DOSE:

1 g

oral

Mushrooms

(dried)

BODY WEIGHT:

175 lb

Being somewhat of a psychedelic chickenshit, I have had several flirtations with the exploration of whatever elevated levels of consciousness that these substances open the door to. Mostly these experiences were random uncontrolled experiments with LSD and mushrooms, and they number about 3 in total. Also, I have more recently experimented with Salvia Divinorum in more controlled and conducive settings, and have quickly discovered that I am a lot more attached to my ego than I previously would have guessed, and Salvia seems to me to be quite intense and unforgiving, and while I have had no 'bad trips' per se, the complete obliteration of personal history and knowledge of identity that Salvia brings always makes me a bit terrified every time I think I want to explore that world further. This has also led to me being a bit of a chickenshit in general when it comes to psychedelics.

So tonight I decided to try a bit of a different tack. Rather than seek the full-on ego-obliterating Terrence-McKenna-approved 5 gram vision quest, I decided to combine my curiosity about the dream state and the psychedelic state and see what happens. I have suspected for a long time that whether we are dreaming, deeply meditating, tripping on a psychedelic substance, or dying, that the place where we find ourselves is the same place, one that has many roads and doors leading to it. So I figure, why not ease myself into the psychedelic realm with a mild dose just before bedtime. I have nowhere to be tomorrow, so I could afford to sleep in tomorrow. The thinking being that the milder dose would gently open some doors to 'dreamland' while affording me the opportunity to cross through them in a more conscious manner, all in the safety and comfort of my bed.

So I took what probably amounted to 1 gram or so of mushrooms, a few small caps and a few stems, and went to bed just as I started feeling the effects take hold. Everything from this point forward occured in my dark bedroom with my eyes closed.

There were a few mild closed eye visuals of the Alex Gray nature (I'm on to your schtick, Alex, but you do it well), followed briefly by the feeling of a visitation to my consciousness of what I can only interpret as some kind of guardian-type entity, almost like a bouncer at the door who was set there to challenge or discourage or test anyone who was trying to go through that door. Again, this was only an impression, not what I'd call a fully realized hallucination, but the impression I got was of almost a gangsta thug type of character; he was big, he was menacing, and he was NOT FUCKING AROUND. I felt a particularly predatory vibe, like he just might kill me. But apparently I passed his test, because I progressed past this stage relatively quickly.

What followed is rather hard to put into words. I felt like I was first shown that what we take as our daily reality is like staring at a piece of paper or cloth, just looking at one side of it. What reality is really like is comparable to the rest of that piece of paper or fabric being folded up into many layers underneath that one piece that you're staring at, and your consciousness expands when you start unfolding all of the layers and looking at the many different surfaces where you thought there was only one. In this state of expanded consciousness this was much easier to grasp or intuit, but this is the best way to explain what I was shown. Note that I wasn't (or don't recall, anyway) shown these things by anyone in particular, it just seemed like this was what was revealed to me.

I then had the experience of what seemed to be dialing into the consciousness of various individuals... well, maybe it's more accurate to say that my consciousness was brought next to theirs in a rather intimate way. It wasn't like I was becoming these individuals, it was more like a sort of communion between our individual consciousnesses. The first, I recall, was for some reason the Queen of England. I know, wtf, I have no idea why. I don't really recall if anything valuable was exchanged. Then the same thing seemed to happen with my ex, the mother of my son, and I had the distinct impression of trying to help free her from some negativity in her past that was weighing her down. Next was her current husband, who is in the marines and serving in Afghanistan currently and who has been on rotating tours overseas for several years now. I had the impression of an internal conflict with him, part of him loving the Marines and his sense of purpose and adventure colliding with the part of him who is a father who is missing his sons' childhoods. I tried to nudge him towards his family who need him. Next was a random shuffling of people who I know and people who I don't know.

This last part seemed to transcend time as I remember just a brief glimpse into the consciousness of a girl who was imprisoned because she had been accused of being a witch. It was during this stage that I believe my body was drifting in and out of sleep because it seems like there were times that I lost the thread that kept me tied to my own identity and awareness of what was happening, and I became at times a disembodied observer and felt more fully in the dream realm. But the loss of identity seemed to be the only thing that clued me in to the fact that my body had fallen asleep-- it seemed that I remained in the same realm and nothing else changed.

Running parallel to all this was something that seemed like a sense of impending doom, only it didn't seem negative, it only seemed that human perception would perceive it as such. I'm not sure how to explain this; it was like I was being shown death from many different perspectives, like I was living many deaths and being shown that death is a necessary transition to something bigger and more important. It almost seemed like I was getting a glimpse of an apocalypse with the comforting knowledge that it was nothing to be feared, only a step that needed to be taken to progress all of us to a new level. I'll leave interpretations of that one alone, because I really have no idea.

All in all, I definitely feel that I was given a glimpse into a larger reality, one composed of many dimensions but intimately tied to our reality-- our reality being just one surface of the infinitely larger reality. And I say larger not to mean in a physical sense, although that's part of it. It seems larger in the consciousness sense as well, if that makes any sense. I wonder what kind of world we'd live in if every adult was required to take mushrooms before bed every few months or so just for perspective.

Exp Year: 2009	ExpID: 77684
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Mar 31, 2011	Views: 27,593
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Mushrooms (39), Dreams (85) : Glowing Experiences (4), Entities / Beings (37), General (1), Alone (16)