DOSE:

125 seeds

oral

Datura

(ground / crushed)

BODY WEIGHT:

125 lb

I had tried datura three or four times at low and moderate doses and found it to be heavier on side effects than psychedelic ones. But being bored one Sunday afternoon, I decided to take out the envelopes of seeds I had culled from the datura plants I'd grown in my garden the previous summer and do a righteous dose.

I am an experienced user of psychedelics and believed I could handle it even with a new roommate in the house. So I pulverized a lot of the seeds with a hammer and put them in a pill box. I retreated to my bedroom and started sprinkling the ground up seed mix into water and drinking it. It's hard to tell exactly what my dose was, but after several glasses of water/datura the physical effects kicked in. They were very unpleasant and I was immediately sorry that I'd done it. I felt a nausea-like discomfort and the usual savage case of dry mouth. My limbs were difficult to move and even limited movements felt sickening.

About four hours after taking the dose the trip started getting hallucinatory. I was drinking lots of water to offset the dehydration to no avail, and going to the bathroom often. But urinating was difficult and not very effective. The bathroom looked normal but when I looked down into the toilet, the water was covered with a layer of gelatine with rainbow highlights. Occasionally I saw small ticks on the wall and upon closer look they were spiders.

By about 11 pm my roommate, jenny, was asleep and I was tripping hard but didn't necessarily realize it. Everything was very dream-like and during one of my journeys to the bathroom, I saw jenny there, sitting on the toilet with the lid closed, looking at me. We stared at each other for a long time and I looked down momentarily and when I looked up at her, she wasn’t there – never had been.

So began a series of hallucinations. In the house’s second bathroom, I saw jenny standing next to me, looking at me. I turned to her and resolved to muster a reassuring smile but when I turned I realized that I what I had really been looking at was my own reflection in the mirror. I was very alarmed and thought, “this is madness,” but my reflection was wearing the placid smile I had put on for Jenny and my calm expression was somewhat reassuring.

From that point on I was very messed up and was moving around, bumping into things, hallucinating and tormented by mental confusion. I had minimal short term memory and at one point noticed that I had the left the bathroom sink faucet running full tilt for an unknown length of time. Colors and sounds were amplified. There were times when there were lots of people in the room, having a party. When I tried to talk, they’d stop and listen, realize I was incomprehensible and then ignore me and continue their conversations.

At some point I saw one of the tick/spider hybrid creatures on the bathroom wall, and put my finger on it to confirm it wasn’t really there. When I lifted my finger, I saw a nail hole underneath and I pressed my finger on it and felt the paint and plaster cracking to confirm that it really was a nail hole. I laughed at mistaking a nail hole for a spider/tick and left. The next day I realized the wall was perfectly smooth, with no holes whatsoever.

After a troubled night, I awoke thinking the trip was over and saw that things weren’t quite right. My battery charger was unplugged and lying on the other side of my bedroom. A rented DVD was by the bed with a pair of scissors from a kitchen drawer, my toothbrush and toothpaste and my socks neatly arranged on it. I walked into the kitchen and the answering machine was unplugged. I had no memory of doing any of these things. I went to make coffee and the coffee pot had vanished. All of my toiletries were gone. Later, I found my razor in the washing machine. A $300 paycheck had been taken from my clipboard and was in the recycling bin. A tube of my roommate’s toothpaste was in a kitchen cupboard, and so on.

I thought the trip was over and was glad but after rigging up some coffee, I noticed the paint was moving on the patio windowsill. This marked a second phase. The physical effects had lessened, and I was capable of talking. I started smoking marijuana and spent the entire day lying on the couch, smoking pot, drinking coffee, looking out at my back yard garden and listening to CDs on headphones. I was having lots of entertaining hallucinations, it was a sunny, windy day and the plants were blowing around and they looked like witches, trolls and hobbits. There was a community of strange and absurd characters in one of the rhododendron trees. The music sounded great.

I looked at my hand and it had a shiny, waxy appearance, and layers of it dissolved like layers of paint or melting wax and finally I was looking at the hand of a creature from another world, with a thumb and two fat, waxy fingers.

All this was very enjoyable and I was lucid and even had a short conversation with jenny (who was really there this time). Later, I went for a walk to the park and all the trees had faces and were smiling at me. The plants seemed to be bending to me, crying out for affection, each one saying, “Me! Me!” and demanding to be stroked and hugged. I did comply but didn’t go overboard with it.

For days afterward, I felt foggy. And a day or so later it occurred to me that jenny couldn’t have possibly slept through all the noise I was making. I had even stumbled and crashed loudly into the wall near the door of her room. And I thought that maybe I did something I hadn’t remembered, and that maybe jenny actually had been in the bathroom one of those times.

All seemed normal, however, but about two days after the trip, I noticed jenny was packing her stuff into her car trunk. She packed a bunch of stuff and then left without explaining and didn’t come back that night. I was certain that I had done something during the trip, or that she had encountered me in that very messed up condition and was frightened. I thought that I was lucky she didn’t call the police.

The day after she left, I e-mailed her and told her how sorry I was, that I would be very cooperative with whatever she decided to do from there. She responded and basically said that everything was cool and she didn’t know what I was talking about. She said she was only visiting a friend and didn’t tell me because she was in a hurry and would be back the next day.

So it goes with powerful psychedelics like datura, which temporarily obliterates thinking processes and memory. Although the second 12 hours or so of my trip was very satisfying, the first half was extremely disorienting – dangerously so. I would also say that I will never try it again, but I wonder …

Exp Year: 2006	ExpID: 53459
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Sep 3, 2008	Views: 35,774
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