DOSE: T+ 0:00	5.0 g	oral	Mushrooms	(plant material)
T+ 2:47	2.0 g	oral	Mushrooms	(plant material)

BODY WEIGHT:

182 lb

Friday 26th January 2007

5g Koh Samui & Dutch King mix @ 11am

1g Ecuador & 1g Dutch King @ 1.47pm

This journey was heavily influences by the myriad things recently digested and rolling about in my brain, primarily Daniel Pinchbeck's book '2012 The Year of the Mayan Prophesy', the recent downfall of snow and the films 'Grizzly Man' and 'A Scanner Darkly'.

I felt pleasantly and surprisingly energized with a positive vibe in the morning, having a confidence in the trip, and myself, which I have never quite felt before. With no real nerves or nausea at all, the trip had a calm natural evolution, the transition from ground state through visionary states and back again was smooth, feeling absolutely integrated with my life, as natural as the tide rolling in and out through the passage of a day.

'Medulla' playing, just into the early stages I reflected on the utter clarity of mind mushrooms bring, I feel totally in the moment with no thoughts at all other than the immediacy of existence through all senses, focus is completely on just the reception of information. I focused on creating a 'Swirls' picture with the felt pens in my notebook, which after declaring it finished I would eventually fuck up by over-ornamenting it. I added to the 'L' shaped pattern again, which is still not finished!

Surprisingly early on, the first closed eye visuals I had whooshed me up into a cloudlike murk of greens. It was as if I had poked my head up into an intergalactic/interdimensional meeting place. The impression was of various species sat round in a circle about to discuss things of great import, perhaps involving me, or maybe I was an emissary as well. Even though I couldn't see desks, I sensed them and I particularly recall a being with a squid-like head.

I think of the peak as 'The Download'. I was hurtling through worlds and landscapes of information. Two three dimensional shadows hung in the air in the air in front of then beside me. Initially it was overwhelmingly rapid, and I felt concern about freaking out. I relinquished my fear and relaxed into it passively letting them pour the information into my head. By doing so the CEVs melted through and into me, becoming a 360-degree experience in which I was enmeshed with what I perceived. The clear light circled and arched around the edges of everything. I can recall with clarity a scroll rolled down by two 'Greys', an absurd mix of ancient and futuristic connotations. Along with the ideas in the Pinchbeck book, the new laptop, with its CD burner, Amy had just bought, definitely influenced the theme of downloaded information.

There was the feeling of vast amounts of ancient and alien knowledge being stored in hitherto unused parts of my brain, which I moved my thoughts through as if I were rediscovering and exercising them. Wondering what 'powers' I may have gained I later, half jokingly, tried to make Socrates and myself levitate. During the onslaught of information I telepathically asked 'Why me? Why this time?' and received the answer 'It's always like this. This is what always happens!' The essence of what they were imparting/teaching me was a message of promoting harmony and interconnection, the notion of 'god' in everyone with a Jesus style acceptance of responsibility. I felt deemed a potentially harmonious man, with a sense of congratulations towards me for trying to be as good a person as I can.

To counterbalance this positiveness, thoughts turned to the issues I'd been having with a person at work I had got along with until recently, who in the trip I saw as both a reflection (He has a slightly similar temperament to me, or rather how I used to be) and utter diametrically opposed contrast. I must admit to feeling some jealousy, as he is a talented guitarist, sometimes playing gigs, which reflects my wish to be musical again. Recently he seemed to have taken umbrage at something and appeared to mock aspects of my outlook on life.

There was an undercurrent that all the signals being thrown out were so vague that the whole thing could have been in my head. I needed the quiet time of not talking to people at work to gain perspective on life anyway though. I saw him running away from me, looking nervous and scared and hiding behind a pillar. I must note that since this trip things have smoothed out and we are on good terms again.

I was overcome with feeling positively freezing. I had a numb little finger on my left hand and was shivering down to me feet, which brought a brief worry about pneumonia. I would also be concerned about having a heart attack later due to a rapid pulse and chest pain. I wrapped myself up in the sleeping blanket. Bestowing sentience on him I said, 'Come here you' to Socrates, a stuffed grey squirrel monkey soft toy and the best tripping companion ever, as I pulled him over to join me in my snuggled up state. That it had snowed and settled earlier in the week had a great deal of influence on what transpired next.

Whilst the opening of the Younger Brother album 'A Flock of Beeps' played I went into a daydream-like reverie in which I imagined myself as part of an expedition in a snowstorm, which was attacked by bear, and someone was bleeding to death. Blood lapped up over my field of vision, and the sense of this was so strong I had to check to see if I really was bleeding and hadn't noticed, or even if I had pissed myself and become highly confused. This whole passage of the trip was tinged with deja vu, so much so that I thought I had experienced the exact same thing whilst listening to that album before, but I've since realised I hadn't.

I quickly realised that the album was wrong for the mood, perhaps contributing to conjuring up this imagery, and I turned it off. Unlike Shpongle, the music felt cheap, disingenuous, non-organic, especially the jarring samples from 'Alice in Wonderland'. I even had to put it back on the CD shelf, to get it out of the way, beyond my sight. I came face-to-face encounter with a female entity. Part of this is wiped from memory, and only echo remains. I give her a look as if to say, 'I don't deserve this' which she reflected back at me and relented in agreement.

What haunted me briefly post trip was a realisation that the couple of times I felt I might die I had a willing acceptance of it. I continue to wonder if I really thought I might die and was truly accepting of the possibility or if underneath I knew I was, hence my acceptance feeling so easy, or if the whole emotional response related to ego death, or was a metaphor for something else entirely!

Transitioning to a less weird and uneasy frame of mind I sensed of an alien family, with the inference that we were all doing an activity like skiing. There was an annoying father figure who was taking charge and felt an utter cliché. I opened my eyes to, successfully, break this vignette.

'Dark Side of the Moon' yet again did the trick and formed a beautiful accompaniment, especially 'Us and Them', to the trees in the gardens behind our flat plumping out, becoming fat with life, their branches twisting with smooth organic animation. My eyes all misty everything blanked out to the view of a snowstorm, with white sweeping through everything my body turned into a mountainscape and I was hit by the thought 'Why am I buried in snow?'

I underwent a visual and emotional morphing progression through a pleasant review of my life. There was an acceptance of errors in a very matter of fact manner. I understood my development through re-experiencing vital junctures of my existence and was imbued with an joy at a complete understanding of myself and how I am who I am. I felt like I was viewing a map of my psyche with a beautiful feeling of fully understanding myself and seeing how you are assembled throughout your life experiences.

The process of re-familiarising myself with the keynotes of my life so far segued into a preparation of what advice I would want/hope to pass on to Jack. The greatest advice was undoubtedly, and undoubtedly based on the follies of my oversexed teenage years: 'Be a gentleman', especially with regards to women. The clouds broke many times and where I was positioned on the sofa the sun (echoing 'son' in my mind) shone down on me many times, surrounding me in a cleansing heavenly glow.

Somewhere along the line I got up and went to the window and looked outside, all I could see had the rotorscope painted look of the films 'Waking Life' and 'A Scanner Darkly'. Surveying the view of the back gardens, filled with kids toys and other paraphernalia I thought 'Am I Bob Arctor?' For a split second I believed I was, illustrating a fusion of various realms of thought and reality in my mind and how deep the trip went into my subconscious.

The music line up was again a mixed bag. After the iconic Floyd the Super Furry Animals album 'Phantom Power' was an okay album to trip to, it filled the gap fairly pleasantly, if a little disappointingly. There was a doubling and tripling of images and ancient/alien text/symbols I have seen many times before rose up through all surfaces emitting meaning beyond ordinary language.

Perhaps echoing Jack's womb bound maneuver, working my way rotating round clockwise I ended up lying upside down on the sofa, my head hanging down. I considered that everything's much better that way round, for one thing there's NO DUST! This may have been somewhat inspired by a photo I had seen at the Tate Modern earlier in the week of the artist upside-down, tied to a chair, reading a book (held upside down). The artist was hanging upside down, but the picture had been inverted. With pleasure at feeling utterly abstracted from ordinary reality I kept completely losing track of time, I felt outside of it, minutes passing ridiculously slowly. The carpet and ceiling swirled with patterns rising and falling, which I seemed to be able to control with my mind somewhat.

As the experience had been quite profound and intense I had delayed taking the second dosage. I was still tripping very hard when I took it at around a quarter to two. I had a bad case of the fidgets, so I forced myself to sit and relax in silence. Chirruping and other sounds familiar from psychedelic music emerged. A golden Buddha/Alien statue confronted me about my identity, in a scene very reminiscent of the stare of the 'confuse a cat' sketch cat. Opening eyes from this, all was roughly, warmly painted (a la Scanner Darkly) and fluid looking/feeling. I felt like I was floating through the sensation of the happiest sunshine day of the year, a comforting, cozy, connected, contented feeling. The light from outside became bright flaring sunlight, the opposite of the snow scene section of the journey, it felt like peak of summer.

I was in hysterics about having to call Amy at 2.30pm due to the incredibly intangible state of reality I found myself in, and the potential impossibility of being able to communicate in a lucid manner.

I only made it through a few track of 'Ziggy Stardust', imagining 70s Bowie as fake, fag, hag scarecrow. Lester Bangs's assessment of him as a poser and phony came to mind and after a few sublime tracks the album became annoying. I turned it off and put on the mix disc I had made the night before. With the mix disc whispering through the flat, after swift rejection of venturing outside into the cold, I went to the bedroom for change of scene. On top of the covers, curled in ball, I found myself on the 'Lost' island, sensing the character Hurly around. Staring into a rock I drifted out of my body and this reality and down through and into holes in the finest detail of the stone, which became hive-like segments, this came with an a feeling of utter comfort and relaxation. I felt in place and utterly peaceful.

I considered the spark of energy and attraction I sometimes feel between myself and one of the women at work. I had had a vivid dream recently in which we had expressed love towards each other, with the true feeling of falling in love again, exchanging a passionate emotionally explosive kiss, only to be upset to wake and find it all to be a dream.

I considered a fantasy of having a relationship with this woman, in an alternate reality where I wasn't with Amy, or if I could split myself in two and live both lives. A lot of this had to do with feelings of loneliness, sexual frustration (I spent a fair amount of time rolling about on the bed in semi sexual positions, or even in anticipation of Amy's birthing positions), a longing for intimacy and a feeling of aging and longing for some aspects of youth, surrounding the pregnancy. I don't really have any feelings of anything other than friendship towards this woman at all, but she seemed to be the closest person in my life I admire beyond my wife. I found myself saying, 'I don't know where I am in my life, or who I am'. This is not really true, I was testing the waters of my subconsciousness, worried that I'm not more worried about the future. Strangely, as if an afterthought on the experience I had already had/was having, I wrote, 'I need a break from myself' in the notebook.

The alarm on my pocket clock went off to indicate that I should call Amy. I rushed into the blindingly bright living room, light flaring in through the window. I nearly tripped over my trouser leg, but my hands quickly restored balance. Amy says I was slurry and odd, in a funny way, on the phone, very vague and talking much nonsense.

Thinking about what I had, perhaps, learnt during the experience I found it hard to define what had actually happened, asking of myself questions that often occur. Was I operated on/modified by an alien intelligence? Do I know have a mass of new information in my mind? Can I access it? How will this modification manifest itself? Thinking about the TV series 'Lost', the ultimate cliffhanger show, I came with what I think is the best, and most intriguing mystery story title ever - 'I wanted to know'.

With the feeling that I hadn't eaten in years, like a madman. I leapt and squealed with excitement about the idea of food. I sat down perched on the precipice of exploding with delight and joy and had the most exciting bowl of cereal ever. I was so amped up that I took some neurofen to take the edge off and avoid the inevitably imminent ache to my mind and eyes. With extreme keenness I organised a mix disc of the only decent songs on various soundtrack and freebie albums we have.

I suddenly, amusedly, realised 'I Am The Walrus' taking that definition to mean that socially I am an outcast. Briefly, due to the extremely draining tone of the experience I worried I'd driven myself insane, or damaged my brain, I also had concerns about not coming down, my brain felt very strange, more so than usual. The odd brain feeling faded and gradually relative normality was back into the driving seat. I barely noticed the transference back to ordinary perception, comfortably drifting into the evening routine.

Exp Year: 2007	ExpID: 61516
Gender: Not Specified
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Nov 7, 2007	Views: 12,875
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