DOSE:	3.5 g	smoked	Cannabis	(plant material)
	7.0 g	oral	Mushrooms	(dried)

BODY WEIGHT:

180 lb

This was one bad trip.

I had been smoking cannabis for a while and decided that I wanted to at least try something heavier, and my cousin had tripped on shrooms before and told me it was very entertaining. So we — we being me, cousin John and our friend from Newark Randy — bought .25 oz. of shrooms and set them aside for later that week. That night, we smoked alot and after John and Randy had gone to bed, I smoked .125 oz. of cannabis straight and sat for a while and watched tv. Being already high as can be, I cannot remember WHY I ate all of the shrooms, i.e., I don't remember thinking 'Hmm it's 2:30 in the morning and I'm all alone, I should trip on shrooms my first time with more than pros do.' LOL. All I remember is thinking afterwards, after looking at the empty bag 'This was a bad idea.' No way was I going to throw up and waste the whole $80 worth, so I decided I would just try to make the trip as comfortable as possible. I turned on The 40-Year-Old Virgin and waited for the effects, and, as I was a first-timer, I had no idea what they would be.

I am very obsessive to take substances at quarter-hours so I can easily see how long it took to feel effects, reach the peak, come down, etc. That’s just me. I ate the shrooms at 2:30 and began to feel cold and anxious around 3:15. I tried my best to focus on The 40-Year-Old Virgin, but soon the colors became too bright and I turned on regular TV — NYPD Blue. As time went on colors became more and more emphasized and the dialogue on the show went over my head as I was paying attention more to the characters movements than the story. Eventually, Sipowitz started to dance like an idiot. At this point, I knew I was tripping because, well, for anyone who has ever watched NYPD Blue, it’s Sipowitz. I turned the TV off and looked around the room. It looked enormous and I decided to walk around.

Time itself seemed to distort along with my environment as even as I tried to move quickly, the movements I saw happened in slow motion. I simply paced around the living room, dining room, and kitchen, admiring different things such as the dripping of the faucet, the assortment of spices, the messiness of the dining room and the huge windows all over the place. I began to feel as though I was in some way connected to the house and wondered if anyone had come downstairs and I just didn’t notice them. Realizing that my movements would look ridiculous to an outsider, I began to speak aloud: “Please, don’t worry about me. I am completely fine and want nothing more than to continue to study my surroundings.” It turns out no one was down there. This was the good part of the trip. Besides watching Sipowitz dancing, I was never ecstatically happy or amused, but rather felt my mind opened in ways I could never have imagined. Hundreds of thoughts raced through my head about such things as God, government, and even gas prices, and even contradictory thoughts and ideas that I would never soberly consider seemed correct.

Then things took a turn for the worse.

A sound banged, a sound I now believe was the dog, but at the time had no idea. The sound echoed and seemed to symbolize the end of any good feelings. It echoed for what felt like 5 minutes and I saw the sound waves (Synesthesia, I believe it’s called when senses cross wires) physically changing and remolding these interesting and intellectually stimulating surroundings into something at once threatening and distant. All connection I felt to the oven, refrigerator, or the dining room table was severed in that (seemingly) 5 minutes. Even the couch on which I sat in disbelief as I watched the sound waves “ruin” the surroundings became nothing to me. At the end of this environmental transformation, I cried because I felt like I would never regain normalcy, much less the connection during the good part of the trip. My feelings became worse and worse as my mind raced through memories like a warped slide show and I became disconnected in every memory. For instance, in one, a memory of a photograph of some event of my 4-8 year old self, people were paying attention to me, patting my head, etc., in the original photograph (I checked afterwards). But the “slideshow” showed me this photograph and altered everyone’s attention away from me leaving me alone in the picture. Finally, the surroundings, the room itself, altered into a sort of animation like A Scanner Darkly.

After a while of crying on the couch and having every good memory altered to one of pain and isolation, I looked up and realized the first light of dawn appeared. Remember the last time I checked a clock it was 3:15 AM, and now it must’ve been after 5:00. I got up from my tears and looked down the hall to my favorite window. It seemed that the hallway was 3 miles long and I felt even more despair. On my slow walk over to the window this thought that I had died and gone to hell entered my head. I also had thought that complete isolation and loneliness would be a worse eternal punishment than fire, so I convinced myself that I was in hell and that these horrible feelings of loneliness and shame was something like God’s punishment. When I got to the window and looked out, the sky was no longer in the morning twilight, but was blood red and I gasped and fell back into the stairs, which had what looked to be snakes on them, probably a product of Snakes on a Plane propaganda. I stifled a scream, closed my eyes, and opened them, and the snakes were gone.

I made my way up the stairs and looked into my aunt’s room. I saw her and hoped that seeing someone I knew would bring some connection back to the environment, but no. I woke her up and she was startled and ran to the bathroom to put her contacts in. I stood in her room, interpreting her immediate leaving to the bathroom as another sign of my isolation. That was when I screamed bloody murder and ran downstairs and out of the house in panic. Outside I met with the Irish guy who was staying with my aunt before he left for basic training. Apparently he was locked out all night and slept in his car. I don’t remember conversing with him, but he later told me I warned him of “the communists” and went on my way.

The outside looked so beautiful but it was like a beauty that I could not be a part of. Even walking along a busy street and looking at the cars that looked so attractive, looking in them, I could see no people driving, and all of nature’s beauty was overshadowed in my feelings of isolation. I was walking towards the gas station I always go to for snacks, but decided to turn down a road I had never been down before. At this time I must have gotten over the peak of my experience and was having a rapid coming down because this street would be a final leg in the journey.

I walked past a few houses and went up to some doors, contemplating knocking on them to see if I could reconnect to reality through them. I did not knock, and I am, of course, glad I didn’t. I continued down the road and actually entered a car and sat for a while, smelling it as it reminded me of my nannie’s car’s smell. For some reason I honked the horn and ran out and down the street a bit until I got into an open lawn. At that point I was emotionally exhausted, having gone from intellectualizing faucet drips to feeling as though God Himself was angry at me and that my hell would be living in the world as I was but simply disconnected from everyone and everything—total isolation.

In the open lawn, I fell and cried one more time and rational thoughts entered my head for the first time. After about 5 minutes I stood up and walked more and was thankfully picked up by my aunt and Randy. Randy, being the clown asked, “What the _____ happened?” and I said “I ate ‘em”. And he said “How much?” So I said “Ummm two…all of it, both eighths.” At this new knowledge, Randy started laughing incessantly, not that I blame him. My aunt and Randy kept talking and I broke in “so is this really happening?” And they both assured me that my journey back to reality was well underway. Things seemed a lot slower and brighter on the car ride home. Eventually I was dropped off at home and bid farewell, and slept for a long while, waking up totally sober, but totally exhausted still. I have had a few nightmares about the experience, but no flashbacks and nothing that could disrupt my life, and of course, nothing with such an intense feeling of shame and isolation.

If I ever do shrooms again, and that’s questionable, it will be with a bunch of other people and I myself will eat no more than 3 grams, and we will have at least one sober sally.

Exp Year: 2006	ExpID: 55725
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Mar 24, 2009	Views: 5,958
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Mushrooms (39) : First Times (2), Combinations (3), Bad Trips (6), Alone (16)