DOSE:		oral	Morning Glory	(tea)
		oral	Datura	(tea)
		oral	Alcohol - Beer/Wine	(liquid)

BODY WEIGHT:

76 kg

I was hitch hiking through Portugal a few years ago with two friends and a puppet show. One of the two most noticeable aspects of the flora there are the profusion of morning glory vines and the fields and beaches of datura (Flores del diabolo). We picked our first datura plant very early one morning whilst walking back from a hill party along the motorway. It was a 24 kilometer hike, hot and desolate. After about ten kilometers we saw a snake writhing across the sand, as we watched it vanished into a hole - beneath the roots of a young datura plant. We interpreted this as an omen and picked it for later. We then returned to our camp and headed for the coast.

On the way we picked a carrier bag full of morning glory plant material and stored it with the datura. We arrived at a quiet and tiny beach village and set up camp in a pine wood about two kilometers away. We let the morning glory seep in cold water overnight and the following day, being careful not to allow any datura into the mix.
The result was two pints of purple, thick, sweetish tasting liquid, which I and one other friend took between us. We then set out to walk to the village for a beer. As we walked, the morning glory began to take effect, we felt elated and light-footed. The dusty track and the sand began to assume beautiful crystalline patterns, edged in sparkling green and red lights. At this time in my life I often hallucinated letters and began to see great swathes of words etched upon the ground and shimmering in the air. We were both voluble and excited by the time we reached the ramshackle bar on the outskirts of the twenty dwelling village.

I left my friend sitting outside and walked in to order two beers. I returned and sat down beside him. As I did so, I felt the datura hit me from behind. All the energy I had been experiencing seemed to drain out the bottom of my feet. We both felt the same way. Where before we had been talkative and alert we now both felt utterly drained. We put away our beers and set off for the long walk back to our camp. Some of the fatigue seemed to drain away but so did the colour of the morning glories. Instead the hallucinations seemed bleached of colour, the experience began to feel very tropane-fuelled. Great people seemed to be in the wood with us, white like huge statues and doing unspeakable things to each other. Yet, as soon as we focused upon them they would be no longer there. After a while we realised we had no idea where we were. Navigation seemed impossible. We did eventually find our little camp and our other friend but only after a couple of hours or so of blundering around the forest being menaced by bestial statues.

The final seal of the datura was when I lay down in my hammock and stared at the sky. The stars were fiercely bright - no light pollution on our little strip of coast - and strange shapes appeared and vanished again. After a while I realised my eyes were shut, I opened them but the scene I was looking didn't change, nor did it change when I closed them. This is typical of datura and henbane.

In all it the experience was rather beautiful. I was alarmed at how merely storing the datura with the morning glory allowed her to entirely subvert and then dominate the experience, like a snake swallowing a butterfly. I have taken 'heroic' doses of datura before, and did so later on in this holiday. By this I mean upwards of a plant or more, but have always been fairly obliterated by it for a couple of days and profoundly amnesiac. This dose was just perfect, although on that night we would have preferred just the morning glory. How do you measure out a dose accidentally incurred through absorption by exposure?

Strangely, no matter how terrifying or amnesia-inducing datura or henbane experiences are, I always feels like repeating them...

Exp Year: 2002	ExpID: 57544
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Mar 13, 2010	Views: 17,597
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Morning Glory (38), Datura (15) : Nature / Outdoors (23), Combinations (3), Small Group (2-9) (17)