DOSE:

oral

Mushrooms - P. cubensis

(dried)

BODY WEIGHT:

53 kg

Positive Surprise - An Account of My First Trip

After being annoyed as hell by anxiety and put down by depression for nearly 5 years, I was about to have what could be my tenth nervous breakdown. Year after year I would swear to myself that I would seek treatment but I had already spent two years doing psychoanalysis therapy which, unfortunately, didn't help much.

The last year had been less horrible, coinciding with the fact that I had started smoking weed and kept a healthy habit of using it to relieve the stress once or twice a week. 
Since my college holidays began, I had been researching psychedelics for therapeutic use, as some friends had taken them and told me some substances had changed their way of living and thinking.
All of them agreed that their trips had helped them 'see things more clearly'. 
I kind of know what they mean, as weed has been helping me clear my mind and process my thoughts.

So here I was, reading about set and setting and dosage and scientific studies and personal reports and all those things regarding LSD and psilocybin/psilocin, when I found out you can actually buy mushrooms in this country legally 'for study purposes only'. 
Well, I thought, why the hell not, then? So I found a seller online and ordered 5g of dry Psilocybe Cubensis; I'm not sure which strain he sent me but it came in the mail in just 2 days. 
I carefully stored them inside my closet and invited three friends to walk on the forest with me.

I'm usually extremely annoyed by day to day noise so I thought it would be proper to do the shrooms somewhere quiet with as few auditory stimuli as possible. A trail on the thick woods of the hill led us to three beautiful little cascades on a small stream, surrounded by tall trees on all sides. We chose the second one, in an isolated area only accessible by descending while hanging onto tree roots on a big stony wall. We set up our stuff on the rocks and I unpacked my backpack: I had brought sandwiches, juice, a water bottle, a towel, citronella oil to repel mosquitoes, my iPod and a portable speaker, sunscreen, a pillow to rest my head and a beach wrap to sit on.

I was quite anxious this same day when I woke up because I had a nervous breakdown the week before and all my friends were late when we met in our way to the trail. 
When I sat down to take my mushroom dose at 9:34am, most of my anxiety was gone and I even felt ready. 
My research on dosage tells me that it isn't easy to find an accurate universal/objective dose, that would give everyone the same results. From the parameters I had, which were substance concentration and lots of personal reports and consensus, I could tell that a 1g dose was considered 'good to start with', 2g was 'medium tripping', up to 5g was 'strong' and so on. 
I did want to start slowly but it wouldn't be worth going through all the effort in preparation if I'd only take an experimental microdose, so I ended up settling for 2.5g. Now, I wasn't going to weigh my tiny psilocybe pieces so I assumed the caps to concentrate the equivalent of 1g and the stems 0.5g. 
I might be wrong assuming I took 2.5g but it pretty much looked like it's how it works. I could tell they should work somehow as I had spotted blue stains on the stems. 
So, I took 1 cap and 3 stems and then took a sip of my pineapple juice, as I'd read somewhere that acidic substances might make the shrooms kick in faster. Also, I'd read that they usually would take from 20 to 40 minutes or up to 90 minutes to kick in. We saw a toucan on a tree nearby and some really cute tiny frogs.

I sat down and, before 10 minutes had passed, my head felt a bit heavy. Then I started feeling mild nausea and it scared me a bit because I was afraid I'd vomit. Didn't happen, and some minutes later I felt a bit cold and thought I should sit down so I wouldn't lose balance and fall flat. Right after I had sad down I felt like I was subtly rocking back and forth without noticing. The thought made me laugh and I completely lost control of my giggles and burst into loud laughter. My friends looked at me and laughed a bit as I probably looked funny. 
Having already lost control, I now felt a little dizzy and decided to lay my head on my pillow and look up at the trees. My body felt colder and I covered myself with my beach wrap and put my iPod and speaker next to my head playing Grateful Dead. As I tried to sing along, failing miserably, I had broken chats with my friends (sometimes I would space out and couldn't listen to what they said) for a couple of minutes. 
Then I looked up again and, whoa, the whole forest seemed to be 'alive', in motion, a 'pulsating' motion. 
I called one of my friends, Silvia, and told her 'I had never noticed how noisy the forest was before. There is the loud waterfall in this stream, the trees shaking in the winds, the tiny frogs, the birds, it's everywhere!'. 
Indeed I don't know how or why I could pay attention to all these things high as I was but I could hear the rush of the forest and it felt very loud to me. I was amazed. Then I turned my head and stared at the stones in the waterfall and it seemed to me that they were swelling, expanding in size and then contracting.

I lay back down and, as I gazed at the sky, I felt like I was 'taking off': there was a loud buzz like 'zzzzooooommmm' ringing in my head and the forest was swallowing me. It felt very intense and my head felt like it was 'melting'. It didn't feel exactly good but I felt it was positive.

All kinds of thoughts sped by and I couldn't focus on any for a long time because I had noticed something strange and fascinating about the landscape around me: it was shining incredibly bright. I knew that I could see the blue sky through the leaves and that the sunlight came in between but I still saw something quite different from that. I saw blue crystals glowing, with dark spaces behind them, shining so bright it was almost unbearable to look at them. But I gathered strength and stared at these 'crystals' because they were so beautiful. It felt delightful, those strange blue things were more beautiful than any 'real' gem I have ever seen. I tried to explain them to a friend when I accidentally focused my gaze on the rocks around me and saw geometric, sort of tribal patterns on them. 
I started laughing about how absurd it seemed but at the same time everything felt awesome, beautiful, and I felt amazing. Then I noticed the butterflies, a blue one, an orange one and a brown one, that fluttered about. One of my friends managed to photograph the brown one. The blue one flew back and forth and I was excited every time I saw it. Can't tell whether it was or not a morpho menelau specimen but it had light blue wings.
After the 'rush' had passed, my head felt less heavy and I decided to stand up for the first time in what seemed like hours to me. I got up quickly and tried to concentrate on hopping from one rock to another until I got to the plunge pool where my friends were, right below the cascade. I sat on the rock and marveled as I saw the rainbow formed by sunlight on the falling watered. Oh, how it gleamed. Then I told Silvia how I felt until she jumped and cried out when a froggy sat on her leg and scared her.

I think three hours and a half had passed then, since I had started to eat the mushrooms. Most of the effects I felt before had now waned and my friends felt hungry so we all sat down and had lunch. I didn't have any problems eating a bunch of food. I felt sober now, although a bit weird and slow.

My friends had stuff to do that day so we had to get going. I climbed up the dangerous steep stony wall grasping the tree roots without much difficulty, even though I knew I was feeling all sorts of stuff not long ago.

We went back down to the city and I spent the rest of the afternoon listening to music, then ate a lot in the evening. I had a headache some hours after I got back home but one single aspiring solved it. 
As I lie in my bed relaxing with music, a warm, blissful feeling washed over my brain. I felt more whole, not perfect or complete but less broken. I don't feel as anxious as I felt before the trip.

I'm writing this on the morning after the trip, I had a good night of sleep and woke up in a good mood. 
I don't feel like I was quite conscious of what was happening to me as I was tripping so I didn't work on my thoughts an feelings as I guess I should have. Anyway, it was an amazing first trip and I am thinking of using these mushrooms as therapeutic medicine to improve my life. It is truly a life-changing experience and I am not scared of taking a larger dose next time. 
I'm thankful to have found not only this substance but also the information that helped me make this wonderful experience happen, and the support of thousands of people who offer it online and my friends who supported me and were there for me.

Exp Year: 2017	ExpID: 109816
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: 21
Published: Feb 12, 2018	Views: 2,610
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Mushrooms - P. cubensis (66) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Therapeutic Intent or Outcome (49), Depression (15), Glowing Experiences (4), First Times (2)