good doctor's mercy and I was smiling widely when facing young people dressed up in starwars gear and swinging neon laserswords in the dark night. It took me some time to find the tent as I was using the windmills to guide me and they, for some unspoken reason changed directions all the time constantly moving and setting me off. I gave up at last, thinking to sleep right there in the grass and peace of the festival as I heard a familiar voice, it was B talking to a couple of other friends (non mushroomers) about my wereabouts. I was lucky indeed, stomping my way through the tents and ropes to get to them, smiling, having the story of my life to share with them.

Exp Year: 2001	ExpID: 24538
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Mar 31, 2006	Views: 7,911
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
Mushrooms (39), Unknown (120) : Hospital (36), Difficult Experiences (5)