DOSE:		oral	Mushrooms - P. cubensis	(tea)
		smoked	Cannabis	(plant material)

BODY WEIGHT:

83 kg

I have been pondering about uploading this review for quite a while, but after re-editing a lot ever since the trip I now feel that it is complete.

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Here is an attempt to let you, the reader, understand my experience with Mexican mushrooms.

Date: Monday, 18th of September 2006
Dose: 2 joints after the tea
1 portion, about 30 grams for 3 people, where 1 person (L) had about 20%
1 joint after the trip
T: 18.36 hrs.

Situation
We were at L’s house. This was possible for his parents were gone for a week and a half. However F was also joining in, but could only do it on the Monday, when he arrived back in Holland that very same day at 2.00 hrs., which was 2 days before L’s parents would come back. The sun was shining, though it was pretty clouded.

My personal situation was that the school year just started and I still wasn’t really worried about anything. The major problems have been solved more then 2 weeks before that Monday.

We have planned this trip one week before, but only that day I was already in my own little world thinking about what to expect. I even dreamt the night before about looking at my hand and feeling the muscles and everything under my skin.

L and F have done a similar trip on the 3rd of August. L however has had several trips before, and acted as the guide through the trip. This was to be my first one. At this point in my life my curiosity was bigger then my fear of the unknown.

The trip
At first I didn’t feel anything but the hype of actually, finally doing it. I didn’t know what to expect. We made the tea, put the shrooms in it, after which we sat down comfortably at the dining table drinking it. While drinking it, F was sitting behind a laptop finding a program to enable us to record it through the mic on the laptop. We could not test the mic however, for the audio didn’t seem to be working. So we decided we couldn’t be fucked to set it up anymore.

Hereafter we made our way to the balcony. F in the mean time rolled 2 joints which we proceeded to smoke on the balcony. After around 10 minutes (for as far as my perception of time was still “sober”) the shrooms started to kick in. I looked at F who was sitting left of me, and with a blanket over his shoulders he started looking like a bug of some sorts-in combination of course with the dilated pupils, and L to the right of me started looking like his facial skin was sucking vacuum around his bones. L then mentioned the sky in the reflection of the glass, which started to envelope me. I then turned around to watch the sky itself, and the clouds started to take the amazing colours-they were very small and very spread out, almost cube-like. The best way to describe what I saw would be as if the clouds had turned into prisms and broke the rays of the sun which was almost setting. Then it started to kick in, as everyone suddenly went inside. F kicked an open carton of juice over, by accident and the splendour, red blood-like colour distracted me for a moment. I then soon followed and laid myself down on the comfy sofa, on which I squirmed because the texture of it felt really good.
I then got up and left F on the sofa next to me, where he would keep rolling and smoking joints.

I started feeling happy. Love and trust was all around me. Mentally I was already on another level. I was in the kitchen looking at a painting of a farmhouse in a forest, constantly blowing my nose because I started crying due to this overwhelming love for anything. L then came to me and guided me from the kitchen to a painting of a paradise-like atmosphere of a tropical beach, blue ocean, blue sky, some clouds and a tree on the beach. Before I could pay attention to this painting I had to grab a box of tissues because I knew that I would leak all over myself. In the mean time L put a song called Row on, from the OST of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

After being able to focus on the painting I started crying like never before. Looking at the way the roots entered the earth, I noticed that it was kind of like someone lying on the beach and enjoying paradise, which was all around him. This exact moment was where I reached my peak of love and happiness. I understood what the painting meant to me. It was paradise. Pure, untainted paradise. And I felt like I was there. I felt like I was that person growing in paradise, just like the roots of the tree. Growing, to never ever leave. I felt like I couldn’t handle this. L then came back to me and put his arm around me. That’s when I started to cope with the love and happiness that was in every little cell of my body. I then cried even more because I understood everything.

I saw what I have been looking for my whole life. This feeling of saudade, that has haunted me ever since I started to think about the essence of life and all the it contains, has finally found a door to go through. It left my mind, it left the room, it left me. It left me. It left my world. Leaving me, I felt like I would never ever have to feel it again. I realised I was finally getting rid of this feeling, and I had L to thank for that. He opened the door, the door that had the typical cracks between the boards of raw-cut wood that it was made of. Closed, I was blinded by the light seeping through the cracks at me in my own darkness. Opening it, letting the light envelope me and the darkness I was in, was the finest moment in my life. It was being where I needed to be at the right moment in my life, it was as if a divine power has allowed me to receive a glance of paradise, of letting all burdens fall off of me, of turning my head in the right direction, of welcoming and embracing the cosmic restoring force that in waves guided me towards my equilibrium, of reaching the oscillation of the universe.
Of receiving eternal bliss.

I finally understood! I actually comprehended the universe in all its magnificence! I couldn’t believe what I was thinking, but I didn’t care anymore, I was in my moment in my own peak. I went beyond the clouds above the earth, I went beyond the galaxies, I went beyond comprehensible borders of space and time. I was grasping the essence of the essence, in its most pure form, the hart of the one thing that was all there was, has been, and ever will be. The one thing that was at that wonderful paradise, that one place that words can not describe, the one thing that can not be explained, the one thing that can not be shared without comprehension, the one thing that I can not tell you of, simply because I physically and mentally lack the ability to let you know what it means to me and everyone that needs to know.

It was then that I had the realisation that people needed to know. The idea of never finding that perfect medium, was haunting and it added a frustrated factor in my quest. People needed to know what I knew, what I had seen, what I had realised. I started to look for what would be the most complete form of art to express this feeling. I began with a photograph, but it was too flat. ‘A camera?’, I asked myself out loud. No, people would still not understand. Painting then? No, no, no it would be too suggestive. Even though I realised I could not share this moment in any other way then how it happened at that time, I thought I had found the one way:
A pose! It’s a POSE! I started to mimic certain poses which could in any way help to spread the feeling, the intensity of it all. Poses such as reaching for the sky with one hand, as if to grasp something. But it was too simple. I felt I was going in the right direction. Then it hit me, it had to be acting, which felt like I have been doing the whole time. Later on, this would bring me into a loop, which I would explain as both a perpetual déjà vu as well as a sitcom.

The whole thing was a sitcom. The constant mumbling of L as I shouted at him from the kitchen when he was in the living room right next to it, the constant rolling and simple laughter of F, constantly blowing my nose, me looking at the paradise-painting, me walking through the hall several times being weighed down by the feeling that it should not leave, me wanting this to last forever, me crying, me being misunderstood, me trying to clarify what I’m going through, me constantly connecting with F and L who started to breath heavily open-mouthed each time, me constantly dragging one towards the other in order to share what I had just discovered, me constantly paying attention to any new impulse my environment would give me and therefore being unable to focus on anything that had drawn my attention, me trying to ripple the atmosphere and discovering it’s solid, me eventually seeing everything in the style of the first picture in the album of Tool’s “10,000 days”. The writings. “The eternal laugh”, “It’s a laugh, not a line”, “oxistifiable”, “The connection, so good, so special, laugh”. The chaos. The utter chaos that surrounded us all. The beauty, love, joy and trust of it all. I’ll try not to get too lyrical, because then it would make no sense anymore (hoping that it does so far).

Then something horrible happened
As I was writing “forever” on the corner of a piece of paper as small as possible, I stood up to show them. At this moment I was in this perfect dream full of every positive thing you can think of. The second I stood up, L and me saw F fall right before our eyes. The dream started to fade into nothing. As he fell he knocked the back of his head against the cupboard the TV was on, and his lifeless body bounced once, before L and me immediately realised what happened and snapped out of everything that was positive. The dream started to become a free fall.

We immediately crouched beside F who was still breathing and tried to get him conscious again. We sat him up straight, when gravity-wise his head finally bobbed forward. It was then that the first fear hit me, his pupils were not steady dilated, they were growing and shrinking constantly. He then made a hurling motion, when L and me tried to get him to the kitchen (which was closer then the toilet). As we almost got him off the ground, F looked at us with his “normally” enlarged pupils as if he was asking “What are you doing? Why are you trying to pick me up?”. We immediately responded, telling him what just happened. We then lost him again, he went KO. We lay him down. L and me stood up almost frozen. We were pondering what to do, as well as the other hundreds of possible consequences of this.

We didn’t see any blood, so we concluded that it was not that bad. Then F mumbled some words. We crouched besides him again. F wanted something cold, for what L and me presumed for his head that must have been hurting really badly to knock him out like that. We went to the freezer, and found some sausages F put against the back of his head. I then lay myself over the sofa F was lying next to. L was crouching next to F, only just in my field of vision. To me F seemed to be sleeping, and I constantly told L to be quiet and let him. What I did not understand however, was that we were still in the trip and sleeping would be almost impossible right now. F then rolled over on his back, and asked for a glass of water, which L immediately ran off for. The glass was put down next to F, who knocked it over by accident.

I suddenly felt tired, laid myself next to F and closed my eyes. L soon “woke” me up (soon, so it seemed, but I wasn’t really sleeping). This moment was the second time I snapped out of it. As I was getting up, I noticed that I have been sweating like never before, my forehead felt like I just got out of the water, my shirt was completely wet and my trousers were sticking to my legs. I gave L a surprised look, and we then continued to look at F, who was still lying on the floor with his eyes closed, though slightly conscious.

After a while I felt tired again and told L that I was going to use his bed for some sleeping. It seemed to me to be the best thing to do, because L would have one person less to look after if I was out of the picture taking care of myself for a short while. I went to the spare room where I made myself comfortable. I was still in the trip though, and without realising I was doing it I was contemplating the intense frustration, chaos, fear and shock of what just happened. Horrible drawn images (almost art-like) flashed through my mind, as if it was purgatory. People suffering, horrible entities sucking the life out of everything it encountered. Then I opened my eyes, frightened by what I just saw, hoping that it would go away if I would close them again, unsuccessfully. Fortunately L came looking for me, and explained that sleeping is now impossible and we must get F to snap out of it and come back among us. I finally understood.

After a short while, F got up and asked what happened. It was 21.30 hrs. at the moment. Again we told him what happened, after which he lay himself down on that same sofa he started to roll joints on. L then put a blanket over F, and we proceeded to the balcony. Here we started to analyze the trip, shock and frustration while we were still in the trip. Here my second and last fear came over me. My perception of F as a person is someone mentally rock solid, he wouldn’t let people drag him down so easily. Therefore to see him fall down like that, while we lost him again was mind-blowing. I realised that that image, that moment, would not leave me in the very near future.

Eventually F would snap out of it, and plainly fall asleep after several hours of analyzing on the balcony, passing out and coming back, and processing and retracing what exactly happened. When he slept, L and I ate some garlic bread and chocolate, rolled a final joint and drank some more juice which we also fed to F before he fell asleep.

Conclusion
The whole trip felt like coming home, coming home to paradise from which we supposedly have fallen from. Nearing the end of the travel, somehow perfectly metaphorically, reality was slammed into our minds, which tried to regain some order in our consciousness. L made the reference to little children under the age 3, as in that they are so easily influenced by their environment’s new impulses, as were we (and most likely others who have ventured to this alternative reality) in the trip.

Right after the trip, I was 100% sure I did not want to do shrooms again. This was my first trip, and what kind of trip it turned out to be (incomprehensibly positive -> very, very, VERY bad). Even now I often wonder how this trip would have ended if no accident would have occurred. I guess I can only find that out when my curiosity again will outgrow my fear.

Below are some connections and memories I had with L and F I can not place in a chronological order

- L and me both wear glasses in real life. We connected due to the fact that it looked like we could see 2 different worlds: one focussed, through glasses , one more chaotic and beautifully blurred, without glasses
- Whenever I was around F, physically, and L started his mumbling and heavy breathing again F’s eyes and mine connected as we observed L’s reaction to this.
- The three of us also had a major connection when looking in the mirror. The eyes caught my attention. I was amazed by the dilated pupils, for I’ve never seen them that big before. It was not at all frightening.
- At one point L asked us if we would like to see something on TV. F and I immediately wanted to see American Beauty. We did this, and I remember putting my head on L’s knee, while sitting in front of the TV where we were laughing about the jack-off scene and the gay neighbours. Soon after we switched it off for all 3 of us thought we heard a baby or woman crying. (note: this happened at the same time. Note 2: both are sounds I detest above anything else)

Exp Year: 2006	ExpID: 64977
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Oct 1, 2009	Views: 17,320
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Mushrooms - P. cubensis (66) : First Times (2), Difficult Experiences (5), Train Wrecks & Trip Disasters (7), Glowing Experiences (4), Mystical Experiences (9), Small Group (2-9) (17)