DOSE:		smoked	Cannabis	(plant material)
	20	oral	Mushrooms

BODY WEIGHT:

83 kg

Before I even start to try and put what has happened into words, I think I should mention I am not myself at the moment. I am shattered, having worked at Pizza Hut for 6 hours non stop and still feel the residue of the mushroom high. I think last night was of such an epic scale I’m unable to come to terms with it, as I seem to be shutting it out of my memory unless I think specifically about what has happened.

At 6 o clock last night G and I met up and smoked a few more joints whilst we waited for M to get our gram of cocaine. By 8 o clock the gram still hadn’t arrived so we went to M’s and bought 40 mushrooms for 20 quid. After that we drove to the cliff top in our own cars so that we could take all the drugs in G’s car then chill out in mine without fear of being searched by the Police. Mushrooms, without doubt, are the worst tasting and smelling drug by far. I haven’t seen every drug by any means, but I have a hard time believing that any of the others will gush cold, rank, raw mushroom flavour juice into your mouth with every bite, leaving a paste that tastes like grass/dandelions lol.

Enough of my complaining, after eating about 20 mushrooms each G rolled a blunt and we chilled out with that. I was really stoned having smoked for the last 3 hours and then having a few hardcore tokes of pure bud. Feeling suitably ratted we went to my car, parked about 10 metres away. My car is so much more comfy than G’s, and when we put some music on that I really like, namely Blur, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Radiohead the evening started to pick up. I can scarcely believe what happened next, and I don’t even pretend to understand how or why it happened, I just know it did.

When the mushrooms started to kick in I was feeling really uneasy. I was scared I’d taken too many and would be thrown into a nightmare I couldn’t escape from. I’m sure I was paranoid and nervy for about 40 minutes or so, and particular songs on the CD player really annoyed me or made me feel extremely odd. Soon however the visuals started getting a lot more detailed, closed eye cartoony characters were all over the place. The moment I realised when things had stopped being quite so menacing is when the steering wheel had turned into a dog-like mechanical head which emitted nothing but a friendly, happy, carefree vibe. I’m sure I’d started giggling.

Staring out the front of the windscreen underwater scenes would appear, filled with cute looking jelly fish. This theme magnified to the point where the entire car was a submarine trawling the depths of the ocean. It was magnificent, and with it came a sense of child like security and innocence. In a sense I was being born into a new world – the mushroom realm so to speak – and I was in fact an infant taking his first look at life through new eyes. The first awe inspiring thought I experienced was the realisation of how my subconscious and conscious minds were completely separate. My though pattern had centred very heavily on “I”, how “I” was feeling and what 'I' was worried about. Realisation swept through me like a bolt of lightning. It was incredibly forceful, my head was pushed back onto the headrest and the “real me” part of my brain was depicted as a burning ball of energy in an empty black vacuum.

I could feel it burning inside my head, the bit of my brain from which all my impulses and fears originated. It felt as though I was becoming awake for the first time in ages. This thought was followed by many more visuals and interesting things to watch. I was totally consumed with watching these visions and I cannot describe the sense of security and well being that had enveloped me. It was out of this world. This is when things starting getting so fucking intense it brought me to tears, and I mean really crying like a baby.

Firstly there was this one image that carried such an alarming sense of familiarity it jolted me out of my content little monging out session into a full on search of my brain to remember what the fuck that picture represented. For the most part it was a cross hatch of dull green and beige with two small eyes in the middle, like black coals. It came in other forms as well, each time with the feeling that I knew what it was and that it held great significance. When the answer came I could barely blink or breathe. It was my grandma, or at least her spirit and it was all around me.

I was taken back to being a child, the feeling of safety with her and the grief I felt when she died came flooding back. I started sobbing without control at the memory of someone who I had loved so much being lost, and then somehow appearing to me in this other world. It truly was another world by now, it had no relation to the physical world in any way but appearance. The feelings aroused by the physical objects in the physical world had changed completely. An overpowering love consumed me, so much so that it hurt but it was still impossible to turn away. The trip was powering onward becoming more intense by the second. I could feel my brain changing as the psilocybin blasted my neural pathways. Imagine the feeling of your fingernails being ripped out, and that’s what my mind felt like. It was as if it was being ripped forcefully out of its socket in my head. It really hurt, and it was replaced by even more painful bending sensations.

Imagine how your knee would feel if it just bent the wrong way, destroying the knee cap with one swift movement. This is what happened to my mind, and it carried on wriggling and bending until it felt free from old restraints. I have a feeling it was my subconscious becoming “in control”, almost taking over from my conscious mind. Now the profound thoughts were coming at light speed. The one I am most happy about is how much I truly love my family. I felt crippled by how badly I have been treating them, and in my mind set I was able to see everything from their individual points of view.

I can’t feel annoyed with mother any more for her continual ‘drugs are bad’ hints she drops, as how can I expect her to remain silent when she sees her son wandering down a dangerous path? I also realised that my dad is my hero, and how grateful I am for all he does. I realised that the child like security feeling I had been feeling was in fact the feeling I had lived with throughout my child hood because of how my parents had treated me. I can’t believe I’d forgotten that sense of well being, but being exposed to it again made me remember how amazing life has been. I thought about how much I love my sister, and celebrated the differences in all of us, as I guess before I was slightly annoyed that no-one else in the family was the same as me. I was crying so hard I didn’t know what to do, and I’m amazed G didn’t look over and ask what was wrong. Throughout all of this I was being shown a spiritual kind of flow diagram detailing a spirits passage through life, the various stages of growth that he achieves. It was almost as if I was looking completely the wrong way to become what I wanted to be, and at the time I knew where I had to go to achieve my goals, although that answer eludes me now.

I also realised, contrary to what I tell myself, that I do care about how I look and how I should take more pride in my appearance – maybe make a bit more of an effort. I also thought about how I’d got beaten up once by a gang of thugs. Before last night I’d always shrugged it off, but in my bemushroomed state I was furious. How dare they have attacked me? I guess I came to terms with so many things that to my subconscious mind were so painfully obvious I reached an entire new level of being. After I had processed all these new thoughts and emotions I began to get sick of the music playing. Each song would annoy me terribly so I just turned it off, only to be amazed by the sounds of nature all around my car.

In the distance I could hear the crashing of waves on the beach, the wind was ripping through the nearby bushes and rain drops were splashing heavily against the roof. Around about now I became another person. It was still me in a sense, but removed completely from every day life. I wasn’t really wasted either, I even phoned up S and had a perfectly normal conversation, apart from the fact I had great difficulty putting the thoughts I was having into words, so I may have sounded off my head.

Oh, one freaky part of the trip up until now was that I was convinced I had a nose bleed, and when I checked the mirror I was covered in blood. Strangely there was nothing scary about this, it was just a fact, although it wasn’t true at all, there was no blood on me anywhere. However, in my new person state when I checked the mirror I looked great – and I mean really great. I had a boyish charm look about me, a sparkle in my eye and an infectious smile beaming out from a happy face.

I thought long and hard about whether or not I had reached a state of mind that I was meant to have been in all these years but had sadly been lacking. Certainly in this mind set there would be no problems with my parents, because I had infinite sympathy and patience, and was connected to a sense of universal love/security that originated from child hood.

[Erowid Note: Driving while intoxicated, tripping, or extremely sleep deprived is dangerous and irresponsible because it endangers other people. Don't do it!]
Soon I was too tired to stay on the cliff top so decided on driving home. I considered being caught by the police, but in comparison to how much I loved my family nothing seemed to matter, at that moment in time they, including grandma, were everything.

Anyway, I looked fine, and could speak fine as well. The drive home was ok, and getting into bed went without any problems. I was still in “other person” mode up to the time when I finally dropped off to sleep around 3 or 4 in the morning. When I woke up I couldn’t tell whether or not I’d gone back to being me or if I’d become more accustomed to my new outlook. I dozed for another few hours before having to get up for work. For the most part of the day I’ve been worrying that my realisations will fade, and I’ll go back to being how I was before the trip in my attitude towards the family. Fortunately I’ve just had dinner with them, and I don’t get annoyed by them at all, and I feel a lot more connected than I have done in a long time.

I’m so tired at the moment all my emotions are running low. Tomorrow I think I’ll be feeling loads better and probably in a better state to think about what’s happened. Tonight I’m going to collapse in front of the TV, maybe order a film from Front Row. It’s very unlikely I’ll ever do mushrooms again, and after this experience I think I’ll give LSD a miss as well. It was so overpowering I could do nothing against the force of the mushroom. Had I had a bad trip I’m sure I could have been seriously traumatised, and that’s a risk I don’t want to take now I know the extremes a trip can take me to.

One more interesting point is the reaction of my cat when I went down for breakfast. When I entered the kitchen he lept up off his boiler and started meowing. I’d repeat the meow’s back to him and we had a full on conversation of really meaningful meow’s, not just the regular “meow I’m hungry” meows. Looking at his little face it really seemed as though some form of communication was going on. It would be amazing if somewhere deep in our minds we possess the ability to communicate with animals, it’s just a shame we need something so potent as magic mushrooms to make it work.

Exp Year: 2004	ExpID: 30547
Gender: Not Specified
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Sep 1, 2006	Views: 15,285
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Mushrooms (39) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Families (41), Glowing Experiences (4)