DOSE: T+ 0:00	20 g	oral	Mushrooms	(sclerotia)
T+ 2:00		smoked	Cannabis

BODY WEIGHT:

135 lb

I went to Amsterdam to try some of the local sclerotia accompanied by a few pot-smoking friends who go to my university (so, tripping alone). I bought 20g of the Dragon type (supposed to be the most potent) and chewed them to a very fine consistency in between two slices of bread. Tasted like sour walnuts, but very painless compared to many other shroom-munching experiences I’ve had. Sucks that you have to eat so much of it, though.

T+0 (12 noon on a Saturday): After munching in our hostel room, buddy and I hurry out into Vondelpark and then into the city to go meet our two female high friends at the Van Gogh museum.

T+0:15: The line for the museum is very long, but we decide to stick it out; our friends are supposed to be waiting for us in the museum. Friend says to me that he feels like he’s at Six Flags, I murmur over and over to myself on and off for the next hour “this is some Six Flags bullshit.” I experience slight nausea, but it was expected anyway.

T+0:30: It starts to rain a little, which stresses us out because we aren’t quite inside the museum yet, but I start to ignore my friend’s complaints when I notice my first sign—the raindrops hitting puddles on the street combined with the bright grey natural light characteristic of northern Europe (I’m from America) impressed the visual into my brain, looping out of sync with the real rain’s pace. I lose the ability to focus on anything out of my immediate vicinity (a ten foot radius, let’s say). I try to explain this to my friend with questionable success. I am able to look into the distance without trouble, or at my friend beside me, but not comfortably between.

T+0:45-1:00: I’ve somehow managed to pay for my ticket into the museum and am in yet another line in a beautifully-built lobby of the museum, this time waiting to go through a metal detector. The wait is 5-10 minutes, but it feels like an awkward eternity; the clamor of intermixed Dutch, English, and French around me begins to go to my head, but after a few minutes I grow accustomed to the librarylike muted voices trying to maintain polite volume. I experience similar looping patterns when interpreting the sound of these languages, and bits of sound begin to play in repetition out of sync with what was actually being said much like the raindrops had been doing earlier. I get through security without trouble, but people are sort of sensing my high energy already. The museum is a little too packed because of the pressure of the long lines outside.

T+1:15: I am tripping balls in this museum. The architecture of the place is foreign to me in actuality, but somehow it also feels like I am exploring the grand mysterious halls of my own psyche; I feel like I am receiving a cultural information packet of sorts from the Dutch. I have many profound personal encounters with the artwork of Van Gogh, often stopping suddenly to stare open-mouthed as one work jumps out at me from the wall. Colors of each piece would intermingle and morph in ways that Van Gogh intended and ways that I apparently intended them to, and I’m not really sure what many of the works looked like non-visual’d so it’s kind of hard for me to tell how distinct my OEVs were. The informational blurbs on the walls (in Dutch and English) spin outwards towards me in spirals rather than letters, rendering themselves illegible; I was only able to focus on paintings with visuals, around 2/5 of the works on display held little interest for me as those which were not actively moving or changing color were sort of grey and distant to me.

T+1:30 (estimating, I didn’t check my watch between the plateau of 1:21 and 2:50): Male buddy and I finally meet up with our female friends who we were supposed to find in the museum much earlier, we are all quite relieved. I seem to perceive all of my friends by their noses before anything else; I can see blue “organic” lines tracing their faces in the peculiar lighting of the museum, and sometimes they have 4 eyes instead of 2. Noses with extra eyes. We talk, and my friends perceive me as distant and extremely calm; in my mind at the time, I was scrambling to convey my experience to them (visuals on the artwork and looping language patterns in my brain) in a normal voice not to be overheard by the dozens of other museum goers. I was tripping about as hard as I’d ever tripped before in my life and managing to hold pleasant if disjoint conversation, and not getting arrested. Not bad so far.

T+2:00: My friends take me out of the museum and into a local coffee shop, and we get drinks and a few pre-rolleds without a problem. I enjoy looking at the decorations of the coffee shop, and particularly enjoy the music. I reflect on my transcendental experiences in the museum, and have a hard time conversing. I have a few hits of a joint, but don’t smoke much as I am still very much in the zone. My friends then head out to a local pub for some lunch, and I am still calm and coming down from the plateau but feeling very odd to be sitting down at a meal in a near-empty restaurant around 2:00. Keeping conversation is difficult, but my female friends still maintain after the fact that they could understand my philosophizing about internationality, traveling, and relating to people through language barriers. I struggle to eat chicken nuggets, taking them apart morsel by morsel, but seem to rediscover the joy of eating every three to five minutes according to my friends. I have some water, too. Visuals don’t really seem to follow me as much in sobering places like restaurants.

T+2:50: Back in the hostel, checked my watch. We wanted some time to recalibrate before going out again at night, and I’m still tripping hard. Friend and I perform basic hygiene tasks, and I take my first look in the mirror… and it was pretty weird. I generally have a hard time looking in the mirror when I trip, and have only recently discovered it to be a positive experience, and I actually only saw myself by accident this time—but it was very vivid. There were black and white “non-organic” lines tracing out triangles and rectangles on my face (as opposed to the countoured “organic” lines that my friends had in the museum), making me feel very peculiar and as if I was a cyborg or something. My right eye also appeared to be grotesque, a different shape and larger than my left and also out of line with the non-organic tracers on my face. This reassured me that I was in fact “organic,” and I had some refreshing perspective on my struggles with mental illness after seeing myself in the mirror. But I digress.
T+3:15: Friend and I are out smoking in Vondelpark. The light is very bright, and we find some very distinctly rectangular rocks to hang out and smoke a joint on. He puffs away sitting on one of them, and I take a hit every once and a while as I jump around him on the rocks, sometimes losing my balance. I babble incessantly about music, the future, how Europe is different—all in all, an ecstatic come-down. I still have tracers, but start to attribute some of the visuals to the location itself; Amsterdam is a very dreamlike place, especially Vondelpark.

T+4:00-5:30: We hang out in the hostel, and I have many deep reflections in my post-trip meditations. I have a relatively clean come-down and actually end up drinking a few beers later that night, with no nausea. Psychologically, I felt “refreshed” or “reborn” and kept rambling about how “young” I felt, especially as an American adolescent in Europe (where cities are much older). I felt like I’d lost track of my previous identity and been thrown back into it from another angle, ready to work on things yet again. The feeling persists even as I write this (five days later), and I feel very happy with the experience.

Exp Year: 2014	ExpID: 102731
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 19
Published: Apr 20, 2021	Views: 628
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Mushrooms (39) : Public Space (Museum, Park, etc) (53), Glowing Experiences (4)