DOSE:

5.0 g

oral

Mushrooms

(dried)

BODY WEIGHT:

145 lb

History:

I am 18 years old, right-hemispherically focused, and occasionally enjoy cannabis for its psychoactive effects and naturally, turned to the ever-powerful mushroom. I had shroomed three times before this infamous trip that I will describe below, all providing different experiences.

The first time I shroomed, it was with two grams of some rather gross mushies. I had fun playing with facial hallucinations, but that was about it. The second time I took two grams of better shrooms, with less tripping but good feelings; however, I smoked cannabis later that night and started tripping hard, eventually having an incredible mystical experience; the part of the brain that produces 'spiritual' or 'mystical' experience opened up for me. I felt a taste of the indescribable love, presence, and well-being that comes with the mind's divine grace, and it was by far the greatest moment of my life. I was unspeakably elevated, cradling this loving, transcendent state. The third time I took 4 grams, but was moving settings very frequently with some of my friends so I repressed the trip and had a poor (but not traumatic) time.

Experience:

Now back to that fateful day, 7 o'clock, and I ingested all 5 grams of the shrooms. They were home-grown from a friend, the strain supposedly from Madagascar. I expected nothing out of the trip; I just wanted to see where it would go. My friends leave, as I want to trip alone. Bad idea. I feel queasy, start to feel 'mashed out', very shroomy very early. I move from room to room, overwhelmed by the power of the shrooms grinding inside me. Once again, 'mashed out' is the best way to describe the feeling. I try to get on the computer but find it uncomfortable. I then decide to go outside into my backyard, and there things get strange. It is 7:30, and the sky is glowing green. Everything seems alien. The grass was very strangely colored, and it was my own lawn. The shrooms were definitely working their magic. I am too mashed out to focus on any one thing, so I look around with indifference. The green alien sky and the sharp, strange alien, pointy, detailed leaves on the trees and grass perplex me. I then look into the sky and notice strange orange birds, like baby dragons or dinosaurs, but ultimately strange and alien, drifting across the surreal sky. There were several of them, and they seemed just as real as everything else did at the time.

I walked back inside and went to my room. I still hadn't found a comfortable place to rest, the shrooms too strong for me. My room seemed odd to me, and my fractal poster became distorted and spiky. It was that way until the very late hours of the night. But that was the least of my cares, as the shrooms were starting to rage into full effect. I laid down in my bed and things started to get very strange. The alienness of the shroom started unraveling -- the 'secrets', if you will. It is hard to explain, so I will present a crude analogy. If our evolved human-being was labeled ABCDEFG, a chimp ABCDEFF, a dog ABBDDEE; what I was experiencing was XZYZYYZ. Strange, discarded and odd evolutionary elements were overwhelming me. I started speaking, kissing, mumbling; strange words came from my mouth in sing-song. It was pure, melodic glossalalia. The language was a song of gibberish flowing from my mouth, and I rocked away in my bed as my consciousness started to unravel. The queasy feeling and the sudden removal from reality was too overwhelming, so I just kept in to my bed as the alienness took me in.

I stare at my clock for what seems like minutes but I think was an hour, the shrooms pulling me hard in their alienness as I started to lose consciousness. It was very hard to analyze what was going on; I was dreamy, entranced and slipping away. Digits of the clock started to lose meaning, just red lines in an incomprehensible form. I don't think I could have read or used any form of human reasoning. In the trance, I only remember two things.

The first was a feeling of floating around the room as a spirit-like face, morphing and flying around with incredible power. The second feeling was an 'absurdity loop'. My entire existence was of an incoherent, babbling wretch, stumbling about my room, my very existence so dumb and painful and utterly odd. The more I focused on the ridiculousness of my babbling, foolish being, the more its intricate detail was revealed to me. I simply moved, stumbling and falling and contorting in every direction simply because I had to. I focused hard, slowed myself down from the uncontrollable movement I had been forced to undertake, and the babbling strange trance slowed into an intricate stop.

The next thing I know, its 12:30 and I'm completely naked, slouched over and feeling strange. I wonder if the shrooms have worn off, wonder where I am, trying to put things together. I look up at my fractal poster and it's messed up, a sign that I'm still shrooming.

I get up, naked and dazed, foggy and thoughtless. I feel primitive, my only urge is to rub my chin and search for something to drink. I then get up and look at my room; it is completely trashed. All of my things were strewn about, a book torn, my chair taken apart (though not broken, it was made to be taken apart), the glass screen to my stereo completely ripped off, my stereo a little kicked in, my mini-shelf a little collapsed, a speaker completely out of place and turned upside-down, books and pamphlets and papers everywhere as if a tornado had touched down. I quickly discovered the reason for such squalor; I still felt the altered-state surge through me, though I now had human control. I had devolved into an ape: not magically, not mystically, but my human body had started to express its primitive ape-like tendencies. Unaware of the technical details of biology, I began to theorize that my DNA was expressing an ancient part of it's genetic makeup. I looked down and witnessed the result. My hands were remarkably primitive, my thumbs no longer opposable. My feet and legs were horrifically and magically primitive as well. It was difficult to say that it was a hallucination and easier to say that it was a transient expression of the ancient part of my DNA, because I could feel the changed parts of me; I could touch them. The joints of my big toes were hardened, as if strengthened to climb trees and grab things.

The hallucination (or, as I thought, transformation) was so strikingly real in so many ways. First, my dog was completely flipping out, trembling at me and becoming very submissive. He has never done this to me. Second, I am never a violent person, and not at all destructive. I have never, under any other drug, completely changed my actions in such a systematically classifiable way. I was very, very apelike, and without the hallucination of looking like an ape. I had actually felt like my consciousness was creating my body, or influencing my body, to act in such a way. At one point I sunk into a depression, thinking my body would permanently remain primitive. I thought that I would be permanently disfigured, and that my family and girlfriend would all know about my shrooming and I would always have proof of it by my grotesque mutation. Slowly, as the late-night hours ticked away, I became more and more human, though for a while after, my jaw and skull felt much stronger than normal, and my hands still seemed a bit primitive. The mushrooms are strange indeed. As I lay in bed, blue symbols started to glow like the ones I see in meditation or closing my eyes in the dark, but these were more vivid and outer-worldly, and my sophist mind associated them as strange alien symbols trying to map its secrets out to me, but proved too vague. The power of the shrooms were fading away, late into the night, until I finally feel asleep to wake up and go to school.

The experience was powerful, uncomfortable, traumatic, distressing, mind-bending, and now, in retrospect, changed my brain chemistry. I now have much more stronger psychedelic experiences with cannabis. I also have learned how much the mind creates reality in that it perfectly created this ape-man version of me. It wasn't an actual physical alteration of DNA (like in the movie Altered States), but rather a mental alteration of my self-image. Now having briefly researched the neurological effects of psilocybin and having gone through all stages of shroom psychedelia down into the level of unconsciousness, I can stay away from large doses of the shroom. Two grams and some cannabis is just fine, and while it will not lead me fully down the psilocybin strangeness, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Now I have a good lesson of moderation out of the way and a totally expanded mind from such a powerful (traumatic?) experience. Since then I have been meditating and have had 3 lucid dreams, and I haven't ingested shrooms since. My life, then I could say, has been changed for the better, though at the time the experience was harrowing, like the feeling a child gets when he's lost, only with an entire life. Fortunately, we exist in impermanence, and good can come from bad.

Exp Year: 2004	ExpID: 39587
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jun 29, 2005	Views: 18,241
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