DOSE:	4 g	oral	Amanitas - A. pantherina	(tea)
	repeated	smoked	Cannabis
	6 carts.	inhaled	Nitrous Oxide

4 g oral Amanita pantherina (tea)
repeated smoked Cannabis
6 carts. inhaled Nitrous Oxide

It had been about a week and a half since my last attempt to take a full dose of this mushroom, and I was itching to explore it some more. Aside from my last experience with four grams, I had tried it one more time a few days later, just eating a one gram cap at a casual party to see if it enhanced sociability like alcohol, which it did to some extent. Though, I decided definitely never to just eat the caps again raw from that point on, as even eating just that one cap was far more unpleasant than drinking the tea. For that reason, I again boiled four grams for fifteen minutes and strained out the mushroom gunk for this experience, though I used less water than last time hoping not to make myself nauseous from chugging it all again. This kind of backfired though, because at least with more water the taste was bearable. With it all concentrated, it left sort of a nasty taste in my mouth which I think may have been the reason I felt nauseous for even longer this time.... That, plus the fact that I got it all down in five minutes instead of ten. Next time I'm thinking about baking an ounce into a batch of cookies or something for equalized doses that are easy on the tongue and the stomach....

Anyway, I gulped my tea down with the intention of doing so about three hours before I would have some alone time, because that was about how long it took for the hallucinogenic effects to fully kick in for me last time . In my last experience I had started out alone and ended up with people during the peak, and I didn't smoke cannabis until a couple hours in to see how the effects were going to play out by themselves. This time around, I started out with company planning to end up by myself, and I started smoking cannabis pretty much right off the bat, especially to help with the nausea after I let the first wave of it sink in. This may have had a significant effect on my energy levels during the rising phases of the trip, because I was very sedated this time compared to the bursts of energy and talkativeness I had experienced previously. I ended up lying down on a couch for most of those first three hours, and my nausea faded very quickly after I got myself relaxed and stoned.

The first thing that I noticed was that the hypnagogic flashes that I had gotten very easily on my last experience during the peak were now showing up from the very start. I actually found myself wishing that I was alone for the entire trip now, because I felt that entering into lucid dreams or out-of-body experiences would have been extremely easy at any point during this, and my default mindset was that half-asleep delirium, so it required no effort at all to prepare myself for it. But, that wasn't the setting I had provided for myself, so instead I just laid back and meditated for a while with my eyes closed.

At some point during this phase of the trip, I started to get the spinning effect that I got last time, and that I associate also with approaching too much alcohol. My vision was moving rapidly, but there was no sickness attached to it. I simply watched it until the image pulled away and I could see the entire sphere which represented the frame of existence in which I inhabited so that I would see these rings spinning around me. I wondered if the purpose of this effect, evolutionarily speaking, was that ingesting a GABA toxin like alcohol would cause perceptual effects to happen, and the animals who survived the poisoning were the ones who got so sick from the perception that they ended up puking and saving themselves. Then, the muscimol would really just be the compound that happens to have just the right pharmacology to cause this visual effect without the accompanying sickening disorientation, which allows it to be taken in high enough to doses to reveal the entire underlying geometric structure of this pattern which we normally only observe the very tip of the iceberg of. Similarly to on alcohol, and my last experience on Amanita pantherina, the spinning was starting to become faster and faster and faster, but so much faster than alcohol even that it was starting to reach something that felt like touching upon the infinite. I had been reading a lot of muscimol trip reports in the past week and a half, and I had seen this spinning mentioned many, many times, and was now absolutely certain that this was the effect I had often read about. In higher doses, I could see this spinning easily leading to complete insanity and destruction of self, no question. This is a peak at something truly mystical, something powerful. It was pushing me so far out that I barely even had a rational thought left in my mind, and if you know how I normally react to hallucinogens, that's really saying something.

During this time, I continued to smoke cannabis on and off, and I'm really not sure how I feel about this combination. Or at least I should say, I have mixed feelings about it. The cannabis undoubtedly potentiates certain aspects of the hallucinogenic experiences, but I feel that certain other things, such as the full strength of the hypnagogic trance and the anti-anxiety effects, are reduced. I feel that finding the optimum way to use cannabis with Amanita pantherina for me will probably come down to waiting the correct amount of time into the experience to start smoking, or just deciding whether or not it's even useful just from one set and setting to another, which is significant to mention for me just because I generally don't even consider taking other hallucinogens, at least ones that last more than a few minutes, without also smoking cannabis. I'm also toying with the idea of adding hash oil to those cookies I mentioned, and maybe that delayed high will allow the pantherina trance state to develop, and then its timing will synergize well when it develops alongside the more overtly hallucinogenic effects of the mushroom.... Anyway though, because the effect was still sort of weak during the first three hours, I really wasn't sure if the cannabis was more helping the trip or hindering it. But I enjoyed it anyway, until the time finally came that I was left alone, and as I had predicted, the more psychedelic aspects of the experience had started to fully develop around this point as well, though I had seen them growing for quite some time. I got up and walked around to see if patterns and the like would appear, but they didn't seem to be quite as vivid or strong at this same dose as the first time, though this wouldn't be odd for me on a serotonergic psychedelic even if I knew for sure that I had taken the same dose. After seeing that the effects probably weren't going to become overly strong in the light, I decided to retreat to my bed in the dark.

I brought some more cannabis with me to smoke, and again, the more psychedelic visual effects and scattered thoughts of the trip were enhanced, but some aspect of it just seems to get reduced too. It's a trade off I think, you just have to take it or leave it. Both experiences seem fine to me, though it's worth noting that I noticed after smoking a lot this time that my heart rate and strength had increased, not to the point of being what I would describe as racing or pounding, but more than most any drug generally does to me. But, thinking about this, I have suspicions that this might have just been because I smoked so much more cannabis at once than I normally do because I could do so with much less anxiety thanks to the muscimol, so I really want to see if this would happen without cannabis too.... At this point I was getting all kinds of crazy geometric patterns and distortions, transformations, and so on in the dark that were a mix of things that I'm familiar with on both psychedelics and deliriants like I reported before, but they just didn't seem to be evolving to the point of full hallucinations like they had done for me in my last experience. Because of this, the thought entered my mind to try combining nitrous oxide with Amanita pantherina once again. During my last trip, I had tried this with four chargers, but then chickened out as the dissociation was increasing, the main reason being that I was starting to get very sweaty from the combination even though I never had from either substance alone, which kind of weirded me out. However, in retrospect I had been starting to think that this simply might have been a physical anxiety reaction which I was little too dissociated to properly process. Since this dose all seemed to be weaker than that time, I decided I could take the risk again, and filled a balloon with six chargers. After meditating a bit in the darkness again to get myself into as much of a trance as possible, I started inhaling.

For me, this part of the experience was the strangest of all. When I combine nitrous oxide with psychedelics, it takes me to a dissociative void, but at the same time I have all of these mystical thoughts about infinity and impossible logic and what have you. Even though it is in itself a state of mindlessness, there are still all kinds of thoughts floating around, even if they don't make a whole lot of sense. With the Amanita pantherina and a full dose of nitrous, there was none of that... or anything, for that matter. I was still, on some level, feeling my body; I was anesthetized strongly, but not completely. Aside from that... there no thoughts... no emotions... no visions... no nothing. I was in a state of complete and utter mental shutdown, I couldn't have had a thought if I was even capable of realizing I wanted to. The only feeling of any kind I had during the experience was one of an intense perception of still silence, a perfect calm. Essentially, it felt as though the combined glutamate antagonism of nitrous oxide and GABA agonism plus GABA positive allosteric modulation by the muscimol and nitrous oxide respectively had shut down my brain circuits so heavily that the only thing left for me to do was purely exist. Then, after an eternal moment, reality started to slowly reconstruct itself around me. The comedown of the nitrous oxide was not significantly altered, but my pantherina trip did feel more euphoric from that point on. Probably the most interesting part about the transition back is that, unlike on a psychedelic where the hallucinations slowly become less intense, this time I got to watch them gradually reappear in my surroundings. Though the nitrous did help my mood quite a bit actually, I wouldn't say that it really had a major effect on the visuals, but that didn't really bother me at the time. By this point it seemed that I had gotten probably as much out of the trip as I was going to, so I just kept lying in bed and watching the colorful patterns shift around for a while.

One of the main reasons I wanted to write this trip report was to give an update on the my previously stated belief that muscimol and nitrous oxide may not be the greatest combination, because even though I think what I got out of it may still be better with something else mixed in too, I now no longer think there's really any significant risk there, at least as long as the muscimol dose is not enormous, in which case you're on your own.... Another big motivation for writing this though was that I also wanted to update my view on Amanita pantherina being a psychedelic deliriant. While I still think is true for the mushroom itself, I had also been thinking that it must apply specifically to muscimol, as the core active compound in the fungus. Now, however, I have some doubts about this.... I have been doing some reading on Amanita pantherina and have found some fascinating bits of information hidden away, such as the fact that two compounds isolated from the pantherina have been shown to be NMDA receptor antagonists. In addition to this, it appears that there is at least one to my knowledge currently unidentified indole alkaloid present in the pantherina. With these things in mind, I have been trying to re-evaluate my own experiences and the reading I've done.

It seems to be pretty much invariably agreed upon that the Amanita pantherina is more powerful than the muscaria, but most official documents only ever cite difference in ibotenic acid vs muscimol contents... whereas many people who have actually tried them seem to think that there is something genuinely better or more hallucinogenic about the pantherinas. From my experiences so far, this has definitely been true for me, but it has been so long since I tried the Amanita muscaria.... For this reason, I have decided that my next experiment will be to attempt multiple experiences on equalized doses of both Amanita muscaria and Amanita pantherina. There is a definite serotonergic quality to the pantherina experience that I noticed particularly strongly my first time with it, both visually and euphorically, and one that I didn't notice at all during any experience with the muscarias, despite the fact that I got at least as much anticholinergic-like delirium. If I can properly prepare both types of Amanitas so that all of the ibotenic acid converts into muscimol, and despite that I'm still able to consistently achieve these psychedelic effects from the pantherinas but not from the muscarias, that will sure say quite a lot about the differences between them for me. I am just growing more and more intrigued with these mushrooms by the day personally, so I'm actually quite looking forward to these experiments to figure out just what exactly is going on....

So, that'll conclude this trip report for now.

Exp Year: 2014	ExpID: 105110
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: 23
Published: Aug 6, 2018	Views: 3,747
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Amanitas - A. pantherina (71) : Various (28), Retrospective / Summary (11), Combinations (3), General (1)