DOSE:	repeated	smoked	Cannabis
	3.5 g	oral	Mushrooms	(dried)

BODY WEIGHT:

140 lb

Existential Reflections With Psilocybin

It was November 10th, 2011 and I had just been dismissed from the longest class of my life at around 9:00 pm. I had two things on my mind; the midnight release of The Elder Scrolls V that was in 3 hours and that big bag psilocybin mushrooms I had at home patiently awaiting my return. To prepare for this, I did some cleaning around the house as to remove some clutter that might cause some undesirable dissonance when I shove off.

My friend Ray called me around 10:30 pm because he needed a ride home, so I drove over there to pick him up. I left there around 11:00, “gotta kill an hour,” I said to myself. Ray suggested we pick up some cannabis and smoke a blunt on the way to Best Buy for the release. I didn’t have an objection, so we picked up a swisher and went to pick up the bud.

We arrived around midnight and there was a pretty impressive line in front of the store. I picked up my copy and we headed to Steak n’ Shake to eat. We finally smoked that blunt once we got home, which was about .7 grams, rolled up in a sexy looking pin that no machine could ever match. We chatted about movies and then began inquire about the certain patterns that we see in society and nature and how they relate. It’s very interesting talking about such subjects with Ray, because he has such a humanistic, empiricist perspective on life while I seem to be the opposite. I have a much more structural, rationalist view, meaning I would sooner turn to logic and formulas rather than emotion or intuition. I guess you could say we become two sides of the same brain, me being left and Ray being right.

We decided to part ways around 1:00 am. I went inside and immediately put Skryim in and began to play. My room is very cozy; it’s like my refuge in which I can go places I would never visit in a different location, like I planned to that night. It is a dark red/brown themed room that had my television with my surround sound set up, my bed, plenty to eat, drink and smoke, and my favorite chair, all I really thought I needed that night. There are two windows in my room from which I observe the wildlife and the weather. I live in an old hunting reserve that was converted to a residential area about 20 years ago, so there’s plenty to watch just looking out the window. There was a comforting, cold breeze blowing through one of the windows that seemed to match perfectly with the vibes of Skyrim.

I was ecstatic to say the least; I had been waiting anxiously for this game for a couple years. So far, it has met my expectations and then some. At this point, I thought to myself that it was a little too late to eat the shrooms, so I kept playing. It was bout 2:30 am when I thought to myself again, “I’m going to be up all night playing this game, why not just eat them now?” So I did.

I poor a tall glass of orange juice to help my little fungus buddies send some psilocybin to my noggin. The mushrooms, like always, taste absolutely terrible, not to mention the outlandish texture. The stems have a putrid, furry interior which almost make me lose it, but I force them down and go vigorously brush my teeth.

I continue to play Skyrim, smoking some cannabis on the load menus to soothe my stomach. I smoked about 5 decent sized swats of that Barney purple crispity-crunch weed from my bong. I was feeling great, and was only going up from here. It was about 3:10 when the onset effects of the mushrooms were surfacing. A slight feeling of euphoria begins to creep up for about 10 minutes.

It’s now about 3:20 am and suddenly an overwhelming feeling of euphoria washes over my entire body. My head begins to feel light, as if it’s going to float to the ceiling like a helium balloon, followed by the rest of my body. I begin to feel a pulse running through my body at what seemed like 2 to 4 Hz. (2 to 4 waves passing through me every second) Sure enough, this pulse was very significant to this trip. I lose the sensation of my back against the chair resulting in a floating feeling. Once it seems that I’ve completely lost contact with the chair, I look straight up at the ceiling. I begin moving closer and closer to the ceiling in pulses that are equivalent to the pulses mentioned earlier. I can’t help but keep my eyes wide open as to not miss anything, completely in awe of what is happening. Soon, I’m staring at the ceiling a couple inches away from it. The detail of the design on the ceiling was extremely vivid. I wasn’t even aware that the designs were there until that night. I then close my eyes and fall backwards. An impressive array of energy and light reveals itself to me. First, the designs were unclear and not very vivid. However, as I began to analyze them, they were forming into geometrical creatures. There was some sort of ground-based animal with 4 legs made of very basic geometrical structures. It was just standing there looking up as far as its build would let it, but I could sense the longing in the creature’s heart to be more able to explore its surroundings. I felt an overwhelming compassion for this being and sympathized with it, because I too was in pursuit of a higher state of awareness.

The different geometrical shapes of the creature started to vary their colors randomly for what seemed like an hour. It became faster and faster until all of the colors were changing so fast that the creature began to fade into the black background. I then open my eyes to my dead character on Skyrim and I look at the time. It was now 3:23 am, however I was convinced it would be bright outside by now due to the extreme time distortion.

By now, the familiar green tint and breathing objects effect was in full swing. Also, vivid auditory hallucinations were tickling my ears. I heard swells of extreme frequencies and large intervals such as 3rds and 5ths spread across 4 octaves pulsing at the 4 Hz rate described before. I listened to this with a huge grin on my face, and progressively started laughing harder and harder at these sensations. I found myself rolling on the floor holding my stomach laughing so hard. Once I calmed down I was on my back with my head turned to the side. My carpet is white with small black dots. These dots were now swarming around each other like swarms of flies. I began to hear them buzzing and it becomes so loud that synesthesia seems to kick in at full force and I taste an earth like flavor, like I licked the ground outside. Taste being the sentimental sense it is, this triggered a very vivid memory of my childhood. I was 7 years old and I was in the creek behind my neighbor’s house messing around jumping from branch to branch. I jumped to a branch that apparently wasn’t strong enough and it snapped from under me. I fell, flailing my arms for another branch and landed face first in the creek. The view of the creek from under water starts to fade as I stare up at the sun. The creek is much deeper than it was when I was a child. I am overwhelmed with nostalgia and longing for my childhood innocence and nievity. Now I start to come back.

I’m still lying on my back and the carpet is still buzzing and tastes like earth. I get up and go to the bathroom and see that it is now 3:50 am. I open the door to the restroom and the dimensions of the room are not quite right. The floor is tilted at a 45 degree angle, but the walls are still parallel. The ceiling is going downward towards the toilet instead of up as it usually is. However, I still used the restroom naturally without hesitation. That’s probably because using the restroom is such a transparent action that I don’t even remember doing it. There were more important things to think of, like what happened to my floor.

I sat back down and observed my blinds. There was light defracting from them, but not how it usually does. I watched waves of light particles slowly detract from the blinds and hit the ceiling. They came back down and hit the television and bounced towards me. I became alarmed but didn’t move out the way. I knew I was in no danger, I was comforted by the fact that there were photons flying through me constantly, and I knew that this beam was just that. I was observing light at work, experiencing what seemed like the purist, most vivid understanding of a physical phenomenon I’ve ever experienced. As the light approached me, I hear individual pure tones that are analogous to the light particles hitting me. As they pile up more and more, my thoughts become more and more chaotic. Each frequency brings with it an idea it seems. Overtones and harmonics continue to stack, and I am now hearing the entire perceivable spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. I am hearing light in the form of pink noise. (theoretically when there are infinite amount of frequencies where each octave has the same noise power)

This is extremely exclusive to this state of mind, it seems. I feel as though my mind could never even comprehend, let alone illustrate these ideas otherwise. I felt like I had a tool box full of intuition and knowledge that I could utilize to convert an idea into something concrete that I can understand on an existential level rather than a theoretical level. I found new understandings in ideas and spatial awareness that I thought I understood fully. I sorted through my problems and dissonances on every level and easily found solutions to them.

The time was now 4:15 and I decided to listen to some music. I chose to listen to Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite conducted by Leonard Bernstein. I use my sound blocking headphones to get a suitable stereophonic image of the piece. The ambience of the hall fills my head and the double basses creep into the silence so perfectly. The layers build up into the woodwind entrance and muted trumpets and low woodwinds call back and forth to each other along with other combinations of arguing winds. Suddenly, the Dance of the Firebird (part 2) explodes out of the largo section with a violent violin trill and chromatic dissonant passages that swept me into a completely new mind set. Variation of the Firebird (part 3) puts my mind to the test in trying to analyze the compositional structure. The motif is still present, but you have to look for it under chromatic and whole tone passages that tug and pull at your attention. Then The Round Dances of the Princesses reveals to me an outstanding show of light when I close my eyes and focus on the pure aesthetics of this piece rather than the structure. I feel like this is what Stravinsky intended for the listener to do here. I enjoyed a show of electromagnetic radiation that consisted of light traveling at different speeds and clouds of gasses that were based on the lower end of the spectrum, revealing beautiful violet and blue colors. When The Infernal Dance of King Kaschei explodes again out of The Round Dances, I experience these colors change to much higher frequencies of light, revealing red like colors. They are much more chaotic and there was a huge increase in the amount of energy I had. I suddenly became very alert in contrast to almost a sedated state in the previous movement.

The transfer to the finale tickles my ears because of the familiarity and sentimental attributes that come along with this movement. I begin to instantly lay out every problem I had in the real world and troubleshoot and replace them with security and pride for the incredible capability of my mind. I felt invincible and unstoppable, the only words capable of understating the state of mind I was occupying. I’m filled with an outstanding appreciation for the universe and my birthmothers that are the stars. I feel as though I’m communicating with the cosmos, and more so that I am the cosmos. I’m part of something so big and so small, and I had all the power in the world bunched up in a small, squishy piece of tissue we like to call a brain; a brain that we as humans like to set limits too for reasons that are now behind me, laid out perfectly for me to see.

The piece hits its final chord, resolving it perfectly in the wonderfully obscure, but relatable Stravinsky manner. I listen to the silence for a good 5 minutes, realizing how important that silence is to piece, for it speaks just as loudly as the piece itself. The euphoria is dying down now, easing me down perfectly. I hear a voice call out to me, and I visualize another geometrical being. This time, it is a god like figure and she is cradling me in her countless arms like a child. She reveals her face to me slowly and the first thing I see is her eyes. These were the eyes of my mother; my eyes. I instantly felt love like I’d never felt it before, at least that I could recall, and it was the purist form of love known to man kind; the love between a child it’s mother. Then, she revealed her lips to me, and they slowly said “spread your wings my child….. Catch the ever present wind…. for I have provided the ailment to your trials…. the path to your knowing.” I said nothing, for I understood, and she knew that. I see the geometrical land based creature, only now it has wings. It flies peacefully out of view.

Now, it is 5:15 am, and the sun was now coming up. I open my blinds and observe the day time beings clock-in for work. The visual distortions are still present, but they are in the background now. They seem to blend into my observations rather than pull me from them. I sit and reflect on what I just experienced. I had no questions pertaining to what the theme of this trip was, and I felt comforted by that fact. Nothing could have gone better, I thought to myself. I send a text message to one of my fellow Elder Scrolls enthusiasts asking him what level he was and what he thought about the new engine and the perks and whatnot. Of course he was still awake, and I knew he would be. He gave me his opinion and I gave him mine and I continued to play.

I played Skyrim until about 8:00am and the sleepies started to kick in so I crashed around then after showering and grabbing a bite to eat. Surprisingly, I slept just fine. Every other trip I’ve had has caused me extreme insomnia. I thought to myself when I woke up around 3:00pm “there’s got to be some catch to these shrooms, they’re too perfect.” However, I felt great the rest of the day and spent a nice relaxing day at home smoking copious amounts of cannabis and playing Skyrim; living the life.

This was an overall pleasing experience. I will value the trip for the rest of life and someday tell my kids about it. My intentions in documenting this trip are to encourage the conscious, responsible consumption of psilocybin and to leave a detailed testament and description of the power of this substance. It’s not something to take lightly; it’s really something serious we’re talking about here, and should be treated as such. In fact, this drug, along with other psychedelics, goes beyond recreational interests and into therapeutic and spiritual interests.

Exp Year: 2011	ExpID: 93797
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 19
Published: Nov 9, 2018	Views: 3,527
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Mushrooms (39) : Combinations (3), Glowing Experiences (4), Mystical Experiences (9), Music Discussion (22), Entities / Beings (37), General (1), Alone (16)