DOSE:	12 g	oral	Mushrooms - P. tampanensis	(fresh)
		smoked	Cannabis	(flowers)

BODY WEIGHT:

9 st

My name is Humphrey. At the time of this experience, I had history with mescaline, but no prior experimentation with psilocybin. I found the two hallucinogens qualitatively very similar, although with a few key differences, a major one obviously being onset and duration. I had this experience with two of my best friends, on a warm, clear day.

My experience was clearly very different to the experiences of John and Harold, whose experiences also had important differences. At first, I was very much affected by a nausea that pervaded my whole body. It manifested itself as a muscular contraction and heaviness in my limbs, as a constriction around my throat, and as various (sometimes unidentifiable) archetypes in my visions.

My visuals during the first hour were the strongest of the day, and I found the bathroom floor shifting and changing in remarkable ways. Length, width, breadth and texture were all malleable parameters of object, and the perception of these parameters was changing in fluid transitions from one manifestation to another. It was if I were cycling through a vast array of filters, in a manner akin to an advanced graphics program. My closed-eye-visuals (CEVs) were very clear, and I journeyed through magnificent scenes and landscapes with comfort and curiosity. One of my clearest and most sharply recollected visions was of the inside of a temple; the walls layered with faces, each face sitting in a red box alcove. These faces were not blank, but their features were hidden by a blinding light emanating from a figure in the centre of the room. This being, composed wholly of light, slowly reached up, or grew towards the ceiling. I also experienced what I would identify as conceptual visuals, which were not directly ‘seen’; rather they were felt through other, indefinable, senses. I was keenly aware of a striated aura around me, and although I knew these striations to be black and white, I could not see them.

My effects, most notably the visuals, vastly decreased when I re-joined Harold and John. Interaction with them suppressed much of the intensity of the experience that had been brought about by quiet contemplation. Harold had a very intense euphoria, and his laughs were deep, enriching and cathartic. Still feeling the burden of the nausea, I did not share this euphoria, but I was filled with a growing excitement. The speed of the onset, and the sharp climb of transfiguration appealed to me greatly, and when I reached a plateau after 30 minutes or so, I was still hoping for more.

I went downstairs, and lay on the bed. I tried very hard to direct the experience towards the contemplation of death. I was guided away from this contemplation by the trip, and I felt a very strong inclination to close my eyes and fully let myself drift off into a trance. This was interrupted however by Harold, who called down to see where I was. I had a very strong calling at this point towards self-exploration, and I was sure that there was something I was supposed to find. It felt very much like I had a particular voyage; a spirit quest.

Harold and John, on the other hand, felt a strong inclination towards the wood. We sat down to eat a bowl of stew, and I encouraged them to set off for the woods on their own, telling them I would join them later. The stew was quite an experience in itself. We felt as if the beef we were eating was very significant; the passing of energy from one life to another seemed important to us. The stew was hot, thick, bursting with flavour, and full of differing textures and flavours. I think it brought me down a lot though, and by the time the others had left, I had almost fully come down. I decided to bring myself up again with a pipe, and so I partially consumed a bowl containing 0.063g of white widow. I went to the kitchen, and decided to follow the others. I felt very strongly that I should be making the most of the experience, and saving self-introspection for a later date. I had to make the most of Harold and John being there. I packed my bag with food and a dressing gown, and filled a thermos full of stew. It was at this point that the cannabis had begun to kick in. My phone rang, and I noticed that my brother was calling me. I let it ring, but I noticed that almost immediately I begun to feel negative physiological symptoms.

Within seconds, I found myself on the verge of paranoid panic, and my hands and forehead began to sweat profusely. I became dizzy and light-headed, and I rushed to leave the room. My breath was short, panicked and rapid, and my heartbeat had increased greatly. It took me about fifteen minutes to recover, using breathing techniques and the attempted application of logic. It must be noted that this tangent into mental disorder (literally disorder, not a direct reference to mental illness) was governed by a system that transcended logic and common sense, and could not be controlled by such means. Breathwork was the best tool for recovery. This experience, I feel, was very much resultant from the cannabis, rather than the tampanensis.

I left the house, leaving also the thermos. I tried several times to enter the kitchen and collect it, but my attempts were rewarded only by transient resurgences into intense anxiety. I walked to the wood, which could equally be called a forest, for it is very expansive. Given that Harold and John could have been anywhere in the wood, I found them with remarkable ease. I had an educated guess to their entry point, and I walked in a straight line from there, not following a particular path. Harold and John were glad and excited to see me, and I felt an intense and deep relief. The remnants of my negative experience were still with me, and on the way to the wood I had felt myself wrapped in tendrils of anxiety and paranoia. Upon meeting Harold and John my negative state of mind was almost instantly transfigured into stability. Harold showed me a tree which had captivated their imaginations. John, at this point, was staring intensely at the tree, his face not more than a foot away from the trunk.

The tree radiated something I cannot exactly pinpoint. A sort of ancient wisdom. At this point, it is worth my mentioning something that occurred to me much earlier in the day. My attempts to translate the experience into language were very unsatisfactory; none of the labels of sober linguistics had a chance at imprisoning any of these concepts. When describing effects earlier, many words presented themselves as options, but I found none to do what I wanted. I felt that, although this may have been a problem of vocabulary, perfection of all human languages would still be insufficient. It has inspired me to learn the language of a culture to whom psychedelics have always been culturally significant. It seemed to me that they would have a much greater chance of satisfactory definition. Psychedelics have been alien to English. I may try to learn a Mesoamerican language. Anyway, the tree. It radiated something ineffable.

There was a cobweb spread out between two twigs. It was not a circular, concentric web; rather a seemingly random crossing of lines to form an array of geometric shapes. Remarkably, one could look through the web to the bark behind it, and at any angle, one could fit the patterns of the bark into the geometrics of the web. The human brain’s ability to conform to patterns was very evident.

After some while, I took a banana from my bag. It was clearly very unlike anything else in the forest in terms of colour and natural habitat. Everything around us was green and brown, the banana was very much an alien. We discussed this, and told the banana, between laughs, ‘you don’t belong here!’ Nevertheless, I blessed it with the forgiveness of consumption. The texture of the oak tree, to tangent back five minutes, was so fascinating and so intricate that one could lose themselves in it. The smallest details were visible, and those details became vast expanses as one zoomed further and further in. I’m not sure how to describe this, but it was astounding.

At this point I had adorned a thick, black dressing gown, which had also been stowed in the rucksack. I proceeded to extract a large orange and half a packet of biscuits; the latter of which went down exceedingly well. Harold wandered off to explore the woods, and John and I, after some further discussion and examination of the tree, recreated a scene from his kitchen. Using the tree trunk as a replacement for the central pillar that divides John’s kitchen from dining room, we circled around, opposite each other, with the aim of hitting the other with the projected orange.

Following this, we decided to follow Harold and hunt him. I found a stick and, pretending it was a rifle, crouched down and crept through the woods with John just behind, holding the orange. It suddenly occurred to me what we were doing, and how utterly ridiculous it was. We were not so very far from the path, and it was known for people to frequent these walks with families or dogs. I had an image of what we must look like to any passers-by; myself, with a ludicrous and un-styled bowl-shaped haircut, clambering around a forest in a squatting position and cloaked in a dressing gown, with John behind me, taking long, careful steps as he pranced like a brain-damaged tiger with an orange held up in his hand and an inane grin on his face. The sheer insanity of our appearance brought us both into hysterics, just as a parade of walkers passed us. We were yelping with mirth, and, ironically, were probably even more of a sight than we would have been moments before.

Harold had, unsurprisingly, noticed us approaching. His attention however was drawn towards a second oak, much like the first. The trunk had a spectrum of colour running down its side, measuring around 70cm x 50cm. It began on the under-hang of a bulge that ran the full width of the tree, and passed downwards from a dark brown to a light red. I speculated that it was the result of varying degrees of sunlight upon a patch of mould.

If anything else of major importance happened in the woods, it evades me. As for our return and the rest of our day, John spent the following 18 hours in the downstairs bedroom, and Harold and I went upstairs. We smoked periodically throughout the evening and, while Harold was clearly affected, I felt little from the weed. We discussed the day, watched some spectacular fractal graphics (electricsheep) and eventually fell asleep.

Exp Year: 2008	ExpID: 84005
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 20
Published: Mar 14, 2023	Views: 749
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
Mushrooms - P. tampanensis (133) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Relationships (44), Nature / Outdoors (23), Glowing Experiences (4), Difficult Experiences (5), First Times (2), General (1)