DOSE:

15 g

oral

Mushrooms

(dried)

BODY WEIGHT:

80 kg

Last night I had a remarkable and terrifying reaction to magic mushrooms, culminating in the distinct belief that I had died and had been reincarnated in a parallel universe where the people around me were actors controlled by some omnipotent being. Let me start from the beginning:

I arrived in a city about 1:30am and consumed about 15g dried Psilocybensis, evidently very strong, because I've taken similar doses and never experienced anything like this. I was with a friend who took a similar does but remained remarkably sober throughout.

By the time I'd got up to my friend's house the mushrooms were kicking in, we chose a lighthearted film to watch and sat in the back garden with a laptop, laughing and joking, as we do. About half way through the film (must have been 3am) we went inside and into his kitchen where things began to go downhill.

I sat in a chair and looked around me. As the influence of the chemical on my brain increased I took images and ideas from the things I saw around me. A bank statement from HSBC turned into a memory of staring up at the HSBC building in Docklands. Seeing a cardboard box with NIGHT or something similar written on it in big black letters sent bad vibes, and I kept moving my head and looping through the different things I saw; an apple, letters on a board, a weird (even when sober) rendering of a cat on the wall, a book of 3D images. Ideas started looping along with them and each thing I saw became more exaggerated.

I looked at the kitchen floor where my friend was sitting and he questioned me 'Are you okay?', 'Are you fucked?'. Either he was repeating himself or the drug was causing time warping inside my head, but this became increasingly worrying. It was as if time was a glass ruler smashed into tens of pieces and played back over and over again.

Feeling increasingly uncomfortable I looked for something real to cling on to. I picked up a pair of bananas and ripped them apart, at this point not knowing or caring what my friend saw or thought. I've lost the plot before but never to this extent.

The chair I was sitting on seemed to become increasingly uncomfortable (perhaps I'd merely forgotten how to sit) and so I stood up and staggered onto the landing where the things I saw around me continued to haunt me. I pulled my glasses out of my pocket and mangled them, and wrestled with my mobile for a brief period. Then I collapsed on the stairs and after that I can't remember much at all for the next few hours. Scattered, distant memories of my friend's mother leafing frantically through a phone book. The phrase 'That particular strain of magic mushroom'. Being offered mugs of water and only instinctively being able to drink from them.

What happened is that my friend had realised that I was losing it, called his parents and they'd called the National Drugs Helpline whose advice was to give me plenty of water and wait it out.

Over the next few hours I had a distinct but barely memorable battle of disassociation between my body and my 'soul' – who I am, my past, my family and my friends; my memories. I remember muttering 'Am I.. (my name)..?'

When I finally did come to, I was seated on the sofa, the sun was streaming in through the window and it was exactly 9am according to the clock on the mantelpiece. I popped back into consciousness quickly and with a quickened heartbeat and tingling sensation which suggested that I'd had my soul reattached to another reality, or at least, that's what it felt like at the time.

My friend and his father were discussing, I think, how Google works when I began to really notice what was going on around me. My initial assessment of the situation was that I'd died and whatever spiteful omnipotent being was out there had sent me days or weeks into the future to perceive how my friend's family had dealt with my death in their house. I thought I could see them but that they couldn't see me.

Then my friend stood up and tried to get the TV working, the cables of which I'd previously plugged into my laptop. Then my friend's mother came into the room and put a plate of toast down next to me. Then my friend looked directly at me and said 'He pulled them all out.'

'Eh?'

In retrospect it was a perfectly reasonable thing to say, but somehow mentally somersaulted myself into believing that I'd died and was now a ghostlike observer, I did a double take. I inferred that this reality was the first part of the afterlife, where 'God' controlled characters and scenery made to look exactly like the people and place where I'd died. I tried talking to these characters, warily, considering that they were actually puppets of 'God'. And yes, this is all a bit mashup.

Convinced that I was dead, I began to think about my family and friends and how they'd react to the news of my death. Not great stuff to consider. I got up and walked around the house, acting as if my concerned friend and his parents weren't actually who they appeared to be, then walked out into the street and walked half way up it before my friend's father came out to stop me. I demanded to know 'Who are you?'. His response was, 'I'm your friend's dad'. I said 'Yes, yes, I know you look like him, but who are you really?'. Heh.

These ghosts around me made me a cup of tea and set out the guest bed and recommended I go to sleep. I followed their suggestions, thinking I might as well see where it takes me. I must have been exhausted, because I fell asleep quickly. Two hours later I woke up and it was midday, upon which I walked around a bit more, had a conversation with the (apparent ghost of) my friend's father, fixed his television for him, went upstairs to the computer and logged into my hosting company's server. Thought God's pretty clever to emulate TCP/IP and reassessed the situation from there.

'Shit, I'm probably not actually dead..'

On realising the actual likelihood of dying from the amount of substance I'd taken, and despite the distinct psychological suggestion a few hours prior to the contrary, I decided that I was probably still alive, and so I went downstairs to apologise to my friend's mother.

She made me another cup of tea and I had a shower, finished reading a book I'd been after for ages (Brave New World by Aldous Huxley), fixed up my glasses by bending them back into shape, found my laptop and, well, life goes on. :)

Take care and have fun
-lq

Exp Year: 2003	ExpID: 26637
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Feb 9, 2007	Views: 4,960
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