DOSE:

15 g

oral

Mushrooms

(dried)

BODY WEIGHT:

70 kg

This shrooms experience has been my strongest to date. I’m not sure what it “means” or how I feel about it, so I’ll just report what happened.

I obtained the magic mushrooms while doing fieldwork in the Transkei in South Africa. There they grow fresh in the coastal jungle, beautiful white shrooms with golden caps and just a hint of blue. One shrooms was over 25 cm in length – the cap was the size of my fist! I would dry them by laying them out on newspaper on the lawn, and the warm sea breeze dried them beautifully in about 2 hours.

I returned home and found a suitable Saturday to take them. My preferred method of ingesting shrooms is to grind them up (sometimes using scissors and a shot glass like I would with marijuana) into smaller powdery flakes. I then eat a small mouthful and wash it down with a big gulp of fruit juice, and repeat until everything is consumed. Because the pieces are already so small there is no need to chew and taste them, and they also kick in faster. I don’t much like the taste when I’m sober, and this is a very fast efficient way to eat them quickly without messing around with teas or honey etc. However I find when I’m already tripping I love the taste and can eat the shrooms like potato chips :D

I decided to trip at home and to trip alone, which I love doing – it adds a whole other dimension to the trip. Because I was an experienced tripper I felt comfortable that I knew my limits and would be able to cope with whatever came my way. There was no chance of being interrupted, or having to interact with other non-tripping people, which I often find humorously impossible :) Once I had ground up the shrooms, I was left with a rather large dark powdery pile, enough to fill up a large cereal bowl. I’m unsure of the exact quantity, but I’d guess there was about 20 grams there. Normally for a strong trip I’d take 5 or 6 grams, but this time around I decided to throw caution to the wind. This is not recommended except for the most experienced of trippers! And even then…. WOW

I ate about ¾ of the shrooms, as much as I could stomach. I usually leave a bit for later to mix with marijuana for smoking, which I find to be an incredibly potent kick when already tripping. However, if I smoke shrooms while sober, the effects are negligible. I chilled out on the carpet of the lounge, listening to music and relaxing, trying not to think about coming on. I didn't have to wait long, about 20 minutes after consumption I felt the shrooms kicking in hard. Describing a shrooms trip is a lot like describing a dream, things are disjointed and it’s hard to keep track. Lying on the floor I began to feel very mushy and squishy, the ambient trance music softly playing in the background. I could hear jungle sounds, like frogs and crickets, and my living room soon became a lush jungle. But it was still my living room.

I got the feeling that I needed to go to the bathroom, which of course I didn’t, it was just the shrooms. But the thought of going into my bathroom became horribly hilarious. I walked between the living room and bathroom, each time getting closer and laughing harder. In my mind I dubbed the bathroom “The Bathroom of Hilarity”, and all who venture in there would surely perish from laughter. I felt fantastically happy, everything was SOOOOOO funny. I eventually found myself lying back on the living room carpet, contemplating the utter ridiculousness of the entire universe, creation, life, myself, my fears, hopes dreams, other people. I can’t really put it into words (as with so many things while tripping – language fails us utterly), but life seemed completely silly. And in that moment I was set free.

I “went straight to heaven”. I “experienced Nirvana”. Rolling on my living room carpet laughing uncontrollably, I realized the Truth. I can’t really say much more about it, except that it is screamingly funny. I have experienced this kind of laughter once before while on shrooms, and it feels really wonderful. The sensation is similar to dreams I have of breathing underwater, in that I “stop” breathing. Rather there is just a continuous stream of screaming laughter from deep inside my gut that comes gushing out like an unstoppable fountain, and I can keep it going for hours if I like. It’s wonderful, but other people might be a bit concerned.

It was that thought that brought me down a bit - that my landlord lived in the apartment above me, and perhaps I was making too much noise? I always get paranoid about being too noisy when I’m intoxicated. So I zipped up the laughter and decided to go have a bath. I’ve yet to go swimming while tripping, which I understand is amazing, but taking a bath, or even a shower, is pretty great too. When I’m tripping I find it very hard to tell if things, including myself, are wet or dry, and actually getting wet delightfully confuses the senses even further. Lying there in the lukewarm water I fancied I could hear the jungle noises again, and soon I got the sensation of lying in a swampy puddle in a lush, dark jungle, with lizards and frogs and other creatures all around me.

It was about that time that I noticed mushrooms beginning to grow everywhere – out of the tiles, the floor, the ceiling, the taps. I looked at my own body and noticed that there were mushrooms growing out of my limbs as well. This didn’t alarm me in the slightest – being an experienced tripper I didn’t freak out, rather I thought it was pretty neat and decided to see where it would take me. At this point I began noticing the ‘fog’, which I had felt I had been aware of in the living room earlier too. And in this fog, figures were moving, people were walking. It felt like the boundaries between this reality and another had broken down, that they had begun overlapping. Because this was the first time I had experienced this I decided to be cautious, and made no attempt to contact or get the attention of these people. Some gave me a cursory glance before walking off, and they didn’t seem malicious, but I didn’t want to take the chance on our first encounter. I went back to looking at the shrooms growing on my body.

I realized that I had become a mushroom completely, and my thoughts and consciousness took the shape of a mushroom cap. Every little leaf or “page” in the cap was one of my thoughts, one of my realities. I was simultaneously experiencing those realities, but I was also the observer, and could see each reality in the tiniest detail, and yet I was there too. I was there in the bath, but also at home with my parents, but also at work tomorrow, and also in the dream I had a few nights ago. I knew instinctively that there were an infinite amount of these realities, and given the time and effort who knew what I could uncover, but at that time I only had the energy/capacity to focus on 5 or 6 of those realities. Still, it was enough, and it was mind-blowing. Later my sister pointed out to me that in that moment I had “Stopped time” Carlos Castaneda style. I don’t know about that, but it certainly fits the bill. Time and space really ceased to have any meaning or to exist at all.

I’m not sure how long all this went on, but I think I only spent about an hour or so in the bath. I soon began to feel tired. I got dressed and returned to lying on the living room carpet, listening to ambient trance music and smoking a joint. I could see wonderful waves of energy around everything, especially my hands, and these waves flowed and swished around constantly in the most exquisite ever-changing colours. I began to play with the energy fields around my hands, trailing them around and contracting and expanding the colours.

The way in which they layered and folded over and into each other reminded me of models that scientists used to explain the interactions between 4 or even more dimensions – which my sober mind couldn’t conceive of, but now made perfect sense. There, in the palm of my hands, I had infinitely overlapping universes, where I could once again simultaneously see the whole and yet go into the minutest details of any specific “layer”, and yet none of this was confusing and no clarity was lost. I felt that I had a miniature working-model of the universe encapsulated there in my hands.

After this I began to lose focus and feel very tired – it had been a really heavy trip after all. I went to lie down in my bed and pleasantly drifted between waking and dreaming until I drifted off to sleep. The total trip lasted about 5 or 6 hours. I felt fine the next day, a bit spacey, but nothing unusual.

I’m not particularly spiritual, more of a scientific skeptic, so I’m not going to assign any deeper meanings or revelations to this trip. It was awesome, but it was just a trip. Also, I have NO idea how my marvelous brain works or what the true nature of reality is. There will have to be further experimentation :)

[Reported Dose: 'uncertain but a large dose. 15-20 grams']

Exp Year: 2009	ExpID: 95950
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: 23
Published: Mar 1, 2017	Views: 3,688
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Mushrooms (39), Cannabis (1) : Entities / Beings (37), General (1), Alone (16)