DOSE:

oral

Mushrooms

(dried)

BODY WEIGHT:

180 lb

The day I met my brain started out like any other lazy Sunday. I had already given a trusted friend of mine a couple hundred bucks to set aside it's worth in mushrooms when he got his next shipment. This time he said it was the last time he was going to get any from this guy and that he had saved the best for last. That day my friend called me up and told me to drive out to his apartment to get these damn shrooms before he ate them all. It sounded like a fair enough arangement to me so I told him I'd be there in an hour.

Not five minutes after getting off the phone with him, my girlfriend came to me and told me straight out that she wanted to get some kind of high in the near future, so I thought to myself,'Hey, this works out pretty well, as long as she doesn't freak out'. She had never tried any kind of hallucinogenic before, and I had only tried mushrooms in smaller doses that just made me a little giggly and weird in the head. I asked my friend if it was cool if we babysat her through her first trip and made sure she didn't run screaming from the house, and he didn't seem to mind too much.

Once we got to his place, his roommate and he were nursing their trip hangovers with a six pack and some vitamin supplements. We didn't waste any time. I never even asked him what the exact amount was once he showed me the bag, it was big, and it was bursting at the seams. They were whole mushrooms, but they were dried. I had heard that dry shrooms didn't do the job quite as well as fresh, but I figured that with the amount that I held in my eager little hands, it wasn't going to make a noticeable difference. I started out eating them two or three at a time, and my girlfriend started in shortly after I did. I tried to eat more than she did because I outweighed her by about 35 pounds, but she was doing her damndest effort to catch up with me. I managed to down about two thirds of the bag in the end, which I thought was fair because I'm bigger than she is and I paid for the damn things.

We sat around for an hour or so and the first wave snuck up on us, we were laughing and giggling and noticing the strangest movements out of the corners of our eyes. Then the colors started to glow with that intensity that you only get with pupils the size of dimes. I spent a good amount of time looking at pictures from a vacation my friend and I went on to Maui one year. The beaches were made out of a billion people in the biggest orgy the earth had ever known. It was interesting. We all three of us went out on the balcony for a little while to just chill out and bullshit for a while. My girlfriend was having the time of her life, she later told me that she had turned herself into a tree to get birds to land on her so that she could steal their powers of flight. She was playing with a strip of white cloth she had cut from the bottom of her T-shirt before we left the house.

My friend started talking to me about all these people he knew in Florida that were going to hook him up with all kinds of business if he ever went back. I started to see all of these people that he knew as a giant bubble that briefly intersected the bubble of all the people I knew through him. It was a new concept of visualizing the complex social connections between people I knew, and the people they knew, and so on and so forth. As I stood there I could feel a small nagging hint of paranoia and despair that just wouldn't leave me alone.

I should have known then and there that I just eaten way too many mushrooms for my own good. I was simply not in the right frame of mind to deal with what I was about to experience. I can also say with some measure of confidence that no one could ever put themselves in the right frame of mind to deal what was about to happen me. Once I started peaking, all I could do was sit on the couch and close my eyes. A huge pattern of organic shapes were slowly cascading down the insides of my eyelids, with little diamonds of reality poking through every now and again. Everything I had ever regretted doing in my entire life slowly played itself out again through these little shining specks of history. Every moment of every miserable act of shame in my entire experience played out, it was not pleasant at all.

Then came the astounding realizations about all of my problems in life and how to fix them, the only thing I can remember from any of them is thinking that when I come down, none of this is going to make sense. That and that my severe aversion to pain as a child, and my later embracing pain as a means to make myself FEEL something were stemmed of my long standing fear of my own death. Ever since the night, and following weeks, that I grasped some small concept of what I beleived at the time would be the experience of death, I had not let myself think about it and would do anything to avoid bringing up that memory. I was ten years old when I did this.

I count myself lucky that the memories didn't come back in full force as I sat on that couch, just the realization that they were the root of many of my current personality traits. We peaked for a couple of hours, then the waves slowly receded one by one until we were entrenched in the breezy, empty feeling that stuck with us for the rest of the day. My girlfreind and I drove home.

[Erowid Note: Driving while intoxicated, tripping, or extremely sleep deprived is dangerous and irresponsible because it endangers other people. Don't do it!]

That took about two hours for a fourty-five minute drive. We played around in the shower for a while, we kept jumping in and out of the water and changing the temperature to try and surprise ourselves. We thought about trying to have sex, but we got the feeling that we'd forget what we were doing in the middle of things and should probably just find something else to occupy our time.

We spent about four hours sitting around the house, losing our respective trains of thought. We came up with all kinds of wonderfull plans for the rest of the day, and promptly forgot them. I thought the worst had passed me, the paranoia was gone now that we were back somewhere safe. I'd managed to forget about all of my stunning revelations about my own failures as a human being and the roots of all of my bad habits. I was finally just having a good time. After hours of debate and deliberation, we finally pulled ourselves together enough to try and walk to the store, we were getting along pretty well until we walked up a hill that allowed us to see the sunset.

I drank in the incredible awe and majesty of the play of colors and light that results from our planet spinning in circle. I remember staring directly at the sun. As big as my pupils were at the time it's no small wonder that I can still see anything at all, but I stared at the damn thing because I had never seen anything in nature so simply beautiful before in my life. I had felt the pain of longing for something so perfect and pure and beautiful that I knew I could never achieve before. But the emotions hit me with such intensity that time that as we continued walking to the store, I began sobbing uncontrollably. I tried to stop, I tried to stop the tidal wave of pure emotion that was crashing down on me in the middle of the sidewalk. My girlfriend took me home.

Once we were back in the house I layed down on the living room floor and refused to move. She layed down next to me and kept asking me if I was alright. It was at that moment that I experienced something that I know I can never forget. I have always been somewhat depressed, and at the same time, very high-strung. For as long as I can remember I have suffered from panic attacks, highs and lows that got so intense that they left me physically exhausted at the end of the day, and occasionally, bouts of depression that had lasted months in the past. I think the only thing that allowed me to live through it was my deeply rooted fear of death. So much so that I never even let myself briefly entertain the idea of suicide.

I had always described it to a very select few people as having a part of my body that aches constantly, but I can't point to it on my body, I can't pinpoint this mysterious organ that is causing me this unending dull ache that no amount of painkillers or binge drinking can numb. As I layed there on the floor trying to force myself to reassure my girlfreind that I was going to be ok, I suddenly became very aware of that same dull ache. The only difference between this time and any other, is that this time the ache began to get worse and worse. I could feel it welling up inside me, making it's way outward through every inch of my body.

My girlfriend was just laying on the floor with me, holding me and trying to comfort me in any way she could. I remember opening my eyes and looking at her with only one thought on my mind,'Please make this stop'. She started crying with me for what seemed like an entire lifetime. It was probably more like two or three minutes. She told me that she could see the terror and panic on my face as I silently plead for some kind of release. Then she said the panic and terror gave way to a look of pure and absolute pain. Immediately after we both stopped crying, the only thing she said to me was that I gave her my pain for a brief moment, and it was the one of the worst things she had ever felt.

This was not by any stretch of the word a,'happy' experience, but I'm still glad that I did it, and that she was there to share it with me. I now have one other person in the world that knows how I really feel. I have also shared in her experiences through different means. She has been raped several times, and I am the only person to whom she has confided all the details and memories. That about sums up my run in with my own brain, and the massive bag of mushrooms that introduced us. Although the trip itself was one of the most painfull things I have ever experienced, I came away from it with a stronger bond with another human being than I had ever thought possible.

Exp Year: 2004	ExpID: 35964
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: May 10, 2007	Views: 21,700
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Mushrooms (39) : General (1), Mystical Experiences (9), Depression (15), Relationships (44), Difficult Experiences (5), Small Group (2-9) (17)