DOSE:

400 seeds

oral

Morning Glory

(seeds)

Before I begin the report proper, allow me to say that all of these sorts of reports should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt. I studied the vaults of Erowid and other sources long and hard before deciding to experiment with morning glory seeds (as well as nutmeg, which is a topic for another report), and I read my fair share of testimonials which claimed that the seeds had absolutely no psychedelic effects. I am now convinced that these reports were written by people who consumed inactive seeds or have some stake in keeping others away from mind-altering experiences.

After the decidedly psychedelic experience I had last weekend, I can not help but imagine desperate members of the Just Say No camp huddled over their keyboard creating fictitious accounts of the inefficacy of natural highs. Maybe that is just residual paranoia, and Yahweh knows I had enough this weekend to last a very long time. I must emphasize that morning glory seeds, when taken in the correct dosage and using species with LSA content, are capable of delivering an unmistakable experience. Don't be fooled, and don't be tempted to dose with too many as I unfortunately did, based on the supposedly subtle effects of the seeds.

So much for the conspiracy theories. I decided two weeks ago that I would give morning glory seeds a shot. I have been craving a psychedelic experience for years now, but have never been lucky in locating actual LSD. I had been burned twice with plain blotter, and so started to think I would wait until my friends found and tested certifiable acid before wasting any more money. As the seeds were readily available and cheap, I thought I had nothing to lose. I went to Orchard Supply Hardware after work, and found two brands of seeds. One was organic and clearly proclaimed the seeds were untreated, while the other carried a warning against using the seeds for consumption. As I did not relish poisoning by fungicide, I decided to buy 5 packages (2 grams each) of the organic brand and supplement it with one package (1.8 gram) of the treated seeds. The organic seeds were listed as I. tricolor, while the treated seeds were listed as simply Morning Glory. Neither one of the brands used the phrase 'Heavenly Blue.' I took the seeds home with naptha, intending to do the usual extraction, and emptied them into a bowl. To my dismay the organic seeds were an equal mixture of dark brown and light brown seeds. As I had read multiple reports of the dark brown coloration of the seeds, I suspected that the light brown were not what I wanted. The treated seeds turned out to be all dark brown. For those keeping track of the math, that left me with 6.8 grams of dark brown and 5 grams of light brown.

As I usually have a strong constitution, I decided to skip the naptha extraction. Besides, I was eager to test the waters and thought a little nausea would be bearable if the world turned Technicolor. I washed the seeds carefully with cold water and a little (two drops into 4 ounces of water) dish detergent (Dawn) and a minute of swirling. I then thoroughly rinsed the seeds, and allowed them to air dry while I checked e-mail. I ground them in an electric coffee grinder, and this took no more than 20 seconds. I brushed the light brown, fine powder into a clean jar and added approxiamtely 8 ounces of cold distilled water. To adjust the pH acidic I added one half-teaspoon of cream of tartar. I swirled the seed powder and water mixture, and then let it sit in the fridge for three hours, mixing occasionally. I filtered the suspension through a gold coffee filter, and had to stir it with a knife to keep the sludge from clogging the filter. I was left with 8 ounces of yellow, thick liquid, probably the consistency of thin shampoo. I added some sweetener (a little more than a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down), and knocked it back. Compared to the horror that is nutmeg consumption, the liquid was smooth and easy to swallow. Tasted a little flowery, and would be just enough flavor to keep you away after some severe nausea. I consumed the extract at 9:00 pm.

What followed was a three hour wait for the effects to kick in. I watched television with no sound and listened to some Nurse With Wound. I was feeling quite listless, and my limbs were heavy. I did not, however, see tracers or anything of the sort by midnight. My thoughts were perfectly coherent. I did feel nausea for about 20 minutes in the first hour, but this passed thankfully. By midnight my coordination was clearly off, as I had trouble pouring a glass of water and drinking it.

Just as I was thinking I had fallen prey to an urban legend, I started to see tracers when I moved my hand to set down the glass. I quickly returned to the couch, queued up some Legendary Pink Dots, and watched the images on the TV start to lose meaning. For about three hours the TV displayed exactly what the music told my brain it would, and everything started to seem frightening in subtle ways. Newscasters wore obviously fake smiles, and I knew their words were created somewhere to keep the world confused and in line. I wondered why I had never seen this before, and the lyrics to the songs confirmed this knowledge. Moving my hand in front of my face created a sense of motion throughout my body, and I spent long minutes waving it in front of my face. By 1:00 am I started to feel a bit of anxiety, and when I went to get a bite to eat I started feeling as if I had been in that precise moment throughout eternity. I felt trapped in a time loop, but had flashes of lucid thought in which I knew this was only the LSA kicking in. I was positive that eating would result in choking and death, sure of it as if I had lived the event over and over before, yet I was too hungry to care. I powered up the microwave, sure that I would forget about it and the place would burn down, and then sat back on the couch. To my amazment I made it through the act of eating without a catastrophe, and this success marked the return to reality gradually. I felt extremely tired about 3:00 am, and made my bed on the floor and fell into a dreamless sleep. I woke up at 6:00 am feeling a non-localized pain, and it took me 30 minutes of sitting in the dark to realize that I was having stomach cramps. I went to the bathroom, looked at my dilated pupils in the mirror for a long time, and then went back to sleep.

There were obvious effects, but nothing Earth-shattering. Some tracers, some tingling limbs, a feeling of numinous revelation for a couple of hours, and then a short spell of unpleasant anxiety and slight paranoia. I wanted more, so I decided to try it again the next weekend. This time I located a nursery and bought seeds which were prominently labeled Heavenly Blue (Botanical Interests was the brand). The packages were 2.5 grams for a mere $1.59, so I bought seven. I brought them home, and prepared the trip for a Saturday evening. The seeds were uniformly dark brown, and a quick count numbered in the range of 400. I washed the seeds with cold water and soap, and performed the same cold water extraction as previously described (using lemon juice to make the water acidic this time). After filtering through the gold filter, however, the liquid this time was very thick and medium brown. I took this as a sign that this dose would put me over the threshold. I did not know how correct that thought would turn out to be.

I drank the thick extract, and headed out onto the sunny balcony. It was 4:30 in the afternoon, and the day was beautiful. I sat on the balcony and watched two jet contrails for 10 minutes, feeling very relaxed and warm. After about 30 minutes, just as the sun was setting, I started to see the sky moving as if composed of millions of living organisms. It was like a sea of tiny creatures, sort of what you see in a microscope eyepiece when looking at pond water. I felt good, but a little frightened that I was having visuals only 30 minutes in. 30 minutes later found me lying on my back on the couch in the increasing darkness, with only the Xmas tree lights to illuminate the room. I was starting to feel sick, and the nausea was not subsiding this time. Then it all seemed to fade. At 5:30 I felt absolutely normal, and started to get pissed because I was sure this morning glory high was a snipe hunt.

Fifteen minutes later I was hit by a rushing feeling of momentum, and turned on the TV in the darkness. I popped in Fantasia, thinking it must be a cliche trip movie for a reason, and put some tranquil ambient (FSOL, Lifeforms) on the headphones. 15 minutes after that I felt a cold wave of terror wash over me, and I started gasping for breath. I snatched off the headphones and stared in confusion at the TV. I was 90 minutes in, and things were going out of control. I must emphasize that at this point, and thereafter, no amount of logic helped this formless anxiety. I knew, at times, that I was high, I recalled all of the tips for tripping, and I knew this terror was the norm. That did not help in the least. There was no way to think myself calm, and for many hours I was without the thought processes to even attempt to do so. But I get ahead of myself.

I called a friend at 6, and tried to tell him what was happening. Words would not work, and he told ne afterwards that I was alternating coherent sentences with absolute nonsequitur. I could not put into words what I was thinking, and over the course of a five minute phone conversation I checked the clock 10 times. Time was losing meaning. At this point my only comfort was that after 8 hours this would all be over. My friend even said as much, but it provided little relief from the fear. Five minutes was an eternity, so eight hours was inconceivable. My friend was going to work, and the thought of being cut off from my one contact who was experienced with drugs frightened me immensely.

At some point the light changed. I turned on all of the lights in the place, partly due to the sense of shifting in the sahdows and partly because I figured the light would make the place seem warmer and friendlier. The quality of the light was diffuse, and even though I stared at light sources they seemed no more intense than the light in the air. I felt as if I was existing in a terrarium of some cosmic sort, and that thought led me to wonder who had put me there. I started walking about the place in a compulsive loop, from the kitchen to the bathroom to the office to the other bedroom to the living room window to the other bathroom and back again. Everything was blurred, and the world seemed to be alive with movement although nothing directly in front of me would do so. The feeling of cosmic terror deepened during this restless pacing, and I was sure that I had overdosed on whatever was in the seeds along with the LSA. I started to sweat profusely, although when I looked in the mirror I could see none. I could feel it on my hand when I wiped my face, but did not see it on my fingertips. I knew then that I was dying, but could not go for help because I would let everyone down. I would be no more than the druggie they all mocked and despised when they saw him in public. Also, I was struck by how powerless the doctors were. I was dying, and they could do nothing for me. No, they WOULD do nothing for me. They lived for having some idiot come into their ER OD'ed on psychedelics, because then they could torture him mentally. My bad trip, which was starting to feel suspiciously like a heart attack, would surely kill me if put at the mercy of doctors and cops.

I alternated between mundane fears like poisoning and existential fears like the universe was a big holographic time loop. I know that sounds precious and lame, but I fully believed that I had fallen into some cosmic appendix and had created my reality from whatever images I retained of the real world. That is why everything looked odd. It was not reality, but an imperfect duplicate of reality projected from my mind. By 7:30 my body was alternating between numb and painful tingling, and I was dreading contact with humans. I felt afraid and wanted help, but was struck by the helplessness of these constructs in my universe. How could a memory or phantom help me? I was trapped here, and the only one aware of it besides me was the cause for me being there. Anxiety kept hitting me in palpable waves, and I thought I could take no more physically. I was sure that death was imminent.

Everything on TV reminded me of my imprisonment in a lonely world, and sound was frightening. I could not differentiate whether the sound was coming from the TV, the headphones on the couch, the window which I closed in paranoia, or from in my head. Then I recalled that this was all happening within my head, so that explained the confusion about the source of sound. I wanted to call for help, but was afraid of saying inappropriate things to whoever I called. I spent a long time hovering over the phone deciding what to do, and then it rang and I nearly stopped breathing. It was deafening and sudden, and I started to think that thinking about a coronary would cause a coronary. I desperately wanted to think about something else, but my mind was screaming 'Heart Failure!!!' and I could feel it happening. I knew that my wife would return home to find me dead on the floor. Or maybe she had already and this was what happened after death. Which meant this would last a lot longer than 8 hours. More like eternity.

By this time it was only 8:00 pm. I had spent an eternity in a frightening hell, and it had only been 3 hours. I wanted to sleep it out, but every time I laid down and closed my eyes I was sure that this was giving in to the poison. If I went to sleep, I would never wake up. Or I would wake up in a worse hell than the one I tried to escape from. I wanted to shower, but was afraid of going into the bathroom without windows. I wanted to log on and find out what to do about poisoning, but was afraid of what I might post if the high progressed any further. I wanted to go out onto the balcony for fresh air, but was terrified of leaping from the railing in a moment of confusion. The feeling of being trapped in my head was overwhelming, while being accompanied by the sensation of being spread thin throughout the universe. I felt clautrophobic and painfully revealed at the same time, in alternating instants.

I started to feel all of sins catch up with me with a vengeance. Every lie, every selfish act, every failure rained down upon me in an endless loop. I saw myself from outisde my body, and hated what I saw. Who was this guy? Who was this horrible human being? I would hate this person if I knew them casually, and it was me. I felt overwhelmed by my flaws, and each one was accompanied by a wave of the cold horror I had been feeling for hours.

My wife came home a little after 8:00 in the evening, and I started to feel slightly more calm. It was almost four hours, and I was expecting a peak soon. I thought, for a second, that all was well. She went out to get cold medicine, and I thought everything would be fine now. She was gone for two minutes when the terror returned in full force. Sound continued to be too loud and too distant and the wrong pitch and seemingly compressed. My vision was obstructed by lights and movement, and the tracers were quite confusing. When I realized it was 10:00 pm and I was still very high, I started to panic afresh. I was now sure that I had been poisoned, as my body was numb and I felt dizzy and my sight was screwed up and sound was off. I started to think that 8 hours was the absolute maximum. If I did not start coming down at 12:30 am, then I knew it meant poisoning. I would have to go for help, despite the shame for my wife and the possible time in jail or whatever. And I was still sure that help would be pain relief at best while I waited to die. I was alone and without a source of aid. No one could stop what I had done to myself. I was either dying or irreperably scarred mentally, and no one was going to change the rules of the universe to save me. People die every day, and I was just one more statistic. My sense of self was destroyed, and I knew that I was no different than that guy who was hit by a car today or the victim of violent crime somewhere in the world. All of my self-professed uniqueness was for nought, and it would all end there with me.

This terror of existence continued unabated, or slightly abated, until 4:30 in the morning. I would feel better for a few minutes, and then the high would return with all of the attendant panic and sensory alteration. Although physically tired, with burning eyes, I was too frightened to sleep. At 12 hours in, I was sure that I was dead and gave into sleep. I woke up in the late morning feeling quite altered still, with sound coming and going and linear thought impossible. I spent all of Sunday, until late evening, feeling a shapeless fear, unable to comprehend long conversations, and distracted by sound and color. This phase, over 24 hours after my dose, would have been pleasant if it had not been proceeded by a marathon bad trip. I was too full of existential terror to enjoy it fully. Or enjoy it at all. Every residual effect was taken as a sign that I had permanently screwed myself, which in turn reminded me of the night before, which frightened me.

I am sure, in retrospect, that this report makes the experience sound like a simple night of paranoia. This was, without a doubt in my mind, the worst mental experience I have had in my life. I am a rather morbid guy normally, and have no problem with existential thoughts that most people avoid. I felt like a babe in the woods when confronted with the terror that morning glory seeds introduced.

I have pondered why the trip was so monumentally bad. I went in with pure optimism, so if poor feelings turned it bad then they were well buried poor feelings. The setting was my familiar home, and eventually included my beloved wife, so setting was as pleasant and safe as it could be. I have read other reports since the trip, and it seems like some amount of fear comes with the seeds to some degree. I tend to believe that I dosed much too strong, so the effects which are usually minor hit me tremendously. As the first weak dose was yellow in color, and the second strong dose was medium brown and thicker, I believe that I took far too much extract. So the moderate hallucinations and mild fear I should have felt became strong hallucinations and overwhelming fear.

It has been several days now, and I still feel out of sorts and everything looks and sounds alien to me. I have not had such prolonged feelings of a world altered since a close loved one died. I am appreciative of the clarity that the trip allowed me to see myself with, but the truth has also changed everything. Before you experiment with these seeds, you should be sure you are willing to step over a threhsold that can never be uncrossed.

Exp Year:	ExpID: 2074
Gender: Not Specified
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jun 24, 2000	Views: 31,999
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Morning Glory (38) : Bad Trips (6), Overdose (29), Alone (16)