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DOSE: oral Mushrooms (tea)

BODY WEIGHT: 150 lb

Okay so this is how it goes...

I am a senior in college right now at Southern Illinois University, a pretty big party school, (have been a party animal my whole life), feel like reflecting on an experience that I had the summer before freshman year of high school.

I lived near Orlando, Florida at the time. Down there there during the summer it rains all the time. So naturally, shrooms grow in the cow feilds on piles of sh#%. You find them early in the morning just growing everywhere. But you have to know the right ones because there are some that will kill you right away. I had some friends that tought me the ropes. They were combinations of brown/purple on top and purple underneath, had a white stem, and a purple ring around the stem just under the cap. They were easy to reconize if you knew what you were looking for.

So we were young and looking for some answers, (and probably just looking to get messed up), and the shrooms were there all the time. We would take them very frequently and had pleasant experiences with combinations of pot and alcohol. It was the summer before 9th grade, we had no responsibilities. So we tripped all the time. Because we did it all the time, we got kind of nieve and one time got excessive.

About ten of us were hanging out at my friend Jake's house. Then a couple of us decided to go pick some shrooms. So we did, there was a cowfield in the neighborhood. We had a feild day, there were so many shrooms you couldn't even pick them all. so we filled one of the big ziplock bags full (about the size of a textbook). Then returned, to Jake's house. We put them in a pan with enough water to cover them, and some koolade mix. I don't know honestly how many were in there, but if I had to estimate, I would say probably 75 shrooms. (a dose of about 6-9 would make me trip and get visuals). Put the stove on high, boiled it for a while and chopped them up.

After it cooled what we got was a purple mixture. There were about four glasses I think. I drank one and a couple of other people drank a glass. Shortly after we were tripping balls. I had never tripped that hard. Everything got crazy. We were swimming in Jake's pool and all messed up. When I went underwater, the colors were awesome, it was really pleasant. I noticed that all of us that drank it were really messed up. One guy was freaking out saying that there were green spider webs all over his body, he was trying to get them off, It looked pretty funny to see him trying to swab them off. Then another guy was inside fighting with the vacuum cleaner. He was wrestling it on the carpet.

I remember some of the visuals during this period. When I looked in the trees, I saw goats that were just chillin staring down at me. They had long beards. Then I remember looking at stuff and it seemed like everything was made out of paper. It seemed somewhat 2D when I looked at things at a distance. I couldn't understand things that were far away. Then I blacked out or something, I don't remember what happened for a while. I remember being in the hottub. We were in the middle of a thunderstorm. It was thundering and lightning. I was horrified but couldn't move. I guess they had been trying to get me out for a while. Then my dad shows up to pick me up. I could not talk, could not do anything. They carried me to the car. I could not understand the interactions happening between people. My dad drove me home and put me in my bed.

I can't imagine how worried he was, stupid kid. So my family is in my room staring at me with horrible lookes on their faces. Can't ever forget the facial expressions, will feel bad for the rest of my life. I kept trying to pull the blankets over my body because I was scared. There seemed to be a glass dome over my body, I could reach through it but nobody else could. The blankets would chill on top of it. The next thing I know, there are about ten paramedics sourrounding me. I thought they were police at first. They strapped me to one of those boards, then pushed me down the driveway. I was all messed up. They put me in the ambulance and took me to the hospital. One of the paramedics was trying to stick a needle in me. I was freaking out, trying to stop him, but couldn't move because I was tied down. To this day, I can't stand needles, they freak me out and make me sick to my stomach.

The next thing I remember is waking up to my mom. I was not tripping any more. I don't know how they got me to come to. They didn't even know what I was on. They had to ask me what I was on, even drug tested me. They kept me there overnight and I went home the next day. I didn't do

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shrooms after that until recently. The doctor said that I had a hearbeat so high that they thought I was going to die. I can't imagine that I almost died with out even realizing it! I felt horrible for putting my family members in so much stress and confusion. They understood, they didn't ground me or anything. They said that I had my consequence already, (they were right). That was the scariest experience ever. The only bad trip I have ever had, (have tripped probably around 150 times on acid, shrooms, and dxm).

Lesson: There is a lot one can learn from altered states of consciousness, but keep in mind the dose. Also, keep in mind family members before you do something that might hurt you. It was the worst feeling to know that I stressed out people that love me so much.

Live, Learn, Have Fun, Grow, Experience, Care, Be Responsible, and Above all, Be safe.

DOSE: 2.5 g oral Mushrooms - P. cubensis (dried)

BODY WEIGHT: 140 lb

It had been a while since I had last experienced mushrooms. My last experience wasn’t so pleasant only because I didn’t make preparations for my set and setting, which is a very childish mistake when it comes to dealing with mushrooms. Nonetheless I have learned my lesson for that manner. This was going to be my fifth time taking mushrooms so I took every effort beforehand to make this experience a very beautiful one.

I was going to take them with a friend named Jay. Jay is a very good friend of mine who I have met in middle school. I knew choosing the right people to trip together is very important (well, around here its hard to find kids who understand these sorts of substances) so I was satisfied with my buddy, for having good company around. This was going to be Jay’s first shroom trip, so I had high hopes for him. Our friend Scott was going to watch over us. We set up a chill spot in my backyard for the trip, this included a nice porch swing and a boom box right next to us. I have a large backyard with nice green grass, nice tall hedges running down my yard, a natural preserve in our view, and of course a crisp blue Florida sky.

Once me and Jay received the mushrooms, we split the bag in half. We were both going to take 2.5 grams of good homegrown mushrooms. They were the Mazatapec-Mexico strain, I believe. Right before we took them, we needed to pick up our friend Scott to baby-sit us. So we picked up Scott, brung him back to my house, then Jay and I started eating our mushrooms. Once we were done eating them, Scott quickly decided he wanted to get some weed before the shrooms kicked in for us.

So we all got in the car, Scott was driving, I was in the passenger seat and Jay in the back. The radio turns on as we leave my house. I feel a tingling sensation at the bottom of my stomach. I felt the shrooms sitting in my stomach starting to work. I paid all my attention to Cream which was playing on the radio. I’d say 10 minutes after the ingestion I began feeling effects immediately. It started off with giggling in the car, followed by a difference in bodily feelings and enhanced depth perception. I smiled, remembering all of these feelings that occurred in the early stages in my recent trips. “Yepp, I feel this shit now, damn!” I said. I looked back at Jay in the backseat, he let out a chuckle and a grin.

As I turned around I noticed a beautiful plant brushed up against the back window. I noticed the very luscious earthy colors that it had. The rich dark green color at the base of the stem and leaves that slowly turned into a bright vivid green at the top of the leaves. And to finish it off, it had purple blossoming flowers at the top. “Damn! That’s f**kin’ beautiful!” I said, amazed at the very clear rich colors that I was already seeing.

Shortly afterwards, we arrived at my house. Right when I stepped out of the car I felt a strange rush of bodily feelings throughout me. I knew the shrooms were kicking in fast, I smiled to my self and opened the door to let Scott and Jay in. Jay and I had a homemade ping pong table set up in the living room. I challenged Jay to a ping pong game, I felt this would be a good way to welcome the energy that was about to embrace us. It was also something I had planned out to make sure Jay would approach this experience in a fun manner. Scott went out for a cigarette out back while me and Jay were beginning our game of ping pong. We had nice music playing next to us, some CCR, Soft

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Machine, Grateful Dead, and some old school Nintendo music which was a brilliant idea to have around.

Anywho, as we were playing, the visuals began to kick in tremendously. We were both feeling the music and laughing hysterically all while playing ping pong like experts. During this fun-crazed madness (that happened so quickly) I started to notice the visuals. I saw a rainbow near all reflections of light. I saw transparent rays of red green yellow blue and purple alongside every light coming from any direction, weather it be from the window or the sun. It was very strange only because these transparent ‘rainbows’ would move in ways like a circle 8, or a lava lamp.

At this time I started to feel in a higher state of consciousness. I came to a quick realization that these shrooms had some effect on my pupils, being that the pupils were in the process of taking in all light and were some how dismantling the light, resulting the visions of transparent rainbows. Then I realized, no shit, that’s what a hallucination would be. Again, I smiled. “Goddamn! I’m tripping balls” I said. “Hahaaaa! Yeahh me too” Jay cried.

We were bobbing our heads to the music like madmen while playing a game of ping pong, I felt very euphoric and goofy. Shortly afterwards me and Jay decided to chill with Scott out back. “Hold up!!! Let me take this boombox!!!” I said as I was still goin’ with the music. I felt a strong need to have music everywhere I was going. Music is an exceptional external activity that I feel should be present during the experience any kind of drug, such as mushrooms, LSD, MDMA, etc.

So, Jay and I walk out to the ‘chill spot’ in the back yard. I noticed the luscious green grass, the crisp blue sky and the energy exploding in me. Jay and I sat on the porch swing that was brought out into the middle of my backyard. It gave us a feeling that we were very down to Earth with all the nearby colors and positive vibes. We sat there listening and bobbing our heads to the music. ‘Medeski Martin and Wood’ was playing on the boombox. I remember thinking to myself that mushrooms always brought me sweet emotion through music.

“Holy shit……these fuckers know whats up!!!! Listen to that organ, Scott!!!! Goddamn!!” I said. Scott smiled at me and agreed. Jay looked very pleasant and looked like he was having a great time. All these thoughts were making me very happy.

I then started to have thoughts such as “what now?” “what’s next?” “Is this my day?” but I knew it was only my mind trying to disrupt the experience that I had planned for. The goal was to do absolutely nothing but just to sit outside with good company and soak these mushrooms in. They bring me a spiritual experience, a lesson in life that should teach you many things. They give me thoughts about friends, loved ones, egos, people, civilization, and mankind. So I accepted those feelings but did not act on them externally. Externally, meaning I did not literally act on them with action such as telling Scott or Jay: “Lets get out of here man!! Lets go do something!!” I knew it would’ve been very childish of me. So I sat there and kept listening to Medeski Martin and Wood with my friends.

We were laughing like hyenas every now and then. Jay and I didn’t need words for communication. We perfectly understood each other through body language and emotions. It was very strange to me, but true. Jay began taking to Scott, telling him of how much of a good friend that Scott is. Scott was thanking him and saying the same to Jay. We all felt the bondage through our good friendship. And we all felt a strong bond to each other.

It was around that time where the 3D visuals came to life. As Scott and Jay were talking with the music was playing, I sat on the porch swing ‘meditating’ looking far into the surroundings in front of me. I noticed the grass taking form of geometrical figures, and hexagons. These figures would morph into other shapes, such as diamonds. To explain it good….imagine the grass (or the earths’ surface) as a finished puzzle board. I could see the lines between all the puzzle pieces. Those lines would morph into various geometrical shapes. It was very fucking cool, it was a common hallucination I’ve seen every time I experienced mushrooms. I become very aware of any type of architecture. I can understand the X and Y planes (the ground intersecting a wall) and the hallucinations only help me understand the idea more.

“Yo Scott, these shrooms are real good man, the visuals are kickin’ in more” I said. “Oh yeah? What do you see?” Scott replied. This is where I realize I couldn’t talk on shrooms, only because I’m in such deep thought for an amount of time. “Its like…..platforms….and….shapes……and…………sorry dude I can’t explain it now, but I will after these shrooms ware off.” I said. Scott nodded his head and

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agreed. Scott had never experienced mushrooms; he’s only had experience with cannabis, salvia, and some pills.

I was getting into a higher state of consciousness I felt like, I began feeling the same bodily feelings over and over. I had thoughts and feelings of stress…followed by relief… excitement… laughter….then right back to Stress. There were some points were I even felt like crying. A thought came to me. The mushroom experience occurs in a cycle. Or that, feelings come and go in waves, climax parts of the waves differentiate from the low parts of the waves. (Think of it as a graph) Both of these theories are correct in my opinion, and both correlate to each other. There were some points in the cycle where the experience was getting quite intense. When these points occurred, it gave me ‘flashbacks’ to my recent experiences where I experienced those same intense feelings. I knew that I was going to be ok and that I needed to ride those feelings out. I needed accept the intensity and wait for that point in the cycle to pass.

Suddenly, Jay began looking not so well. I had a strong vibe from him that he was going through an intense point in the cycle. I walked over to him to reassure him of some company. “It’s too much man!!” he said. I put my hand on his shoulder and plainly said “It’s the shrooms man, come over to the chill spot and ride it out.” I really wish I could’ve explained much more than that. I wanted to explain the whole theory of the cycle to him, and help him understand he was at an intense point in the cycle. I wanted to tell him to accept the intensity, welcome it all. But of course, I was in really deep thought at the time, and my communication skills weren’t functioning well. So I told him what I could “Ride it out”. He understood what I meant, which made me very relieved. He’s a smart kid.

I put the music up for him as he was laying down on the porch swing. He seemed to enjoy it very quickly. Music and having good company around are excellent external activities to have when someone has intense feelings and hallucinations. If anything, have it around at all times. This whole mere incident happening, made me reach a even higher state of consciousness. I understood Jay’s feelings, and I realized he was going through the cycle too. This mere fact confirmed my theories of the cycle. I felt a rush of mindfulness. I started to ponder more and more, beyond all boundaries.

As Jay and Scott were talking about the same things over and over, and doing many hilarious things, I began thinking about the whole situation. All life forms are energy. Energy can emit and receive energy. This energy can be emitted in a bad or positive way. I understood the theories of Angels and Demons, Heaven and Hell, God and Satan. Then I started thinking about how me and Jay were ‘communicating’ without the usage of words. I knew exactly what he was thinking of and him of me. I feel like the energy from his mindset was emitting energy to my mind (or some sort of receptor) resulting me having this ‘bondage’ with Jay. Then I thought, this mere feeling of ‘bondage’ is the feeling of awareness. I was then receiving opposing thoughts to put my theory into question. And then I thought of the mere thought process I was undergoing. It all was blowing my mind in such a natural and beautiful way.

There were some distractions to my deep thoughts, like Jay and Scott laughing and having a good time. Which wasn’t bad at all, it made me really happy that they were here with me. I felt the positive energy being emitted to each other, and we all received it. This energy was not emitted by actions; it was emitted by our mindsets. And all of us had the same mindset.

A friend named Alex came over. Alex lived down the street and was visiting us; I had told him earlier that I was going to do mushrooms this day. My last mushroom experience…wasn’t so pleasant, and it was with Alex. That horrid day started out with no preparations on set and setting, just the two of us, no baby sitter, no music, no nothing. We had planned on taking mushrooms and enjoying nature for the day. And what do you know? Right when the shrooms kick in, my friend Alex decides to take a trip to the Mall. I opposed the idiotic idea. I felt things getting tense between us, I was beginning to get out of this ego-driven world, and Andrew kept ‘reminding’ me of it with remarks such as “ooh my godd, lets go to the mall…..all you wanna do is just chill, pussy” I could’ve whooped his ass if I wanted to, but I didn’t. Thoughts like “why?” “why is one a pussy if he doesn’t want to go to the mall for the experience?” were racing through my mind. I plainly told Alex that I was in no way shape or form going to go with him to the damn mall.

About 40 minutes into the trip, we had went our different ways. I went home, and he went with another friend to the Mall. I came home, had an intense horrid trip. I laid in the bed like a patient in a hospital room who had just ate some bad mushrooms (which they probably were) waiting for the effects to ware off just a tiny bit so I can feel somewhat content. But no, I had a horrid experience in

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that room. I wanted to stop hearing, feeling, seeing, and thinking so damn much. And what is the only thing that can accomplish that? Death, I thought to myself.

So yeah Alex came over while me and Scott where in the kitchen. I said what’s up to him and greeted him in the house. I got an orange to eat. We all ended up outside by the chill spot. This is where a lot of giggling and laughter had took place. There isn’t much need to write here since most people know what its like to laugh hysterically. But visuals seem to enhance funny emotions and antics of people. I’ll just let you know some of the things that were involve: Looney Toons, Popeye, Alex looking like an Abercrombie & Fitch model, very funny strange dancing, and…..old school Nintendo music. We laughed real fu*kin loud. Like animals. It was pure emotion. Pure laughter.

After all of that, me and Scott decided to jam out. Jay said he was feeling horrible. He made his way to the couch and laid down. I had a feeling he’d feel better when he’d lay down while me and Scott were jammin’. So I got on drums, Scott on guitar. We started playing. It felt real good to be playing music at that moment. The flow of the jam went really good. I started thinking about how powerful this energy is from music. I wondered how amazing the feel of music can reach to people. But, realizing that this energy of music is created from the mind and effort from a human being was so bizarre and beautiful.

I looked at Scott, then myself, and realized all it takes is effort and pure emotion to make a work of art truly beautiful. It takes pure emotion for people to receive those pure emotions from things such as music or art, or anything in fact. It is energy being emitted from one mindset to another mind. Still to this day, I remember that moment being a very significant point during the whole experience. To sum up those 10 minutes, it was a beautiful jam. I went downstairs to see how Jay was doing. He kept saying it was all “too much” and kept mentioning he was feeling mixed emotions. I brought him outside, to the chill spot. Sunrise was beginning; colors were becoming ‘nicer’. I told Jay to sit outside with me, and to just sit in silence, focus on the mind. We did so.

Jay began to laugh and cry at the same time. I knew the exact feeling he was undergoing. It was a feeling of mixed emotions. The feeling of learning something that is extremely meaningful. “That’s life man…..that’s life!” said Jay sobbing. I nodded my head and agreed. The mushroom brings insights to everybody. There is no way I can really explain the beauty behind it. Words simply don’t do justice for these experiences. And honestly, I don’t think they should.

After that moment of solemness, came a feeling of wanting to let go and move on. It’s the feeling after being slapped by someone great, in order to teach you a lesson. You have now learned that lesson and want to move the fu*k on in life and accomplish many things. The rest of the night brought me many clear thoughts and revelations that I would never forget. I really have a hard time trying to explain them, so I won’t, sorry.

Jay suddenly decided to go home. I thought this was a very strange idea, concerning that I was still tripping balls. I kept asking Jay to stay with me for a couple more hours to ware off the effects and to get some bud later. He rejected the idea and said his goodbyes. I had a strong feeling that I needed to let him go, let him think about the spiritual experience he had gone through today. So we all said goodbye to each other. It had been a very long day. Jay drove himself home (which I was worried of) and I drove Scott home. [Erowid Note: Driving while intoxicated or tripping is dangerous and irresponsible because it endangers other people. Don't do it!] After that, I came back home to sit in silence and meditate. This session was incredible.

In conclusion, (I’m bad at these) I have only simple words to give out. The mushroom brings my intelligence, awareness, and insight. It lets me see the beauty in both worlds, external and internal. Having gone through these experiences has made me a better human being, showing me the path, a way of life, to live a beautiful life. It shows us to appreciate the mind and how powerful it is and can be. And I wouldn’t trade anything in the world for these beautiful experiences I’ve gone through.

DOSE: T+ 0:00 1.125 g oral Mushrooms (dried) T+ 0:30 0.5 tsp oral Kratom (plant material) T+ 2:00 0.5 joints/cigs smoked Cannabis (plant material) T+ 2:30 0.5 tsp oral Kratom (plant material)

BODY WEIGHT: 220 lb

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I was hesitant submitting this story due to privacy concerns, but since I didn't see any other listing for this combination I thought my story should get out there.

A few months I took some mushrooms with a friend. Since the quantity of mushrooms was less than desired I decided to put together a psychedelic sampler. Per the title: won't do that again. In the end I feel it was the Kratom which was the wild card. The Mushrooms Cannabis Combo was something I’ve had plenty of success with in the past. We took approx. 1.125 grams of your standard magic mushroom. One half hour later we took a 1/2 teaspoon of Kratom. What grade I couldn't say, but it must have been high-octane. One half an hours after that, we smoked a joint of some high end hydroponic bud. Time elapsed approx. one hourThe effects of all three blended together creating an amazingly euphoric high. We were discussing this as the 'trifecta of good times”. We felt like we'd discovered a whole new thing and wanted to spread the good news. At this point I decided to up the ante with another 1/2 teaspoon of Kratom. A half hour later I could feel the effects of this second helping of Kratom taking hold. It's been a bit since this happened, so I can't get super specific about the buzz. Visually I was having wavy, blurred, and distorted vision. Physically I was warm & euphoric. To this my friend decided he was going to try more Kratom as well. This is where the wheels came flying off.He had decided to make it in hot chocolate, and went about preparing that as I sat down and had a cigarette. As I was smoking all the sudden I was overwhelmed with a sense I needed to lay down. Next thing I know, my friend is standing over me on the kitchen floor trying to wake me up. I had convulsed at the table and passed out. I was weak, disoriented and had trouble speaking. After laying there for about five minutes, unable physically to do much, he/she tried to sit me up. I immediately passed out again. At this point my friend, who's a nurse, took my pulse. I was running at between 35-40 beats a minute, which is exceptionally low from my understanding. After a half hour I was able to stand up and walk to the bathroom.While I was standing in the bathroom (I'd been upright for about 3 minutes tops) I felt myself passing out again. Since it was coming, I decided to start heading in that direction while still conscious and somewhat in control. Trying to yell for my friend, I again couldn't speak. Groundhog Day! I woke up to my friend standing over me…again. This time he insisted we go to the ER. I was able to convince him that third times a charm, and if that happened I'd go.

I was able to drag myself into the living to lay on a couch using only my arms. At this point my legs weren't altogether cooperating and by raising my head too high I risked passing out again. Then I'd be heading to the hospital. Things had gone terribly sideways and I didn't know what to do other than ride it out. But let me say this: I've ridden things out before. This wasn't my first rodeo. But in all my experience, this was the first time I didn't know if I was coming out the other side. I started to wonder if this was what OD'ing felt like. My friend, who deals with dying and nearly dead folk all the time, was terrified. Both times I passed out he/she had trouble waking me up again. I had nothing to gauge this experience against.

For the next half hour I fought off passing out because I didn't know if I'd wake up again. I was really afraid I’d close my eyes and never wake up. After this time passed I began to feel the effects waning and I knew I had turned the corner. About half an hour after that I felt fine, this being relative to the condition I was in to begin with.

Total elapsed time, about 3 hours. This was not fun or enlightening. This was dead-ass bad news for me and my friend. Both he and myself thought I was going to die. To be honest, I took awhile writing this because I didn't want to put the story out in cyberspace-privacy concerns and what not. In the end I decided to go ahead because I think people should know what they're playing with here. I wrote it because I’d feel horrible if this went even worse (death, coma, who the hell knows) for someone else and I hadn’t done something to help.

DOSE: 3.5 g oral Mushrooms - P. cubensis (dried) repeated smoked Cannabis (plant material)

BODY WEIGHT: 160 lb

Trip Report for June 10th, 2006

The day started out pretty normal, got up at around 10am, and had my sole meal for the day, a huge bowl of Life cereal. At around 3pm I called my friend, let's call him Jake, to make sure he’d acquired

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the necessary stuff, and also called the other 2 participants (Shawn and Brian) to make sure we were set for the night and that it would go off without a hitch. The plan was to meet at Bryan’s house at around 8:45, consume the mushrooms at around 9:00 and start our trek at around 9:30-10:00. At 8:00 I’m incredibly hungry and decide I’ll eat a couple bananas and an orange, as well as take a couple of motion sickness pills, which seem to really help with the nausea I usually get from shrooms. I also got some essentials together in a backpack (Water, flashlight, pot, some benzodiazepines in case anybody started to have a really bad trip, a few granola bars, some Pepto-Bismol chewable tablets and a handful of lighters).

Jump ahead to 8:45, I’m the first to arrive at Bryan’s house at almost exactly 8:45, then 5 minutes later Shawn and Jake are here and we’re all ready to down 3.5 grams of these vile pieces of fungus. It was quite the ritual, as everybody used a different method of ingesting them, I made tea, Jake ate them by themselves (accompanied by quite a few gagging sounds), Shawn made some cheese-toast to put them on, and Ben ground his up and put them in a cup of orange juice. It was about 9:10 when we were all finished eating/drinking.

As we all started to head for the door to start our walk, Jake realized that in his excitement he had accidentally locked his keys in his car. Not wanting to start the trip on a sour note, Shawn offered to give him a quick ride home to get his spare set.[Erowid Note: Driving while intoxicated or tripping is dangerous and irresponsible because it endangers other people. Don't do it!] While they did that, myself and Bryan sat around and listened to some Talib Kweli and Krayzie Bone, chatted about his new job as well as my lack of employment. The time passed exceptionally quickly and before we knew it, Jake and Shawn had arrived back with the spare set of keys, and we were ready to start our trip. By now it’s about 9:30, and everybody but I was starting to feel to first effects of the mushrooms. I’m usually the last to feel anything.

Bryan’s neighborhood is by far the trippiest neighborhood I’ve ever walked through. The street itself has a lot of hills and inclines, which with the body load of mushrooms proved to be pretty entertaining. There’s also plants on both sides of the road which seem to almost hang over it, which accompanied by street lamps provide some pretty interesting shadows. We kept walking for about 30 minutes until we found a park with a huge field and on the other side of the field was a small playground, which we thought would make for a good tokeing spot, we all climbed up onto the playground and proceeded to smoke a couple joints and 1 bowl in Bryan’s pipe. At this point we were all very stoned.

After the session Jake mentioned that he was starting to see some CEV and a moderate distortion in his vision at which point Bryan and Shawn mentioned that they were also feeling like that. I on the other hand had yet to feel anything but the slight change in body load. About 5 minutes later, I find myself with an amazingly strong urge to laugh and burst into laughter about absolutely nothing which trigger all 3 of my friends to burst into hysterics, after we’d calmed down, we started talking about various philosophical subjects, and some not so philosophical :P, things like: whether we believe in creatism or evolution, how it would be shitty to be a rock because people always step on you, about how something that can just grow out of the ground is able to make us “trip out”, to name a few, while listening to some trip hop (which I’d never heard until that night).

I felt a sudden urge to yawn and flex every muscle in my body, which usually means the shrooms are about to kick in and at the same time noticed that there was a kaleidoscopic array of colors on top of my vision, at which point I stop talking and just start taking it all in. One of the first OEVs I got was in the clouds, at first it just looked like a jumble of letters not in any particular order, I focused on them for a few minutes until they seemed to spell out “Welcome Home” at which point I decided to thank them out loud much to the surprise of my friends, they didn’t say anything but I sense that they wanted to know why I had just said thank you, so I explained it to them.

Across the field there were some tall bushes in somebody’s yard directly under a street lamp which gave way to some interesting visuals. It appeared that there were samurai warriors and cartoon characters bursting through the bushes but could never make it all the way through, the only way I can describe it, is it looked like they were pushing through a thin piece of rubber so they’d push up against it, and make an impression on it, then bounce back, kind of like when you look underneath a trampoline when people are jumping on it. That’s probably a pretty bad explanation, but I don’t know how else to put it. I also saw quite a few pictures in the clouds, like, superman, goofy and Donald duck.

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I think it’d been about an hour and a half when we all decided we should continue walking. While we walked across the field I got the most amazing sensation, almost like I was walking on clouds. As we walked across the field we noticed that the moon had come out and it was a full one at that, we stopped and just looked at it completely awe struck with its beauty, how it commanded everybody’s attention, there was a cloud hanging just above the moon, which seemed to have a lot of faces looking down on us, almost watching over us, which gave me a great sense of security and euphoria.

We decided we’d make a big circle around Bryan’s neighborhood to arrive back at his house and watch a movie. After walking for about 15 minutes I suddenly got a urge to be closer to the nature around us, so I started walking through the trees, it felt like they were pushing me along, guiding me way through them, at first I thought it might seem weird to my friends but I felt like I got a telepathic message from all 3 of them saying “We understand, do what you need to do”. After walking through the bushes and trees for a while, I noticed that on the other side of the trees, there was a park, which seemed to be completely hidden from everything, it felt like I had x-ray vision and could see the park in its entirety without going all the way through the bushes. I told my friends about it, and we all climbed through and sat down on a bench.

As I looked around I noticed that there didn’t seem to be any direct pathway into this park, it felt like it had come out of nowhere just for us. Bryan decided to pack up another bowl and we just sat in completely silence apart from the occasional flick of the lighter, when it was my turn, as I hit it, I felt like I could inhale an infinite amount of smoke and without realizing it, cashed the entire rest of the bowl…wow, I felt like such a dick, so to make up for it, I decided to pack a bowl as well. After the second bowl we just sat there taking in all the visuals, it was now that I started to feel very different then I’d ever felt before while shrooming. I felt like I didn’t exist, like I was everything, a complete loss of individuality, I felt like I could read everybody’s thoughts, like I knew what anybody I thought of was doing, like I could communicate with the plants around us. It sounds horrible, but it felt like my soul had separated from my body and fused into everything. I was everything.

I don’t know how long this went on for, but it seemed like an eternity and I didn’t want it to end, I don’t remember too much after this in detail, we walked back to Bryan’s house, not talking very much as we were too busy thinking and watching things around us melt and morph into different things. We got to Bryan’s house at around (I think) 1:00am, I had a hard time reading the clock, the numbers kept twisting and moving around. To our surprise Bryan’s grandmother was still awake, which didn’t really matter, because we’ve gone to his house while tripping before and she knows we know what we’re doing.

We then headed downstairs into the basement and popped in a DVD Jake had rented earlier in the day, called Waking Life. While watching the movie, I couldn’t help but feel like I was in a lucid dream. About 2/3 of the way through the movie I could tell I was coming down and by the end, I wasn’t tripping too much anymore, just some tracers and I still had quite a pleasant body stone. When the movie ended, Jake, Shawn and I all thanked Bryan for letting us walk around his neighborhood as well as letting us watch a movie in his house.

During the drive home, I didn’t have any music on, I just sat and thought about the nights events, and how I was lucky to have such great friends who all shared the same passion and appreciation for magic mushrooms. When I got home, I decided to have a bowl of cereal and a banana, and threw on the cartoon version of Alice in Wonderland and smoke a couple of bowls in my Vapolution which, to my surprise, brought quite a few visuals back. After watching the movie I decided I fall asleep listening to music, so I put on The Best of Bob Marley and the Wailers, and dozed off.

I woke up the next morning feeling refreshed and energized, contrary to how I usually feel after a night of shrooming (tired, worn out, headache, lethargic). This was by far the most spiritually enlightening trip I’ve ever experienced, I felt closer to my friends then I ever had before and gained a new perspective on life, to live every moment like it’s you’re first and last. One of my favorite quotes from Waking Life, one which I really understand and enjoyed was when Guy Forsyth said: “The worst mistake that you can make is to think you're alive when really you're asleep in life's waiting room.”

This trip report was written a couple of days after the trip, so I may have left some parts out, and it definitely doesn’t do justice to the way it actually felt.

DOSE: 2.3 g oral Mushrooms (dried)

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1 g smoked Cannabis (plant material)

BODY WEIGHT: 145 lb

(The nice thing about shrooms is that I dont get really addicted, I discover feelings and emotions, the universe inside my head. . . And they are cheap. )

It all started around 12pm, on lunch break at college. For almost a week me and some friend had planned on buying some shrooms for the weekend. It had been a long time since I didnt do some and for some reason I was really into it this time. All my previous experiences were in the range of what I would call fun and bizare but never in the hilarious/profound/mysterious way some people have sometimes on some kind of shrooms. So we bought an ounce of shrooms at school that were supposed to come from B. C and supposed to be good shit. Me and some friends, Ziu, Zia and Zio, bought each g of shrooms for half the price (5$/g) me taking 2. 3 gms and Z and Z 3gms each. We planned takin them late in the afternoon.

Around 7pm Ziu got by my house, and then other dude who was there just to take his shrooms(from the ounce we had)and do it the day after. We smoked some ganja waiting for Zio and Zia to get there. When they finaly arrived, we decided to go to Ziu house since my parents were supposed to get home soon and knew we coudnt trip on shrooms by my house with them there. So me Zia, Zio and Ziu went to his house 5 minutes awayfrom mine. We got there and in no delay ate those magic vegetables.

TRIP:9. 30pm chewing them a long as possible even if they taste like shit. Ziu and Zio ate each like 1. 5g Zia and me 2. 3 gms each. We decided to kill the time in Zius room, playing guitar and listening to music.

(around)9. 50pm: first uncomfortable feelings in my belly. As if I had eaten some rotten food. In fact thats what we did.

(AR)10. 15pm: all along we had played guitar with a lamp on on the corner of the room. First impressions of the buzz, I started to find the light too bright but not uncomfortable, just brighter than before. We started to get groovy with the music. We played some simple chords but I was starting liking the sound of the guitar extremely. I closed my eyes to concentrate more on the sound and liking it more, and realized I was giggling beacause of the music.

10. 20pm: Ziu turned off the light. We continued playing music. I had some problems concentrating on the movement of my fingers on the guitar but played anyways and with nothing to see but all to hear I went in some form of mild but very pleasant music trance. Suddenly the light comes on again and sudden but not total back to reality (I remembered I was in a room).

10. 30pm: stopped playing guitar. At his point I cant tell what happened to the others, just Zia who for some reason didnt get a thing off the shrooms, very straight. I started to get into MY buzz, knowing there were other people tripping but not interested or able to analyse their trip. We let some music in the background and found myself again giggling, laughing for no reason. . . Just some bizarre/NICE euphoria.

(From this point I put some random hours, not the exact but hours that make this story have some sense for at some point I really lost the thing I have in my head that makes me know time continues and in at what pace)

10. 40pm: extreme euphoria. Not the same euphoria as I could get on E or alcohol, a little like pot but much more intense, just outburst of laughs for no known reason and knowing theres no reason just makes me want laugh more. First dancing 'forces' in my body, I already knew the music being played at the moment but for some reason this time it appeared more fun, inspired, nicer than before. Need to get up and move my knees, arms and neck. (dance I guess but with my neck included)

10. 50pm: need to chill a little. Belly hurts because of the shrooms and because laughed too much. First open eyes visuals: in the corner of the room where was the lamp a bob marley poster appeared to have a perfectly drawed face in it and with some 3d pattern. It wasnt bobs face just a face created by the lights angle on the poster. Incredible.

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10. 55pm: between the vision on the poster and this seemed like a loong time, maybe an hour. We checked the clock and 6mins had passed at the most. We laughed at this for we all were lost in the time sense, even in the space sense. We were talking laughing and making I think a lot of noise; later I remembered Zius maman was there, and that we were in his house. We decided to forget the clocks and I put away my watch. Lots of thoughts about anything and everything, really fast thoughts but not concluding at any point.

11pm-11. 10pm: nice closed eyes visuals. Red-blue colourful lines waving, rolling travelling spinning on themselves. Very nice interesting to see but knew I coudnt stay just fixing them. Opened my eyes stared at things in the room until I saw a closet door. The rectangle patterns carved on the door started 'breathing', moving in and out like lungs would. I stared those lungs for some time maybe 5mins maybe more.

(time)pm: at this point we all looked mentally ill. We would get up walk in the room, talk with one another but not finishing any conversation or talking corehently, but in my head I was more clear than ever. We would be talking then in the middle of the talking stop suddenly and stare at something. I was losing it and so were all I think so we decided to go outside to change the setting and see if it would be different outside.

While outside we saw my friends mom arrive in her car from somwhere while we were looking at things everywhere. I needed to piss so went on the side of the house. While pissing I saw what I think the most misterious, beautiful nice 'drawings' I had ever seen on the sidewall of the next house: I saw faces again but more like indian faces, not in the sense the faces looked amerindian but the way of drawing, the art looked like those faces in aztecs/inca temples and more precisely like the faces in the Easter Island: long, big rectangle like noses big ears and looking down, giving them an impression of being higher, godlike. I was somewhat freaked out because they were moving, changing sizes and expressions on them. Then I realized they were formed out of the shadows of the trees in my friend backyard; the moonlight had give birth to them in the wall and the wind had give them life.

For the rest of the trip we walked on the streets, and where each one of us I think in our little worlds. I was amazed by the way I felt whole but empty at the same time, like with lots of things in my mind but at the same time nothing. I really cant explain this state of mind I was in but in anyway I really liked it. I knew I was on shrooms but at some points I forgot and was sure, though not scared, that I would be like this for a long time, forever maybe even if I coudnt explain normally what time was. Each on of us tried to talk to the other but coudnt really say what we wanted the way we wanted it. I would sometimes feel really deep and think about personal things but (and maybe too bad because it helps focus on personal matters)decided I wanted to be more amazed than reflective so I started thinking outwards, about the bizarre street, neighborhood, bizarre land I was in. While walking we smoked some joints we had rolled with great difficulty because I coudnt concentrate on something too long and didnt feel the need to. We finally got somewhere and each on of us decided to go home, I knew I was supposed to but didnt want to get home and crash, I wasnt tired or sleepy. Anyway it was cold outside and around 2am so I walked a little and got home.

Overall: it wasnt a scary experience at all, I felt deep and more aware of my surroundings but at the same time everything seemed different but worthy to watch. The final point of my trip was when looking at the moon, I felt what I just felt once in my life and because I have great difficulty understanding it and explaining it I can only make an example: imagine yourself looking at the very bright moon, at 2am in the morning, face upwards and hands in pockets. You are looking at the moon. Now imagine you are seeing this as it was a movie, so you see yourself in some place doing something at the same time that you know you are somewhere else. Now put away the television your are seeing the movie with: so your are seeing yourself LIVE watching the moon at the same time you are just elsewhere looking at yourself, but LIVE. Thats what I felt for some seconds, as if I was watching myself from another angle at the same time I was in that myself: I felt like as if I was at two different places at the same time and it freaked me out, amazed me, puzzled me and then I liked it.

DOSE: 3.5 g oral Mushrooms - P. cubensis (dried)

BODY WEIGHT: 135 lb

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HISTORY:The following report is a recollection of my fifth time experimenting with 'shrooms' (and the most mind-blowing experience might I add). I have never been big into drugs. I am particularly into psychedelics and expanding my mind, knowledge, wisdom, and experiences. That is my reasoning for experimenting with this fungus. I am the type of person who likes to try everything once, and do it wisely... but 'shrooms' have really made an impact on my outlook on life. I did research on anything and everything about P. cubensis mushrooms before trying it. I have always been very careful to make sure that I am comfortable and prepared for the experience. However, this one caught me by surprise. I had not planned on doing it until about one hour before I actually ate them.

SETTING:I am with three friends of mine (“J”, “Z”, and “M”, ”S” enters later)… none of whom I am close to. We are at my friend’s new house which is completely empty of furniture and people so we decided to trip there.

THE “TRIP”:We all ate them at the same time and consumed the same dosage (1/8 of an ounce). The taste is something I have never enjoyed. I was sitting on the floor and it hit me almost instantly… faster than it usually does. I felt drunk, swaying forward and backward, and began laughing along with J. He was moving all over the room and talking which I found a little strange. From my experience, I feel it is difficult to move because my whole body feels weak. I try to refrain from speaking because I know that I don’t make sense and feel stupid when I do. This may be my own paranoia, though. J was very entertaining to me for the rest of the night, and made me laugh a lot. My abs are still sore. Somehow, I felt comfortable tripping around these people so I talked a lot more. We plugged in a movie, made ourselves comfortable, and watched it until it really kicked in. Eventually we all got bored and the others decided to take a little journey through the backyard. I was getting numerous phone calls so I decided to stay inside. I was very surprised that I was able to hold a conversation with somebody sober. This is something I have not been able to do in my past shroom experiences.

Soon enough, they came back inside satisfied with their journey and we all had a few laughs. My vision was distorted, the most distorted it has been compared to all of my trips. There were colorful waves moving through the walls and pretty much everything I saw. The floor was moving in parallel layers, each layer moving differently. I was cold for the rest of the night and time moved very slowly. I had very poor depth perception, balance, and coordination. These things didn’t bother me too much though, because I spent the majority of the night sitting down. I had a period of about 5 minutes, which felt like 2 hours, where I was “realizing” and “analyzing” everything I was experiencing, as well as comparing them to my other trips. I felt disconnected from reality, lost in my own mind.

I finally snapped back into reality and I saw that J had found a garbage bag and thought it would be fun to get inside of it. With much struggle, he had managed to get lost inside it and couldn’t find his way out. I found this very amusing, as did the others. I found it very difficult to hold back laughter. I felt as if I was in some sort of circus or zoo with all of us running around laughing uncontrollably. All I can really remember thinking is how much fun I was having and repeating it over and over in my head. We all decided it would be fun to go for a ride in my car. None of us were willing to drive (fortunately), so we called up a sober friend. “S” agreed to drive us around because he needed some entertainment.

So “S” comes over and we take my car around town. I feel lost, disoriented, and confused whenever I actually have to do something. Any simple responsibilities we had for the rest of the night, such as going to the bathroom, walking, finding something, etc., became known to us as our “burdens”. We had several words and phrases throughout the night that only us four understood. I usually experience this sort of connection with others while I am tripping. I felt very connected to them in many ways, and still do because of the experience.

We decided we would just drive around and “behold” (another word we used) everything there was to see. I felt as if I was in a boat, a racecar, and a spaceship and different points during the night. It seemed as if the car was still, but everything around us was moving. The street was moving very fast, and in layers. The trees were overwhelming and were everywhere. They were growing and moving abnormally. I felt as if they were “beings” watching me and what I was doing. The phrase “they know” kept repeating over and over in my head. Everything seemed to “blossom”. The others in the car were talking but I didn’t pay attention or take the effort to try decipher what they were saying, because I knew it was pointless. I just wanted to get lost in my own thoughts. Everything around me was so overwhelming. I had the feeling that there was so much going on around me and I couldn’t

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absorb it all. Everything I would “behold” for the rest of the night seemed to simply just “make sense”. Everything made sense in a way I had never experienced before. I felt like everything in the world was it’s own puzzle piece and all of the little pieces came together and fit perfectly. Everything was everything. Nothing was nothing. Everything was the same.

The most disturbing “burden” I had throughout the night was seeing other people, especially people I didn’t know. We wanted to get away from everybody so we went to a place that fellow trippers in my area call “mushroom mountain”. It isn’t a mountain, but more of a big pile of dirt. It had rained earlier that day, so it was very muddy. We parked and all walked up the hill. My distorted depth perception and vision was really kicking in now that we were outside. We were walking together but it seemed like they were all very far from me. I began to feel like I was in a movie, a play, or a painting. I couldn’t decide which one it was most like, more like a blend of the three. It was dark outside and the sunset made an orange glow in the background. I could see “beings” which I made out to be J, Z, M, and S walking in a straight line across the hill to the right of me. They were moving very slowly with their heads down… at least that is what my mind perceived. I was very confused at this point because a second ago they were all right next to me. I felt like something was controlling them and for some reason we were all about to be in trouble. I do not know where this feeling came from. Then I “snapped out of it” and they were all “sucked” back to where I was. I had lost touch with reality again for a brief moment.

We continued walking and sat at the top of the hill silent for what seemed like hours. It never got boring. We all sat there and thought. I felt as if our thoughts were all in unison. I was thinking what they were thinking. I was feeling what they were feeling. Eventually we walked back to the car. We were all coming down from the trip on the ride back to Z’s house. The trip lasted for about 5 hours, which was one of the shortest trips I have had. It started, proceeded, and ended very gracefully. I was ready for it to be over and I had not experienced anything too overwhelming. This was a glowing experience.

I apologize for the lack of clear explanations of my trip, but this is beyond words. There are no words that will ever do justice to a mushroom experience, at least that is my opinion. No two trips I have had were ever the same, or even remotely similar. That is why they never get boring to me. I am always anxious to see what the next bag of fungus has in store for me. I don’t mean to put a drug up on a pedestal, but in my opinion it is one of the safer drugs to do. For now, I would have to say “shrooms” are my drug of choice.

Exp Year: 2006 ID: 55520Gender: Female

DOSE: repeated Various

BODY WEIGHT: 65 kg

I could not write this without providing a short history of my life since starting to use drugs and providing a little info about my personality. So, here we go...

I began smoking cannabis during my teens. I was in high school at the time and was soon in trouble. A favour provided to a classmate turned into a charge of drug dealing. I was given the option of attending a rehab or being reported to the police. I spent six weeks in an in house treatment centre where I was bombarded with totally ridiculous anti drug propaganda. There were one on one counsellor sessions, group sessions, occupational therapy etc etc. I was an ocassional dope smoker surrounded by heroin, cocaine and prescription drug users (the patients) and ex heroin, cocaine and prescription drug users (the therapists and doctors). Eventually I had enough of their bullshit and refused to acknowledge being an addict in group therapy (it was a NA style rehab). After leaving it took about 3 months before I smoked cannabis again. I met new friends through one of my fellow patients who remain some of my best friends to this day.

With these friends I attended my first music festival where I experienced my first fully psychedelic LSD trip. I had taken a very small piece of a paper before this, but this was the ONE. Uncontrollable laughter, joy, and then, later on I got lost in the crowds of people and joy turned to sudden, inexplicable fear. An undeniable facet of my personality - shyness - rose to the surface of the trip and

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burst the bubble. In my first trip I experienced the ups and downs of acid. I carried on a few months later.

Tripping became a regular occurence and, unfortunately, a nightmare. Every time I tripped I would experience the negative thoughts and feelings from my previous bad trips. Smoking cannabis would induce similar paranoia to my LSD trips and stopped being enjoyable in social settings. Set and setting were just not happening for me and I stopped regular trips. Around this time I discovered mushrooms and was delighted to find them like acid, but without the irrational fear acid created in me. Unfortunately this led to a fall as well.

On the occasion of my 19th birthday I ended up with a 6 gram bag of psylo's and no one to share them with as my friends had bought and ingested their own when I joined them. I decided to take the whole bag alone and see what would happen. This was far, far bigger than the ONE. This was the absolute. I was in a particularly beautiful setting in the South African countryside at another music festival. After half an hour I could not walk. I lay in our campsite and was overcome by the beauty of my friends sitting next to me, the yellow flowers in the fields surrounding us and the mountains surrounding the valley we were in. That was what I think Timothy Leary must have experienced when he ate his first dose of mushrooms in central America. It was religious. I felt spirits in the surrounding mountains observing me and I felt the unity, the oneness, the universe as a whole and I could not contain the tears that started streaming down my cheeks as a result of the joy I was feeling. I was in complete awe.

The following year I wanted to repeat the experience at the same festival. I went a bit nuts and overdid things. I ate, I think, somewhere between 10 and 15 grams of psylos over a few days. I did not experience a short 6 hour trip but rather an extended 3 week descent into madness which resulted in hospitilization and sedation. Three months of weekly therapy sessions, a couple of psychiatric evaluations and medication followed. My consulting psychiatrist informed me that there was a very real possibility that my experiences could have resulted in long term epilepsy or schizophrenia. My therapist urged me to cease all hallucinogenic use to prevent another descent into madness. I ignored those warnings and resumed smoking later on without the expected epileptic fits or schizophrenia.

The remaining years until now saw me introduced to ecstasy and electronic music forms, both of which I had abhorred before. These two things showed me the way to enjoy psychedelics again, safely, and without the fears I had known before. I stopped all drugs, except cannabis, in 2005. I still, however, become introverted when smoking cannabis. The magic of cannabis left me. Last year I reached a point where smoking cannabis was no longer fun. I would wake up in the mornings and feel uncomfortable until the first joint which would just leave me feeling normal. I passed a resolution to halt my cannabis use as well and see what would happen.

My emotional development from teenager to adult suffered as a result of hallucinogen use. I think that in the last few months I have been experiencing some thoughts and emotions lingering from my teenage years. I have been up and down. I have suffered two short bouts of very serious depression and self doubt. At least the negative feelings have been real, rather than drug induced. I wish that there had been someone or something to advise me not to leap too fully into the world of psychedelics at the age of 15. In fact, I wish I had waited until the age of 18 or 19 before commencing experimentation.

Since ceasing to smoke, my concentration skills are better, I learn new things faster, I am more productive during my spare time, less exhausted, and more optimistic. I have smoked on a couple of occasions recently though and the experiences were sacred again. I plan to limit smoking to once a week, maximum, in the future. For now, I am not smoking at all. I practiced kundalini yoga for a few months after my traumatic mushroom experiences and it really helped me regain some focus as well as getting some good exercise. I am not currently in any classes as I don't have time. I wish to join a tai chi class some time and then decide between yoga or tai chi

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

BODY WEIGHT: 83 kg

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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 2006Dose: 2 joints after the tea1 portion, about 30 grams for 3 people, where 1 person (L) had about 20%1 joint after the tripT: 18.36 hrs.

SituationWe 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 tripAt 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

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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 happenedAs 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

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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.

ConclusionThe 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.

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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)

DOSE: joints/cigs smoked Cannabis (plant material) 5 g oral Mushrooms (dried)

BODY WEIGHT: 13 kg

I was making my yearly visit to see my friend ‘A’ who lives in Denmark. Now I’ll give a brief outline of what the drug scene in Denmark is like. Little do people know but Copenhagen (capital of Denmark) is very similar to Amsterdam (Holland), in that draw (cannabis) and variety of other herbal drugs are legal (or at least not illegal as police do nothing for possession?). In fact there is a designated area where sale is permitted. In which stalls sell all kinds of draw and shrooms etc.

Anyway I caught a plane from London Heathrow (UK) at 6am so was up at 4.30am after sleeping about 2 hours, followed by an hour on the plane. We arrived at the Christies (the place where sale of herbal drugs is permitted) around 11.00am. I brought a cue (7grams) of REAL good white widow (skunk), and 5 grams of Hawaiian shrooms. Little did I know at the time how strong Hawaiian shrooms where!

We sat at a bench nearby and promptly smoked a few joints. Feeling very stoned, and further zonked from only 3 hours sleep combined with international travel, I stupidly gobbled my shrooms. 15 minutes or so later (might have been more I was stoned), I began to trip. It was sudden no warning, For a few seconds I was like ‘what is going on’ I forgot about the shrooms and thought it was the draw. Then I realised and said to A ‘Man I’m tripping bad’. Colours suddenly became much brighter and intense. My whole surroundings became so much more focused. It was a bright and sunny day so everything looked so beautiful. As I rocked back and fourth my vision rocked with me, and the colours blurred across my eyes. I was loving it, so involved I couldn’t even hear A when I wasn’t trying too. Luckily A had his girlfriend with him so they talked between themselves. Neither of them wanted to take their shrooms yet as they were saving them for later (something I wish I had done). Soon I was really breaking into mad hallucinations. A’s face whilst watching him talk to me (oblivious to what he was saying) suddenly became 2D and he lost colour on one side of his face (black and white), it was as if one eye is stuck in 1930’s TV and the other in 2050’s TV. But that ended as soon as I looked away. Starting to become a little worried I closed my eyes to try to calm down the trips, again inexperience let me down as I didn’t know once your tripping there’s no escape, closing your eyes only makes things double strength.

When my eyes where closed it felt as if I could still see through them. This of course was just the light of objects that appear for a few seconds once you close our eyes, like looking at the sun or a light then closing your eyes you can still see the light. However my brain wasn’t functioning properly and I forgot all this, instead I genuinely thought I could see through my lids. As the shapes faded, mad colours unseen to my eyes ever before this, flashed and twirled across the darkness of my closed

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lids. Suddenly I was in a cinema it was dark but the screen was on all the walls, HUGE screens. The cinema seats were red and I was the only one in the seats. It felt as if the seats were floating. I watched myself sitting in the seat looking at the screen unable to control THAT me, and yet was seeing what THAT me was seeing. The screens were playing a film reel stuck in a loop of about 3 slides. The film was a face laughing, the face was Dom Jolly (A British TV program called Trigger Happy TV, Dom Jolly is the lead star). I found this odd as though I did like trigger happy I wasn’t obsessed with it and the show had finished over a year ago and I hadn’t thought about it for ages. This illustrates how trips get right to the back of memory cells in the brain.

I opened my eyes again because closing them was freaking me out a bit (lightweight newcomer what can I say?). As I watched A and his girlfriend talking in Danish I became more and more paranoid. I kept saying‘Stop talking about me’ trying not to sound scary or rude, might have failed though I couldn’t really grasp what I was saying. A told me to stop being a ‘paranoid android’ and relax. I blinked and as I opened my lids from the blink I realised I had 888 across both eye balls. This was weird. I could see everything but 888 was across both eyes and I could not sake it off. Soon the 888 was changing colour and everything else was becoming either brighter or darker. Few seconds later my eyes began to slit along the horizontal and the lines began to move together blocking out everything. This shitted me up as I thought I was going blind, however the lines never joined and thinking back it was probably my lids slowly closing without me noticing?

Through I was feeling a bit paranoid and a bit scared I was also enjoying myself. However the 888 was still there no matter how hard I tried to lose it. Then I realised what it was. The floor by our feet was cobbled with diamond shaped stones. The stones where not in any 888 shape but the shrooms had fucked my vision and locked my eyes on certain stones fading the colour of only those stones. The shape made 888. As soon as I noticed this the 888 vanished and only came back when I deliberately looked at the right stones. Now out of the 888 I inspected the floor more closely. A very common trip for ‘Space Cadets’ is patterns. They are guaranteed to fuck you up, and this was no different. Looking at the stones my eyes followed them down in rows, but square rows, like I saw 4 stones on the left 4 on the right 4 above and 4 below. The 3 3 3 3, then 2 2 2 2, and finally, I focused on the centre singular stone. As I concentrated on it, it began to rise of the ground and turn on it axis. I noticed it was made up of loads of little cubes on each face. Suddenly the cubes began to split apart from the stone and glorious blinding blue light came from underneath.

Anyway as the cube completely and utterly overwhelmed me, some fucking drunken, tripping tramp stumbled over to our bench and mumbled to me for 5 crowns (slang for 5 Kroner Danish currency-about 40p). I thought he said 5 pounds (UK currency) and said ‘what 5 pounds’, he immediately broke into a laugh and put on a doggy posh English imitation accent, ‘Oh 5 pounds’ he said. He then sat himself down on our bench, noticed my bag of shrooms and went into some lengthy detailed absolute nonsense about selling shrooms mixed with acid for 500 Kroner a gram, and not knowing whether he liked Danish shrooms more than Swedish (he was Swedish). As he lapsed from English to Swedish whilst talking I lapsed in concentration more interested in his huge messy beard that was moving and looking like something was living init. I was also stunned at how bright ginger it was, it almost hurt to look at. Finally he finished talking, I gave him 5 Kroner and he wondered off. As he left I noticed his beard looked like it was on fire, it was SO bright.

Whether the tramp had anything to do with why my trip went bad from then on I don’t know, but he marked the beginning. I suddenly realised I needed a piss. I walked over to a gate nearby outside some deserted building, and took a wiz. Suddenly I became really paranoid, the fence which I thought was big and covered in ivy blocking passers by from seeing me, was in fact pretty small and had little ivy on, furthermore a window in the building next to me looked liked in might be in use. I just couldn’t tell. The last thing I wanted was some enraged Danish drug dealer running out of his house screaming at me in my state. So I quickly finished and wondered back to the table. I sat down, a few minutes later I felt as if I was gonna wet myself. I checked my groin area on my trousers no wet patch. I scolded myself, You just went for a piss you not gonna piss again thicko! I was sweating hard oblivious to how hot it was (It was clocking 90oF) at about 12.00pm I had had enough ‘Right lets go’ I remember saying. A didn’t understand why I wanted to go so suddenly. But after a little conversation, he realised the paranoid delusion I was slipping into and agreed we should go. Walking was hard at first. My legs felt wobbly probably because we were sitting down for so long. As we came out of the little cove we were sitting in shaded by the tree, I walked out into the bright open sunshine, and JESUS CHRIST it was light. SO FUCKING LIGHT. We went into the cannabis café nearby, because A’s girl needed a piss.

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Suddenly as we walked in everything changed. It was dark and almost ordinary again I hoped I was coming down because I was getting really paranoid. I felt like everyone was looking up at me like it was a cheap Western when a newboy walks into the saloon. Me and A sat down at a table and I tried to relax breathing deep and all that shit. I began to feel I needed a piss again and made a move for the bathroom, it gave me a reason to get away from the faces. I walked into the cubical, and suddenly felt really disorientated and claustrophobic. Was I in a toilet cubical or was this the whole toilet? It was a big cubical with a sink and mirror and bog so I wasn’t sure whether it was or wasn’t the only cubical. I looked in the mirror, a mixed reflection peered back, I was SO pale with a few bright red spots, I looked like a fucking clown, and my pupils had dilated so much I couldn’t see the coloured bits at all (Something I learnt from this is have a cap handy when your tripping in public). I tried to take a piss but nothing came out (understandably as I had only pissed about 5 minutes ago). I stumbled out into the café, and sat by A. My vision was blurred and shaking. I skinned a spliff and smoked it, I had a few tokes on A’s orders, he informed me everyone was looking at me and I had to chill. I screwed at him for doing that later because it tripled my paranoia to have a none tripper telling me I have reason to be paranoid. Finally A’s girl finished on the loo (woman and toilets?), and we left. I was relieved to have left that place. Now I could try and act normal again.

We went to the bus stop. I was exhausted from sweating, worrying and genuine tiredness. Typically the bus stop we were at had no bench, so instead I collapsed against a wall and tried to look normal. Again I could not escape the trips, closing my eyes made it worse so I kept them open and tried to focus on one thing across the road. But it was too much. The colours and people on the main streets was insane. Everything was running into each other, colours, buildings just moulding together. I felt like I was in a film this actually clamed me a bit because I kept telling myself your in a film it doesn’t matter what people think. Then the trips became so intense my head felt like it was pounding pulsing in time with the trips. I saw a line appear on the shops, and it was as if that line was a boundary, which if I passed I was fucked!!! Out for the count so to speak, until the shrooms completely wore of, but I was in the middle of city and needed to meet A’s mum later. However much I would to have loved to cross that line and just forget all the problems, I HAD to fight it. It was the biggest battle with a drug I’ve ever encountered. It was scary to think if I pass that line I will have NO control. Luckily the bus came and that broke the war, I had won. Any longer like that I would have been fucked.

Other than some severe day-shar-vo (sp?), major paranoia, and feeling that I was being encircled by people at the train station, and the constant feeling I was gonna piss myself, we made it back to his town just outside Copenhagen. IT WAS A LONG TRIP BACK!!!! However the shrooms where warring off and when we got the bus from his station to his road I was almost feeling normal again. But I looked like shit, and on entering his house (the first time since I had landed in Denmark that day) his mum was of course straight up to greet me. I made some bollocks up about feeling really tired and a bit ill and she THANK GOD suggested I have a nap. I slept in his brothers room who was away, But had to make light chat with his mum as she made up his bed. GOD that was difficult. Finally though she left and I was able to enjoy myself for the first time in hours. The shrooms began to kick back when I let them (control over them was pretty much mine now). I watched the silver scales of a fake fish on his wall glitter and sparkle so bright, and starred at a drawing of his brother on the wall and watched his glasses fade away and reappear. Still these were nothing compared with earlier and finally I fell asleep.

DOSE: T+ 0:00 3.5 g oral Mushrooms - P. cubensis (dried) T+ 1:20 0.5 tablets oral MDMA (pill / tablet) T+ 1:30 0.5 tablets oral MDMA (pill / tablet)

BODY WEIGHT: 59 kg

Background: I am a 23 year old American male currently living in overseas as a graduate student in a research science. I weigh 59kg and am mildly sensitive to most drugs. I consider myself to be a fairly level-headed and rational person and I am currently in average mental health. I am in good physical health, take daily vitamins, and spend ample time working out and being active. As of writing this, I am not taking any prescription medicines. I have been dealing with bouts of depression and anxiety over the past few months due to a difficult breakup seven months ago and a demanding academic workload, but things have been going slightly better over the past few weeks.

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My previous drug history includes alcohol, cannabis, crack/powder cocaine, psilocybin mushrooms, LSA, LSD, Salvia, MDMA, a host of mostly ineffective “legal highs” and a few popular pharmaceuticals, such as Adderall, Xanax, Vicadin, etc.

Preface: This report documents an experience that I had five days ago (11 October 2007), during which I combined 3.5g psilocybin mushrooms (P. Cubensis) and 1 pill of MDMA while attending a rave. Though no stranger to either of these substances, this was my first time trying them in combination. I write this in attempt to accurately and descriptively capture as many of my thoughts, emotions, and feelings from the night as I can. And as much of this night I spent with my mind on overdrive, naturally this essay will be somewhat lengthy. With that said, hopefully my quality can match my quantity and that I can effectively lead my readers through this very powerful experience without it becoming superfluous. At times, this report may deviate from a direct recap of my experience to include descriptions of personal issues with which am currently struggling. These deviations are relevant, though, as much of my thoughts comprising them are direct results of what I was thinking about during the experience, which was unquestionably effected by the psychoactives.

Being an avid trance enthusiast and opportunistic-raver, news that one of the world’s most famous DJs was coming to my city had me anticipating this night for over a month. It had been over a year since I had been to a proper rave, and almost as long since I did any type of potent psychedelic. So naturally I felt like a kid counting down the days until Christmas. Unfortunately, though, as I have only been living in my current city for a few months, I have not yet been able to line up a trustworthy MDMA source. Hence I was forced to resort to a backup plan, and so it happened to be psilocybin mushrooms. Not that it was a bad backup plan, though, as I have had several beautiful experiences with mushrooms. But still, this was a world-class rave and I was admittedly disappointed that MDMA was not on my plate. I assumed that there would be plenty of MDMA at the club, and though I was not sure at the time how I felt about combining it with mushrooms, I figured that I would play it by ear if presented with an opportunity to score.

Experience:*note: The following timestamps are approximations/best guesses.

T=0min: The walk to the venue was about twenty minutes, which gave me enough time to thoroughly chew up and swallow the 3.5 grams of P. Cubensis mushrooms (I actually am atypical in that I don‘t mind the taste of straight mushrooms at all. I rarely even need a drink to wash them down). This particular nightclub has a very strict dress (and image) code, and I knew plenty of people who had been previously rejected at the door for stupid, superficial reasons. So naturally I was a bit nervous about showing up alone, as I was not really in the mood for bouncers and their questions. But considering this was a huge event on this particular night and I already had purchased a ticket, I felt like I would not likely have any trouble. Still, though, I knew that I would be taking a risk, as in the case that I was rejected, not only would I not get to see the show, but the mushrooms would be about to kick in, and I wouldn’t be in a very good headspace.

T+20min: I am allowed into the venue without any pressure at all. Actually, this brought about a nice sigh-of-relief that put me in a good mindset in which to begin. I look around, seeing if anybody that I know has arrived yet, but that does not appear to be the case. So I decided to purchase a beer (I find that having one beer while coming up on mushrooms helps me battle the nervous energy and feelings of anxiety, which I don’t find to be very comfortable at all) and check out the supporting resident DJ. I must note that this particular club is world-class when it comes to sound and lighting, so it provides an absolutely phenomenal backdrop for a psychoactive experience.

T+40min: Finished the beer. Still nothing happening yet. I ran into someone who I knew from University. We speak for about five minutes before he has to go.

T+1h: I’m starting to get a bit worried, as I still don’t feel anything, and usually mushrooms hit me between 35 and 50 minutes. I walk to a bathroom in an area that I’ll call ‘Raver’s Corner,’ which contains a bunch of couches and lounge areas, and is frequented by those who are on drugs. I was thinking that some time away from the noise might help me better assess if I do actually have any alerts yet. And after washing my hands, I noticed that the water did have that crystal-clear feel and look to it, and I felt slightly like some energy was manifesting itself in my lower body. I returned to the main floor for a little bit longer, listening to the music as the body buzz kicked in slightly more.

T+1h15min: I return to Raver’s Corner and take a seat. In not too much time, a guy to my right introduces himself to me as S and we strike up a prototypical first conversation. In not too much

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time, we reach the topic of drugs and after he tells me that he’s taken 3 ecstasy pills already, I mention how I am disappointed that my mushrooms unfortunately are starting off rather weak. Shortly thereafter, S offers me a single MDMA pill for free. Because of my increasing jealously of the increasing number of people around me rolling off their faces, it took me all of two seconds to accept his offer.

T+1h20min: ½ of an ecstasy pill down the hatch. Continue talking with S and two others S knows.

T+1h30min: ½ of an ecstasy pill down the hatch. I usually take MDMA like this. No serious rhyme or reason for it, other than I’ve convinced myself that this way prolongs the initial euphoria of the early peak.

T+1h35min: Feeling very awake. Definitely an objective alert, much more than anything before. But from what? This is way too quick for MDMA to kick in, so either the pill was something else (which I highly doubt as S seemed trustworthy and I witnessed him take one) or the mushrooms were finally coming around. After a few more minutes of talking with S and his friends, I had myself convinced that these were effects of the psilocybin. I was developing a body buzz that definitely felt more “tingly” than “floaty” and I could feel my throat slightly tightening, which often happens to me with mushrooms. I tell S that I have to go. I thank him and force him to accept some money for his generosity. He genuinely seems to understand why, and I head off to the main area in attempt to speed up my effects. I was happy to know that after 90 minutes of essentially being baseline, my night was starting.

Now I have done mushrooms once before when surrounded by people rolling, and like that time, I found it very easy to join the collective consciousness of the ravers. It was almost as the setting was pushing the effects of the mushrooms to the euphoric/giggly/carefree edge of the mushroom spectrum, and as the body buzz isn’t a whole lot different, I was almost pretending that I was already rolling. And I figured that everyone around me assumed that I was rolling (after all, my pupils were huge and I was clutching my water). In any case, though the mushrooms had taken a solid 90 minutes to kick in, they were now beginning to show their force. I stayed on the main floor for another 15 minutes enjoying the body buzz of the mushrooms and feeling my thoughts begin to speed up.

T+2h15min: Even though I haven’t any overt indications to back me up, I feel like I just “know” that the MDMA is hitting me. Not just because the timeframe is right, but also because my euphoria seems more natural and less responsive. What I mean by this is that before I was feeling excited because I could feel myself getting physically higher, and in turn, that likely meant even better times ahead. But now, I had the prototypical dumb grin on my face, I felt inclined to match smiles with other people, and I was no longer consciously trying to push my happiness forward. It felt very good to be back in such a mindset.

As I continued to enjoy the rush of both drugs, I started thinking a lot about the life path that I am walking down right now. My university degrees are pointing me toward some white-collar job and its inevitable that many people will assume that there’s no much more to me than corporate greed and an elitist attitude. In the past, I’ve been teased (sometimes casually, sometimes with actual convictions behind it) about the academic/professional route that I’ve taken, and people don’t often believe my arguments that contrast their accusations. Truth be told, I actually do study what I do because I find it fascinating, not because it will make me money or make people ‘think I’m smart.’ And it really troubles me knowing that a lot of great people that I meet in life don’t believe that I can remain a good person at heart while heading down the corporate path. Now when I’m sober, I often worry about myself, as even though I have no desire for wealth or ego right now, I know that I am just a human being, and there’s always the suggestion that I could change over time. But while under the influence, I actually, for a brief moment, felt very sad about the retrospect/prospect of people misjudging me. The sadness did not last, though.

As I stood there in the center of the rave, I experienced a moment of clarity about myself. I knew that as long as I could remember how I was feeling at the moment, I would never let myself be corrupted. I’d listen to raver music on my headphones while at work. I’d wear my crazy jewelry hidden away under my formal attire. No matter where I ended up in the real world, I’d always have that constant rhythm-of-life mental backbone that I’ve had ever since I started opening my mind years ago. I knew that as long as I kept having experiences like this every now and then, I would remain a good person at heart and forever an exception to stereotypes. And even more, I stopped worrying about the people who might not believe me and started focusing on the subset of humanity that would. Looking

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at the people near me, exchanging prolonged glances with those in similar mental states as me, I knew that at least the people around me would understand perfectly how I felt. And at the moment, that made me even happier to be where I was. The “comfort blanket” of the people who phenomenally understood what it was like to rave was, well, comfortable.

I saw myself ten years down the road, still young and full of vitality, but more settled down in my life and my interests and passions more honed. I saw myself spending much of my paycheck on building my own private rave temple in my future basement. A spacious (and soundproof) room full of lights, speakers, monitors, and comfy couches. I saw people who I felt understood me smiling, dancing and bonding. I saw myself learning to spin records and holding eye contact with my friends as the music I played climaxed. In retrospect it’s a bit of a skewed image, but I saw myself not as a man throwing a party, but instead as a philanthropist in the truest form. I was helping people remain safe and mentally healthy, keeping them all away from the demons of the standardizations and routines of a professional world, and the personal and emotional sacrifices of the corporate workplace. Sure, in retrospect, this wasn’t different than the ‘if only everyone in the world rolled at the same time…’ fantasies, but it the moment, it’s hard not to find even those appealing.

T+2h30min: I returned to Raver’s Corner and took a seat. At this point, the venue was becoming very crowded and it was downright obvious that at least a third of the people there were on some form of drug. And it made me feel comfortable that the venue staff was turning the other way from massage circles, people playing with water, and even people who were obviously bugged out of their minds. I greeted the people around me, accepted a free bottle of water from a stranger, and laid back on the couch.

I realized how, despite all of the elaborate analysis that I do about how ecstasy effects my mental processes, ecstasy also is so physically amazing. How it makes everything just feel and appear so crystal clear, how a slight breeze can be translated into a wave of pleasure, how water going down my throat feels so good, etc. But with the mushrooms going on as well, the floaty and silkiness and of the ecstasy was coupled with the core buzzing of the mushrooms, resulting in quite pleasant a combination. And, also to my good fortune, the ecstasy was helping me stay loose, as I often get kind of physically tense and feel less adept with my limbs while on mushrooms.

But it’s not just the personal act of enjoying this high that makes the experience so euphoric, but also the collective consciousness plays a very strong role. As someone who has suffered a lot of anxiety in the past due to self-esteem issues and fears about other people’s thoughts and perceptions, I find raves to be the most pleasant setting I’ve ever experienced. The concept that everybody around me is also experiencing the positive feelings that I am and has so much instantaneous love for humanity means that these people are likely feeling nothing but positive emotions because of me. And it’s comforting to be able to let my guard down because of this and not be afraid to talk with new people.

Catching the reader up a bit on my recent personal history, I have also been battling some mental demons in recent months concerning past regrets and inerasable memories. About eight months ago, I went through a terrible breakup with a woman who I thought was the future love-of-my-life, and immediately thereafter fell into a very dark state-of-mind. During the following burdening months, I found myself drinking a lot, abusing Xanax, and going foolishly out of my way to get cocaine. And with irresponsible drug (ab)use came irresponsible choices, decisions and moral compromises. And even though I won’t expand on the ways that I let myself down, I will say that I have many regrets from the past year of my life, and I am tortured by the reality that these regrets will likely stay with me for years to come. Sure, a bad period of my life, but in my current attempt to better my self-image and come to believe that I really am a good person at heart, dealing with bad memories is a humungous hurdle.

One consequence of my regrets is the dilemma of keeping secrets verses revealing shameful things about myself to others. I often think about, for example, if I were to meet the perfect woman tomorrow, I would be met with the dilemma of having to either hide my shameful things from her or hope that she would still be interested in me after hearing everything. Sure, everybody goes through dilemmas like that, but I think I tend to overanalyze it. One of the bad things about being someone who has flirted with addictions is that it tends to make you very emotionally sensitive. Sure, emotional sensitivity can make the good times so much better (and I feel like my good times have been so much better once I started living more crazily), but there are negatives that have to be accepted as well. And the idea that this dilemma will be with me as long as I have a desire to date is petrifying - it really is. Even though I am convinced that I wouldn’t go back in time if given the opportunity, it’s tough trading away some of my innocence.

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And I sat there on that couch thinking about this, but for the first time in a positive light. I knew going into the night that sooner or later I was going to have to tackle this issue on my mushroom trip, but the MDMA really did come as a blessing. Needless to say, it had me convinced that it was not actually about regrets and personal images that I was worried, but instead just about honesty and openness. Now I emphasize that it’s not this simple in normal time as these thoughts were brought about the drugs, but I’ll share them anyway. I was convinced that if I met somebody new, even if I was 100% open and revealing about everything, if I could accurately convey to her the beauty that I had in my heart (not due to but definitely accentuated by the drugs), then I wouldn’t have reason to even worry.

I know that much of the mushroom and/or ecstasy experience is ineffable, but at the time I felt so confident about myself, as I knew that I was privy to that ineffability. Again, ecstasy just makes me so happy and confident, and with the openness and desire to connect with other humans on the deepest levels that I feel from mushrooms, together they had me feeling like I possessed volumes and volumes of unwritten knowledge about life and love. Knowledge that, no matter how hard on myself I was, I had to admit was potent, appealing, and something I had to offer that many others didn’t.

Looking around me, seeing mostly everybody in Raver’s Corner starring off into their own distances and remaining motionless, I could feel how everyone else’s minds were flying as fast as mine. The notion that others were feeling great about themselves too and were possibly helping sort their lives out made me quite elated for them. That we were a bunch of strangers, visibly from different countries, cultures, and social normatives, but all experiencing an important night of our lives was incredible. We all sit there thinking and taking things in, but occasionally break to share water or simply to smile at each other. It really seemed hedonistic, idealistic, and yet somehow also actually happening in reality. There we were, Raver’s Corner, a tiny little hub of humanity that was, in that very moment, as pure as life could get.

T+3h: And all along, one of the best DJs in the world is, for our convenience, just a few steps away. And even though the drug combination was downright intense, I had no trouble temporarily shutting my mind off for an occasional trip up for sensual overdrive. At this point, the famous DJ was in the middle of his set, and I went to watch for a good thirty minutes. And it was amazing, both due to what he actually was playing and also because of the great response he was getting.

T+3h30min: Still feeling as high as ever. I notice that if I drink a large amount of water at once (maybe a third of a liter) I get a rush of physical euphoria. I try not to do this too much, but it is an observation.

I return to my seat and start thinking about humanity again, and how my current positive mindset contrasts with positive mindsets of people not necessarily on drugs, but who get through their days better than I do. And I boiled it down to my understanding of the difference between ‘happiness’ and ‘euphoria’ (a theme I have thought about before, but never with this much attention).

Essentially, happiness is what makes us realize that we are human beings. Euphoria is what allows us to understand how we are unique as individuals. Okay, I’ll be more specific. Happiness is about what one might expect - riding horses on the beach, getting married, petting a puppy, hearing “I love you“, etc. Prototypical stuff that everyone is raised to like and want. Part of human nature and such. Euphoria, on the other hand, well euphoria is sexual climax, being humbled by a gorgeous view, using psychoactive substances, getting mentally stuck inside of the music that one hears, etc. Everyone pretty much reacts to the happiness stuff in similar ways - butterflies in the stomach, chills up and down the spine, etc. But it’s about how one react to the euphoric things that let one know who one really is, as I feel that this spectrum of euphoric reactions is far more expansive.

Ask me why I like any of the euphoric things I do, and I am going to talk your ear off forever (case in point, this report). But ask me why I like happiness, well, my answer will be pretty much “well, I mean, I’m human and we humans like that stuff.” A good amount of people, I believe, live lives in which they just want some illusion of “happiness,” not actively creating their own recipes for good feelings but instead trying to follow predetermined models for ‘a happy life’ and don’t ever bother to understand or develop their own personal relationship euphoria. And while those may be moderately happy people, well, they’re missing out. It’s my basic belief that pursuing euphoria AND having a solid philosophical or moral understanding as to why one is pursuing euphoria is a large goal for a small subset of people. And sure, maybe while I am not as ‘happy’ as those I pass on the street, I might have the better understanding of my emotions and what could cause them to be maximized.

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It doesn’t have to be about taking drugs, as drugs are simply just the easiest example to cite (and the one that I can personally relate to, as nothing else has been able to effect me nearly as strongly). I think that this is what people are getting at when they say that they’re attracted to people who have passion. And to those who have never done psychedelics, it’s hard to accept that passion, and especially attractive passion, can come from them. And that’s fine, but I’d still like to hope that at least some people can be open-minded enough to consider the possibility. I know that the thoughts and feelings that I was experiencing there in the middle of a few thousand ravers, and how much deeper it all was making me understand my view of humanity and human relations (and in a more positive light as well), were passionate, and I’d like to hope that such introspection and personal development has made me a better person.

The good feelings from MDMA or psilocybin (as opposed to good feelings from more socially acceptable practices) are like mountains to molehills. But then again MDMA or psilocybin can also make molehills appear as beautiful creations. I know that a lot of people are critical of drug use and furthermore are skeptical about their contributions to personal happiness. And though I am not going to forcefully try and separate people from their established beliefs, I do feel bad for all of the people who will grow old never knowing just how good the good times can get, how deep the deep thoughts can be, and why people like me will put these glowsticks around our necks, lollypops in our mouths, and then sit there absolutely motionless on a couch for an hour.

And maybe we only stress out about our own regrets, and the shameful moments from the past of those we care about, because we’re too caught up in a ‘happiness is the goal of life’ attitude. Hypothetically, I'm walking down the beach with that special someone, but it still bothers me that she’s got skeletons in the closet. I want to ‘take in the moment’ and be ‘lost‘, but it cannot happen. Despite the fact that we have a long conversation earlier about both of our closet skeletons, and she seemed totally accepting of any and all of my admittances, I still cannot help but think about those she mentioned. And I worry that she is secretly bothered by mine, but is essentially ‘sucking it up.’ I can't be completely accepting because stuff gets to me. I want the ‘live with no regrets’ approach to life, but even though she cannot ever erase those bad decisions from the past, and even though in the current day she wants to more than anything, well they still bother me. And now I turn on myself, getting sad by the fact that I cannot force myself to let it go. I am upset that I'm walking down the beach in such a ‘happy’ setting, but I am not feeling that happiness. Will I ever be able to let go of the past and feel it? Will it ever be like it is in the movies?

So I look at my past and sure, I regret things. But I need to stop getting caught up in them. I mean, I don't really, personally, phenomenally remember what it's like to feel 'in love' or what I felt during whatever long walks on the beach that I have taken. Ya, I can want to feel that stuff again and get upset that it's fading from my memory, but why? Even though it's been a long time now, I still remember every detail about the first time that I took a psychedelic or my first real rave. Sights, sounds, emotions, how I changed, etc. Put music on that I can connect, and it's all so easily accessible. Once I felt euphoria, I never forgot it. It never fades away. It's always in my back pocket. It doesn’t change or become more and more different in recollection over the years. It’s as crystal-clear as anything in my life. So whose to say that my regrets, which have nothing to do with the experience I’ve been describing, need to be things that my mind wants to try and remember perfectly? In truth, my mind likely exaggerates them and makes them worse over time. I attach labels and stereotypes to my actions and let society then scorn me for what I have done. But it doesn’t have to be that way, and the truth is that likely at those times, it was not as bad as I remember.

So that's really what I should be working on right now. Personally, trying to exactly draw up how I can reconstruct some classical things (love, family, human relations, etc.) with my ‘euphoria over happiness’ understanding of the world. I mean, raves and sunsets are amazing, but we're human beings and it is in our nature to find partners, reproduce, and connect with each other. And I feel like once I really figure out how to cover such 'human' things with my understanding of euphoria, then I finally will live a skeletons-in-the-closet free life, and it will be the most powerful thing that I will have ever felt when it happens.

Because that’s what true love should be - not psychological battles about who says “I love you” first, but instead about learning about the euphoric drives and passions of another human being. The latter will bring two people so much closer. And when one does one’s best to understand another’s quest for bigger and better rushes, one can also understand that inevitable hiccups that occur along the way. It’s actually good for people to make what we must perceive as mistakes, as we learn from

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them. It’s all part of the quest for a meaningful and life without restraint. And when one can separate the sin from the sinner, one can then understand that it’s instead just a person and an action.

T+4h-6h: I starting coming down during this period. Sure, it was kind of disappointing, but as others around me were also noticeably fatigued and crashing, I didn’t feel so bad. I chatted up with a few random people and watched a bit of the closing resident DJ’s set. Nothing much to report physically here other than that typical feeling of being noticeably fatigued, but your heart still pounding and your eyes still wide open.

T+6h: The rave ended. I left the club to discover that it was morning. The sun had already come up and morning traffic was moving by. So I started my walk home. It was kind of funny actually, as a couple hundred crashing ravers were mixing with the couple hundred early morning runners, bikers and commuters all over the city. Anyway, I began to experience horrible stomach cramps, which made the walk rather unpleasant. I did arrive home at around 6:00am and was asleep by 7:00am. And, in impressive fashion, I actually made it to my 12:00pm lecture.

Epilogue: Overall, I enjoyed the psilocybin-MDMA combination and would not hesitate to try it again, perhaps even at higher doses. Typically, when I take mushrooms, I go back and forth between positive and negative mind space. But the ecstasy definitely gave me a nice cushion against any mushroom negativity. So while I didn’t get to experience unadulterated MDMA euphoria per se, I got taken for a pleasant ride by the positive side of the mushrooms and was chauffeured by the empathetic and physically-blissful elements of the ecstasy.

Looking back, simply based on how much I thought about and how much I was able to write in the follow-up is indicative of the combination being effective, even if the mushroom trip was more implicit. Sure, ecstasy makes me ecstatic, and the whole water-playing, massaging and bonding is fun. It feels great physically, it feels great mentally, and it feels almost better knowing that others are feeling it too. But it’s ultimately more of a fun drug and social lubricant for me instead of something that really penetrates deep into my mind. The mushroom combination made my mind understand the MDMA experience through much more analytic means. And this allowed me to not only enjoy the ecstasy in the moment, but to really think how I could capture and hold onto the ecstasy experience and keep it closer to me for a longer time.

Even though I felt like I understood a lot about rave mentality before this night, I know that I learned even more. This was the first time that I went to a rave where the focus I felt was not on the music and the lights, but instead on the collective consciousness. And it’s kind of silly actually, as it was such a famous DJ. But still, like many others I met/witnessed, I spent a predominant amount of my time away from the main floor and huddled in the corner with others also off of their faces. And to me, it was instead as if the music was a complex recording device meant to amplify the retention of what was experienced in the Corner. Before, it was as if I went to be blown away by the sensual overload, and the collective consciousness helped intensify that. And sure, that’s true if it’s what you come for. But, and I think as directly attributable to the psilocybin, the idea of a rave being a mental overload about preserving good qualities of humanity is comparatively powerful.

DOSE: oral Mushrooms (dried)

BODY WEIGHT: 155 lb

This experience was a long time ago, but I think it's still worth recording, as it's apparently an unusual one and I still don't really understand what happened.

My first experience with psychedelics was when I shared a low dose of psilocybin mushrooms with my wife and two friends in 1989, as we sat together in a forest glade. The effect was pleasant but subtle - I remember seeing mild hallucinations with my eyes closed, like more intense versions of the patterns I normally see when I squeeze my eyes shut. The main effect, though, was a relaxed feeling of childish playfulness - very enjoyable.

After that I was interested in repeating the experience, and a year later obtained a larger dose of psylocybin which my wife and I planned to share on our anniversary. Unlike me she had tried all manner of drugs in her mis-spent youth, and was experienced with psilocybin. We took half the

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mushrooms in the early afternoon in a seaside hotel room, and sat on the balcony waiting for the effects, which when they came were much stronger than the previous time. For a while the effects were mostly visual, and my mind was clear and I could observe them with great interest and enjoyment. The clouds took on repeating fractal shapes, and I was fascinated that my brain would interpret the usual visual stimuli in this strangely distorted way.

At some point we ate the rest of the mushrooms, and the effects became stronger still - I remember going inside to lie on the bed, surrounded by swirling patterns and a wonderful feeling of euphoria - I think I said something like 'why would anyone not want to do this?'. Then I pleasantly lost awareness of my surroundings, feeling like I'd dissolved into myself. This was maybe an hour after taking the first dose.

Next thing I knew my wife was looking at me with a panicked expression, asking if I knew who and where I was. I had been hugging her on the bed and she'd felt me suddenly go rigid, and then I'd had a full-blow epileptic seizure. She'd been in the middle of phoning for help, but when I regained conciousness she didn't complete the call. She told me about the seizure, but I was now fairly befuddled and couldn't take in the information - I couldn't understand why she was so upset.

For the next several hours I continued in this confused state - if I concentrated hard I could bring myself back to reality and talk to my wife, who was still pretty freaked out, but mostly I was off in some other place. I remember smiling at her for minutes at a time while she tried to talk to me - I felt that smiling was all the communication that was necessary. I was still having hallucinations but was getting bored with them, and eventually I just waited for the drug effects to go away, which they did after the usual six hours or so.

My wife had felt only mild effects from the mushrooms, and these had evaporated with the shock of my seizure, though she had taken a dose similar to mine.

I felt groggy the next day, and didn't feel right for several days after that, and I continued to have vague feelings of being unwell for a long time afterwards. I was really afraid that I'd damaged my brain, and this feeling persisted despite subsequent reassurances from doctors who couldn't find anything wrong. It was several *years* before I convinced myself that my only problem was hypochondria triggered by the shock of the experience, and I was finally able to put my fears behind me. So while I don't think I suffered any lasting physical damage from the seizure, the damage to my mental equilibrium was considerable.

There was an interesting postscript six years later, when I ate some wild puffball mushrooms (with gastronomic, not psychedelic, intent) and briefly blacked out, twice, about an hour later. I don't know if I had a seizure as no-one else was in the room at the time, but there were no lasting after-effects. That experience suggested to me that I have a general allergy to some kinds of mushrooms, rather than a problem with psychedelics per se. But I'm playing safe and haven't taken any psychedelics since that day in 1991. Too bad - but for the minor detail of the seizure, it would have been a great experience

DOSE: 15 g oral Mushrooms - P. cubensis (fresh) 1 cig. smoked Cannabis (plant material)

BODY WEIGHT: 65 kg

It’s difficult to resemble, with words, the holly teachings of these unique dwellers of earth, so close to it, that should not amaze us how much or why they know. They have their own Kingdom and are guardians of the entrance to insanity and maybe horror, yet, to wisdom and ultimate beauty. These, my friends, are keys to hidden locks in the vast of our neuronal maze. These are sacred tools.

Why to do soMind is a marvelous thing. It encloses our share of the collective unconsciousness. It is volatile. It is infinite. It is the will of the brain to study itself. It is a cycle. It gets to the same point and unfolds in what we call dimensions, but in none which we can understand. Why not to buy the entrance to a better understanding? The information is there. The fact that we make our mental masturbation of seeing all this (I mean, psichodelic tools) as taboo or as obscure magic and untouchable ritual is mere ignorance. If one encounters this information and feels the need to reach another non-

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achievable-with-usual-disciplines mind state, for the sake of your peace of being, the attempt to an answer is at one’s fingertips.

A lot has been saidThis is my chance. I have a life, a girlfriend, luck and had recently recovered my self- confidence after being kind of depressed for about a year. Life is running smoothly for me, to the point of forgetting the possibility of a bad trip, though I’ve had a lot since I’m a moderately anxious person. I’ve rolled on both sides of the coin, and know how hard my mind can beat me, as well as how memorable it can be, speaking about life teachings.

My fate positions my being in distant latitudes, where the government ironically declares no prohibition. Questions arise: we have the restraint of law attached to our ankles, and then, why does this legal oasis exists? The leaders of this planet came to the conclusion of banning powerful insight resources, they don’t want us to be thinking too much about ourselves, it’s dangerous, people with ideas should be wiped out. This has been and still stands since ancient times. It is so absurd, why here and not anywhere else? The cultural shock is amazing: we have 7-11’s, as they have chills n’ thrills, whatever. A lot has been said and researched. Set and setting: check. With proper knowledge about the world I’m daring to visit, and without the 'security hazards' my native country imposes, I was now seeing myself buying my ticket to ride. That I thought.

Journey beginsBeautiful day, peaceful. The evening light glowing pastel yellows through the window of our very small, but comfortable and habitable, hotel room (very hard to get one, as a matter of fact, so we were grateful for ending up inside this modest and cozy hideout). It was a bit rainy the day before, but it seemed like someone knew we needed good weather and a nice lightmood for the trip. Maria and I have been together for a while; she’s so wise and easy-going. She’s a perfect partner. We were staring at the plastic package. Inside: the Stropharia cubensis (they sold them as Thai).

I would be lying if I say I wasn’t afraid. New situations are stressful by nature, specially ones that include the possibility of suffering or being freaked out by our own thoughts. The benefit exceeds the risk, I kept on reassuring myself. And with a rush of adrenaline flowing through our bodies, we both said: let’s do it. Both of us are doctors and know how these things are supposed to work. So, there they were, so indescribably them. Three of them. We split the dose and Maria took the first bite. She said they weren’t as bad as everyone said, maybe because these were so fresh. I took my bite to assess what she was saying. They’re OK. They tasted like plants. Really lite, as if you were eating a mouthful of air. We washed them down with zips of orange juice until food was gone.

Thoughts of uncertainty arrived, as well as excitement. We began talking about what was the best way to roll a joint, since none of us knew how to tailor a nearly smokable spliff. Maria designed a new method, she rolled the paper around a straw and started to introduce the material through it; she succeed and made two or three. I was beginning to feel funny, lightheaded but not sick, which I was thankful for; later, the bathroom door knob began to wiggle and became fuzzier, then it started to lengthen and stretch, very noticeable. Soon the whole door started to come at me.

I said: the door is... coming??!!! The door is coming!!! I was happy, it is real!!! I tossed myself to the bed staring at the white ceiling and walls which morphed then into a vision of antique bicycles, people with huge hats working on wheat fields; I saw the alphabet letter by letter passing me by, everything over a chess deck background, as if I was in a reckon flight of the mushroom landscape, all in subtle reds and pinks. Indoors were mind-blowing, unimaginably crazy and seriously meaningless. We needed to explore the new world that was waiting for us outside.

To the MuseumSo, out we went, in a foreign country, with the expectable disorientation and feeling of being in wonderland. The light was awesome; I wish I had a picture of what my eyes were witnessing. Life was made of images. But not everything was so obvious. You had to pay attention concentrate a bit, and the most important of all, let go. Following these steps, suddenly all that which we were surrounded of, started to change; at first, almost unperceivable, next, surfaces were outlined, like with a felt pen, and then with no advise, everything became a cartoon, every scene of the activity of this city seemed hilarious and lacking of sense: where was everybody going, they seemed to be in a hurry, but, why? They just had to stop and see the intensity of what existence represents: everything in its right place.

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We walked, amazed and realizing how blind we had been. All is all. The sense of wholeness exploded from my center, from my heart, I wanted to embrace everything as my arms expanded wide opened through every new dimension I was experiencing. Maria took off, she let go and flew way more than me, but in control. She is so unbeatable, and secure, she is the goodness. She has no envy, and all this spiritual well-being launched her into a track of absolute understanding. I was taking a walk in the clouds, with an angel. She said she was OK, but very, very overwhelmed of what was being revealed to her.

We entered the museum. They warned us about the soon closing time, but we didn’t care. And, my friends, there I knew and saw what I think the word art in its whole length stands for. Maria was my guide there; she showed me the way as she was more aware of the happenings. At first, we entered a room with paintings, but for us, they were windows, portals to Van Gogh’s mind. Different paintings called us and we stared at them in separate geographical places, but fusing our feelings, what she felt, I felt. We didn’t even care to look at the silly little card at the side of these windows. We didn’t have time, and yet, it was not important in any way to look at them.

People were staring at us as if we were the painting itself, they didn’t understand what we were looking at with such childish attention and why we were smiling from ear to ear since we were in a museum, such behavior was not museum-behavior indeed. Giggles escaped from our desperately eager-to-laugh-our-ass-off mouths as we teleported to those places, Arles, Van Gogh’s room, and we knew exactly what he meant to communicate. All the moods, all the thoughts, all his fears and joys were crashing like raindrops in the windshield of our understanding, all at a time.

We contemplated some entities which we call violets, bubbling and singing with their river flowing movement and distorting into crystal-clear ideas, they told us their names and age, and how they accepted the sacrifice of being cut to have the privilege of immortality, entering and living in peoples’ minds for a while and all just because they had been put in a canvas by one of those who has the power to narrate with colors the most unusual and difficult concepts of philosophy, the sense of beauty in ugliness, and back again to purple tones.

Maria taught me that the face in the self-portraits was a decoy. An artist knows well how to draw a face, but the real thing is in the background. I acknowledged this comments as I gazed into the brown and discolored surroundings of this face, and got it. All his feelings were captured in the back of the painting, not in his unexpressive face. He felt unlucky and just spoke his thoughts through his paint-brush, no forms, just colors. Again, she’s wise. Van Gogh, …me. Me, Van Gogh. I soon re-realized you don’t have to be alive to get people to know you, and that this is a powerful potential of our everyday work. In that moment, I was really feeling his presence. Every picture, every window was alive in ourselves, we gave them personality, and they just existed and were waiting for us to be sucked by them into their animation. Things have soul. We choose to give or not to give them life. Now I have this eye.

Closing timeThe announcement of the museum doors closing in 15 minutes brought us back to usual reality. We got off the ride for a while, and it had been like 3 hours since psychedelic lunch. Every place was a planet inside our Earth. My amazement didn’t want to get tired. I had these new eyes, the eyes of the boy I used to be. I was feeling like a newborn. Again we walked with our bodies, this unbelievable machine, the house of our mind and soul. I was walking, but with my “I” unified with which composes my physical symphony.

Maria was teaching me endlessly, talking every thought that aroused her comprehension. She guided me again to seeing not just paintings, but everything as a gate to a parallel existence. She said, “look closer, look behind what your eyes see”, and what she was trying to tell me, appeared easily. Trees, grass, concrete, faces, sky and clouds. Every little piece of matter hides a story. Individuality merging in wholeness. I was so grateful for being there and then. And with her. This new understanding of existence is one of the principles I follow in my living, after the experience. As things lurk with life, because they are part of our creation, our own lives, our soul experiencing physical consciousness through the miracle of the mind must be worshiped and elevated to the maximum reachable.

The landingBack in the hotel, I felt renewed, different, and tired. She was still tripping, and I felt a little jealous about that issue. But the mushrooms wanted this for me, I thought, they are wise and treat you according to what you are into, in that particular moment. Maybe I was not as prepared as Maria for

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enlightment (if there are any doubts, yes, she was enlightened). I decided to get this envy out of me, it´s worth nothing. And there it went.

She was saying I was a gnome, as I was standing in front of her, looking through the window. Then she said I looked like a demon (she perceived I was jealous) and wanted to look inside of me. So I laid beside her, on the bed, and she looked very close through my eye. She saw a demon, an ugly one, but she wasn’t scared. She said everyone has one of those inside, and as I stood up and again went to look through the window, she said “You see, now you are an angel, you have the light of the angels”. Then I lit one of the recently manufactured joints and buzzed our way down to cotidianity.

Last noteThis was my first time with mushrooms. It is my very personal experience. Draw your own conclusions.

DOSE: T+ 0:00 15 g oral Mushrooms (plant material) T+ 7:00 3 hits smoked Cannabis (plant material)

I havn't done many drugs, apart from pot,and I'd done mushrooms quite a few times, but not for a while as the last time I'd done tham I really sketched out.

It was a saturday morning and me and my friend rex, who I normally 'shroomed with, decided to get a bag of mexican mushrooms (30g pack) and take half each. I was quite nervous about taking them but I missed the intense euphoria of the shrooms as I don't take any other hard drugs, and wanted to get back into them.

I was assured by friends that I would be fine as long as I took them in a safe, calm environment, and I was prepared and was in the right state of mind to do them. So my friend went to the shop to but them and reterned quickly with a very unattractive bag of wet mushrooms. It took me quite a while to get round to take them as I made sure I wasn't going to regret it or be anxious before taking them, as I knew it put me on a bad trip.

About half an hour to an hour later I began to munch them with crisps as they really horrible by themselves, and waited to feel the effects. As we were sat in a friends flat I wanted to get out to where I usually hang out, in quite a pretty little park. So we left and me and rex sat on a bemch in silence just as the shrooms were taking effect. Rex came up alot quicker than me as he ate all off his mushroos at once, and I'd eaten only one or two so if I was to sketch out, it would'nt be that intense.

After an hour or so I started to go quiet and notice things alot more clearly. The grass, the trees, but very much the clouds. Its better on a semi cloudy day, as the clouds make shapes, but just generally the sky is quite magical to look at when on mushrooms.

So me and rex left the bench and went down to join our friends at the bottom end of the park, who found it quite ammusing as we were really triping and being really weird so they just sat and watched us while smoking a few joints. I refused to smoke any pot while on shrooms as I think it was pot that sketched me out the last time I did them. So we sat there and enjoyed the nice weather and company of our friends as our trip started to peak.

We walked around town for while and looked in joke shops, flower shops, as they were all brightly coloured and really exciting to be in. I went to my workplace to see my friends, who instantly knew I was tripping and had a good giggle.

I'd nearly compleetly forgot about my last bad trip and was enjoying this one so much I couldn't wait to do mushrooms frequently. After about 4 or 5 hours of tripping I felt as if I was coming down and wanted to eat the rest of my shrooms so we went back to my friends flat. I never got round to eating them becoz I got so induldged in computer games and intense conversations. A few more hours past, and I thought I was completely down. As there was a bud spliff being passed round I thought 'Why not' I'm not feeling anything anymore so I'll have a few tokes.

Almost as soon as I took my first toke back, I felt myself come right back up-it was quite strong weed so I quickly had a couple more tokes and passed it on and tryed to enjoy the end of my trip.

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I started to stare at the tv and could quite focus propely as I felt I was sinking back into the wall. I instantly thought you should NOT have smoked, and prepared myself for a bad trip. I had my friends big furry coat on and I felt quite suffocated by it so I quickley removed it and tryed to calm down. My friend noticed my jerky movements in trying to remove the coat and asked me if I was ok. I turned to her with a reassuring 'Yeah I'm fine', and she blurted out 'Your pupils are HUGE!'. Everyone in the room turned around and looked at me and I found myself feeling very paranoid and had to leave.

I went to lie on the sofa, to try and calm down but couldn't get comfortable and felt really anxious and uneasy. Rex came in to see if I was ok, but becoz of his trippy state, his dreary words just agrivated me and I snappped and told him to go away. He returned shortly afterwards and said he was quite concerened and wanted to speak to me. Holding conversation was so hard as I was momentarly blacking out, forgetting what I'd said where I was and didn't want to tell rex as I knew he'd panic too. I asked my other friends if we could leave and prepared myself to ring my mum to come and pick me up. I managed to have a brief converstaion about where I was and where I wanted to be picked up, but that was all.

As I dialled the number I noticed how sweaty my hands were and just how fast my heart was racing. Time was going so slowly and I was dying to get home feeling exactly the same as last time. I felt everything would be ok as soon as I got home.

My friends flat is half way up a street and I was getting picked up from the bottom. At the very most it would take about 2 minutes to walk down, but it seemed-with no exageration- about half an hour to reach the end. I started to run as I hoped it would get me there quicker. That made my friends aware that something was wrong. I shrugged off their concerns and told them I'd see them tommorow and got in my mums car. I tried to act as sober and normal as possible actually making conversation so I'd seem ok.

As soon as I got in the house I went upstairs and got into bed. My heart was still racing so fast so I put the telly on and watched a bit of Friends. Because I'd seen the episode a number of times before, it seemed to go on for ages as I could predict all of the oncoming lines, and knew everything that was going to happen. So I turned over in bed and tried to calm down and tell myself that it was only because of mushrooms that I was feeling like this and assured myself that I wasn't going to die.

I had a full length mirror at the end of my bed and I sat up -and was shocked to see myself. My face was very red and my pupils like saucers. I'd remebered that when my friend had a bad trip on mushrooms she put her head in a sink full of water and that woke her up quite a bit. Being quite a spirtual person I quickly linked that both of us were water starsigns and that maybe water would make me feel better too. So I got my towel and went for a shower. When I saw myself again in the mirror, I stood and stared for ages as I tried to work out-and for some reason picture what was going on in my head that was making me feel like this. I imagined a big pink sqidgy brain fuzzing with information in overdrive with all of my thoughts. It made me feel quite uneasy so I proceeded in getting in the shower. And it was the strangest feeling in the world.

Water was rushing over my body-but I'd forgotten what water was like and couldn't recognise the feeling of being wet. It just felt so unfamilinar, and unrefreshing. So I turned the shower down to the coldest setting really quickley-hoping that it wake me up a little, and it did for about 30 seconds. I can't make any kind of realistic estimate about how long I was doing anything for. In the shower, looking in the mirror, because time was so messed up.

I don't remeber getting out of the shower but I remeber lying in bed trying to work out why my hair was so wet, and got really scared because I thought it was how much I'd been sweating and was thrown into absolute panic and back into the reaccuring thoughts of 'I'm going to die'.

I continued to toss and turn in bed and felt so strange. I wasnt hot or cold I was dying to feel and intense feeling. I thought my foot was itchy so I scratched it for ages. I did this for so long because I was nearly entirely numb. In fact until it bled. At that point I got up put some clothes on and seriously considered going down and teling my mum that I was on drugs. But I bathed my foot in the sink and went and got the fone. I dont remeber the fone call or how I even remembered the number but my friend told me a few things to calm me down. It's like when you smoke to much weed and mong out. You should drink juice and it brings your sugar levels back up. So I quickly cut up 3 oranges and squezed them into a glass. There was about 10-15 pips in the glass but I was so

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desperate to feel ok that a drank it quickly and managed to spit them out without wasting a drop of the juice.

Being reassured by a friend and after alot of oranges and paceing around my front room I felt ok. After the second time of sketching out on mushrooms I don't feel any want or curiosity to do them again. My best friend at the time said something that I only understood after sketching out for the second time. 'You shouldnt do drugs until you have a washing machine and a car'. Which basically meant untill you are old enough to own a car and washing machine-basically an adult - because at the age of 14 and 15 its too scary and I didn't have enough experience or understanding to handle them. This obviously doesn't apply to everyone but it really made me see why drugs are illegal. Beacuse if there was a certain guarantee that you'd have a brilliant trip everytime and there was no health risks-they obviously would be. But because of the risk of having hours of shear terror like I did, it just can't be available to the entire public. Drugs have given me times of histerical laughter and some of the best memories of my life. But I learned to be careful and be aware and prepared for when they don't.

DOSE: 2 g oral Mushrooms - P. cubensis smoked Cannabis 6.7 g Mushrooms - P. cubensis

BODY WEIGHT: 177 lb

This was my first experience with psilocybin.

After obtaining 10.5 grams (one quarter plus one eighth of an ounce) of cubensis from an aquaintance of ours, my friend T and I went to our usual hangout bar to wait for our friend G to join us. After an hour of waiting, I couldn't take the suspense and decided to down about 5 stems with caps. It was about 8pm and my last meal had been about seven hours earlier. The taste wasn't as bad as I had been led to believe. It was a bit like chewing on paper.

By the time G showed up, about another hour later, everybody's face looked abnormally pink and I was giggling like a girl uncontrollably. Despite this, I was convinced that the shrooms were having no effect, although it was obvious to T and G that I was tripping. We stayed at the bar until 10pm, amused by my intermittent giggling fits that came out of nowhere, and then decided to go to G's house so we could all trip together. G hadn't touched the shrooms yet and T had taken only two or three and was showing no signs of tripping.

Once at the house, G tried to 'catch up' with me by downing as many shrooms as I had. I also took more. Days later, I weighed out on a laboratory scale as many dried mushrooms as I thought I'd consumed that night, and concluded that my total dose must have been about 2 grams. I don't know how much T took, but his trip would be miserable, while mine would be glorious. We also smoked some weed.

We drank some more at G's place and talked until G started to feel his shrooms kick in, and then G suggested we go for a walk in the woods. T was almost passed out on the sofa and didn't wish to join us. The neighborhood around G's house was quiet as we walked past the houses on our way to the woods, a few blocks uphill. Before we entered the forest, G asked me what time it was. I looked at my watch and it said 2am. It only occurs to me now that four hours couldn't possibly have passed since we left the bar. At the time, both G and I accepted that it was 2am.

We walked around in the woods for perhaps half an hour, enjoying the strange, distorted sights. Trees seemed enormous and loomed ominously over us, extending their branches as if reaching out to grab us. Shadows seemed longer and moved strangely. As we were walking out of the woods, G asked me again what time it was. I looked at my watch and stopped dead in my tracks. It was 1:30am - half an hour earlier than when we'd entered the forest. I asked G to look at my watch and he agreed with the time. We joked about time going backwards and said that in a few more hours we'd be back at the bar again.

On the way back to G's house, we walked around the neighborhood through some of the back streets. Nothing looked real. Everything looked perfect. Everything was beautiful. All the grass was a uniform green, and every blade was cut to the same height and there wasn't a single weed in

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anyone's lawn. None of the paint on any of the houses was peeling. We both stopped and stared at one house in particular. G said that it looked like a prop on a movie set. If we walked up to it and kicked it, G said, it would fall over. I thought it looked like something out of an idealized 1950's family TV show, and kept staring at the front door waiting for Beaver Cleaver's mom to open it and wave to us. Oddly enough, I still wasn't convinced the shrooms were having an effect. It all seemed so subtle and gentle on the brain.

When we got back to G's house, we woke up T, who was still on the sofa. He told us he had relived every negative experience of his life (not sure whether he was asleep or awake for this) and that he'd had a nightmare of a fat Polynesian woman sitting on his face. G decided to make pasta. As he boiled the water, I looked at my watch and compared it to the kitchen clock. It was 2am (again). Actually, it was exactly 1:52. I asked G to confirm this, which he did. We cooked the ravioli for about 20 minutes, then took our plates onto the front porch to eat and listen to music on a portable radio. We took our time eating and listened to several songs.

After eating, we washed the dishes, then moved to the back yard, where we sat on chairs in the grass. At least an hour seemed to go by since I last looked at my watch. I now looked at it, and it was 1:45 !!! The shock must have shown on my face, because my friends asked me what was wrong. When I told them, T confirmed that it was 1:45 on his cell phone clock. I began to freak, but in a delighted way. I began to wonder if the perception of time and time itself are the same thing, and if altering brain chemistry could actually change the time. I got nothing but weird looks from my buddies. Okay, so maybe I couldn't tell what time it was, but then neither could they. For several hours, the time seemed to bounce back and forth between one and two o' clock.

As we sat there in the yard, I gazed out across the neighbor's back yards. The space seemed immense, as if I could see half a mile across other people's yards. Off in the distance, to my left, I saw an enormous, beautiful mansion. Towering over everything, to my right, was an enormous oak tree that seemed the size of a redwood to me in my beshroomed state. I was in awe of the whole scene. It was SO beautiful! I told myself that I loved the earth and that I loved living here, and had to be careful not to show my buddies how choked-up and teary-eyed I was getting.

Then my watch finally made it past two o' clock and I started coming back to normalcy. By three I was back in reality again. Days later, I went back to G's back yard and looked again in that direction. It was not possible to see very far across the other yards. There was no mansion off to the left, only a garage. There was no towering tree. There was no beautiful scene. Only then did I realize just how profoundly the shrooms had affected me.

This was my second experience with psilocybin.

After my first exposure to shrooms, my friend T decided to give me all of his leftovers from that night. I weighed it on a lab scale and it was 6.7 grams in total. I had read that to get the maximum effect out of psilocybin, you need to go over 5 grams, so I decided to do everything I had in one shot. Around 7pm I walked into the bar where my buddies hang out. I had just swallowed the shrooms and had a grin on my face. When my friend G found out what I had done, he demanded that I give him my car keys, which I did. He was much more experienced with mushrooms and had never done as much as I just did.

About twenty minutes later, everything became UNBELIEVABLY colorful! Objects had a weird prism effect around their edges and people's faces were orange. Nothing looked real. Everything took on an almost cartoon-like quality. I was expecting to level-out, but instead I just kept going deeper and deeper.

After about half an hour, I went downstairs to the bathroom because I felt the urge to purge. I stood there, swaying back and forth, staring at the floor. Then I saw thousands of little white dots that began swirling. The whole floor started squirming as if covered in maggots. Then I exploded into the toilet in a spray of vomit. After that, my friends suggested I go for a walk. They didn't realize just how bad I was doing or they would have come with me. I wandered out of the bar, disoriented . A feeling of panic began to come over me, yet there was nothing really wrong with me. I just had the unexplainable feeling that I had just made the biggest mistake of my life, and this was only the beginning.

I wandered around the neighborhood and got hopelessly lost, even though I've lived here my whole life. The visual part of my trip was over. As I walked, the psilocybin began to squeeze my emotions

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out of me like water out of a sponge. My thoughts fixated on my father, and how my relationship with him had ended for the second time after a failed attempt at reconciliation. The pain I felt was like every painful experience in my life had just happened a minute ago. Love, loss, mourning, guilt, shame, regret all poured out of me, and I became irrationally convinced that I was about to die and needed to reach out to my dad one last time.

I stopped a stranger on the street. I was sweating profusely and my pupils were probably the size of dimes. I asked him if I could use his cell phone. This was really stupid since I was obviously tripping and could have gotten arrested. He gave me his phone, but I couldn't think of anybody's phone number to call, so I gave him back his phone and asked him to point the way to the town center. He told me to keep walking the way I had been walking. I thanked him, walked one block and was lost again.

Somehow I made it back to the bar and asked my friends to take me home. G still had my car keys and drove for me, while T followed behind us in his car. They stopped at a pizzeria to get me some pizza and water to bring me down. I don't know how much time had elapsed. I thought I had been walking for hours, but they said I had only been away from the bar for 45 minutes. As G drove me home, I asked him to take me to my father. He wisely refused. I asked him to take me to the hospital. Again, he wisely refused. Thank God for friends, especially friends with more experience.

Once they got me home, I took a shower and crawled into bed and that's when things REALLY got weird. I was tripping worse than ever. In the darkness of my room, I stared at the ceiling, feeling very cold. Then suddenly, I began to experience a 'loss of self'. I began to merge with the room. I could still feel my body, but didn't feel connected to it. It was as if I was feeling the sensations in someone else's body. I wiggled my toes and that brought me back, but incompletely and only momentarily. I still had emotions too, but they didn't seem to be MY emotions. It was as if I was dispassionately observing someone else's emotional meltdown rather than my own.

Faces appeared to me, of my parents, my grandmother, other people I had known in life. But I couldn't think of anyone's name, and I was overcome by the feeling that NONE of these people were real, or that, at any rate, none of them mattered anymore. I was beyond that world. I felt that my entire life had been unreal, an illusion, a dream. Now, for the first time ever, I was waking up from that dream and seeing REALITY.

I discovered, to my horror, that reality is a cold, dark, lonely void. I no longer feared dying because 'dying' doesn't exist, only the void exists, and I was now trapped in that void. This was worse than dying. I realized that the one overwhelming emotion that God feels is loneliness. I also believed/feared that I could never return to the world I had known. The void had swallowed me and would never let me go.

(Note: the darkness. cold and out-of-body crap probably could have been remedied by getting up, turning on the lights, and turning off the air conditioner.)

Shortly afterwards, I began to feel myself coming back to reality. In another hour, I was fine. Badly shaken, I got up and wrote what I had just experienced. All in all, my trip lasted six hours. I won't say that I'll never do shrooms again, but I'll show more respect next time. Now that I've tried 2 grams and 6.7 grams, I would guess that the ideal dose (at least for me) is probably 2 to 3 grams.

Respect the power of the mushrooms.

DOSE: T+ 0:00 3.5 g oral Mushrooms (dried) T+ 0:45 0.5 mg oral Pharms - Alprazolam (pill / tablet)

BODY WEIGHT: 125 lb

I initially woke up with the thought of taking a psychedelic on that day. All other days which I woke up like this ended up with a spectacular trip. I was planning on taking a psychedelic to celebrate the successful completion of a 7-week spiritual working (for those who know, I was working with the Olympic spirits from The Arbatel). I had abstained from all drugs for more than a month, save for a couple of bowls and a beer spread out across the period.

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The day started out as very gloomy and rainy. Don’t get me wrong, I love rain, but this day was dark and cold, and the rain did not help much. My plan was to take the psychedelic outdoors, in some park away from people. I was originally torn between 2C-T-7 and Mushrooms, both of which I never tried before. In the evening the sky cleared but it remained too cold to allow for an outdoors trip. So I chose the mushrooms, for their shorter duration, and for the fact that I can easily procure more if this trip was bad, whereas the dose of 2C-T-7 that I had could very well be the last 25mg of 2C-T-7 that I will ever see. Therefore, I decided to save the T-7 for a perfect occasion.

The problem is that I underestimated the mushrooms, for two reasons. The first being that I imagined, due to my spiritual background and my experiences (all beautiful) with the sacred DPT, that it would be hard for me to have a bad trip, since DPT is a mammoth of a psychedelic which I handle very well and the people I know who took mushrooms seemed to imply that it was a rather easy trip. The second reason was that I didn’t think that 3.5 grams of mushrooms would do much to me, since I have had a high natural tolerance to all Tryptamines I tried.

Some background: I live with my parents, who would not appreciate their son “doing drugs.” They are aware of my spiritual practices and are tolerant of them, so I had that on my side. I had always been able to take psychedelics with or without their presence, and get away with it without them suspecting that I am under the influence. This happened in that the psychedelic is either short acting (like DPT), or long acting but does not cause much impairment or confusion (like 2C-E), or a combination of both (like 2C-D). Almost two years before this experience, I took 500 morning glory seeds on one occasion and went into a severe vomiting fit that scared me and turned my trip very bad. I eventually had to turn to my parents for emotional help, and I was lucky they were understanding when I explained that it was a part of my spiritual progress (and it was). The moral: Do not underestimate the importance of a trip sitter! I've found parents are not very good with this role. In my MGS experience, I managed to somehow convince them that I was not poisoned. As you will see in this report, I put my parents in a very stressful situation, and I feel it was very selfish of me to do so. Read on.

The 3.5 grams were made up of 4 stems, 1 cap, and 1 unopened cap attached to one of the stems (a terminal, which I have been told contains more Psiloc(yb)than opened ones). They all had blue stains on them. They were all eaten between 5:00pm and 5:10pm. They didn’t smell bad at all, somewhat exotic. The taste wasn’t very encouraging, but bearable. I actually felt an alert as I was finishing eating the last stem. I walked around… I was beginning to notice that movement was becoming typically more “fluid”. I then had a meal, which took me 45 minutes into the trip. I was now feeling definitely off baseline. From then, I began developing some anxiety. As time progressed, I became a little uncoordinated, and the anxiety grew. I really did not know why I was having so much anxiety. The psychedelic effects were not new to me at all. Yet I was actually scared. A big thing my mind fixed on was that my mother would be able to tell that I am on drugs because of my lack of coordination and, as my thoughts were beginning to get jumbled, I imagined I won’t be able to interact clearly with her.

I decided to take 0.5mg Alprazolam because I was now sure that I was bound for a bad trip (I didn’t care if it diminishes the psychedelic effects, I was just desperate to get out of this discomfort). I then went to lie down. I was shivering. I didn’t know if it was the cold or my anxiety. I went under the covers, but I still shivered severely. The problem is that I was not exactly intensely tripping – I was simply very confused and had irrational anxiety. And I didn’t like it. I was also feeling an uncomfortable body load that reminded me a lot of 5-MeO-DMT, and I didn’t like it. With that, and despite the Alprazolam, the anxiety grew. And grew.

And grew.

I figure I was now at the 2 hour mark. I was experiencing nothing but pure terror. I was literally afraid of everything, including myself. Actually the one thing that frightened me most was fear itself. I had no real reason to be afraid, and yet I was. It certainly was not ego death that scared me – I had my ego dissolved in the divine ocean of milk on DPT while the world shattered many times before, and I have taken on other, alien personalities on Ketamine at one point. Therefore I knew my fear was not out of some kind of identity crisis. Yet I was afraid of being afraid, and also afraid of the fact that the Alprazolam did absolutely nothing (later I learned that 0.5mg might not be enough, even though I don’t have much tolerance to the drug).

I decided to seek help by talking to friends. I went on MSN. As I waited for it to sign on, I looked at the window and I saw a matrix of multicoloured dots. It was an interesting visual that persisted for a

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while – all the dots where mathematically perfect in size and arrangement. I also had a hard time typing because letters on the screen all had red “electricity” buzzing around them, and I had very bad coordination. I found only two of my friends online, and both were geographically far away. One of them told me not to self-medicate with Alprazolam, since “it could be a potentially dangerous combination.” Now, I know that the most commonly used as a safe cure for bad trips is benzodiazepines, but at this moment, since I was so afraid of everything, I took his word for it.

This experience of fear reminded me how pathetic I was. I told this to the second friend. He simply told me what a good person he thought I was, and that I didn’t deserve all the crap that I went through this year. I found his comment extremely nice, and started crying. I then went to lie down, and cried a lot. It was a catharsis for a very bad year. Mind you, I had been doing better for the last couple of months compared to the rest of the year, which was a very difficult one. However, I have a tendency to suppress (but not repress) negative emotions. I am guessing that what this trip did was simply release these suppressions and breaking the dam. I experienced the year’s worth of anxiety and despair in 6 hours.

Now that it was about the 4th hour, I was lying down, occasionally crying. The time between hour 3 and hour 5 seems to be a blur. I lost track of it and I do not remember all that happened, but much of it was spent lying down. I did not listen to music, since I was afraid to listen to music. I didn’t get up, since I was afraid of getting up. I remember crying a lot, and feeling sorry for myself (something I don’t normally do). The trip took a distinct sine-wave form. I got periods of extreme euphoria and an opiate-like body feeling, followed by the aforementioned fear with a lot of shivering and tension.

The positive points, though fewer than the negative ones, were very significant. I remember the first peak I was lying down, my body twisted, my eyes and mouth wide open, staring at the ceiling with a feeling of immense wonder. The ceiling was no longer a ceiling, I don’t know what it was, perhaps a white sky with multicoloured stars and streams that kept moving? I remember staring at the light. A lot of green eye-murals (think Alex Grey’s artwork) flew out of the light and swirled around it, all in geometrically perfection. Since I was afraid of closing my eyes, the few closed-eye visuals that I saw were faint and chaotic.

After that euphoric peak came another fit of terror, and that was followed by a sense of “this is it”… my body felt like it was dying, and I truly believed that I was somehow dying.

In fact, I think this is what the big problem was. My ego did not die, for some reason. I maintained my ego as I lost control amongst a lot of confusion and anxiety, and I don’t know why. Perhaps I did not want to let go because I knew I still had a long trip ahead of me and did not want my mother to see me in that state and freak out. I also needed someone to be with me. But I had no one to contact. My only friend nearby was busy that day. Plus, as I thought of all the people I know, I became afraid of all of them and found I had no one to trust. I felt like I could trust no one. And because my ego remained, I went into a rather psychotic state. I started crying and masturbating at the same time for some reason (of course, the masturbation didn’t do much due to the state I was in). I know for a fact that at this point I was just overflowing with love towards everyone (which is paradoxical with the fear). I felt like nothing mattered, but unlike the exhaled form of the same feeling I get with DPT after ego annihilation, here my ego was there and knew that I was going insane.

And for the first time ever on a psychedelic… I actually forgot that I took a drug! Actually I didn’t forget, it just somehow ceased to be relevant. I was convinced that I was going to be eternally insane.

This “insanity” extended between two “lows” of terror and one “peak” of euphoria. During this one peak, I felt God-intoxicated like I do with DPT. I felt like I had super-human powers. I had many twisted thoughts, including the idea of walking outside naked in public (now it was back to raining – almost a storm) BECAUSE NOTHING MATTERED AND NOW I HAVE BECOME GOD AND WILL DIE SOON!!!! Hover, in spite this insanity, I had a grain of reason left in my, and that told me to stay as still and as silent as possible, and that that would be the best way out.

As these thoughts persisted, the terror remained, and instead of God, I was now possessed by paranoia. I stumbled into the bathroom because I needed to pee. My vision was blurry and I seem to have had some nystagmus. As I was in the bathroom I felt the same PAINFUL terror I felt throughout the trip. I was debating whether or not to go tell my mother. I figured since the original source of anxiety was my fear of my mother seeing me in that state, perhaps confronting her about it will resolve the anxiety.

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And so I stumbled down the stairs and into the living room (where she was sitting) I barely made it to the couch where I fell on it. I was completely paralyzed. I remember hearing my mother freaking out and calling my name and asking whats wrong. I then remember seeing nothing. Not black, nore white, nothing. I saw nothingness. I was stuck in a moment where the divine and I were one. I saw nothing, heard nothing, and felt nothing. I then had a whiteout. This happened to me before on two previous occasions. I saw whiteness everywhere, whether my eyes are open or closed. Eventually I “came back”.. I saw my mother holding my limp body and crying. I told her I was alright. She said she thought I had died. The whiteness dissipated into many hues of different colours and again the eye murals that covered everything but quickly disappeared. It took me only a few minutes to recover from that state and reach a level very close to baseline and I still do not know how this is possible. With most psychedelics you climb, peak, then slowly recover baseline. Here, I spend 5 hours climbing, peaked at the 6th, and quickly returned to baseline in almost half an hour. I suspect it was less from the drug action and more from the psychospiritual reaction.

As I came to I simply told my mother that I was on morning glory seeds, and it was not hard to explain. I was then able to open up emotionally with my mother. I had had problems connecting emotionally to my parents for the past few years. I loved them, but could not express it, and felt very guilty about that. I was now able to very openly talk to my mother (and later my father when he came home), and I managed to talk to them about many serious outstanding issues. There were two things my parents wanted me to do for my future that I was very afraid of and previously could not do. The day after the trip, I found myself easily starting with them without fear, and happy at the fact that I am finally doing something that I know will make my parents happy after all they did for me.

I would say that I have never felt so much fear in my life as I had during that trip. I really did not enjoy it. And yet, at the end it was worth it. The only thing I regret is putting my mother in such a stressful position. But even that has shown me that she really cares for me. I had suicidal ideas before and now I would never kill myself and put her in that situation for real. I simply cannot cope with the guilt. Although I said I will never touch mushrooms again during the trip, I now think I might consider taking them in a few years time. However, they definitely deserve much more respect than they are given on the street.

DOSE: 1.2 g oral Mushrooms - P. cubensis (dried)

BODY WEIGHT: 63 kg

Background - Time for therapy

I was raised in a kind of a Christian family but I later shunned the religion and it's institutions completely as did my parents. In the good old days I used to use LSD, MDMA and Magic Mushrooms. Almost all of these substances were used in minimal doses and as a party drug; never as tool for exploration of my psyche. After 5 years of abstinence I have decided to return to the use of psychedelics, but this time in a strictly therapeutic kind of way. To prepare and learn more about this type of therapy I dived into the most comprehensive book on this subject; LSD Psychotherapy by Stanislav Grof, explored trip reports, started a daily meditative routine and grown the P. Cubensis mushrooms from the grow kit I've ordered.

Saturday - Preparing for Take Off

On the day of my voyage I took it slow. I avoided all the usual information sources such as newspapers and TV and instead listened to some relaxing music, took my dog for a long walk into the forest and swimed in the nearby river. Later that day I cleaned up my apartment, installed some fresh flowers, prepared a bowl of fruits and honey and light up a few candles and incense sticks and print-out some motivational quotes in case I freak out.

Around 9 pm I was ready to ingest the mushrooms. Since this was about to be my first psychedelic experience after so many years my level of anxiety was extremely high. I made a quick prayer next to the statue of the mushroom I've made and asked the Spirit of the Mushroom, The Spirit of Life, my spiritual guides and all of those who have travelled into these realms before me to keep me safe. I then proceeded to eat the 1.2 grams of the dried mushrooms.

The Trip - Jesus, God, Grof and Hoffmann

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About a half an hour later I could feel the experience is about to intensify rapidly. I've started the play list on the computer, turned off the lights, blown out the candles and lay in the bed. The anxiety level would continue to soar but I decided to go with it and see what will happen.

My mind was slightly confused. All sorts of strange images and emotions would rise up and I embraced them all. Anxiety and fear have dominated the scene and since these are the two feelings I have most trouble with in my daily life too, I tried to get to the underlying issue.

'Unfortunately', the dose was too high for my highly sensitive bodily chemistry and the experience was getting way out of the psychedelic therapy and into the realm of transcendence. I tried to return to the issues of fear, anxiety and sadness I felt in my normal life but the mushrooms wanted to go further. It was like I wanted to feel the sadness, to mourn the things I didn't have the courage to mourn until now, to feel the depressed, but the Mushroom wouldn't have any of that.

It kept 'forcing' me to let go of those feelings and lighten up. It showed me Hell and how hot it was and then kind of joked with me; like how prosperous would I become if I started a cold drinks business down here. It then showed me the joys of the world, but I kept returning to my morbid worldview and thinking how death has the final world and all is in vain.

In a second I was standing before a huge gate, the gate of Death. I was left in an amazing fear, respect and awe. These were the gates nobody returns from. This is The End. After the gates there is only silence. The Ultimate Unknown. We don't know.

During the vision I started to sweat uncontrollably and used my drinking water to splash my face and T-shirt. This then continued throughout the night.

Soon after cooling off my respect for Death and the mystical awe I was experiencing at the gates vanished and was replaced by mockery. I instantly knew I was going to pay for it - by dying.

I felt the tissue of my body started to disintegrate. And then the skeleton. And then my mind. And then there was Death. The Ultimate Unknown. After some time of this nothingness I started to feel something again. It was ultimate acceptance. It was Love. Nothing but mystery of eternal pulsating Love. In that instant I became overwhelmed and started crying. You see, my vision of God until now was based on the work of Carlos Castaneda; where God doesn't care about any of us and we live merely to expand its awareness after we die. Eternal love, reincarnation and 'crap' like that was the domain of New Age ideas I came to despise. The tears that were flowing now were the tears of Joy in the realization that I was wrong. We truly are here to learn how to love. There is nothing to fear. There is only Love.

In that instant I was shown a vision of my very good friend who was in a car accident 5 years ago and is now completely paralysed. I felt the energy of Jesus Christ in him. I felt as my friend is some aspect of Jesus, and his old soul has chosen the disabled life to teach us about compassion. That was the final straw as I started crying and sobbing; 'Oh My God! Oh My God!' I felt so unworthy. So stupid! So grateful! The tears wouldn't stop. 'Oh My God! Oh My God! I'm sorry! I'm sorry!' I cried and cried. I now knew the idea of reincarnation is true; I felt which of my friends belong to my group of souls in the afterlife. I felt the true nature of my being after a long time; I've felt how my restless soul wanders much of the time in abstract worlds instead of staying put, learning about love.

After I calmed down a bit my focus returned to God. I wanted to know why all the suffering exists, but I was given only a feeling of mystery. I wondered if we humans are special or the same as any other aspect of God such as plants, animals, rocks. I felt it doesn't matter. We are to have a human experience. I then broke down again, fell to the floor and cried uncontrollably; 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry!' And then I cried some more.

I contemplated what Grof, Hoffmann and other members of psychedelic community are truly doing. Guiding us gently towards the Truth. I was so grateful to them. I loved them.

As I continued to experience the feelings of Love towards these people I was struck by the idea that I might be gay; the fear I use to harbour from time to time. I thought to myself 'God, not gay!', but then I realized it's just Love I feel; love towards men, towards women, Love towards everything. It doesn't matter.

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As the trip started to fade I was left contemplating the relationship with my mother, who left me with severe emotional scars I am now left to heal. I hated her. I loved her. I felt I can't save her. Her sorrow is too deep. Her mind to confused. I felt the damage she's still doing to me and how I need to detach myself from her. To let go or perish. I was then angry again. Angry at the world. Angry at the people. I hated everything. But as I allowed myself to feel the anger, it too passed and I was left exhausted and at peace. Nothing but peace.

DOSE: 1.75 g oral Mushrooms (plant material)

BODY WEIGHT: 95 lb

I just came down from the fucking most trippy emotional high of my life. And I don't know that it's something my body is capable of ever feeling again. Fuck man.

I admit I was apprehensive to eat mushrooms at all. I heard stories of people freaking out and well it freaked ME out. But it's something I've wanted to try and thought to myself, 'anything that you feel, remember that you did it to yourself, and it will only be temporary'. I went with that thought and proceeded to eat only one cap and a few stems (maybe 3 or 4) plain and just chase them with some water. I remember watching one episode of Family Guy, and then turning it off because we started to feel the body buzz.

So it was within a half hour that my legs started feeling light, weak, and tingly. It was real cool feeling, I knew I was about to start tripping. I remember it coming on really fast and I literally started, for no reason, cracking up, like laughter I've never felt before. I was crying because I was laughing so hard and there was absolutely NOTHING funny. Like, Family Guy was done and it made me laugh even more that there was nothing to laugh at. I felt great though. I was really happy feeling. I can't think of a better word to explain it except for trippy. And I guess that's for the authors who have done 'shrooms to define. I don't even know that I could, though I wish I could express the feeling. I couldn't stop smiling. Things started to make sense. Everything began to seem EXTREMELY trivial. I think it changed my life.

Really, the whole experience made me realize so many things about life in general. It gave me a whole new perspective. It just brought things out in me I never knew I had. I wanted to talk. I wanted to connect with someone. I wanted to know that someone was feeling what I was, because it was that amazing. I became so connected to Charlie, who I was with that night, that level of understanding could never come about in normal life, I don't care what anyone says. It was just a wonderful feeling.

I remember us playing with our hands a lot and just experiencing things as they came. Realizing how things are so trivial and how the world works just fuckin' sucks. Like, I remember wanting to rebel. I understood the hippie lifestyle. We waved our hands in front of our faces and it was tripped out. I could still watch my hand trail as it left. I could have done that forever. Experiencing things JUST as they were, not messing with ANYTHING just letting things BE. It was really powerful. Thinking about the end of this high made me sad, because I didn't want to come back to reality.

Any person you could have brought me around I would have made friends with. I wanted to have deep, deep conversations with everyone. I decided I wanted to be an artist. I wished I could capture how beautiful everything was to me and share it. I took pictures. I took a video of things just as they were. I remember being happier than I've ever been. How can coming down from that not make you sad? We had REALLY REALLY deep discussions and we just understood each other. We just knew what the other was thinking. I can't explain the level of understanding. I really don't think I'm capable.

I didn't want to get it on, I remember thinking that clearly because before I took them I was wondering if I'd get all horny. But the literal last thing that was on my mind was sex. It didn't sound appealing in the least. It actually seemed very insignificant and stupid. I wanted to laugh at sex because it seemed so stupid to me picturing people doing it. I kept thinking about the world and it's problems but I wasn't depressed.

I was literally in the middle of my high and I was loving it. Charlie understood EXACTLY my train of thoughts though and I remember being skeptical. Like, it seemed weird that that could happen; that two different people could be on the same wavelength like that. It amazed me and I thought it was

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beautiful. I didn't want to touch. I wanted to be just myself. I felt independent and I felt very very at peace. I felt like I had figured out what I finally wanted to do with my life. We took a picture of the ceiling with stick on stars and it seems so silly but we stared at it forever making designs out of it. I still thought all of this was so beautiful.

I remember wishing people could always be like that, and just LIVE. I was very in touch with my body and what I was feeling. I remember realizing that touch is one of the most powerful senses which is weird because I didn't want to be touched at all.But I could go on forever about the feeling.

The come down was different. That was the only bad thing about the experience.I got VERY depressed and cried a lot, thinking that the world is just such a shitty shitty place. I actually never want to feel like that again. It was a melancholy, sad feeling. The kind of feeling I would think someone would get before they kill themselves. I just knew if I was going to keep feeling that way, I did in fact want to die.

And don't get me wrong. I didn't WANT to kill myself and I was by NO means whatsoever planning suicide. But the world seemed very, just sad I guess to me. Hopeless. But I'm better now :)

The experience was most definetly A+++++ and worth every extreme emotion I felt (and I did feel EVERY emotion very strongly).

I'll probably eat some tomorrow.

Mushrooms, to me anyways, aren't a hard drug and in NO way should be classified with ecstasy or acid by any means. I didn't hallucinate but was afraid I would. I think it's worth everyone's time to give them a try at least. It might be a VERY powerful experience (as it was for me, I think it changed my entire life actually) but it might not be just the same.

I really have no advice I guess, that's just my experience and it was something I knew I wanted to share with other people.

Exp Year: 2005 ID: 44906Gender: Female

DOSE: 4.5 g oral Mushrooms - P. cubensis (dried)

BODY WEIGHT: 150 lb

Set: Positive mindset, fully prepared through reading, musical exploration, and meditation.

Setting: My college dorm room, and the surrounding area during my walk.

I found out that morning day before that my roommate would be gone for the rest of the day and that night, and I had been waiting to take my second solo mushroom trip. I prepared myself during the day by going for my daily run, meditating as I do everyday (but a lot longer today), and listening to some of my favorite music. At 8pm, I ate 4.5 grams of the best cubensis I have ever come across, washing the sacrament down with orange juice. About 10 min after eating the shrooms, I began to meditate, and continued meditating until the mushrooms took hold. I decided not to attempt to meditate during the trip itself, though. After coming up, I decided to take a walk, so I threw on headphones with the first CD of the album, “The Multifaceted Genius of Ustad Alla Rakha.” By this time the post-come-up mushroom trip was setting in, and I was going deep.

I began to “feel” the spiritualities of different cultures and continents, and associating them with certain ideas, feelings, and other relationships. The tabla drumming was simply beautiful, with such full, rich sounds coming each time the tabla was struck. After a while (probably 30-40 min), I began to head back to my room. I had a bit of trouble finding it, as I have problems with getting slightly lost on psychedelics (not to the point of being a major problem, though). I got back to my room, spoke to my hallmates for a few minutes (they knew I was tripping), and turned on some music once I was alone. I listened to some old Santana (such as Samba Pa Ti-an amazing song), Coltrane, and other

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stuff. However, after maybe 40 min I began to get stuck in negative thought loops that led to complete self-loathing (but I never considered physical suicide) and hatred of the world and all other people. This was strange because (sober) I'm confident (but not overconfident, I don't think), stable, have good self-esteem, and have never suffered from depression.

This was coupled with a sense of the mystical/Taoist/Buddhist/Hindu/Huxleyan (the Perennial Philosophy)/Schopenhaurian idea as reality as undifferentiated and one, and the ego as an illusion - thus, 'I' don't exist. I had been reading and studying this philosophy with great interest for months and had sort of adopted it. Usually, this idea struck me as very positive and good, but on this trip, the idea was VERY negative to me, although I still directly sensed the truth in it. I was left curled up in the fetal position on my bed for what seemed like forever while hating, fearing, and pitying everything. Finally, I hit rock bottom with a complete self-loathing and an understanding that I was insignificant.

However, after hitting this bottom, I felt a wonderful peace, helped by my reading of Hesse's Siddhartha two months earlier, as I recalled the river scene (though I certainly don't claim to be enlightened). I felt that it could never get any worse, an idea that was very comforting. I went out and sat in my hallway for a while with almost no conscious thought (similar to the meditative states that I have achieved) for long periods of time until I decided to go sleep.

So, in the end, the trip ended on a positive note, and I feel that I learned a lot from this bad trip. I now have more sympathy and empathy for people suffering from depression or other conditions, having experienced it myself, and I think I'm more sensitive to people in general. I feel that a major reason that my bad trip ended on a very positive note was my preparation (reading Siddhartha and meditating, for example) and sober integration of the experience.

Some random thoughts to conclude: I feel that taking entheogens seriously and treating them as sacraments (as I do) can increase the severity of a bad trip, as one believes that they can reveal the truth to an extent (otherwise one might just dismiss certain thoughts as being “drugged-out” thought). This was certainly the case for this trip. However, this mindset also increases the potential rewards – bad trips can be worse, but good trips can also be much better and more meaningful. It is clear to me that while approaching entheogens seriously may increase the risk of a bad trip (although others might say the opposite), this approach also increases the spiritual and personal gains of psychedelic use and allows one to learn from almost any type of trip (good, bad, social, solo, day, night, etc). Also, preparation and sober integration of the experience are essential for making the journey a beneficial one.

DOSE: 2 tablets oral MDMA (pill / tablet) 3 g oral Mushrooms (plant material) repeated smoked Cannabis (plant material)

BODY WEIGHT: 180 lb

As I sit here and try to comprehend, my thoughts and my perception of reality are shifting. It's now 5 pm sunday afternoon. I feel incoherant yet feel like I've been shown the world for what it really was. I feel like I have a new understanding of life, a new interpretation on reality. I've been a vivid explorer of my mind, for the last 3 years I've smoked pot on a daily basis and have tripped my mind out on nearly anything that has been available to me. I spend my money as fast as I make it and weekend to weekend I go out and I live to my fullest potential. This weekend however was not like the rest. I've found myself, I've found my spiritual mass. In the midst of the most psychadelic experiance of my life, I've encountered my true conciousness, above all other levels of reality. And this is my amazing expieriance that I feel I must come here to post.

My name is Eric. Last night which was a Saturday me my friends g, j ,c, m and a decided to get together for a good time. Normally we would just blaze a few joints talk have some drinks. Last night however we decided to try something completely new. Me and all my friends went downtown to go buy some ecstacy. G, C, and J had each purchased a pill. I purchased 2. While we were hanging downtown waiting to get on the bus and travel back to my buddy c's apartment, we all poped our pills and were waiting for our usual roll. An hour later while sitting on the bus I can start to feel myself sinking into a new level of conciousness and as I spoke to my friends I felt emotionally bonded to all of them like I had never been before. It was my first time taking two pills.

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5 minutes later it kicked me in the back of the skull. I felt my head start to tingle and as my entire being began to feel above concious thought process. There I was, completely stonned and enjoying this feeling which I can only describe as pure euphoria. It hit me in an intense wave of sensations. As I sat there in my seat I noticed myself begin to breath faster. And deeper. Every breath that I was taking felt like complete euphoria. I would feel my head float off of my body and the rest of me would start tingling. For the whole ride I was sitting there quiet enjoying every sensation, every wave of energy. I felt completely enamored by these feelings.

By the time I looked out the window we had arrived to c's apartment, our desitnation for the night. Once there I went into my backpack and pulled out a nice bag of some mushrooms. As I was sinking into the couch contemplating weather to eat them or not I had already found that I was chewing on a big mouthfull of them. I figgured what the hell I just ate 3 grams of mushrooms let's see how it will go from here. Once I had chewed and swallowed the mushrooms I realized that I did not want to be the only person tripping on shrooms. So I handed three grams to my buddy g as well and a gram or two to my friend m.

Time felt like nothing, I don't know how long it had been because at this point my perception of time was dissolving into a higher level of conciousness. The wierd thing was that I was not feeling anything from the mushrooms at first so I though it a bust and figgured I wasn't going to get high off them that night. I was so, so wrong.

As I sat in a room full of friends where the conversation would flow like water, I felt like I wanted to express every thought I was thinking but couldent peace them together clearly enough to make much sence of it. The next thing I knew the room was completely quiet even tho nothing had changed. Everyone was still talking drinking and smoking. And all I heard was a whisper in the back of my mind. It told me it had something to show me and I needed to follow it immediately. I felt a sence of fear but this quickly dissolved as I was walking towards the voice in c's apartment. It felt warm and soothing. I felt like it was just the natural thing to do. I followed it into his washroom and I heard it coming from in the bathtub. As I leaned in closer and closer to hear the whispering words of this voice with no face I noticed it was coming from the drain hole. It told me to get closer and to look into the hole. As I started to stare into the abyss of a darkened orfice I watched the world around me pixelate and start flying all around me. I watched it get drained like water in the tub.

As I was watching this in utter contentment I suddenly heard a loud wooshing noise. The water of the tub had just turned itself on. It wasn't hot, wasn't cold. It was perfection and another huge wave of euphoria hit me much harder. As the water was falling upon my head the vision that I had was completely black. I felt like I had lost reality and within seconds all I began to see were bright vivid colors filling my entire visual field. Suddenly these colors started to melt away and started to get sucked into what I could only describe as a brilliant spiral of lucid colour and in my head every color of the spectral field started to entalgle and form cubes. As the cubes spun wildly out of control all I could feel is my body tingling and this water rushing over my head. I felt like I was having an orgasm this sensation was so intense.

As I would see bright flashings of multicolored light I felt like I was being sent through a blackhole shooting through the air a million miles a second seeing all these vivid colors enamoring my concious mind. As I was flying I suddenly came to the end of the wormhole and I could see hundreds of spirals flying out of control. Then all the colors came back together and suddenly I saw pixels of color come together to form a bottom of a tub. There was no water on but I could see myself dripping. As I stood up the voice then told me that it had shown me all.

I ran out into the livingroom as fast as I could and had explained to all my friends what I was feeling I felt completely amazing. I was sitting talking to them when I noticed certain things start to change in my visual field. I saw the whole room breathing and my friends faces would change colors. I was thinking wow! This is amazing, as another huge wave of euphoria hit me. As I looked at g I started seeing his face swell up and turn to a deep purple tinge. I asked him how he felt. He was not feeling how I was feeling. No one could be feeling this good. The euphoria kept increasing ever so slightly.

As he was talking to me I noticed his forehead open up and I then saw two mouths on his face. I was trying to make sence of it but I just told him 'Holy fuck, I can see a mouth on your forhead' and then I watched his face dissolve into a mirror image. I saw the top half of his head change to look the same as the bottom half. I saw the room change to vivid moving swirling colours. I was amazed and went into the bathroom with g. At this point he started tripping out too.

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Tho he was more concious of reality then I, I knew that it was peaking for him right then and there. As I looked to the bathroom floor it was glowing different colours and sifting arround. I felt like I was hovering above what I could only describe as swirling muticolored clouds. I took my hand to the light switch and started quickly turning on and off the light. Everytime the light would come back on the room was a different color and I felt like I was in the middle of space flying in a circle seeing colors all arround me. I stoped flicking the lights and looked at g. We decided it was time to go for a walk to enjoy this wonderful sensation.

C's hallways are huge orange yellow and black lines so as I was walking towards the elevator I felt the floor get further and closer from me. All these lines apeared to be wiggling and jumping off of the floor. As we got into the elevator I looked to this gigantic red exercize ball. Inside of it I could see swirling vortexes of brilliant color and light. When we got to the outside doors it was already about 2 am. In front of me I saw a tennis court but in my new perception I watched it glow and shine. I felt a really good vibe about it so I went out onto the court. My friend j came out and I explained to him that I wanted to play tennis by kicking this giant bright red universe around.

As I started playing I felt like I was in a videogame. I could see every detail amplifyed in color and in synergetic force. I felt like I was god and I could play this game faster and better then anyone else could. I watched the bright glowing orb fly through the air leaving the most amazing traces I have ever seen. I watched rainbows and sparks and bright flashes of light exploding out of the trace. The sky was bright pink and sparkled as if it was embeded with diamonds.

I reached in my pocket and found a little mirror. I looked into my eyes and my pupils were nearly as big as my eye. As I tried to focus on them I would see bright flashes of light apearing all arround me and then came another wave. I could see that something in my eyes were definitely wrong and these looked nothing like my eyes. All the lines in the colored section of my eyes were wiped away. All I could see was a silver haze around my pupil and my eye had a glow to it. A giant sparkle that I can only describe as something out of 'pet cemetary'. I started wiggling my eyes around and my whole world was getting lost in vortexed lucid colour.

I then went to see g and j. As I walked out I saw these two guys. Random stangers. P and H. For some reason I felt like I knew them and in my delusional state of mind I wanted to experiance the colors with the bright red ball in the tennis court so I asked h to come and play me he was up for it so we played a round and after that we had a smoke and spoke about drugs. They had there connections that I wanted and I have the connections they wanted. So we exchanged numbers and I felt as if these people I have known my whole life. So I asked them if they wanted to get high. They did so we went and sat a picknick table and packed a few bowls as I sat there talking to everyone I was still lost in a cartoon state of reality.

Suddenly again the pixelation started. Black was the only color I could see. The closed eye visuals manifested so quickly and I could hear myself thinking very deeply. I was being launched a hundred miles a minute and again my world started to reform and repixelate. I could see reality coming together. I was watching something moving really fast and I saw traces everywhere. After about 2 minutes of trying to understand it I noticed it was my hand and I was writing a text with deformed letters from my subconcious mind onto the table at wich we were sitting. This whole time me g j h and p were having a deep conversation. I was feeling wave after wave of extreme euphoria. One that is impossible for me to explain.

We then tried to get a game of hack going but the hack didn't look right. It looked like a black sphere of energy with white sparks flying across the surface and vortexes and wormholes of every color were inside of it. As we were playing I would see amazing traces of bright vivid light. It was sensational. After the game we sat back smoked a few more cigarettes and smoked another few bowls. It was now about 5:30 am, So everyone decided it best to go back to c's apartment and see how everyone else was doing.

When we got there everyone was asleep and I was still seeing halucinations. T+6. So I decided to go have a shower to see how good I would feel because my body was tingling. As I got into the hot shower I had an idea and I turned off the light. I was in the bathroom, pitch black in the shower and it was the most amazing thing I had ever experiainced. I felt like I was just a ball of energy. I lost my actual body somewhere and as I would travel through rooms of melting colors and distotions in my mind I was still so amazingly content feeling wave after wave of euphoria still hitting me stong. The next thing I know I go from floating in a mystical lucid dream to hearing a faint knocking on the door

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and I couldent see anything. I had no idea where I was placed in the bathroom. Upside down, rightside up. Spinning, Sitting standing still. I didn't know.

Suddenly the knock got even harder and I felt the water falling on my chest. I then was able to notice I was laying in the tub. I walked to the light opened it. The spirals and visuals were now faint and in my peripheral vision. They weren't as abundant as before. So I got dressed got out of the shower it was then 8:20 am. I was still feeling so great, so euphoric. I then went into my room for the night, lit up a cigarette and my friend g walks in and says he can't sleep so we start talking.

By this point the visuals were no longer noticable and I felt like I had been enlightend by a spiritual force. We spoke, we laughed, we cried. We spoke about everything. Things we never told anyone before in our lives. After smoking a few bowls and talking it was 11. He started passing out so he went to bed. And as I layed in bed I still felt fucking amazing. And there were no signs of a comedown coming. I went out on the patio at that point and admired the view and I layed on the couch outside having a smoke with my eyes closed. I started getting good closed eye visuals again only they were not intense. I was just admiring rainbows in my visual field.

After I was done I went to my bed closed my eyes had closed eye visuals until I fell asleep. At 1 I woke up. Fully refreshed still feeling...FUCKING AMAZING! I got up and I spoke to everyone with perfect clarity. And deep philosophical aspects of life and the search for a higher power. I felt like I was shown the universe. I could sence peoples energy. I felt like I was everywhere all at once. I felt I understood everything in life. I felt, omnipresent.

Being hungry I decided to go eat and to stop by and see the table of the other night because I remember I wrote something. And I felt like it was really important. The table read two things. First in huge angry looking letters spread out across the table it read 'Your in my fucking circle step the fuck off.' This made me feel uncomfortable. The second message read 'The meaning of life... ' It also said something about us living in a facist system. Then it said 'Drugs will set us free'. Now eighteen hours after, I still feel FUCKING AMAZING.

Out of this expieriance what I've learned is this. Life is too short to live it full of worries and regrets. Energy is essential. When my mind and my body fade away, the energy I leave behind is everywhere. This energy can be either negative or positive. My energy will live on far longer then the entire human race.

Good luck, and happy trippings.Eric.

DOSE: T+ 0:00 8 g oral Mushrooms - P. cubensis (dried) T+ 4:30 smoked Cannabis

BODY WEIGHT: 185 lb

Friday, 18:00

Substance: P. cubenesis taken shaken in 500mL of juiceDose: 8g dried, powdered

Set: This time I fasted for two days. Last tryp, approximately 60g of wet, frozen mushrooms was pitiful. We had let a friend freeze them instead if taking the time to dry them and it destroyed their potency. It ended up being a light recreational tryp when I wanted a heroic experience. It was a big let down to me because I had rearranged my schedule to make time for it.

This is going to be the biggest dose I've taken, but I am extremely excited about it. And, to be honest, I do have the very slightest tinge of anxiety about entering this uncharted territory, but mostly (99%) excited.

[I must note here some sub-conscious programming I had that I wasn't aware of that profoundly influenced my tryp. Please take this as an example of the fact that you may not realize all the programming you have that may surface once in the highly suggestible beshroomed state. First of all, I am not a 'worrying' person in general, although it is my nature to be paranoid, which I feel

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makes me prepared. However, before this tryp I let it be known that it would be a big tryp and we were camping in the cold and so many friends and family expressed their concern, the influence of which I certainly felt later. Also, the day before I trypped my friend sent me an Eminem song called 'My Fault', in which after eating an enormous dose of mushrooms, having never trypped before, a girl proceeds to drink a bottle of Lysol and dies. Also, some programming from farther back, I grew up in New England and am familiar with the cold and hypothermia and am probably more aware of its effects and dangers than most Californians, or least that's what my programming says ;-P]

Setting: A camp site in the low-lying mountains. We hiked 2.8 miles in to this spot. Some HS kids are camped a few sites away. No one else is around for at least 2 miles. [3/12/02: Yes, the HS kids get involved.] I am tryping with R, who is only taking 4g's.

Report: While we were getting ready to take the mushrooms, the park ranger came along to do his sundown rounds. We had our sacrament in bags upon the table, so I got up and walked forward to meet the ranger as a distractionary measure, allowing R to grab the bags of powdered power from the table and place them in his pocket. We talked briefly with the ranger, who then went on his way, after making me very nervous (law enforcement officers make me very nervous even when I am not engaging in any 'criminal' activity, owing to their inherent oppressive nature).

[T+0:00] We built the structure for our fire before taking the mushrooms, but didn't try starting it until after we had ingested them, which was a big mistake that we will not make again. We could not get the fire started because the wood was damp and did not want to stay lit. R and Myself worked on the fire together for about the first 10 minutes after which he was too non-functional to continue and he went to lie down in his sleeping bag in the tent. I continued attempting to build a fire for about another 20 minutes, but all the while I was slowly becoming more and more non-functional until I reached the point where I realized I would not be able to get the fire going and had to give up. [T +~0:30] As night was concurrently coming on along with our inebriation and it was getting colder [about 50 during the day, down to the 30's that night] I got my sleeping bag and pillow from the tent and proceeded to lie down on the bench of the picnic table at the campsite.

R said he was having CEV's and later related that he was also experiencing 'phantom' music. I was having some OEV's in the trees and the sky, but it was difficult to see much with so little light. And although I was having visuals I didn't have the 'mushroom feeling'.

[T+~1:00] I started wondering if this batch was impotent as well, although I couldn't think of any reason they would be. R began to complain about the cold, however at that time I felt fairly warm curled up in my sleeping bag. This is where my earlier mentioned bad programming, aligned with my, by this time, highly suggestible state, comes into play turning the tryp into what some would term a 'Bad Tryp', even though I am personally grateful I had this experience and I learned much about myself during the following stage of my tryp. At this point I went into the tent to see if I could make R any warmer, but after I got in there I started feeling cold, with the ground sucking the heat out of me, so I went back out to the picnic table. I believe the cold weather slowed the onset of the mushrooms (I have had this same slow onset taking mushrooms in cold weather before), and so through this time I was still coming up and becoming progressively more confused and non-functional.

The bad programming I had started coming to me over this period. As I was laying on the bench [T +~2:00] listening to some music, looking up at the sky, I started feeling extremely drowsy. Now, this is an effect the mushrooms have had on me many times previously, but by this time my normal brain functioning was almost completely impaired. I also noticed how cold I felt and how delirious my thought processes were becoming. Fear began to overtake me. I had lost faith - in the mushrooms and in myself and my ability to keep myself safe. I was afraid I had not properly prepared, that I had made an accidental mistake and that the temperature was too low and we were suffering from hypothermia (although in my earlier normal state I recognized my ability to easily survive in the temperatures we experienced that night). The cold can be insidious; it creeps into you and makes you numb, clouds your thoughts. In fact, many of the symptoms of mushroom inebriation and hypothermia are very similar - clouded thoughts, loss of functionality, drowsiness.

In my inebriated state I convinced myself that not only were we inebriated, but we were also suffering from hypothermia. However, I was too non-functional to really do anything. I started talking to R, trying to make sure we didn't fall asleep, because I was frightened that we wouldn't wake up. It was difficult because I was so sleepy though, and I've had difficulties in the past remaining awake even when I wanted to [in one case I was up for only 36 hours before I started falling asleep while

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walking!] We agreed to wait till the mushrooms wore off and then collect ourselves, but I was afraid we would die of hypothermia before they wore off. The longer time went on the more convinced I became we were dying as we sat there doing nothing, waiting for the mushrooms to wear off. R was trying to calm me down, but I had already convinced myself. I absolutely believed it was imperative we make it to civilization, or get some outside assistance, or we would die.

My thought processes continued to degrade still, which served to increase my now mortal fear. I tried to avail to find the flashlight so I could walk out of there and seek some help. I felt extremely helpless - like I had made a mistake that would cost myself and R our lives and bring great suffering to all our loved ones. I believed I had inadvertently committed suicide. Some time around here I made myself vomit, hoping I could maybe speed up my recovery time.

[T+~2:30] I heard someone call out, and I responded back asking for help. I shouted for my life that we were suffering from hypothermia, our camp site number and to come immediately to save our lives. It turned out to be the HS kids we had seen earlier, they must of heard us being non-functional, who were kind enough to come over for which I was and continue to be grateful. They had a video camera with them [I can't wait to get a copy of the tape]. We asked for their help. They quickly ascertained that we were inebriated and assumed we had been drinking alcohol. They asked what we had been drinking, to which we didn't respond, and then asked if we couldn't remember, which I responded to affirmatively even though I did remember [although there have been instances I have momentarily forgotten I took them]. They said they had a fire, and I asked them to take us to it, which they did not [now understandably] want to do. I however saw no physical proof of their claim.

They started talking about building us a fire, but did not, and they just kept talking about it with no action. I believed we were all suffering from hypothermia, and so even though they had not taken any inebriants they were likewise not in their 'right minds'. They made a couple feeble gestures towards building a fire, without success. I was afraid all four of us were going to die. This was the only time in my life I have honestly believed my death was imminent. They kept talking about a fire, but still there was none. I tried to explain that saying you can start a fire is not the same as having one. I thought they were all delirious like me, but they just didn't realize it. I believed the only way to continue this existence was to get some outside help. The HS kids (rightly) told me if I said we were going to die then they would leave and not help us, so I limited my comments about dying to myself from that point.

No one else believed our existence was going to end and this was very frustrating for me because I was preparing to meet God without being ready and they were all just standing around, doing nothing, speaking of inconsequential things. I knew I was too inebriated to get to civilization and the HSer's had a video camera, so I started saying my goodbyes, so I could at least leave a message to those I was leaving behind.

Waiting to die was excruciating, to the point I briefly considered suicide to speed up the process. I understood for the first time how afraid I really am of death, even if that fear stems from a belief that I'm not yet prepared to take that journey. Thankfully while I was off by myself R talked to the students and told them to ignore me and implored their help in starting a fire, expressing that we were inebriated on mushrooms and how grateful we would be for their assistance. They finally started a fire for us, for which I owe them a debt of gratitude. The fire very much helped to ground me and allay my fears. Ryan told them our inebriation would subside in several hours and they returned to their campsite. Being by the fire I slowly started to believe I would continue this existence.

[T+???] After some time in front of the fire I slipped into a transcendental state. I became fully immersed in the mushroom reality. I have had several level 4 tryps before, but this was my first level 5 experience. The 'mushroom feeling' was now in full effect, stronger than ever. It was all the gratefulness, humility, love, connectedness, awareness of grace and awe of my previous tryps, but magnitudes greater. I had a complete loss of time sense because I was too busy with the immediate experience of living. I was caught up in the mystical, ecstatic experience the mushrooms are generous enough to provide. They truly are my greatest teacher, an invaluable gift from God. I came to appreciate and understand Buddhism far better. I perceived the real power, elegance and truth of the yin-yang symbol and how its dichotomous yet joined nature pervades everything. I understood that all life is suffering and why the Buddhist masters laugh, even despite this. I could perceive the pervasive hidden patterns running throughout existence.

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I learned once again that the purpose of existence is just to exist and that existence has always been there and will always be there. I could truly understand the awesome power of cooperation and love. And I was aware of how powerless I am, and how dependant upon God's grace I am. R and I talked across the campfire, sharing this amazing state - the most wonderful, honest, insightful conversations. We explored the nature of reality and each other.

[T+~4:30] As we talked the mushrooms began to fade and we slowly returned to the other, everyday, reality. Around this time the HS students returned, with video camera in tow, and we were thankful for the opportunity to document in some small way our experiences and to try to explain to them the other, mushroom, reality, despite its inherent ineffability. They must have thought we were extremely strange, but they were curious and helpful. They asked questions about the mushroom reality, which we did our best to answer. Finally, they helped us find our flashlight and left for the night. We cleaned up our campsite, ate a little, smoked some cannabis and went to bed.

Summary: This experience was the most powerful and profound in my life. The mushrooms are an incredible helper and teacher, although they may teach things that are very hard to learn or that you may not want to learn. This tryp was both my 'worst' and 'best' ever. I certainly transcended everyday reality and had powerful terrifying and enlightening portions. I hope I can learn from and integrate these experiences into my everyday existence to grow to be a better person. Peace and love to you and all of creation.

DOSE: 3.5 g oral Mushrooms (dried)

BODY WEIGHT: 200 lb

When I was given the opportunity to take mushrooms, I jumped on it. This was my first hallucinogenic experience, and ended up wildly different from my expecations. It was a weird and philosophical journey. The best part was sharing it - I invited my friend, 'Rob' to join me. Much to my surprise, he agreed and we decided to ingest together that very weekend. 'Matt' agreed to be our sitter for as long as we needed him. We each had our own goals going into the trip. I was looking for mental and visual inspiration, for my life and artwork. Rob wanted to find himself. Taking the trip with another friend added a whole new dimension to the experience. At 4pm on Saturday, we went to pick up our mushrooms. A friend gave us a jar of peanut butter to eat them with, his own shrooming tradition, so we ate them like kindergarteners with crackers. We each dosed a dry 3.5g. The mushrooms had the texture of styrofoam and a light bready taste. Rob and I left in great spirits, licking our fingers and thanking our friends. We each drank a glass of orange juice, to hopefully accelerate our come up, and left with Matt to sit outside. Rob and I passed the time with a bucket of sidewalk chalk and a blank stretch of asphalt. 20 minutes later, Rob declared that he was restless and it was time to go. The three of us left for the woods. We sat next to a little pond with a swing and discussed how we felt. Rob sat under a branch and said he felt connected to it, like it was reaching out and growing towards him. We relaxed for long time before deciding it was time to leave. I asked Matt to bring us along the trail to a local smoothie restaurant. As we walked, all of the woods were picturesque. Rob and I pointed out interesting objects and patterns to Matt. We came into civilization near a small maintenance building. Rob and I were in our own world. 'I've never seen this building before,' he said to me. We discussed the personality of the building until Rob asked, 'Does it have a name? What sort of name would suit it?' I found a small plaque and told him, 'it has one. Its name ... is Plaza.' Matt smiled and watched as we discussed and explored our new friend Plaza. After a while, we said goodbye and continued on our quest for smoothies. Rob and I debted whether or not we had come up yet as we walked, as we pointed out buildings that looked off or different. When we walked into the campus center, I was absolutely awestruck by its size. I had been there dozens of times, but now it was cavernous. I couldn't stop staring at the ceiling, which was so far away. I tried to make Matt and Rob appreciate how enormous it was. The smoothie restaurant was closed, so we walked upstairs and continued to talk. We spent some time inside before we decided to go to the cafeteria for dinner. We took another beautiful walk and went inside. The cafeteria too was huge. We sat together, surrounded by windows just above a few trees covered in blossoms. I felt like I was sitting in their branches. Rob and I commented to Matt on how mild the trip had been - we were disappointed that it must almost be over. Matt laughed and told us it had only been an hour. We were absolutely awestruck. It felt like an eternity since we had dosed, and I had estimated it must have been at least three or four hours. Rob and I burst into disbelieving laughter. We finally realized how incredible a day it was going to be, and settled down to enjoy ourselves. Dinner was fascinating. Everything I wanted to eat was on Rob's plate, like some kind of miracle. Rob said it looked to him like a tiny landscape, he could just imagine a tiny civilization living beneath the broccoli. As we

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talked, I started to feel that Matt's presence was almost an intrusion. His white shirt reminded me of a lab coat, and I mentioned it was a little like being in an experiment. I spoke to his reflection in the window because it seemed like an excellent substitute. Rob and I decided that we were the ones observing Matt, and started asking him questions like, 'What's it like to be YOU?' Matt took it in stride. The theme of our trip appeared when we started wondering about the materials in the wall next to us. We compared each to its natural equivalent: the plastic beam could be a branch, the ceiling a forest canopy. But Rob and I were stumped when we came to the window. If beam is to branch, then glass is to what? I declared that there was no equivalent to glass - it's what we used to separate ourselves from nature. Analogies between our lives and the natural world became the big question and topic throughout the entire day. With that thought, Rob and I decided to return outside to appreciate the outdoors. We asked Matt to catch up with us later, since he still felt like an outsider in our discussions. Matt insisted we get a cellphone in case we needed to talk to him. Our next trip was then to Rob's room, which quickly became a very difficult task. As we walked down the street, I felt like we were in a private bubble of existence. I was surprised to remember that other people could hear and understand us - it felt like the world was a movie and we were the critics. When we reached Rob's room, I realized everything indoors was foreign and strange. Rob and I started laughing at how absurd all his things were. I tried to rationalize what mushrooms had done to my perceptions. I explained my viewpoint to Rob: all of the symbols and classifications I used to get through the day had disappeared. I didn't see his books, I saw blocks of flattened wood pulp. When I tried to read the title, I had to wonder to myself what each word meant and what it signified. All of my assumptions and rationalizations about the world were gone. Rob had a similar problem - he realized when he picked up his cellphone that he'd have little idea how to use it if he needed to. We left his room laughing, because our lives seemed so odd and contrived. Rob took off his watch so we could enjoy the timelessness of the day, without being reminded of how our perceptions were 'wrong.' Our minds dancedfrom topic to topic, but we were completely on the same page. The rest of the world wasn't - we met someone on the road outside, but could barely converse with him. By the time he responded to us, we had forgotten what we were talking about to begin with. We met his questions with blank stares. Rob and I laughed our way back to the woods. We were once again stuck by the pristine beauty of the outdoors. It was drizzly and grey, but everything shone with such incredible detail. Rob and I split up along different trails to do some individual introspection. I went back near the swing and lay out the ground. Every time I turned my head, I was surprised at what I saw. It was remarkable that everything was still there, even if I had forgotten about it a moment ago. I stared at the sky as it began to rain. I watched the clouds swirl and surge. They slowly resolved into a series of faces - first an arrangement of people I knew. Then they moved, and I saw a profile of a beautiful female head. She looked like an Egyptian queen with a tall, squared-off hat. Finally the clouds simply spiralled together in a whirlpool. I got up when the bugs began to bite and sat on the swing. The pebbles and sticks beneath me looked like that were turning into symbols or words, but I could never make them out. I swung in the rain and thought about my life until Rob came back. He told me he found another person in the woods. We talked about how fantastic that seemed, to find someone completely new on a rainy day on the same trail. Our second analogy was this: everyone is just lost in the woods. That's life. We sat together and talked about our trip. We discussed the differences between the indoors and outdoors. 'Why,' Rob asked, 'is it so much simpler to be out here?' I came to a realization, and explained the answer to Rob. When we were indoors in civilization, we relied on symbols (such as the written word). We dealt only in the abstract. Outdoors, everything simply was what it was, with no complex layers of meaning and assumption. The mushrooms were simply an opportunity to appreciate the world as it was. The third analogy was that you have to build symbols on top of a physical object, just like you have to build civilization over nature. You couldn't abstract your world without understanding it. This was the most important realization of the trip: that we needed to step back from our lives and understand what they were really built on. We couldn't live in the abstract - we needed to go out in the woods and deal with the physical world sometimes. We talked about what it meant for us to grow older, our expectations for our lives. We walked together through the rain. As we left the woods, Rob suddenly realized what he had been looking for. 'I understand now. I don't have to find myself - I am what I am. There's nothing to find, I'm right here.' He smiled and we went back to my room to order pizza. The sun had set and we were coming down. It was about 10pm. The pizza was a sort of miracle - we forgot we ordered it, but it showed up with perfect timing. The whole day felt like it had been one incredible coincidence. We visited Matt and talked about what we had learned that day. We came to a few important points. Everyone needs to take some time off and go appreciate how beautiful the world is. It was a rainy day, but nature is beautiful regardless of the weather. Rob also pointed out something important about the shrooms. A trip is exactly like a trip to a new country - the mushrooms sent us somewhere, but we had to find our own landmarks. Too many drug users, he said, act like obnoxious tourists. They look only for the high or the visuals, and miss the real adventure and meaning. We left our friend Matt and everyone we saw with this message: Don't be a dirty tourist in life. The trip lasted 6

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hours from start to finish. I was exhausted, physically and mentally. The next day I was completely serene. The trip gave me a chance to step back and think about what was really important to me. None of the research I did really prepared me. My expectations were blown away. Tripping with a friend lead to some incredible conversations and discussions. The interaction was on a completely different level. It led the trip away from the visual and into the philosophical, which was a truly memorable experience.

Exp Year: 2007 ID: 64264Gender: Female

DOSE: 3.25 g oral Mushrooms (tea)

BODY WEIGHT: 155 lb

With summer dragging on and on, and our living rooms becoming one of the few cool sanctuaries available to us, we decided to perform some 'communing with the other' this weekend. Having 'attempted' to quit smoking with my girlfriend, T, Wednesday night after the GbV show, my nefarious, nicotine-stained habit was definitely still in mind (and between fingers, unfortunately), especially as our tandem failure to 'slay the dragon' became more apparent with each day, each moment that passed. Anyway, Saturday night came, and after C got home from work, we brewed up some tea. My own glass contained about 3-3.5 grams of the 'wittle boo monstahs,' and the others' doses were right around this amount, too, give or take a gram. Exchanging excited glances across the dim, candlelit room, we drank, and then sat back, waiting for as C likes to put it, 'the field to come down.'

It began after about 20 minutes, with a realization that there were now giant shadow insects, 'grasshoppers of the ether,' if you will, inhabiting the living room ceiling above our heads.

'Look at those shadows!' exclaimed someone, an observation which at the time set off a wave of drunken panic in my mind, as in, 'Oh, shit, I'm piss drunk and stranded and how am I going to get home now?' This I recognized as the first pangs of fear and frustration from my ego as it realized it was about to take leave of itself, AND ME, for a while.

It was at this point that the tremors began, first in my thighs, and then continuing up into my stomach and back, as the first quantities of psilocybe snaked their way through nerve endings. 'I think I want to lay in my bed,' I heard myself saying, which was strange, because the bed was T’s not mine, and I usually referred to it as 'the bed' rather than as a personal possession: this was a brief and minor detail, but sticks with me now for some reason.

C said something like, 'I'm not moving… They get you when you close your eyes...That’s when that thing threw that lightning bolt at me last time.'I wasn’t sure if I knew what he was talking about, but I was feeling fairly certain at this point that I didn't need to hear his spiel at this time in my own trip, as it was just coming on, and I was feeling very weird myself right then.

In fact, it was when C said something like, 'You're either gonna go through it with your eyes open or your eyes closed - and I’m keeping my eyes open.' and began to talk again about the entities with lightning bolts that I felt a strange urge, and exclaimed, 'It's official: I am FEELING IT.' It was official. I was going to bed.

By the time I made it back into the bedroom and lay down, the tremors had begun to turn into actual shakes, and were starting to make me nervous. Almost as soon as my head hit the pillow, though, I heard a strange voice say something to the effect of, 'You can relax now - it's just your stomach. It'll be all right.'

Huh? I wondered to this strange voice, and then relaxed almost immediately when I focused my eyes to the darkness both in the room and in my head, and saw them. Everywhere were tiny jeweled, spider or elf-like creatures: floating through the air, crawling the walls, roaming the nether regions of my skull. I raised my hand in the dark and it was awash in these small, shimmering hyper-organisms.

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It was at this point that my conversation with them began. By this time, the trembling having subsided, I noticed the knot in my stomach tightening, an uncomfortable feeling to be sure. I thought I might be getting sick from the mushrooms or some thing: the feeling of taking that last soggy, chunky gulp of tea now came back to me, and this intensified my sick feeling. Fortunately, they began to speak again.

'Y'know that you’re not feeling sick, not really anyway,' they said. 'The feeling you are feeling is the truth of your existence; we are showing you what is at stake here in this life, what you have done and are doing wrong, and what you must do to feel better...'

(At this point, I noticed the colors of the entities more closely - they were red, blue, yellow, purple, and gold, as well as other colors which I cannot name here now; I also noticed that they spun clockwise and all together at one point, and then in beautifully syncopated patterns at another. With Tortoise and Bardo Pond playing softly on the radio, I realized that the music was triggering an intensification of my interactions with these hyper-beings. As the music got softer and clearer, so did the beings; as it got louder and more dissonant, the beings seemed to back off into the darkness, and the 'psychedelic drunk' feeling came back like gangbusters.)

Anyway, the beings then clued me into what was going on inside of me: the pain and discomfort I was feeling and associating with the mushrooms or with digestion or something, was in fact the pain my spirit was feeling because of my smoking habits. The beings explained quite simply to me that smoking cigarettes was a waste of my time, energy, and most importantly, my life, and by continuing in this behavior I was perpetuating cycles of fear, greed, and disease which reached both through and beyond time and space (at least as we commonly know them). I realized that what the beings were trying to clue me into was that my smoking was supporting the dominator culture that persecutes the mushroom, its 'children', and all of us as well; while some of my discomfort was no doubt the result of the actual physical act of smoking, my spirit was in pain too, it was obvious to me now.

'What to do, what to do?!?' I wondered as I lay in bed.

'We will show you,' they said back almost immediately.

At this point, the entities changed appearance again, turning into bluish, gold bits of light, less defined than before, and proceeding to 'paint' whatever it was I looked at; I say 'paint', because that’s what it looked like- paint flowing onto various surfaces (although the most beautiful paint I'VE EVER SEEN!!!) as I passed over them with my gaze.

(At this point in our story I feel it necessary to inform the reader that I've made my living as a housepainter for the last several years; the source of this paint imagery..?)

I started to get the feeling that the ghostly painting going on in my room was surrounding me in some strange way; I didn’t feel threatened, as I realized this pent-up feeling I was beginning to develop sitting there in the dark was simple ego-dissolution. The color-beings began to multiply and crowd around me almost as soon as I realized what I was feeling. 'We will take over from here,' or words to that effect, were pretty much the last thing I heard from these beings that night. Almost as soon as I’d heard this hyper-dimensional message, the painted surfaces began leaping off of themselves and congregating in the air, casting off a strange blue glow. As this fuzz ball of psychedelic energy materialized, I felt it start to cover me, as if it were a ghostly sheet covering my deceased body in the morgue or something; strangely, I felt no fear, dread, or even much discomfort as this thing, this shroud of or by or from these hyper-dimensional space aliens, covered me, wrapping me like a newborn child...A NEWBORN!!!

A non-smoking newborn. 'Hmmm,' I thought to myself after laying there a while longer. The elf shroud blanket had vanished, as had most of the space aliens. My hallucinations became less coherent staring into the dark, and for the first time since laying down, I noticed the sound of other voices coming from the other room. Then, T walked in to see if I was OK, and I could tell by the look on her face that she too was 'feeling it'. Also realizing how thirsty I was, I decided to return to the living room and the others. The entire experience in the bedroom had lasted less than a half-hour.

We stayed up for a few more hours talking, raving, and tripping, until it became time to quiet down and retire to the wispy comforts of sleep; C and S left, taking much of the past hour’s heavy

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conversation with them, thankfully. T and I got into bed almost as soon as they left. I talked to her about what I’d experienced as we lay there, and then noticed that I was putting her to sleep. So be it. I decided to shut up, and closed my own eyes, content to fall into the lull of the transdimensional laser light show still playing (although much more dimly than before) in my head.

Looking back, I am definitely of the opinion that the psychedelic drunk trip I had was due to high levels of psilocybe in the mushrooms; C and S (esp. C) seemed to be having a much more visionary, cerebral trip, like that from mushrooms higher in psilocin (we had eaten two different batches) than I was anyway, and some of C’s words after I returned from the bedroom struck me as having a distinctly visionary flavor to them; as T and S's smaller doses began to wear off, and my own as well, it seemed to me that C's conversation, both the speaking and listening of it, were directed by or at something entirely 'other' than the rest of us in my living room.I'm sure C will relate this to the rest of us as indicative of us not 'taking an active dose,' and therefore not having a true visionary experience.

I don't know about all that, and don't really care much either, especially not being directly affected by such theorizing: I know what I saw, felt, etc., that night and I now feel more ready than ever to take on the dominator cancer plant that has been my master for going on ten years now.As C said during our living room rave-session, 'This stuff is powerful medicine!!!! It can cure smoking, or IT CAN CURE CANCER!!!'

After that night, I'm inclined to believe this more than ever.

DOSE: oral LSD oral MDMA (pill / tablet) insufflated Cocaine (powder / crystals) insufflated Methamphetamine (powder / crystals)

BODY WEIGHT: 200 lb

I started smoking weed when I was 13 and that seemed to be good enough, it made me mellow and kind of uncaring about the depression (now that I look back at it)I seemed to be suffering from. But then I moved from the small Texas town I was living in to Houston when I was 14 and that is where the story really began. For another year I did alright, I barely even smoked weed, my grades improved and I passed my eighth grade year (the second time around). I started high school with all the hope of graduating, but that just wasn't to be.

About two months into it I took my first trip, and I loved it! it kind of cleaned all the remains of the Christian religious crap-ola out of my head and got me in touch with the true unfathomable mystic energy that all humans and animals feel (not to mention making a pretty cool light show go on inside my head!). I continued taking acid and smoking weed through the next few years, but unfortunately my education suffered. I thought it was more important to study the outer reaches of consciousness and have a hell of a time doing it, instead of studying what THE MAN wanted me to learn. Acid also seemed to have an effect on my creativity, I have always drawn and played musical instruments, but now I seemed to be doing it to produce a trance that helped me tap into my subconsciousness, which I believe to be a direct conduit to the chaotic creative energy of the universe.

I finally dropped out of school when I was 18 and still in ninth grade. At the time I would rather of had big drug parties all day with like-minded (but not really) people. I was finally kicked out of my mother's home a month after my eighteenth, you would think I would've straightened up and got busy surviving, but nooooope. I continued partying. It was around this time I started taking MDMA (or sometimes the stuff they passed around as). I was told it was a lot better than acid (and I found it to be!). I ate my first roll at a Marilyn Manson concert (I told you I was an unhappy child!) and I connected with the music (empathy) as I never have before! It also seemed to bring me closer to the people I went to the concert with, who were my best friends (and still are today).

The next day I was preaching to the heavens on high the virtues of ecstasy to all of my friends who hadn't tried it, but by nightfall I hit the emotional slump that all E-users feel. At the time I didn't know to terribly much of neurotransmitters and the affect serotonin has on your moods so I started craving more E. So I became a heavy user of ecstasy, I would eat 2-5 tabs every Saturday night and be broke the rest of the week. I started living off of ninety-nine cent hamburgers or any other cheap fast food I could eat. Luckily at the time I was living rent free in a tore up i was supposed to be

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repairing and the only bill I had was car insurance. Well anyway, I lived their for about six months, the last two with a couple I had never met before, when i got kicked out. The landlord wanted to move back in. At the time I was jobless and had no money worth speaking of, but the couple took me into there apartment when we moved so I never ended up homeless. The guy used to be a crack and heroin addict so he kind of understood. I didn't mention I moved from Houston with my mom because she got a job offer in another small town, I moved when I was seventeen and a half.

Well anyway here I am strung out on E, herb, cocaine and just about anything (besides crack and heroin) I could get my hands on, jobless, and living with a strange couple who's patience for me is getting shorter day after day. So I decide to move back to Houston and I start hanging with the remnants of my old crew, most of their pharmacological tastes had also increased. Also a few of them were frequently going to raves.

My first rave was BassStation'99, and prior to this I had heard of raves and knew some 'ravers' peripherally and had an idea of what they were about(PLUR, being happy and having a good time), but I had never been to one. I went and had a good time until the lights and the music started to be too much. I had taken a dose of clear gel acid and smoked some ketamine laced in a joint. After smoking the joint, I decided to get up and walk around, bad idea, the dose started kicking and the K hit me and all I could see were arms, legs and heads flying around and the blue uniformed cops staring at me (I think).

Well, this was a little too much so I started looking for my friends to help calm me down. I found them but they were too wrapped up in everything to really help, so I ended up walking around in a room full of people I don't know scared to death with a headful of strong acid for five hours. But that didn't stop me from going to more raves though I continued to go for about the next year eating every kind of roll that went around from mid-'99 to mid-'00.

I guess from the constant drug abuse my psyche started to crumble.

When I first moved back to Houston I had purchased two vials of liquid acid to sell, but ended up eating most of it with the help of friends in a matter of two months. I would constantly take a few drops and go out on the town, like I was doing stimulants or something. I believe the lack of supporting people and of set and setting helped lead to the six months of having lost touch with reality. I started believing their were hidden messages in music and that some great conspiracy was controlling every thing (like the rich trying to control the poor by numbing their minds with drugs...but it might be true Hmmmmmmm...). Well that was just one of them. Also at the same time I was having a hard time dealing with the level of sensitivity toward people (male and female) i cared about, that E seemed to give me. Growing up in a home with a father that made you feel like you weren't a man unless you were rough and tough and fucked any girl that walked by, didn't help either. I had difficulty trying to give the love I felt for all of my friends to them without feeling sexual. Well anyway, that kind of set up a loop in my head made me have conflicting feelings about my sexuality. Coupled with that the slightly schizo-paranoia the two month acid bath gave me.

Then I ran into an old high school bud, and I thought he had the answer to my problem, crystal methamphetamine. I started using crank(speed, tweak, bullshit, whatever) to make me a 'man' again. I thought it would toughen me up. Well any way this takes us to the end of 2000 and on to the final chapter.

So I started using tweak and selling it, because I was getting it cheap (old high school friend don'tcha know). It was great I found a new group of friends, I was high 24/7, and I had a little ching-ching in my pocket. So i was doing hard physical labor all day and had the energy to play all night, my lost self confidence (it has always been kinda low)was replaced with a new bravado and I started feeling like a tough guy (said in you best Italian American Bronx accent). Then I was asked to move in with my homeboy's family, I said sure. It was all gravy for three months, when every body started staying up waaaaaayyyyy too long. I started thinking the subliminal messages I thought I was hearing on the radio were real and that there was an impending race war. Also, I thought that my homeboy was trying to turn me into a homo (not that there is anything wrong with that) and that he was trying to set me up. It finally came to a head in the January of '01, when I came home from work and found a pictograph on my bed saying that I lied.

There were some people over, so I started talking to them about what I found on my bed. I was asking them what this was all about and they just kind of shrugged their shoulders, then came homeboy down the stairs, anorexically skinny and looking friggin' nuts with two knives on his belt.

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He started screaming at me that I was an undercover DEA agent, and I was a part of the Aryan Brotherhood, and that I was gay! The thing that was scary about all that was that we knew each other in high school and in between the few years we didn't see each other there was no way I could have become John Law, the AB thing was understandable because I told him my conspiracy theory(but I’m not a racist at all), the gay thing is understandable to but I never tried to experiment with him or anything. My only conclusion was not enough sleep and tweak. He also pulled a sword on me and tried to stab me.

I've finally started to pull my head back together in the past few months, I still suffer from slight visual disruptions and I still feel more empathic than I used too, which is a good thing. I'm also more understanding of people and their situations. It also seems I'm more at peace with myself and the universe, and less attached to materialistic things. My HPPD really doesn't bother me it just adds more color to this life. I also had a slight stutter I had as I child come back but it's not to bad it only happens when I'm under stress. I've also have come to terms with my heterosexuality.

The point is if you want to do drugs do them for the right reasons (consciousness expansion), and don't let the drugs do you.

Much love and respect to all.

DOSE: T+ 0:00 2.5 g oral Harmala Alkaloids (seeds) T+ 0:22 4 g oral Mushrooms (dried) T+ 0:00 1 g oral Mushrooms (dried) T+ 0:00 0.75 g oral Mushrooms - P. cyanescens (dried)

BODY WEIGHT: 60 kg

Psilocybe Tampanensis (Philosophers' Stones) (4 gr. + 1 gr.), Psi. Cyanescens (1 gr.), Peganum Harmala (2.5 gr.), Hash and Weed (a lot)

First I want to apologize, as I'm French and my English is not really perfect, I think you'll all understand what I've written anyway.

I prepared a decoction of 2.5g of Peganum Harmala seeds by extracting them twice according to OTT method. The resulting beverage was drunk at 20:30, after that I smoked a little joint of Nepalese Temple Ball.

Very light dizzyness was felt about 5 minutes later but not disturbing, feeling quiet cool. A gentle warmth was now spreading through my body.

At 20:52, the effects were now stronger, so I ate 4 gr. of Psilocybe Tampanensis (dried, cut in little slices), they taste like nuts, a little acidic. I took the Mushrooms' fragments left after I cut them, and smoke them in a pipe with some Kashmir Hashish. Immediatly after the pipe I lighted a Malana Cream joint. The pipe had its little effect, light colored trails were appearing following my hand . Colors are starting to change, some kind of electric (I was reading a magazine about nature at this moment, with nice, colorfull photos). It's now 21:00.

21:06 : It's beginning to push stronger now.

21:08 : It's coming realy stronger, I lay down on my bed..

21:20 : Very strong rushes have been coming since 5 minutes, feel very good. Light nausea and a few abdominal cramps when I move (It won't last).

21:30 : rushes are stronger and stronger, and suddenly something like a click happened. Rushes are still here and strong, but they're not the same anymore, I feel a kind of clarity in my mind.

In front of me (I'm still laid back on my bed) there's a big picture of Bob Marley, his face is continualy changing in shape, size and colors, mosaics are runing all over the yellow walls. I'm listening Ummagumma by Pink Floyd (crazy music) and it's sure « stimulating » the trip.

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22:00 : I light up a joint of very high quality indoor grown sativa, and it's sure helped. A higher level of rushes is now reached. Wow It's really strong, everything is flowing, breathing, changing colors and shapes, and I still feel very calm, mind clarity is astonishing, I'm laughing of the insights coming to me, they're totally different kind from those I had with LSD, It?s so clear here, not a hint of mental confusion. Everything seems so clear to me, I've never experienced such a clearmindedness with psychedelic, usually it was mental confusion for almost all the journey, very difficult to talk or to understand. Here it was not the case. That's it : Perfect clarity of mind, EXTRA CLEARMINDEDNESS !. The curtain has been put down and now I see ! I know ! I understand ! These mushrooms deserve their name, you can believe me, it's incredible. I was thinking about my heroin addiction, and the way it revealed itself to me made me understand finally that this is not life. Everything which seemed normal to me, what heroin had made looking normal, the mushroom blasted it away and I realised that NO, those things were not normal, I've been fooled by the dope for all this time. My mind was made up, I would never take heroin again. Now I'm gonna live and enjoy REAL LIFE !

22:30 : I lighted up a second sativa joint. The mushrooms effects came stronger again, colors are so beautifull ! closed eyes imagery is very complex, geometrical. I decided to eat the left gram of P Tampanensis.At that time, two of my best friends arrived, they had arrange a rendez-vous with their dope dealer at my place (as usual). As they arrived I saw them in a very strange way, I saw them, without blindedness given by the heroin, as they really are, and WOW it was really disgusting. I saw them as dirty, lost, negative, (almost) mentally, (totally) spiritualy dead people. I was not thinking good things about them and I begun to feel very repulsive about them. But I told my self « Hey those are your friends whether they're dope addicts or not, you can?t think such things about them !.

Instead of it, I was feeling very euphoric, often laughing because of the derision of the things I saw or said.

Finally I asked them to leave because they were sending to much negative energy and I was afraid they would have spoil my journey. Anyway, They?re still good friends, even if they're still in the dope. But seeing them this way gave me more motivation to stop the dope. They proposed me some brown sugar, but I refused it in a totally natural way, « Non Merci ».

After they left around midnight, I shut down the light and laid back on my bed listening, with my walkman, some tribal music from Colombia.Here it really started, the music brought out the effects of the mushrooms intensively, multicolors patterns where flowing everywhere, mosaïcs, spirals, Imagery was very intense and it would not change whether my eyes were closed or open, exactly the same and then it began, I felt an incredible power surrounding me, I was no more in my bedroom, I don't know were I was, but it was not my bedroom. I penetrated another dimension filled with love and peace. I started breathing « in rythm » with the music and after a few minutes I felt like one of my chakra in the adomen was WIDE OPEN. Regularly, around every 30 seconds, my abdomen was plunging at the level of this chakra, and at those times I was feeling incredible levels of energies penetrating me, this was pure positive energy, pure love. with the music blasting in my ears, I was feeling like at the end of each song I had passed another level of consciousness and knowledge, it was leading me further and further, I was feeling like I was in a passage or initiation ritual.

At the tapes ended I lighted on the light, I was wiped out but still very clear in my mind, no confusion at all.

I decided to take the Psylocibes cyanescens and did so.

Know that the light was on and the music off the visual aspect was more intense than before but I realized that I was no more alone, something was here, « It » was here. Love peace and compassion were surrounding me, they were almost palpable, it was incredible, I was in total bliss.. But this was so much love, so strong bliss that I exploded in tears of love and compassion. I cried and cried again but it was so gooooooood. Waves of love were submerging, spirits of peace and knowlege were floating around me wispering and stroking me. My face was covered by tears and from my nose was flowing huge quantities of sea-water tasting (not like tears, really like sea-water) nasal mucus, it was flowing so much that I took a trash and kept my nose over it, mucus flowing and flowing again, I was unvoluntary breathing in a very strange, way very very deeply and noisy (I've never breathed like this, or maybe at the moment of my birth, but I don't « remember »), and noisy (1) . It was the power of the music (I've been listening to colombian music on my stereo for the rest of the journey) along that of the mushroom, I was undulating and breathing in rythm with « something » in the music,

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another kind of rythm but inaudible. I told my self that I was undergoing an healing session. And then I remembered that P. Tampanensis were attibuted some healing properties (but it was not specified wich one), and during the first 3 hours I get to pee a lot of times (and still after), like I was purging my self, and then now, my nose was flowing again and again as it was purging and then it Hit me BAM !, that's it !

It's for dope ! ? It cures from dope ! ? IT CURES FROM DOPE ADDICTION ! ! ! ! ! !

and BAAAAAAAAAAAAAM It hit me again, but really much much stronger, more love, more peace and compassion, more bliss it was stronger and stronger. And I was crying stronger and stronger, but it was still so goooood. I remember me telling it several times « haaaa It's so gooood ». I felt like I would have been rolling in the « hand of God », I felt « Him » gently remodelling me, I was crying of love for my friends, thinking to those, addicted to heroin, and I found something which cures it! I wanted to give them some, to go back to the seller buy other mushrooms and give them to my friends. Levels of energy flooding in me were still stronger and stronger, I was progressively going through newer and higher states of consciousness and knowledge and then « It » talked to me (no words or sounds in my head but much like an insight, although it was a very different kind of insight compared to those I've had this night or other times) and It made me realise that I'm able of really more than I thought, that I know really much more than I thought (in entheogenic plants and their use), that I have to go on learning again and again about it, that I could help people with it. I felt that this presence was very gentle and only want good things to me, It made me understand that I was not the same anymore, I died and was reborn.

My life had took a new way

This lasted about 4 hours, around 4h o'clock in the morning I felt the effect of P. Tampanensis were going away, and I was more feeling the effects of the Hawaian mushroom. Strong on the body, big burst of very strong energy were coming up from my abdomen, I felt like somebody would have been crushing me in his hand (but no pain at all). I was sitting on my bed, moving, balancing like a cobra and moaning. It was pushing very strong, and I was not feeling so clearminded anymore (phil. St. Were really off). The rushes were hard on the body, but it was only rushes, no effects associated with it. Although those rushes, I felt that the journey was finished so I decided to go to sleep. At the very moment I closed my eyes, I was sleeping.

The day after, I woke up feeling very mind-cleared, although physically a hangover was present all the day and some again the other day after.But the energy wich was surrounding me that night was still here, I felt it him me and I still feel it more than one month after. It's not overpowering uncontrolable energy. It's a cool and positive one which gives me a lot more self confidence than I used to have, I'm filled with hapiness.,life and love are flooding in me it's the pure positive energy of LIFE I'm blessed with, so niiiiice. Total harmony with LIFE

The day after the journey, a fried of mine came to see me, and he proposed me some heroin, I refused it. And I refused again, several other times since, with absolutely no hesitation and no regret. I was still feeling physical withdrawal symptoms, but mentally it was sure over, NO MORE HEROIN, EVER ! ! !(2)

Because of the physical symptoms which were still disturbing, I had to take some buprenorphine (very , very little doses), but this I wanted to stop it again. I went back to Dutchland 3 weeks after this journey and bought some other Phil. Stones. There I took half a dose (6-7 grams fresh) alone. It was still very cool, great mind clarity, but (sure) less stronger. Eye closed imagery was really beautifull (3) . But it was more a recreationnal trip as I wanted it to be, I spend most of the journey hitting the streets of the Red Light District. The day after, I didn't felt the need to take some buprenorphine and I didn't want to take some. The other days were the same, it was finally over. I needed no more buprenorphine. I was free of dope, finally.

I was trying to quit dope from the beginning of the year (5 months), but all my friends are in the dope, and it's very difficult to refuse dope when some body give you some. But i had the will to quit dope, I really wanted to stop, and « psilohuasca » gave me the necessary mentally strength to do so, but I'm almost sure that it acted on a biological level too, but which one?

More than one month is gone since I stopped dope, I just took one time a line of heroin with some cocaine (4) , just to see how I would react. I used to LOVE Speedball. I enjoyed the effect, but as soon

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as the coke was off, BWARF, awfull, I sure didn?t enjoy the heroin effect, really. So it?s cool, don?t need it anymore, don?t LIKE it anymore !

I decided to test Phil . Stones on one of my addicted friends to verify wether it really cures (mentally, and biologically as it blew out my physical symptoms of addiction in two trial) from dope addiction (5) . It?s not the case. Even if he took out positive things from his journey (2.5 grams Peg. Harmala + 4 gr. Phil. Stones), even if he realised that heroin is big shit and that he had to stop, he?s still on heroin. He has not the strength to stop, and HE DOESN'T WANT TO ! ! !

I've ever had a lot of respect for those substances, but now I have far more respect for them, really.

DOSE: 0.25 oz oral Mushrooms

BODY WEIGHT: 140 lb

From the first time I did shrooms until now... its like a totally different drug. I always did them with my one buddy rob, at his apartment. The first time I did them it was cool had a great body buzz and everything and anything was really funny. After I did them the first time I was instantly hooked, the same thing that happens to me on any drug I like. I started doing them 3 to 4 times a week. Once I would get outta work I would eat about an eighth to a quarter. And when I was on them I didn’t care about anything. I could never stand still always dragging my buddy out anywhere that popped in my head. We would go to places anything between like pool halls or grocery stores. Anything to keep me out there surrounded by different things.

Now we get to this one day. Its just like any other day except I got a girlfriend a couple days ago. She said she was going to a party and of course I didn’t care one bit. As long as I had my shrooms you could of told me my father died and I wouldn’t of cared. So me and about four other people take them and like all the other times once it kicks in I get all hyper and cant stop laughing. By now when I take shrooms I get a lot of visuals. I’ve heard people say you don’t get many or any at all on shrooms. Bull shit. I was at the point, maybe from doing them every other day. I got more visuals then I did from the time I took 5 hits of some great acid. My buddy rob says instead of running around town or blaring the music and turning on all the lights (my buddys apartment was a trippers heaven… we had blacklights with 3d posters, x-mas lights, disco lights, and other shit) lets just turn on the pink lamp and watch “pink floyd’s the wall” video. Now I had never watched this nor did I like to watch movies while I was tripping unless it was alice in wonderland. So we do that and watching this movie is totally bringing me down.

It seemed like we were watching it forever, but in reality it was only like 20 minutes. So the movie starts depressing me and really freaking me out bad. Don’t know why, it just was. So I got up and went to the bedroom, went in the closet and closed the door. If you’ve ever heard someone say “take one step back to take two steps forward”, that’s what I intended to do. Its always worked before. But I guess I zoned out or passed out or something. Because finally rob opens the door and yells “mike!” I jumped up out of the clothes I had somehow buried myself in and gave him a big hug, not knowing that this trip was going to ruin the fun I had with shrooms forever. I wouldn’t go back into the living room. I got a boombox and a pink bulb and sat in the bedroom listening to my music the rest of that trip. (My favorite music while on shrooms was “red hot chili peppers.. One hot minute”)

After that experience I stopped doing mushrooms. For about two months I was in a horrible state of depression, and severe paranoia. I worked in a big place, the detroit metropolitian airport. So I was pretty much surrounded by people I didnt know. Luckily the job I had didnt require any supervision and I had no one to report to. My paranoia was so bad that while at work I would find a room (stock room) that no one was in and cry. When I would be working I was so afraid of every body that I saw. I felt that everyone was staring at me and I kid you not I thought that they were all after me. People noticed that I wasnt the same, and the quality of my work was by far not my best effort. I was written up all the time for leaving work before the shift ended without permission, or not showing up period. Luckily before any of this happened I proved myself an excellent worker and regardless of all my new faults my managers kept me there because they knew something just wasnt right with me.

To this day I can't trust anyone. I am very frightened when I even have to go to the grocery store by myself. But after the depression I decided to try shrooms again and when I do I'll get hyper for about 20 minutes then I get all bummed out and depressed. The only thing I can do to make me happy on

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shrooms now is being alone with my music. Now I don’t know if this is because of the movie, or maybe it was coincidence. Maybe it was because I had just got a girlfriend and cared about her a lot and before her I didn’t give a shit about anything at all. But something made that happen. Some of you might think that it was“divine intervention”. If that was the case... Good job god because after trying to have fun on shrooms about 10 more times... I don’t bother to waste my money anymore.

DOSE: oral Mushrooms (dried)

BODY WEIGHT: 180 lb

The day I met my brain started out like any other lazy Sunday. I had already given a trusted friend of mine a couple hundred bucks to set aside it's worth in mushrooms when he got his next shipment. This time he said it was the last time he was going to get any from this guy and that he had saved the best for last. That day my friend called me up and told me to drive out to his apartment to get these damn shrooms before he ate them all. It sounded like a fair enough arangement to me so I told him I'd be there in an hour.

Not five minutes after getting off the phone with him, my girlfriend came to me and told me straight out that she wanted to get some kind of high in the near future, so I thought to myself,'Hey, this works out pretty well, as long as she doesn't freak out'. She had never tried any kind of hallucinogenic before, and I had only tried mushrooms in smaller doses that just made me a little giggly and weird in the head. I asked my friend if it was cool if we babysat her through her first trip and made sure she didn't run screaming from the house, and he didn't seem to mind too much.

Once we got to his place, his roommate and he were nursing their trip hangovers with a six pack and some vitamin supplements. We didn't waste any time. I never even asked him what the exact amount was once he showed me the bag, it was big, and it was bursting at the seams. They were whole mushrooms, but they were dried. I had heard that dry shrooms didn't do the job quite as well as fresh, but I figured that with the amount that I held in my eager little hands, it wasn't going to make a noticeable difference. I started out eating them two or three at a time, and my girlfriend started in shortly after I did. I tried to eat more than she did because I outweighed her by about 35 pounds, but she was doing her damndest effort to catch up with me. I managed to down about two thirds of the bag in the end, which I thought was fair because I'm bigger than she is and I paid for the damn things.

We sat around for an hour or so and the first wave snuck up on us, we were laughing and giggling and noticing the strangest movements out of the corners of our eyes. Then the colors started to glow with that intensity that you only get with pupils the size of dimes. I spent a good amount of time looking at pictures from a vacation my friend and I went on to Maui one year. The beaches were made out of a billion people in the biggest orgy the earth had ever known. It was interesting. We all three of us went out on the balcony for a little while to just chill out and bullshit for a while. My girlfriend was having the time of her life, she later told me that she had turned herself into a tree to get birds to land on her so that she could steal their powers of flight. She was playing with a strip of white cloth she had cut from the bottom of her T-shirt before we left the house.

My friend started talking to me about all these people he knew in Florida that were going to hook him up with all kinds of business if he ever went back. I started to see all of these people that he knew as a giant bubble that briefly intersected the bubble of all the people I knew through him. It was a new concept of visualizing the complex social connections between people I knew, and the people they knew, and so on and so forth. As I stood there I could feel a small nagging hint of paranoia and despair that just wouldn't leave me alone.

I should have known then and there that I just eaten way too many mushrooms for my own good. I was simply not in the right frame of mind to deal with what I was about to experience. I can also say with some measure of confidence that no one could ever put themselves in the right frame of mind to deal what was about to happen me. Once I started peaking, all I could do was sit on the couch and close my eyes. A huge pattern of organic shapes were slowly cascading down the insides of my

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eyelids, with little diamonds of reality poking through every now and again. Everything I had ever regretted doing in my entire life slowly played itself out again through these little shining specks of history. Every moment of every miserable act of shame in my entire experience played out, it was not pleasant at all.

Then came the astounding realizations about all of my problems in life and how to fix them, the only thing I can remember from any of them is thinking that when I come down, none of this is going to make sense. That and that my severe aversion to pain as a child, and my later embracing pain as a means to make myself FEEL something were stemmed of my long standing fear of my own death. Ever since the night, and following weeks, that I grasped some small concept of what I beleived at the time would be the experience of death, I had not let myself think about it and would do anything to avoid bringing up that memory. I was ten years old when I did this.

I count myself lucky that the memories didn't come back in full force as I sat on that couch, just the realization that they were the root of many of my current personality traits. We peaked for a couple of hours, then the waves slowly receded one by one until we were entrenched in the breezy, empty feeling that stuck with us for the rest of the day. My girlfreind and I drove home.

[Erowid Note: Driving while intoxicated or tripping is dangerous and irresponsible because it endangers other people. Don't do it!]

That took about two hours for a fourty-five minute drive. We played around in the shower for a while, we kept jumping in and out of the water and changing the temperature to try and surprise ourselves. We thought about trying to have sex, but we got the feeling that we'd forget what we were doing in the middle of things and should probably just find something else to occupy our time.

We spent about four hours sitting around the house, losing our respective trains of thought. We came up with all kinds of wonderfull plans for the rest of the day, and promptly forgot them. I thought the worst had passed me, the paranoia was gone now that we were back somewhere safe. I'd managed to forget about all of my stunning revelations about my own failures as a human being and the roots of all of my bad habits. I was finally just having a good time. After hours of debate and deliberation, we finally pulled ourselves together enough to try and walk to the store, we were getting along pretty well until we walked up a hill that allowed us to see the sunset.

I drank in the incredible awe and majesty of the play of colors and light that results from our planet spinning in circle. I remember staring directly at the sun. As big as my pupils were at the time it's no small wonder that I can still see anything at all, but I stared at the damn thing because I had never seen anything in nature so simply beautiful before in my life. I had felt the pain of longing for something so perfect and pure and beautiful that I knew I could never achieve before. But the emotions hit me with such intensity that time that as we continued walking to the store, I began sobbing uncontrollably. I tried to stop, I tried to stop the tidal wave of pure emotion that was crashing down on me in the middle of the sidewalk. My girlfriend took me home.

Once we were back in the house I layed down on the living room floor and refused to move. She layed down next to me and kept asking me if I was alright. It was at that moment that I experienced something that I know I can never forget. I have always been somewhat depressed, and at the same time, very high-strung. For as long as I can remember I have suffered from panic attacks, highs and lows that got so intense that they left me physically exhausted at the end of the day, and occasionally, bouts of depression that had lasted months in the past. I think the only thing that allowed me to live through it was my deeply rooted fear of death. So much so that I never even let myself briefly entertain the idea of suicide.

I had always described it to a very select few people as having a part of my body that aches constantly, but I can't point to it on my body, I can't pinpoint this mysterious organ that is causing me this unending dull ache that no amount of painkillers or binge drinking can numb. As I layed there on the floor trying to force myself to reassure my girlfreind that I was going to be ok, I suddenly became very aware of that same dull ache. The only difference between this time and any other, is that this time the ache began to get worse and worse. I could feel it welling up inside me, making it's way outward through every inch of my body.

My girlfriend was just laying on the floor with me, holding me and trying to comfort me in any way she could. I remember opening my eyes and looking at her with only one thought on my mind,'Please make this stop'. She started crying with me for what seemed like an entire lifetime. It was probably

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more like two or three minutes. She told me that she could see the terror and panic on my face as I silently plead for some kind of release. Then she said the panic and terror gave way to a look of pure and absolute pain. Immediately after we both stopped crying, the only thing she said to me was that I gave her my pain for a brief moment, and it was the one of the worst things she had ever felt.

This was not by any stretch of the word a,'happy' experience, but I'm still glad that I did it, and that she was there to share it with me. I now have one other person in the world that knows how I really feel. I have also shared in her experiences through different means. She has been raped several times, and I am the only person to whom she has confided all the details and memories. That about sums up my run in with my own brain, and the massive bag of mushrooms that introduced us. Although the trip itself was one of the most painfull things I have ever experienced, I came away from it with a stronger bond with another human being than I had ever thought possible.

DOSE: T+ 0:00 13 g oral Mimosa tenuiflora (tea) T+ 0:00 3 g oral Syrian Rue (tea) T+ 16:00 1.5 g oral Mushrooms - P. cubensis (tea) T+ 16:00 15 g oral Banisteriopsis caapi (tea)

BODY WEIGHT: 120 lb

Bear with me, as I piece together the shattered parts of my ego and write this report.

T+0:00: Mimosa hostilis 13 grams + Syrian rue 3 grams

T+16:00 Yellow Banisteriopsis caapi 15 grams + Psilocybe cubensis 1.5 grams

Age/Sex: 22, maleWeight: 120 poundsYear of experience: 2007

Previous experience:I am very experienced with a variety of psychedelic drugs, having used a variety of tryptamines and phenethylamines. Mushrooms are the ally I am most comfortable with and I had combined 1 to 3 grams of mushrooms with 1 to 3 grams of syrian rue with positive results several times in the past. I had one prior experience mixing mushrooms and caapi (Erowid experience ID = 57698). I had attempted the Mimosa/Rue mix once before using 2 grams of rue and 5 grams of Mimosa bark but this had proved very weak and left little impression on me.

No medications or other plants/herbs had been used in the previous week except for Cannabis and yerba mate which are an all-day-every-day thing for me usually. As a precaution only MAOI compatible food was eaten for two days prior and one day after the combined experiences. Consumption of yerba mate was limited to two cups daily during this period as I didn’t want to risk developing a headache as some people have described.

The experience (written in the lingering aftermath):Yesterday already seems like a world away so I’d better write it down now before it fades. I had worked up the courage and felt psychologically ready to enter the world of Ayahuasca analogue brews. Under the advise of another member I was going to use the combination of syrian rue seeds and mimosa hostilis root bark.

A friend had recommended the combination of syrian rue seeds and Mimosa hostilis root bark. He told me '20 grams of mimosa, cooked three times, and possibly up to 10 grams of rue 'tea' boiled down to one shot. Very intense, and I think a good starting dose.' At this point I should mention that this is FAR ABOVE what anyone who is not very extremely experienced with psychedelics should contemplate taking. He was recommending this dosage to me as the full, immersive, mind-shattering kind of 'introduction'.

After reading some freaky reports of people apparently tripping balls on as little as eight grams, I decided to scale down the dosages somewhat. This might have been a mistake, as during the experience I felt no fear and could gave gone deeper. There was this little voice in the back of my

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head that said 'Okay, that looks like a lot of mimosa bark in the pot, that should be enough'? Ignore that voice. As Terence McKenna says, when in doubt, double the dosage.

I ended up making a brew of 13 grams of shredded Mimosa hostilis with 3 grams of syrian rue seeds lovingly sprinkled into the boiling concoction. I boiled the plant materials twice, adding some peppermint and stevia the second time to help with the taste (haha, nothing’s gonna cover the taste of this stuff!). I combined the two extracts and boiled it down to around 2/3 of a cup of the most vile tasting purple alien blood ever. Tongue shudderingly bitter. Every sip screamed 'POISON'.I combined the two extracts and boiled it down to around 2/3 of a cup of the most vile tasting purple alien blood ever. Tongue shudderingly bitter. Every sip screamed 'POISON'.Drinking the brew took an amount of determination and around half an hour. Although there was definate stomach tightness from drinking the brew, it never evolved into an actual nauseated feeling, and I didn’t purge thoughout the experience.

It was around the ten minute mark, when I was only about half way through the cup of tea, that I began to feel the effects come on. From there it was all steeply uphill to la-la land. After 20 minutes my sense of time stopped working, and around thirty minutes I laid down in my bed because I was totally fucked. There was an intense dissociation, I could feel my physical body being dissolved and digested by the drug, like I was blowing away in the wind particle by particle. Pure energy poured through me, and I found I could control literally every thought, every emotion, every slight muscle response in my body.

The rush was so intense I would keep involuntarily clenching up my muscles as if to resist the push of the drug. Then I would notice my clenched muscles and consciously relax them all, reaching very deep states of content. My thoughts flashed through my mind in waves, and I’d see each thought as a fleeting, moving flash of colour in my mind. Open eye visuals consisted of a crawling motion and tracers when I waved my hands. The OEVs I found very much like mushrooms but the feeling of this drug was quite unlike mushrooms. The DMT gave a very high frequency buzzing feeling that I found more reminiscent of the cosmic LSD than the earthy mushrooms.

I began to come down somewhat from the peak of the high. It took me about fifteen minutes just to figure out the time. First step was remembering the current time.'It’s 9:00 now' I would repeat to myself.

So I thought about this for a long time, and in the mean time went to the washroom and came back to my room. I had now progressed to knowing that I had ingested the brew at 7:30. Not only that, I stil remembered that it was 9:00 now. Quite an accomplishment, remembering two numbers at once! After a further several minutes of thought I came to the brilliant conclusion that an hour and a half had passed.

But wait? All that in only an hour and a half? It didn’t seem possible. The time distortion had been so severe, I couldn’t accept at first that so little time had passed. I’d set aside several hours to be high and now less than two hours had passed and I’d already been blasted into space and come back to earth. It was perplexing. On mushrooms I’d just be peaking, and here I was coming into a very pleasant plateau instead.

There was an almost ridiculously heady euphoria at this stage. Like a good dose of MDMA, except of course for the visuals. I was feeling very very empathetic and at this stage concluded 'This drug is nothing but love.'

For another couple hours the experience tailed off, and it was clear to me that the DMT peak was long gone, and it was only really the rue I was feeling now. Rue’s a very interesting drug, it seems very strongly antidepressant. All the fear and anxiety circuits in my brain were just switched off.

I came to thinking about the differences between rue and caapi. One of the things this Mimosahuasca brew impressed on me is that both the Mimosa and the Rue are male entities. They aren’t particularly comforting, or nurturing. It may be a rough ride. But there’s this sense of total power, in a testosterone/adrenaline kind of way. Total exhileration, inflation, power trip. These plants are not here to cuddle with me, but if I can flow with them its an incredible rush. The Mimosahuasca brew struck me as a very powerful drug – a drug with healing properties, yes, but still a drug.

To me caapi seems a much more medicinal plant. Caapi is going to heal me, and she is a motherly, caring, nurturing plant (although like any good mother she’s not going to hold me back when the

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stream of life gets too intense). Rue doesn’t mind if I’m just looking to get high. Caapi is more demanding of respect than the rue. On the comedown of this trip I smoked a lot of potent ganja and some hash as well, and this really brought out the euphoric side of the brew.

I had a rather bad sleep that night, I don’t know if I was ever really asleep or just spent the whole night tossing and turning in a kind of waking dream state.

Surprisingly, though I felt reasonably rested and in a good mood in the morning. The afterglow from rue brews usually lasts a day or two for me. I went to a rather exhausting lab session, and when I came home decided more exploration was in order. The Mimosahuasca had raised my confidence (and arrogance?) levels regarding MAOI bearing plants. I was going to take caapi today, and I thought I could handle it. I thought I was stronger than this drug, and that the previous night had demonstrated that. I WAS WRONG.I was going to take caapi today, and I thought I could handle it. I thought I was stronger than this drug, and that the previous night had demonstrated that. I WAS WRONG.

I boiled up 15 grams of yellow caapi with 1.5 grams of Psilocybe cubensis stems. The plant materials were boiled twice with peppermint and stevia added to the second boiling just as I had done with the Mimosahuasca. The Psilohuasca brew came out a funny creamy-yellow colour. The taste was definitely better than the Mimosahuasca. The caapi has a somewhat unsettling alkaloidal aftertaste but it much more tolerable than the Mimosa. It just tastes like really terrible tea. I was really quite curious as to how the brew would compare to the Mimosahuasca, and also hoping that the MAOIs would take care of any tolerance issues dosing two days in a row (in retrospect – no concerns on this point).

Again I drank the brew in about half an hour but this time it look longer to come on. My sense of time remained intact for a good 45 minutes after starting to drink the tea. This was around 12:30 and I knew I had to go back to the university around 3:30 to mark some final lab data (we were running TLC plates and my group was relying on me to come in that afternoon when they had finished running and mark the positions on the TLC paper before the signals faded). Somehow I thought I had enough time to trip balls and still come down and go do this lab stuff** Doing too many psychedelics can mess up your sense of time

Maybe it was because I had tripped and come back in two hours the day before, but somehow I was expecting to be relatively back to reality within three hours. Silly rabbit! Around 1:30 I looked at the clock and thought 'Okay, I’m totally tripping right now but that’s okay, it’s still two hours before I have to go.' But instead of slacking off, this trip kept getting deeper and deeper. I was getting into some really deep trains of thought, rather depressing ones actually. CEVs of plane dogfights from WWII and elite SS soldiers marching in lines. I felt all my social obligations and expectations to be shackles on me, and wondered why I forced myself to be miserable so much of the time just to please other people. Suddenly it’s 3:30 and I’m tripping harder than ever, what am I going to do?

The caapi vine was making it very clear to me that THE HEALING ISN’T OVER YET. All I wanted to do is lay there and try to keep sane as I watched the ceiling writhe and twist. But no, I had to start screwing myself up to going out into the world and dealing with shit. I began to get quite anxious. After a while I noticed a thick foamy spittle in my mouth, which about three seconds later became an intense need to vomit. Not that there was really anything in my stomach, but I did manage to throw up/spit up/blow out my nose vast amounts of foamy mucous (yes isn’t that pleasant). Alright, fine, so I’m getting rid of all the accumulated poisons in my body. Well and good. But I’m supposed to be finishing my lab right now! Panic.

A second wave of purging comes over me. After it passes I see this little dead ladybug that’s been on my bathroom floor for a couple days. But wait! It’s moving, wriggling it’s legs around! I’m so messed up that for a while I actually entertain the notion that I somehow brought this ladybug back to life. So I’m thinking about this ladybug, helpless on it’s back, should I flip it over? Should I give it another chance at life? I look closer. It’s not alive at all. Rather there’s another bug chewing it’s heart out. The wriggling legs I saw were the legs of a different bug entirely. This freaked me out and disgusted me a lot, but was a very good metaphor for how I was feeling at that exact moment in time. Like the world was a filthy insect chewing away at my vital organs.

So I finally get myself together and leave the house, another 45 minutes have passed what with the puking my guts out and all. Before leaving I look in the mirror and see my massive pupils and flesh

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white and pasty, drained of blood. Great. Everything should go smoothly, as long as no one looks as my saucer-sized pupils. I still can’t believe I’m about to go into university while +++ tripping and just having purged on Psilohuasca. I must be crazy.

On the walk over I’m still screwing myself up to what I have to do, it becomes a game almost. There was an undeniable thrill at the thought of trying to navigate a normal every-day learning situation whilst having one of the most intense trips I’d had in a long time. I mean, I’ve done lots of things whilst high on psychedelics. Just never biochemistry lab stuff. There’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to do it. I just can’t fuck up. It’ll be really bad if I fuck up. I imagined suddenly puking a bunch of Psilohuasca all over my TLC plate. Yes, that would be hard to explain to my lab partners, wouldn’t it?

I have to cross this overpass with a train station just before I get to the University, and I’m surpised to see one of my lab partners walking across the overpass at exactly the same time as me, but in the opposite direction.She waves me over and says 'You aren’t going to check the lab data now, are you?'Alright, just play it cool, I say to myself. No one else knows what’s going on inside you’re head.

'Yes, I’m going there now' I reply to her.She explains that she had just gone and checked the data, so that I don’t need to go now.

What? I don’t have to go? Hallelujah! My prayers have been answered!

Now I know how hard it is not to tell this cute girl you’re tripping balls on Psilohuasca, but just keep your mouth shut. She doesn’t need to know. I’d be a lot of hassle to explain. It’s too difficult to explain the concept of psilohuasca even when straight. Plus then she might think you’re some kind of freak. Who does a bunch of psychedelics and then goes to lab still tripping anyways? What’s wrong with me? Does she know I’m on drugs? I think she knows. Well maybe not. I say goodbye to her and head off before making a fool out of myself.

So now I’m walking home, feeling very relieved, and kind of thinking that the caapi just 'arranged' things so that I wouldn’t have to go into the university. I mean, what are the chances that my lab partner would spontaneously decide to check the data that I was supposed to be gathering, and not only that but I would run into her just after she checked the data, thus saving my poor schizophrenic mind from having to deal with it? Synchronicity at its finest.

I end up going for a walk in a park near my house because I’m still tripping very hard and walking is calming me down a little bit. There was this puddle of murky milky brown water flowing out of a parking lot and into the road. I spent a while standing and watching the beautiful swirling patterns made by the flow of the silty water. Hopefully no one was watching me as I probably looked pretty stupid completely dazzled and enthralled by a scummy puddle of water.

I’m walking past this elementary school and these five kids start giggling. You know, the 'lets try really hard not to laugh at this person as they go by' kind of giggling. Maybe I looked funny. I think I gave them the biggest contact high of their lives, because the closer I got the more and more hysterical their laughter became. Five kids killing themselves laughing at me whilst I’m tripping my ass off was a bit much to handle. What should I do? Well, I could just ignore them, pretend I can’t here. That’s what an adult should do, right? Instead I decided to throw a snowball at them. This only resulted in another wave of hysterical giggling and a couple snow balls half-heartedly thrown back at me.

'You suck! You call that a throw!' I yell back at them

Then I feel really weird. I’m insulting children and having a snowball fight whilst tripping. Is this what normal people do? Definitely not.

I continue walking and there’s this feeling that I’ve regressed to infancy. I was nothing but a big baby. To further this notion, I hear a baby screaming. This fat lady is walking down the block pushing her kid in a stroller, and the kid is bawling and bawling without end. I mean literally for five minutes I watched this lady plodding along, her infant screaming, clearly audible an entire field away. It was surreal. Don’t you want to try and comfort your child? Are you hoping that by letting him cry now, his batteries will wind down?

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I was feeling so many intense emotions at once I didn’t know what to do with myself. I half wanted to die, because there was so much destruction all around me that was caused by humans. Senseless destruction. Like this area of trees I enjoy going to, but a lot of stupid stoners hang out there. They come and they break big branches and limbs off the trees for no real reason, just for some stupid entertainment because they are drunk and stoned. So the trees are scarred, and bleeding and wounded, and some even have spray paint graffiti on them. It’s no longer the comforting clean natural place it once was, where I could smoke a bowl under a spruce tree standing up, with the branches coming down to ground level all around me. Now all the lower branches are snapped off.

The other half of me felt more intensely alive than ever. Life, squared, cubed, to the ninth degree. Being so intensely alive that every breath hurts to take. The late afternoon sun was warm and comforting. I thought about the sun, and whether it could be considered to be God. Is the sun powerful enough to be God, I asked. To which the response was 'No, he’s gone behind a cloud.'

Seeing as the sun was behind a cloud I began to get rather chilly and headed home. It was now around 4 and a half hours since beginning to drink the tea. I was still +++ tripping, but definitely beginning to repair. I didn’t trust myself with any food yet, but after coming home I warmed up and began to slowly drink a cup of yerba mate. I passed on an offer of dinner with the excuse I was feeling kind of sick, which I suppose was true in a way.

It is now seven hours after ingestion and I’m mostly back to normal again. I feel very weak and shaky though, probably partly from the lack of food. But the caapi + mushrooms was not a recreational experience, I’m shaking now because it took me so far out. I feel I’ve subjected myself to rather severe stress today.

Was it a good idea taking the Psilohuasca today? No. Am I glad I took it? Yes.Did I have a sufficiently deep experience this time? Almost too deep. I went right over the cataract and flailed around on the other side, staring back to the calm and placid reality I’d so willingly smashed.

Thanks for reading.

DOSE: 7 g oral Mushrooms - P. cubensis (dried) smoked Cannabis (plant material)

BODY WEIGHT: 180 lb

Alright here it goes.... it was the summer after I graduated high school and boy was I letting loose. I partied pretty much everyday up until this point and I didn't have a care in the world. A few friends and myself really wanted to do something out of this world so we decided a trip to the Hookaville festival at this place called Nelson’s Ledges would be perfect. Hookaville was a three day hippie festival which consisted of many concerts being held with headshop tents set up all over the place and drugs of all sorts being sold and consumed by many. Up until this point in my drug career I had experience only with alcohol, nicotine, oxycodone, xanax, marijuana and only one time I had a very mild mushroom experience where I ate very little barely feeling the effects. My other friends were a bit more experienced that I so I tried to take their advice when it came to enjoying the experience to its fullest.

So we were off, it was the middle of the summer and I was elected the driver since I had a fairly large-sized SUV, which could carry all of our camping supplies since we were going to be spending the night. There were 5 of us total, me, Nick, Bill, Murphy, and Tony. We brought along with us drinks, cigarettes, lots of beef jerky, a stereo, and a bunch of chairs for our voyage. Tony had a ton of money in hopes of bringing back a lot of party favors since they would be fairly cheap at the festival.

We left at roughly 1:00 p.m. and it took almost 2 hours to reach our final destination. During our trip to the festival, my friend Nick pulled out an eighth of mushrooms, which nobody knew he had and started munching them while we were driving there just in case we couldn’t find anything useful during the festival. We all had a good laugh and were in suspense for what we were about to be witnessing. When we arrived there was a booth where we had to pay $40 each to enter the campsite and get our car searched. They required us to sign in our names which we all used fake ones. Nick was tripping at this point and he signed in his name as “MIKE JONES” in all capital letters and I had a good laugh about that one.

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Once inside we realized we should have came earlier or on the first day of the festival because it was absolutely packed to the maximum. There were cars, trailers, campsites, and huge mobile homes all over the place. It took almost an hour to find a good camping spot to park the car, but we actually found a nice one which was some what hidden from the main parking sites. We unloaded the car, pitched our tent, made a fire and decided we should make friends with our neighbors. They were really cool so we all felt we were going to have a great time. We decided at this point that it would be wise to make our surrounding familiar to us so all of us set out to check out the park while it was still light outside.

We realized at this moment in our journey through the festival that we were surrounded by hippies and people all around us were selling weed out in the open with no fear of police (since there weren’t any) or getting robbed or anything. We figured this was pretty awesome so we were no longer afraid of making any purchases, small or large. We came across a bunch of head shop tents that were selling pipes and bongs and all sorts of awesome stuff.

At this point we decided to split up into groups to find the mushrooms we had been looking for. Since there were only 5 of us, Bill and Murphy went back into the woods to find the hippies, while me, Nick and Tony stayed in the headshop tents. All of a sudden it started to rain so we were basically stuck in the tent where Nick bought a really nice piece for cheap. He was tripping hard at this point and couldn’t stop staring at his new glass. It wasn’t so bad being stuck in the tent because the owner had lit up 2 or 3 joints and started passing them around. Very cool experience overall and we laughed that Bill and Murphy were stuck in the rain.

Once the rain stopped we figured it would be a good idea to regroup back at my car so we headed back and while on the way this shirtless guy ran up to us saying how he had X and chocolate mushrooms. He smelled terrible as if he had been running around for a week without a shower. We bought a few chocolates just so he would leave us alone and we were back on our way. We checked to see if the chocolates were fake so we cracked one open and could see the shroom pieces inside. He said there were 2 grams in each one which seemed way too low of a dose. I wanted this to be a memorable trip and I felt fearless (bad mistake).

Once we made it back to my car and all 5 of us were together once more everything seemed pretty cool. We each showed each other what we had found on our journey through the wilderness and I was astounded at what Bill and Murphy had found. They pulled out 2 large bags of mushrooms, which were distinctly different but nonetheless very large. They said there was a quarter in each bag which seemed unlikely since they were so large. Murphy decided he didn’t want to eat that many so I traded him $30 and my 2 chocolates for his large back of the bluish mushrooms I had ever seen before. I thought to myself “Wow this is going to be great” (bad mistake #2).

Murphy ate his chocolates while Bill went to show Tony where he got all the mushrooms since the guy had many more. Nick sat in my beach chair tripping balls but completely harmless nonetheless. Now at this point my excitement got the best of me, I sat in the driver’s seat of my car, put my cell phone, keys, wallet and everything else in my glove compartment but left the windows open so we wouldn’t get locked out. I started to gobble down the mushrooms. I didn’t just eat them, I shoved them down and was loving it. When I was almost at the bottom of the bag Bill came up to me and said hey dude let me get some, I was feeling greedy but I gave him the rest of the bag since he was a good friend. That was probably the best thing I did all day.

All of a sudden within 10 minutes after ingesting the mushrooms I felt the first of the effects. I was sweating hardcore. Not just hardcore though, the worst sweat I had ever broken out into in my life. I wrestled in high school and a sauna couldn’t have made me sweat this much. I looked in the mirror and I could see the sweat bead up and fall off my face within seconds. I tried to shake this off but I couldn’t I felt my body going through a transformation, which I couldn’t put my finger on. I pondered what was happening to me since my first mushroom experience had not yielded this type of effect before.

I attempted to walk around, but I felt as if I were an infant walking for the first time. I felt like I never used my legs before. Nick was laughing hysterically at me and took pictures of me with his phone. I went to go sit back in my car so I could collect my thoughts. All of a sudden I turn around and Murphy is going thru the backseat looking for something. He says something to me but I can’t understand it because it sounded like he was talking backwards and even moving backwards like I was rewinding a videotape. This freaked me out and I was thought “Holy shit, what have I done.”

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I come out of the car and my friends try to calm me down. They are in somewhat of a panic because they don’t know what to do with me. They give me a cigarette and I reply “what’s a cigarette? What do I do with such a thing?” (I was a regular smoker). They give me a bowl with weed in it and I reply “What’s this? What’s Weed?” I really didn’t know what these objects were used for cause for some reason I felt above it all. I just felt like what’s the point of these materialistic things. All of a sudden I looked up at the sky and the trees had these patterns which were interweaving and moving very quickly. My eyes couldn’t keep up with the lucidity and movement of these patterns moving throughout the trees. I was astonished. I was befuddled. I was in utter shock. I had heard of people seeing things before, but I had no idea how intense it was.

At this point Nick got up out of his chair and started walking through the woods, me being an infant child once more decided to follow him through the woods where we came across a path. This path was basically the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland and once more I was astounded at what I was seeing. The flowers, trees and vines were growing all around us, Nick was basically dancing and I was just like “Oh my god, Nick are you seeing this stuff?” It was unreal, the clarity of everything was breath taking. Everything was breathing and growing with me.

Finally we made it back to the car where everyone was about to go leave and check out the concert going on. At this point I had my shirt off and felt like one with nature. I get back in my car and sit for awhile and at this point it felt like I started back at the beginning. Murphy came in the car looking for something and said the exact same thing he said before but it was backwards again and he was moving backwards again. This really freaked me out and I got out of the car saying “Where am I? What is this?” I had completely forgotten I had ate a shit load of mushrooms just 30minutes prior.

I couldn’t stop asking Murphy questions at this point since he was the closest friend I had there. Bill and Tony were nowhere to be found and Nick was back to sitting in his chair smoking something. I felt that Murphy was the marker for my experience so I asked him everything. I tried to collect myself, but soon I found out this would be impossible. I’ve read somewhere about ego death before, but this aspect had totally consumed me without my knowledge. I fought and fought to gather myself and get my personality and ego back but it was indeed impossible at this point. My ego was a 5 billion piece jigsaw puzzle and it had dropped on the floor and spread everywhere. I had to pick these pieces back up one at a time. And I assure you I tried my best.

“Murph, why am I thinking about Melissa so much?” (my girlfriend at the time) “Murph, what’s elite fitness?” (the gym I worked at). “Where are we?” “Where are we going?” Well at this point Murphy didn’t know what to do with me so he grabbed me and we started walking towards the concert area. We met up with Bill and Tony where Tony confirmed to us that he obtained a quarter pound of mushrooms and would be joining us shortly. I was awestruck. Since Murphy couldn’t’ answer my questions I felt like I was on this journey alone. I was the shirtless wonder of the festival. As we were walking I would go up to random strangers and flex in front of them as if I was at a bodybuilding show. Some would be like what is this crazy kid doing and others would be like nice muscles baby and after whatever they had said I would see their faces morph from strangers into a person from my past. People I had either forgotten or had not spoken to in a long time.

At this point I was tripping as hard as anyone could possibly trip. I was gone in the worst way, trying to pick of the pieces of my lost ego from wherever they laid. I kept wandering off the path speaking to random people as if I knew them because in a weird way I felt like I did. They all resembled people from my past and I couldn’t just walk the path to the concert. Murphy kept pulling me along and I tried my bet to keep up with him, but I was constantly wandering away from our destination. A small child approached me and to this day I am not sure if it was a hallucination or real, but the child took my hand and brought me to a van which once inside I realized it was the most trippy spectacle I had seen thus far. I was amazed by this van and how it resembled a replica 70’s VW wagon from Yellow Submarine or something.

Once again Murphy appeared and brought me back to the path. Strangers everywhere realized the condition I was in a tried to take advantage of it by selling me things that seemed spiritual by nature. I would converse with these people for some time and they believed they were making a sale when Murphy would appear once more and pull me away. At this point everyone was waving good bye to me and this made me feel somewhat uneasy. I remembered the end of the movie Big Fish when the father is dying and his son tells the story of when he’s going back home to the lake.

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All of a sudden I felt as if this was it. This was the point where I convinced myself that the matrix was real and I had taken the blue pill (the blue mushrooms) and was now using my senses for the first time. This new realization overtook me and I wouldn’t be making it anywhere near the concert although I began to hear the music blaring through the trees. I tried to collect myself once more and then I realized “Oh my god, this is my death, I’m on way back to the beginning, the alpha and the omega.”

Once again I wondered “Where am I?” “How did I get here?” I tried my best to remember this day and what had happened. I completely forgot about eating the mushrooms and all of a sudden convinced myself I was Donnie Darko. A year earlier I was involved in a near fatal car accident in which only a safety belt saved my life. I felt like I had cheated death back then and now was the time where I was being called back to it. I felt as if I didn’t learn my lesson from that accident and now I made a fatal mistake. I remembered that my friends and I were on our way to a festival and then my memory went blank. I didn’t remember if we had ever made it to our destination since my car was no longer in sight and I didn’t have anything on me except a pair of shorts and shoes.

Murphy kept telling me to come on dude lets go and I kept seeing a light at the end of the path. This scared me immensely and I decided I no longer wanted to go anywhere. I was afraid of the light and I tried my best to get away from it. I decided that since this was my time, I would just lay down in a puddle, in the middle of the path of mud and just lay there. I didn’t want to move any closer to the light and the sky just looked so beautiful. At this point I was pretty much left alone, I had no idea where Murphy went nor did I really care since it was my time to die, that was it. Horrible ideas started shooting through my head while I attempted to get a clue to what had happened. All I could think about was my past car accident and how I made the same mistake only this time nobody was restrained by a safety belt. I convinced myself that I had killed all of us on the way to the festival and that’s why my car and friends were nowhere to be found. I lay there in the puddle of mud while horrible ideas flooded my head once more. I saw ambulance lights all around the trees and people talking and beeps going off in the back round. I felt like I was in the hospital on my deathbed and there were surgeons running around trying to stop the insanity going on all around me.

All of a sudden someone told me to get up and for some reason I got up from my comfortable place in the mud and got onto a golf cart. Apparently this was a security vehicle of which I had no idea at the time. I was still hallucinating to a great degree. I was brought to a hippie campsite, which looked as if they had made their home at the ledges. It was a hippie family which I was now a part of, I kept shrieking saying how I was suppose to go to college and make my father proud but now I was destined to be part of this new hippie family for all of eternity. It was raining at this point and this is when I realized it was nightfall as well. I returned to thinking horrible thoughts and was having the most terrible trip of all at this point. I was consumed by all that horrible things I had done in the past, cheating, stealing, sleeping around on my girlfriend. I felt like I was being punished, this did not sit well with me so I stood up in a panic went back onto the path and was hallucinating like a mad man.

All of a sudden the hallucinations were too overwhelming and I started literally pissing my pants. The strangest part was that I didn’t even care because I was already soaking from the rain and just wanted it all to end. As I peed myself uncontrollably my entire field of vision melted in front of me and suddenly I realized where I was. I sat back down and someone put a towel over my back. I was still tripping hard at this point but was feeling slightly better since I had wet myself. I started reminiscing about all the horrible things I had done in the past and all the bad karma I had built up over the years. I felt as if I was in a confessional in church and the only thing that made me feel better was spilling my guts out to these complete strangers taking care of me. I swear they knew more about me then my parents did after that heart to heart and once everything was out.

After all my confessions had taken place I snapped back to reality was done tripping in a split second. It was as if I woke up from a deep sleep and felt extremely at peace and well rested. I got up and stood next to a man by the fire. It was the hippie man that took me in from the wilderness and I told him how grateful I was for saving me. He just kept saying its all good and we just understood each other without wasting words at all. We just nodded to each other because we both knew what I had experienced couldn’t be justified with words at all whatsoever. I gathered myself and bid farewell to my new hippie family and went along my way. Before long I realized I had no clue where the car was at and I decided to explore the festival on my own since after all I did pay $40 to come and enjoy myself.

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As I made my way down to the concert, this couple approached me said “Wow you came out of it man, I’m really glad because we saw you earlier and thought something terrible was going to happen to you.” I replied “Amazing experience dude, can I come along with you guys?” They were delighted to bring along a local celebrity with them since I ended up being “that guy” at the festival. I smoked a few joints with them although I already felt high as a kite from the mushroom experience.

After I split with the couple I went back on a journey to find my car and my friends. I finally came across the mobile home, which was our landmark since it had been blasting techno music for the better part of the day. In complete darkness I followed down the path to my car and low and behold there were my friends, they were beyond amazed to see me back there walking with my hands on my head as if I had just come back from an extremely long vision quest. Apparently they thought I was going to get raped by a bunch of hippies and that when they came looking for me, security told them that I was with the “spiritual leader”. I told them that was exactly who I was with and that it was an amazing experience. They looked at me as if I were a ghost for the rest of the night until everyone went to bed except for Murphy and myself. We traveled a long a little bit and sat by the lake smoking cigarettes for awhile before we decided to call it a night.

Overall, my experience was breath taking. I explored my psyche from the inside out and full realized the extent of a full on mushroom trip. It was extremely insightful and helped me get over my past self. The only negative after effects were my car being extremely muddy and being hung over for several days thereafter. Nothing in my life could ever compare to what I had experienced that day at the ledges but at the same time I wouldn’t wish that difficult discovery of enlightenment onto my worst enemy.

DOSE: 3.5 g oral Mushrooms (dried)

BODY WEIGHT: 125 lb

I always assumed that those legendary “bad trips” I heard about in anti-drug literature, and from my parents, didn’t actually happen. Well, they do happen, and the cause of mine was a combination of a familiar dose, with an unfamiliar batch, filtered through some philosophical misconceptions I had. However, I will hold the experience as one of the most important, defining moments in my life. It was the moment I came closest to both complete ego-death, as well as actual, physical death, and I offer my experience to anyone who is interested in psychedelics, to be warned and prepared for the type of tests you must sometimes face if you ever accidentally hit that ceiling of consciousness.

It was early July, and me and my true love, who will henceforth be referred to as V., were going to again take a trip to that dazzling psychedelic mushroom-land in celebration of her birthday. We had tripped several times before together, and we have a very loving fulfilling, relationship. So I was expecting the best, and I was in a very happy, excited mood.

But first, some information about my drug history. I’ve taken probably more than 75 total DXM trips, which has created a continuum of mental activity, leading eventually into an unpleasant, cramped mental box. DXM was my first outlet to different realms of consciousness, but it is a very small path, one without any real spiritual knowledge. For me, DXM caused acne, depression, high blood pressure, and different pupil sizes for days after trips.

I had used Salvia probably 20 times, and never had a bad trip. Once, a party was held by some mischievous entity, who informed me that I was “The most fucked up anyone has ever been”, and so I got to see the truth. Banners advertising “Reality Is An Illusion!” flew, streamers, confetti. My friends got up and celebrated with kazoos. Since this experience, I feel like any further experimentation with Salvia would be interpreted as insolence by that mysterious consciousness which inhabits the soul of the plant.

I’ve done mushrooms and acid probably a combined 20 times, (I lose track of which experiences belong to which drug, they are very similar to me) and once even induced a “bad trip” by listening to Wolf Eyes, (a horror-noise band) as a test, and out of curiosity. Every time I’ve done mushrooms I have taken the same dose, (3.5 grams) as I did this time, and it goes to show you that you should always take a preliminary dose with a new batch to ensure that you are prepared. Indeed, the mushrooms we had were supposed to be very strong; their stems were marked with purple and blue spirals, which I assume indicates a high presence of hallucinogenic potency. A friend of ours, having

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taken the same dosage, had become lost in a Columbus park, mistaking his environment for Egypt. I figured that it wouldn’t be an issue for someone with the aforementioned Salvia experience under my belt, so I took the full 3.5 grams in one sitting, slathering them in peanut butter.

(+0:30) Me and V. went outside, to the lot behind my apartment. Both of us are artists connected to our inner child, so we were planning to go draw with sidewalk chalk. I had taken a book on Michelangelo, and I was hoping to reproduce one of his drawings in chalk. When we actually got out there however, I got lost in a haze of artistic anxiety and indecision. I simply could not settle on anything. Every line was hesitant, my spatial distortions were completely off and I had almost forgotten that it could be due to coming up on mushrooms, since I was not actually getting any other changes in perception. I would second guess myself, and then judge each single line like a monument to some huge personal failure. We were listening to The Fiery Furnaces, which made my mind jump around frantically. There was a lyric which haunted me: “I thought I was thinking, but apparently not.” I kept lingering on that line. How can such a contradiction exist? It felt like I had forgotten how to think.

I told V. that we should go in, and she agreed. She was not getting good work done due to similar mental circumstances. Inside, I started to realize that I was might face something really big, and I wanted to have a full stomach so that the mushrooms alone weren’t the only thing in my stomach. I prepared a sandwich, took one bite, and couldn’t take another. I wanted to drink something, but all the cups were dirty. We decided to try to watch a movie, and within 10 seconds I realized I would be unable to follow it. I put on a blanket because I was cold, then I realized I was hot. All of this was adding up to a state of nervous contradiction and negation.

I started to become just really irritated, and borderline angry. I decided I should just try to sleep, so I threw off my clothes, and took out my contacts which were itching badly. I tried to induce vomiting because I felt sick, but couldn’t. I told V. to find and put on Godspeed You! Black Emperor, but she was unable to find the CD. (Later on I realized this might have been a subconscious desire to have an appropriate soundtrack for the end of the world)

At this point, my thoughts were racing: “Want To Draw, But feel blocked. Want to eat, but not hungry. Want to drink, but no clean cups. Want to watch a movie, but can’t follow it. Feel like vomiting, but can’t. Want to listen to Godspeed, but can’t find it. Got ready for sleep, but can’t because I’m losing my fucking mind.” I am in bed with my face into the pillow, pulling my hair. V. Comes in and lies next to me.

Me: “This is awful.”V: “I know.”Me: “I need to forget all of this.” (I start to cry)V: “We poisoned ourselves, we just need to sleep, and when we wake up, it’ll be like nothing ever happened.”

She goes to clean a cup, so I can have a drink of water. With my eyes closed, I see what I can only describe as a slot machine, infinitely long and tall, that adjusts in perspective according to my heads actual position. On the face of each is a picture of myself in a different emotion or physical state. Whichever picture is located in the center of my range of vision is the emotion I feel fully, but the slot machine is cycling at such an alarming rate that I am feeling what I estimate to be 10 emotions every second. My facial muscles work to accommodate each emotion, and I essentially lose control of my face. I feel extreme pain, followed by extreme euphoria for a millisecond each. I feel, essentially, everything at once. Finally, the slot machine rests on a single face: Madness. It is a picture of myself in green, clawing at my eyes. I realize what is going to happen: When the machine adds the sum total of all I’ve been, I will be defined, and I will die.

Some scientists speculate that since the universe exploded from an infinitely powerful singularity, the gravitational field may one day become too weak to sustain this expansion, and the universe will start to gravitate inwards, and collide into another singularity, possibly to restart the entire process anew. I see every human consciousness as analogous to the big bang. Throughout our experience as humans, we become more and more complex and organized from our embryonic states, to the point that we grow up and start integrating concepts into patterns of thought, behavior, emotion, just as the universe organized into clusters of planets and stars, comets, black holes, etc., As I am running from the bedroom to the living room to find V., all the concepts and truths I accept, regarding nature, matter, humanity, sociology, biology, philosophy, art, start to rapidly compute into analogies, which physically connect to one another.

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Everything subjective, everything regarding the self (my emotions, dreams, etc.,) become the earth, and all my perceptions regarding the external world are the stars. And the entire universe is folding in on itself, and I am simply not ready for whatever happens after it. I feel like I will have completed life, solved the puzzle. It was as if I have seen every part, or almost every part, through my observations, and how they fit together, so I was worthy to view the gestalt, the whole form, one singularity. And I thought: “No one would be allowed back from seeing that, because you must be outside of that form in order to view it.” I thought of what V. said, “It would be like nothing ever happened.” I thought I would die, for sure, but I also thought I might be reincarnated, (maybe due to her statement “when you wake up”) or simply exhiled somewhere away from this world that I know and love. I didn’t think a living person is allowed to see what’s on the other side of the end of the universe.

Near this time in my life, I was extremely immersed in Ayn Rand’s novels, and objectivism as a practical philosophy. For those that don’t know, her philosophy revolves around the love of the ego, and the virtue of selfishness, (or at least “rational self interest”). Being an artist, the Fountainhead greatly influenced my drive to work hard at learning my craft, rather than just sit around and wait for inspiration. However, worshiping my ego, and reveling in the separation between me and my environment will not allow me to sit complacently as it dissolves. I mistook my ego for my actual life, which I believe was not actually at risk.

I tell her: “I am going to die. Call 911, right now.” She refuses on the grounds that I am “just having a bad trip”, so I run to my neighbors apartment right across the hall. I am frantically trying to get them to call, but they demand to know the situation, and I don’t think I can even take the time to explain without dying first. I feel like I am being tested. If I am able to go out, into the world, in my underwear, at the risk of public humiliation, legal trouble, hospital bills, potentially losing my job, (I worked in a movie theater, located in the outdoor mall area right next to my apartment complex), having my parents and the world see me for what I was, exposed and scared and on drugs, then I would have earned my right to live.

As I attempt to run out of the building, V. and a neighbor attempt to stop me. The neighbor is about twice my size, and both of them are grabbing me as hard as they can. I am pulling on the door frame with all my might. I feel their hands as a thousand corpse’s hands, trying to hold me into my coffin. Gradually they let go, and I fly head first off the concrete steps, flat on my face, fracturing my nasal bone, bloodying my face. I don’t even register the pain, it feels like I just fell through a huge number of patterned-walls.

I take off running as fast as I’ve ever run. I don’t have contacts or glasses on, and since I am legally blind without correction, I can barely discern forms from blurry blocks of color. The sun is setting, and I run towards the exit of the apartment complex. I get a car to stop, and tell the driver, as calmly as I can under the circumstances, that I have poisoned myself with mushrooms and need help. He says “Nah man I got kids in here.” I look and do not see kids. I assume that he was basically the universe’s analogy for this cokehead idiot I know, who inexplicably always wanted to hang out, even though I made it consistently clear how little I respected him. I always made these half-assed, transparent excuses not to hang out, and now there was some universal equity.

Next, I turn towards my place of employment. I get to the back of the building, and successfully stop a car, with a man driving and a woman in the passengers seat. I try to the best of my ability to explain to them that I am going to die, and I jump into the back of their car and demand that they take me to the hospital. The guy gets out, comes to me, and starts hitting my legs and trying to pull me out of the car. He is yelling: 'Get the fuck out!' I associate the door he is trying to drag me out of with death, and so the opposite door, the passenger’s side, must be my chance at life. I scramble across the seats, onto the woman’s lap, and then out her door. I run as fast as I can into the parking lot. My brain is in a whirl, and I figure out that the Security Guard for the theater, who shall be referred to as X., can help me. I’ve known him for several years and I figure he would understand I was on drugs and needed help, and I trusted him. At this point he represented the concepts of security and life, a trusted friend and rational problem solver.

Once an hour, he will take a walk around the building on patrol, so I start to scream for X., but he is not outside. I get to the intersection that is formed by the street the movie theater is at, and another perpendicular street. For some reason, probably a sense of embarrassment, I decide to take the perpendicular street. I love my job, and I was glad to be able to keep it after this incident, but if I had

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simply obeyed the rules of the game, clearly internally defined at the outset, I wouldn’t have faced the trouble I am about to explain to you.

As soon as I reach the other side, I am standing outside an ice cream store. There are probably close to 20 people eating outside, and loitering around. I cannot see, so everybody there appears as faceless, non-specific “people”. I ask them all to help, and everyone keeps turning away from me. Looking back and realizing how scared people must have been, I understand, but still wish someone had acknowledged me. In this entire experience, all that it would have taken was one single person assuring me: “Calm down, I’m going to call 911 right now.”

So to try and get some attention for my cause, I attempt to run full speed into the glass door, with my head, to shatter it. I had passed up my work, and without any real direction now, I was confused and grasping for straws. I smash into the glass, fall backwards, hear a scream…

Apparently I blacked out, got up, and ran another 2 blocks, because that’s where my next memory starts. I’m staring diagonally into the intersection in front of the shopping center. On one side is a security guard employed by the shopping center, and on the other, a police officer. I think to myself that I can turn myself over to the security guard, but since it’s not X., I don’t want to settle. And I could turn myself over to the cops, but I have a problem with authority, and he may take me straight to jail instead of the hospital. So, I decide to take my chances by running between them, into the intersection… I don’t know what I was thinking at this point, because I seemed to forget my original intention of getting help, and almost be putting myself into the way of death.

I think perhaps this experience was a call-back to another mushrooms trip I had, where me and V. took a walk in the city at sunset, and life unfolded as a perfectly-created game, where everything we saw was conceptualized and represented conceptual trends, rather than just isolated events. We almost followed a group of people into a crosswalk on a “Don’t Walk” sign. The first people in the group almost got hit, and returned back to the side they came from. I look at V., and say “That represents group-think, and group-mistake”. I saw the intersection as a microcosm for life, and I think this time I was submitting myself to the mercy of life, to chance. Or maybe it was just because the whole event felt like the last 5 minutes of a movie, and I needed a climax worthy of what preceded it. Or maybe I was just confused and crazy, with a serious head injury. Most likely, it was a combination of all 3.

The cop grabs my arm, and I yank it away from him. As I approach the geometrical center of the intersection, a millisecond-timer hits 0:00:00, and then it starts into a positive counter. That number, later, I think represented what could have been a timer for the end of my life, and when I got there, there was a coin-flip to see if I lived or died. I get to the other side of the intersection and I feel my muscles lock up, and see everything fading to black…

When I come to, I am in an ambulance. I am told that I was tazed by the cop as soon as I got to the other side of the intersection. At the hospital, I am diagnosed with a brain hemorrhage, a fractured nasal bone, a bruised rib, and tons of lacerations all over my feet and body. For 2 days I am in the ICU, and spend another 4 altogether. They were extremely close to having to drill into my head to relieve the pressure, but thankfully they never did, and I survive without any enduring injuries.

My stepdads military insurance thankfully covers the medical bills, so I have no expenses besides the court costs. I get $700 in fees, 2 years probation, and 5 years where any alcohol or drug charges will cost me 7 months in jail. And as I leave the courtroom I feel such an immense happiness and love for all things. I am extremely fortunate for the way everything turned out. I feel like Dostoevsky, facing the firing squad, only to be pardoned at the very last second. This event gave him inspiration, (most of his books reflect this theme of near-death experience), and it also gave him the drive to finish some of his greatest novels, being completely aware of the fact that he would one day die. This event has effected me in very much the same way. This will be one of the most defining moments in my life, and one I will revisit often in art.

During the first month or so after this experience, I had very little recollection of what it was that had caused this madness, and I was sure that I would never, ever take psychedelics again. My mind blocked out a number of details that slowly, little by little, came back to me. It seemed like everything that had happened in the peak of the trip was too much for my brain to comprehend, and so it buried them under waves of mental noise. When, almost 3 months after the experience, I had decoded the last of the information, I started to realize that the trip is concurrent with a lot of Buddhist ideals, and with the concept of ego-death in general. It was not, as I first assumed, that I

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had seen something as meaningless as a giant refrigerator monster chasing me down, trying to eat me. I had viewed the truth at the end of all things: Everything is one. As Phil Elverum sings: “The world is in me, and I am in the world.” Altogether, it was not the trip that was bad, it was my attitude towards it, it was the worship of ego I had adopted. I consider it a failing of myself, and not of psilocybin, which truly caused this experience.

I have been researching Terence Mckenna recently, and although I’m too much of a rationalist to agree with all things he’s said, it would appear based on my experience, that psilocybin lets me contact something which is pure information. I like to call this thing the Logos, (My definition lies somewhere between McKenna’s and Aristotle’s). It is the entire logic and balance of the universe, the thing which binds matter together, and also the process of organization into hierarchies. The Logos, at least, has complete knowledge of the individual which is communicating with it, perhaps of the entire history of genetic information, and even moreso, perhaps even over the entire history of the universe and beyond. In the future, we will master these realms, to apply engineering and science to these inner worlds, which are truly the most mysterious thing we are capable of currently exploring, (probably more so than the local areas of space which we can explore while still dependant on combustible fuel).

Will I ever do psychedelics again? Yes, and I do not answer this question lightly. I genuinely feel, as someone receptive to these experiences, (I usually trip roughly twice as hard as everyone I know under equivalent doses), and as someone with a rational, adventurous mind, I have almost an obligation to the future of mankind to report, through my art, those truths behind this world that we know. I am taking a 5-year break, (enough to wear off that suspended jail-sentence), but after that, I eagerly await the worlds to find on the other side of ego-death.

Simple Mushroom Teaby Anonymous

1. Chop or crush mushrooms. 2. Use 1 cup of water per person and/or 1 cup of water per 5 grams. 3. Heat water to boiling, pour hot water over mushrooms. 4. Wait 5-10 minutes, strain water into drinking cup. 5. Pour a second amount of water over strained mushrooms. 6. Drink first infusion. 7. Strain second infusion into drinking cup and drink.

Zam's Mushroom Elixir Recipe

I would say that mushroom tea is by far the least 'gross' way to go with mushrooms. (though to each their own for sure). I've played with various tea-admixtures and have recently been using:

1. Yogi Tea brand Licorice Tea Much MUCH better than it sounds if you havent tried it. Extremely interesting / magical flavor. Highly recommended. Other brands of 'licorice spice' are ok. 2. Small amount of Fresh Ginger - (as a stomach helper). 3. A little squeeze of a fresh orange Not too much. Adds a little acidity and a nice round flavor. 4. Sometimes Damiana A very mildly stimulating herb that I find interesting by itself. Set your own admixture herbs according to your tastes and preferences.

I boil the water, pour it over the tea and let it sit until not mouth-burny, and then strain. You don't have to swallow the mushroom parts if they upset your stomach, a majority of the active ingredients of the mushrooms will be extracted into the water. The resulting tea has a very -magical- or -weird- flavor but is not at all like chewing mushrooms into paste in your mouth.

I personally find the idea of 'hiding' the mushrooms inside other edibles to be less than appealing because I often don't want much (or anything) in my stomach at the time.

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Zam's Mushroom Elixir Ritual

A ritual that I've been developing goes something like this:

1. Start a pot of at least 3 cups of water boiling per person. 2. chop mushrooms while waiting for water to heat up 3. place mushrooms in small tea pot or ceramic bowl with spout 4. pick your favorite herbs, you might consider stomach helpers like ginger, mint, etc or some mildly stimulating herb if you find mushrooms 'sleepy' (damiana, a tiny bit of green tea, etc). I would recommend against trying a new tea or herb for the first time as part of your mushroom Elixir, so work with the herbs beforehand- everyone has very different tastes. I have personally found that Yogi brand Licorice tea (with black pepper) combines very well with Teonanctl - think about taste combinations- mushrooms taste 'earthy' to me with a mysterious bite. 5. pour ~1 cup hot/almost boiling water over them and go about your pre-mushroom rituals, change clothing, clear a space, get your blanket, find your jacket, prepare an altar, or whatever would make the experience more focused or magical, make you comfortable, try to have everything you are planning on needing prepared before you drink, etc. 6. Music / Sound: I choose a mellow, meditative music for the drinking period to help me focus and relax. 7. After 10+ mins, pour the 1 cup Mushroom Elixir into your ritual drinking vessel, straining with a tea strainer (available everywhere) or get a little teapot that has a built in strainer. 8. Pour another cup of water over the wet mushrooms 9. Hold the Mushroom Elixir and reflect on where you are, why you are choosing the Mushroom today. Drink slowly and relax into the taste. Imagine that you enjoy it :) 10. wait at least 5-10 mins before straining off the second cup, then pour another 1/2 - 1 cup of water over mushrooms for a third extraction. 11. drink 2nd extraction and save the third for later. 12. relax and lie back and await the peak. I find that if I remain still during the peak, I experience very little stomach unpleasantness.

* I don't notice any loss of potency from swallowed dry to the Elixir. * I do experience far less stomach distress with tea.

I find that it is quite pleasant to drink the mushroom tea slowly, the effects come on quickly in the tea form and by the time I've finished my first cup, I can feel the Mushroom approaching. By the time I've finished the second cup, there are distinct alerts. I save the third extraction for an hour or more after the first two and find that when I go back to drinking it while bemushroomed to be an interesting and positive experience and the effects also are increased by the third cup at T+60-120. I wouldn't recommend drinking the 3rd cup much after 2 hours as I've found trying to extend the mushroom experience after that to be somewhat unrewarding.

Mushroom Sesame BallsLady Di's Discreet Mushroom Sesame Balls

IngredientsDried, finely ground mushrooms of your choiceDouble that volume (not weight!) of the best whole sesame seedsFine honeyDash of salt

Toast the sesame seeds lightly in a dry cast iron frying pan on medium high setting, stirring heartily. When they start popping and smelling great, that's enough. Pour them into a bowl and let them cool. Set a small handful aside, then whiz the rest in a blender until there's only about 30% whole seeds visible. Add mushrooms, whiz again. (For additional Ch'i, you can do all this whizzing in a suribachi.) Pour into bowl, add small amount of salt and enough honey to attain clay-like consistency. Roll into one-inch balls, licking hands frequently. Roll balls in whole sesame seeds, store in tightly sealed container in cool place. Take anywhere. Guard against unsuspecting refrigirator raiders.

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Honey MushroomsMushrooms Forever

Coarsely chop dried (or fresh, I imagine) mushrooms and loosely pack into some beautiful little jar which is shallow enough that you can reach its bottom with your finger. Add honey to fill all spaces. Hide in a dark, cool place and try to forget about it for a month or two. Eat by fingerful for brightened colors, elevated humor, musical enhancement, new friends and so on. When you finish a bag, add the crumbs to your mushroom honey jar. Occasionally replenish it with mushrooms and top off with honey.

Mushroom Pizzaby D. Moss

I was wondering whether mushrooms could be baked on a pizza and still provide effects.

So, I went out west and picked some (there is some abundance in South Florida). Then, when I went to work that evening (I was amanager at the local Pizza Hut), I baked an extra cheese, double mushroom (1/2 and 1/2), and onion pizza (pan crust).

Not only did it taste great, but I found the buttons on the cash register changing places. So, I did the only thing any person would---close up shop early.

It definitely beats the bitten routine of making tea and eating sludge.

Mushroom Tabouliby D. Johnston

This sort of reminds me of my first Dead show. A friend of mine from Toronto put 1/2 oz of 'shrooms into a taboule (sp?) salad a day before crossing the border to Buffalo. By the time we got to the border, the 'shrooms had swelled up and just looked like... well, mushrooms.

So we all pigged out on the floor in Rich stadium before the show. They worked just fine!

I think the only factor to consider is the full stomach/empty stomach thing that's a factor in any drug eating. If you eat six pieces of pizza, with a certain ammount of mushrooms, you'll take longer to get off than with only 1 piece of pizza.

Mushrooms with Peanut Butterby Anonymous

I don't like the taste of psilocybin mushrooms, but I've found that if I mix them with peanut butter or make a chunky peanut butter sandwich with them, I find the flavors mix well and it tastes good. Serious Thumbs-Up on the peanut butter route with plenty of liquids to wash em down. Some people get queasy with mushrooms and the peanut butter can make them longer to come on than tea, but it can be a great way to go.

Chocolate Dipped Mushroomssuggested by ClayR

Using dried mushrooms, melt chocolate chips carefully in a double boiler or over very low heat. Its very easy to burn chocolate when heating on a stovetop, which makes it taste off and dries it out so its hard to dip. Once the chocolate is liquid, simply dip the mushrooms into the chocolate using tongs and place on wax paper until cool. Enjoy.

Be aware that not all chocolate resolidifies well after heating, but most chocolate chips have additives which help them resolidify nicely. Chocolate stores better over long periods of time in the freezer inside air tight containers. When transporting, frozen chocolates will melt less quickly, so keep them cool. Well made chocolates are also an excellent disguise.

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DOSE: T+ 0:00 1.5 g oral Mushrooms - P. semilanceata (plant material) T+ 0:00 1 bowl smoked Cannabis (plant material) T+ 0:40 1 cup oral Passion Flower (tea) T+ 1:00 1 bowl smoked Cannabis (plant material) T+ 6:00 5 mg oral Pharms - Zolpidem (pill / tablet)

BODY WEIGHT: 75 kg

It was early afternoon the 22 December, I got of work early because of the upcoming holiday. I didn't plan the trip, but while chatting with an old friend he decided to start the Christmas celebration with 15mg 2C-B, he kept insisting on that I should join him on the journey to the place of spells and fairies. When he finally convinced me I thought I'd take a 'light' trip, I consider myself a fairly experienced tripper, I've done LSD, 2C-B and several other psychedelic drugs numerous times. I've previously done 3 g Semilanceata and 5.5 g Cubensis on separate occasions so I figured 1.5 g wouldn't beat my mind up too much.

T+0:00I weighted the mushrooms carefully, previous dosage mistakes on other substances have made me cautious. Previous to eating the mushrooms I smoked a good-sized bowl of quality weed, I smoke every day and to my experience it usually mix quite well with tripping. The bowl got me quite stoned and kept me calm during the first effects of the mushrooms.

T+0:40The effects of the mushrooms are growing stronger, nothing unusual at this point. My tripping chat-friend is already way up there and tells me that he needs to spend some time outdoors, I don't argue with him because I know the urge to pay a visit to mother nature can be very overwhelming. I decide it's time for me to take a break from the computer as well, I find my way halfway to the kitchen when I remember that I've got some passionflower stashed upstairs. I know that MAOI’s are supposed to boost mushrooms, and I feel quite comfortable in the trip so far so I decide to make myself some tea. I've never tried MAOI’s during a trip before, but the added ingredient doesn't concern me at all. An unknown amount of passionflower is soaked in boiling water and stirred until it's cooled down, I filter the brew and bring it back to my computer.

T+1:00I loaded another bowl of weed and enjoyed it along with the tea. After the second bowl the mushroom shifted gears on me, I got a slight headache and decided to rest for a while. I find my way to the bed, manage to place 'The Wall' in the DVD and threw myself on my bed trying to get rid of the annoying headache.

Approx. T+1:30What am I doing? What's happening to me? The questions are rushing trough my head, which is no longer bothering me, the headache is gone. I can still hear Pink Floyd playing in the background, I do not dare open my eyes however. The effects of the mushrooms are increasing constantly and is starting to become quite overwhelming, I'm not sure how long I've been tripping but I realise that I should be peaking soon. I've got the shivers and pull every blanket I've got far up over my head. Here, buried in blankets the music starts fading in and out. I start thinking about me, my past and my future. The thoughts form images of both beauty and terror, the images turns into white flashing lights which travel trough my brain faster than the thoughts themselves.

Approx. T+2:00The effects of the mushroom are still increasing, I feel completely lost and realise that I'm about to die. As I await my doom the flashes through my head is getting more and more intense, but I feel completely indifferent to the fact that my ego is being completely disassembled. The music is gone, I'm not sure where there the DVD is still playing, but it doesn't matter, nothing matters anymore. I

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temporarily 'pass out', I'm aware that I'm passed out but I'm not aware of anything in the real world. All my senses are gone, I now only exist in this world of nothingness, I'm dead.

T+3:00I wake up with a strong feeling of satisfaction, I've been reborn. I've never experienced an ego death before, I've feared from the day I insufflated way too much 2C-B, I almost died back then as well. I get out of my bed, still tripping like never before. I carefully start to investigate my apartment and soon find it to boring to remain inside. I dress warm and go out for a walk. It's cold outside, about -15°C, the snowstorm the night before has formed beautiful snow formations in the trees, on the ground, the roofs of the houses... The sky is completely clear, the stars form beautiful fractal formations in the sky, much like the clouds in my LSD-experiences. Suddenly I find myself outside my house again, deciding to go in and get another cup of tea but this time I stick to Yellow Label.

T+4:30I can feel the effects decreasing and decide to make the best of the upcoming afterglow, I slice up a grapefruit and bring it and the tea up to my bedroom. I carefully study the bed before laying down, the place where I died, the place where I was reborn. I put on the TV and manage to find an entertaining show which I decide to follow at the best of my abilities.

T+6:00The effects are still present but much barely noticeable, I always seems to have shorter effects of mushrooms than my friends strangely enough. I decide to smoke another bowl of weed, after this bowl I feel how exhausted my mind actually is and decide to head back to the bed to get some sleep. This proved impossible though, my mind was still doing overtime so I swallowed 5mg Stilnox just to slow things down a bit. Half an hour later I fall asleep.

Conclusion:I don't know where there it was the MAOI that triggered this extreme experience, but it seems likely. This trip blew my mind like a stick of dynamite, much more extreme than any other mushroom trip I've ever had. I don't know if I should classify this experience as a good one or a bad one, it was neither, but I've learned that MAOI’s can be an interesting additive to mushrooms. I will, without a doubt, try this again sometime in the future. This combo should be handled with care though, you just might end up with more than you bargained for.

The World Has Suddenly Turned SidewaysMushrooms (P. cubensis) & Passion Flowerby Trip-Fiend

DOSE: T+ 0:00 6 oz oral Passion Flower (tea) T+ 0:45 2 g oral Mushrooms - P. cubensis (capsule)

BODY WEIGHT: 160 lb

About a year ago my wife and I decided to try a Mushroom-MAOI combination of Psilocybe cubensis and Passionflower (Passiflora incarnata). Syrian Rue is traditionally used for this experiment, however, we selected Passionflower because it seams to be more natural and more readily available. Passionflower extracts are about 80 times weaker than Syrian Rue but seam to produce less nausea and fewer undesirable side effects.

Preparation

12oz of fresh dried Passionflower leaves were soaked in a small amount of cold water (just enough to saturate the leaves) and lemon juice for 2 days. The leaves were pressed and the liquid saved. Water

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and lemon juice were added and the mixture was brought to about 150F for 2 hours. The leaves were pressed again and the liquid saved. Finally the leaves were boiled for about 1.5 hours, the leaves were pressed, the liquid was saved and the leaves discarded. After cool, the liquids were combined with fresh ginger root was added to the mixture (to reduce nausea) to make 6-8 cups of brown, bitter liquid. This liquid was cooled for 4 hours, iced and served as iced tea with plenty of sugar.

The Experiment

We prepared for 72 hours prior by eating only MAOI compatible foods (MAOIs react dangerously with *many* foods and drugs)

6:00 pm - After fasting for 6 hours, we each consume half of the Passionflower extract.

6:15 pm - I experience some nausea, my wife feels fine. The nausea (probably due to the large amount of liquid consumed on an empty stomach) quickly dissipates.

6:45 pm - We each swallow 2 grams of potent dried P. cubensis in gelatin capsules. At this point we are beginning to notice the effects of the MAOIs; a warm comfortable feeling, some loss of coordination and a general feeling of euphoria similar to alcohol (about 4 beers).

7:15 pm - I feel a definite shift in consciousness, a familiar sensation that usually precedes a mushroom trip. We watch a movie (The Spy That Shagged Me) and wait. I feel dizzy as I walk to the bathroom. As I stand there, I feel as if something is about to happen. I feel nervous and anxious, much more so then before an average trip. I try to relax and suddenly notice that I see the toilet bowl 'in double' and *everything* seems to have a greenish hue. This is the first visual that I have seen on this trip and the world has suddenly turned sideways on me! I feel like I have been physically pushed to the side of myself, a curious feeling I have only had once before with high-dose LSD. A sense of *physical* disassociation as if I am standing next to myself.

My first thought is oh shit, I took too much. Then the visual effects seem to mellow. I begin to feel comfortable again. Waves of warmth and comfort came over me and the world seems odd but friendly. I return to find that the effect has hit my wife as quickly as it hit me. She is sitting on the floor watching the movie with amazement. I sat next to her and began to notice that I can not understand the movie. I have only minor visual distortions and feel very clear headed but I can not understand the movie *at all*. My wife says that she also feels more impaired than usual, although she feels significantly less impaired than I do. Although we consumed no alcohol or any other drugs, the inebriation deepens over the next 45 minutes. This state of confusion is alternately distracting, annoying and hilarious, but never unpleasant.

8:00 pm - The visuals are now quite good, not spectacular, but the TV seems to pulse with energy and it wiggles astonishingly when the channel is changed. At this point I can not understand how to use the TV remote. I begin to feel cold and I ask my wife if she wants to take a bath together. She agrees and I walk to the stairs. I discover that walking is *very* difficult. I stagger dramatically and look very drunk. When I get to the tub I pour a bath and use the bathroom. I have now pissed about 6 times since 6:00 pm!

8:15 pm - We light candles and sit in the bath. The candles light make great shadows on the walls to watch. The visuals are very prominent at this point and seem to primarily be strange distortions of actual objects. The distortions are very obvious and very extreme. At this level the distortion seemed +++, but I did not experience things I commonly experience at +++ such as flowing surfaces, color distortions, time distortion or actual hallucinations. The distortions seem to show only the world as it is, but geometrically distorted to be beautifully stretched and shaped. My wife says that she is experiencing considerably less noticeable effects. She comments that the visuals seem obvious, be seem to change less than she would expect. She rated her level to be ++.

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8:45 pm - Out of the bath, I lay by the fireplace and listen to music. CEVs are extremely well formed and 3 dimensional, almost like vivid dreams. I see more than shapes, but fully formed Magrette-esc scenes, very surreal. Music seems to be the only thing with severe time distortion. If I listen to the music carefully I get caught in a music loop. We are listening to ambient music and the long continuous sounds seem to go on forever. Unlike an LSD time-warp experience I enjoy this and just float with my eyes closed never wanting the endless loop to end. We lay by the fire for what seems like hours.

9:15 pm - I want to take a bath again. I have begun to shiver and some nausea has returned. I sit in the tub and my wife sits next to me on the floor. I can now talk more sensibly and we chat about life, philosophy, death, etc. I describe the CEVs which are now more like a move playing when I close my eyes. We sit quitely and I close my eyes and try to focus on the visuals. I feel strong rushes of emotion. An overhelming sense of alone, a sense of spiritual loss for the world. I relax more and feel as if I might drift from my body. I see images of friends and family, as well as strange landscape. The effect reminds me of opium dreams. I think I was actually asleep for 10 or 15 minutes (strange I know).

10:00 pm - Still at a strong +++. I now feel very hot and sit outside to cool off. I seem to notice more color distortions and unusual moving patterns. The visuals seem more like a standard mushroom trip. Things with texture are very interesting and have kaleidoscopic color patterns.

10:45 pm - I sit with my wife by the fire, we watch the flames which look fantastic. I return from the bathroom (I have pissed another 5 or 6 times now) and we have sex by the fire. The sex is amazing, very sensual and tender. We rest by the fire and listen to music.

11:45 pm - The effect is now beginning to were off. About a + now. Feel euphoric, but very tired.

12:00 am - We go to bed. My wife sleeps instantly, I cannot. I remember something about Meletonin being a mild MAOI. I take some Meletonin and eat something. In about 45 minutes I sleep soundly and have fantastic dreams.

7:00 am - Our mood is great. I have a slight headache which I attributed to dehydration. I feel very clear headed even at breakfast with friends.

I believe that an MAOI-Psilocybe mushroom experience is a wholly different experience from Psilocybe mushrooms alone. The sense on inebriation is much greater and the effects are very strange and pronounced, but much less disturbing than a Psilocybe mushroom experience with twice the dose. The spiritual aspect seems very different as well, very impersonal. Almost as if I was experiencing it as a detached observer. No deep introspection or self-realization. The MAOI seems to make the overall experience more comfortable. The effect is definitely stronger than Psilocybe mushrooms alone and lasts slightly longer.

DOSE: T+ 0:00 2 flowers oral Passion Flower (tea) T+ 0:00 2 flowers oral Passion Flower (tea) T+ 0:40 1 cap oral Mushrooms (fresh)

BODY WEIGHT: 125 lb

I had read that passion flower increases the potency of mushrooms. I recognized the flower from pictures as one I had seen growing around my area. Mushrooms are my favorite so I was keen to try them with the flower. Recently I went out looking and found one mushroom (I think the species is

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psilocybe cubensis) and a passion flower vine. I picked two flowers. By the way these flowers are very beautiful!

I tore the flowers up and left them to soak in 2 cups of water for a couple of hours, waiting for evening. Then I boiled the mixture for several minutes, added more water and boiled a little more. Then I added a tea bag to the mixture, Lipton. Because there was only about 2 cups of water I only soaked the bag for 2 minutes. I drank the tea, flowers and all, and waited about 40 minutes before ate the mushroom. The tea tasted normal. I forgot to weigh the mushroom but I guess it to have weighed 15 or 20 grams.

The onset was normal for mushrooms. An hour after eating it I was quite high. I stayed high for 7 or 8 hours. Id say the effects of the mushroom were roughly doubled in intensity, but it was different than normal, I didnt like it. It made me hyper but at the same time I didnt want to do anything. The high had a sharp, uncomfortable edge I didnt like, and it was the same from beginning to end. I don't think I'll ever take passion flower with mushrooms again.

DOSE: smoked Cannabis (plant material) smoked Leonotis leonurus (plant material) smoked Mugwort (dried) smoked Damiana (dried) smoked Passion Flower (dried)

BODY WEIGHT: 52 kg

Okay, it was a Saturday night and I decided to have a quiet one and meditate, well I didn't get around to meditating the way I planned straight away, instead I just relaxed a bit and listened to the new tool album, it was not the first time I had heard it so was getting quite familiar to hearing it, in this comfortable space I had the flash of an idea, I had been smoking lion’s tail and Mugwort and Damiana with Marijuana lately as it altered the high a little, and on separate occasions I had lotus with marijuana, and lotus with alcohol.

Each of these herbs I had enjoyed in smoking mixes and tea, but I decided to mix them to about a 2 gram mix, considering how many herbs were involved it was not really that much of each, as I smoked I got the urge to draw, it was unlike the typical high of each drug, but it was in no way a strong high, I have become used to discerning the slight and subliminal effects of these drugs quite well so at this point of the high, drawing pictures which were the same as I would normally draw just a little more tribal, at one point I felt a tingling within my feet, in the soles, I realized the opportunity being presented to me, as my feet chakras began to harness energy, I stopped drawing and began to focus on the energies building in my feet, as I cycled through my breathing 7 for 7 , basically there was this feeling of branches and vines of energy coiling and growing up through my legs, anchoring me and feeding me with energy from the earth.

As the feeling rose through my legs I continued my steady and calmly focused breathing, I placed my hands in the root chakra mudra and steadily the blackness of the back of my eyelids began to filter into a deep blood red, at this point I was feeling a mild excitement as the energies swirled around at the base of my spine, it is hard to put the experience into words because my stream of consciousness was silenced for the time being, I used images and symbols and imagination to push and instigate the trip to go further, when on Lion’s tail I find that regulating my heart rate is essential, the lotus seemed to sedate the emotionally overwhelming aspect of the Lion’s tail, and synergized with the Mugwort and passionflower to give a divine clarity to the high.

The feeling progressed onto my sacral chakra and the color I saw behind my eyes was becoming a bright orange, similar to that of Lion’s tail flowers, the sacral chakra never seems to present me with emotionally challenging images, instead it represents itself to me through sacred geometries which

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outline in my imagination like liquid fire, made of a white iridescent light, this is an imagination technique which creates the image in the centre of the mind it is neither O.E.V or C.E.V, but just an imagination within, after focusing on the pranic energy for about 5 minutes, I began to hold for 4 seconds between each seven second exhalation, this began to move my solar plexus in ways which I can achieve on rarity, but never has the feeling been so well controlled/subdued to keep me from being distracted away from the meditation, at this point my veins were pulsating with energy, I felt calm, but my body felt anything but, I could hold the mudras but there was a strange vibrant energy pulsating through my body.

I focused on the energy as a ball of yellow light within and through about five breaths, each at seven seconds each focused upon growing this ball of golden energy, from here I went on to my heart chakra and changed my mudra accordingly and went from an explosive yellow happiness to an implosive green world of feeling and love, this is probably only instigated by the drugs to calm and sedate me enough to continue on with the meditation, beyond this point I became channeled energy through my last three primary chakras, but only believe I got close to an opening with the throat chakra, from here I spent another 45 minutes bringing myself back through each chakra, before I opened my eyes, the only feeling I could describe would be excitement mixed with euphoria, this was an amazing and awakening experience.

Planning a positive and productive psychedelic trip

Since you're reading this I will assume that you already know that drugs carry risks and spare you most of the requisite warnings and finger-waving. You're here because you know this and have most likely already made your decision to embark on one of these bizarre and wonderful journeys into a state of altered perception. The remainder of this page is a guide that should help you plan your adventure for safety and success.

WARNING:

This site is for personal entertainment and educational use ONLY. The creator of this site is will not be held responsible for the actions of those who read it. We are all adults here, any decision made by you is YOUR responsibility. If you are under 21 years of age you must leave this site immediately. By continuing down the page you agree to hold the creator and maintainer of this site harmless in any actions or damages resulting from the use or misuse of information contained herein.

Understanding the nature of a psychedelic "trip"

A psychedelic drug-induced trip can make you feel as if your senses are awakening to a new way of interpreting the world around you, the experience feels quite honest and real and at the same time quite foreign. Maybe it is real or maybe it isn't, this is your decision to make. The point here is that from our current sober perspective, the things we are aware of that define our existence are the sensory impulses from the environment as translated by our brains, and our own minds and thoughts. These are the things in the foreground through most of our waking lives. We are used to having a large degree of consistency in both how we experience the world, as well as what we think

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and feel. If you look, you can see the consistency in the patterns of thoughts and feelings that we experience from day to day.

When you embark on a psychedelic trip you are taking those two things that define your daily existence (thought and experience) and turning them upside down. You're senses no longer "feel" the same as they have always felt before and your mind no longer seems to function the same way as it always has before. You will think of things you have never thought of before, you may also feel things you have never felt before. Normal, everyday common sense and logic can go flying out the window and cease to make sense. It is from this unfamiliarity that fear can creep in and a bad trip can begin, but it is also from this freshness and purity of experience that you can "step outside of yourself" and see things in a whole new way. If this is your first time then you may have no point of reference for this experience, the closest thing would be dreaming.

To sum it up, be prepared for anything, and be 100% confident in what you do because once the ride begins, there's no getting off early. Don't let this scare you though, because any trip that goes 'bad' can also be brought back to 'good'. Adequate preparation and focus can easily accomplish this.

So what's the plan, Stan?

Now is the time to begin planning for your experience. Here is a basic skeleton from which to design your own plan. There are some important steps here so don't get lazy. You must safeguard both your mind and your body.

1. For what purpose will you be tripping? (Why?)

This is important for planning. A spiritual trip requires a different environment than a recreational one. A creative trip is usually found in lighter doses then the other types. Different drugs have different effects. Once you know WHY, you can then choose HOW. If you are not sure, ask yourself the question "Why do I want to trip?", then write that answer down (or remember it) and ask "Why?" to the answer. Repeat these steps until you have a solid understanding of your reasons. This requires a good degree of honesty to do successfully but it is important.

Example of spiritually rooted reasons:

Why do I want to trip?

Why is it fascinating to me?

Why do I want to understand it?

Why do I want to better understand this place?

and so on....

Because I find the idea fascinating!

Because it is entirely new and different! I want to understand it.

So I can better understand this place in which I exist.

So I can function more effectively and efficiently.

2. What drug are you planning on using? (What? How?)

You had better know more than just it's name. This step is very important for both your physical and mental well-being. Go to Erowid.org right now and learn everything you can about it. The Lycaeum is also a good place to look. Understand how the drug works in your body. Understand what

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physiological processes are occurring, creating it's effects, and understand well how to identify it and gauge your dosage. Are there any drug interactions possible with other meds you are on? Read all of Erowid's experience vaults for your substance of choice, real people write these and they are invaluable for gaining unique perspectives on the experiences that different drugs can bring to you. Learn from the mistakes of others so you don't make them yourself. Knowledge is the key to confidence. Confidence is a sturdy and dependable life-line during a psychedelic trip only when rooted deeply in sound knowledge.

Search Google groups to find more experiences, opinions and information. Start with the name of the drug, then refine the search based on the results you see. If nothing is relevant, imagine what it is that you're searching for and add words that you would expect to see on that page. "LSD experience" for example, or "mushroom come up"

Find a forum about it. Use search phrases like: "mushroom forum" or "LSD forum" and search the results for relevant forums that have lots of members. Forums are fantastic sources of info because you can register and ask questions as well as search through years and years of conversations. I have gained much from forums and I recommend them to everyone for any subject you wish to learn more about. Always remember that they are populated by people unknown to you, so you should use them for direction and not as the final word. Try and confirm everything you read on a forum before acting on the information. As you build your plan write down all questions as you go so you don't forget them.

3. Who is taking the trip with you? Are you going it alone? (Who?)

My first trip was solo and it worked out well, so don't feel that you need to have a partner for your first time. An experienced buddy can spice up your first time tremendously though and help you through any rough spots if you have the need. Make sure that you trust everyone who will come into contact with you and that you will NOT have to pretend to be sober. Be aware of people on different types of drugs. Drunks are a bad mix with people who are tripping. Do not trip around people who are drinking, as they get drunk, their sloppy boisterousness will annoy you as it grows and continuously grabs at your attention. Stick with people that can remain mellow and composed. Show anyone who will be joining you this site and let them plan along side you.

4. Where will you do it? Inside? Outside? Day? Night? (Where?)

This is very important. Your environment WILL largely dictate the overall mood of your trip. 90% of bad trips are the result of a bad environment. When you are tripping, you are experiencing a series of chain reactions of thought, so you must identify everything that can trigger a negative reaction and remove it from the experience. To select your environment, first decide how you need to feel to achieve your purpose for tripping. Then ask yourself what places make you feel this way. Once you know where, get specific. What items will be around? What imagery, sounds, music, textures, colors, etc. Focus on each one individually and ask yourself how it makes you feel. Analyze any negativity you feel from something that will be present and discover why you get a bad vibe from it and either eliminate the bad vibe or eliminate the stimulus. You can eliminate a bad vibe by understanding why you react negatively and by making one or more decisions about the nature of what causes the negativity. This process comes down to figuring out what bugs you and why, and then making a decision about it that prevents it from bothering you any more. If your decision is solid then the negative thought pattern will not return (unless you focus directly on it) because it's cause will have been resolved. Do not reevaluate these decisions mid trip, have faith in yourself and your decisions.

Prepare situations and environments that are both happy and relaxing, and that also work well with your purpose. What is the most relaxing music you've ever heard? What music makes you feel happy and bubbly? Prepare a large selection to choose from, sometimes you will enjoy some off the wall stuff that you wouldn't normally like while sober. What else relaxes you and makes you feel secure? Prepare several interesting 'diversions' that will engage your entire mind if need be. When a trip feels like it is getting too strong it often leads to focusing too much on the experience itself thus magnifying the problem, so bring along some simple things that you can immerse yourself into completely. Quantity breeds quality. The more you have to available do, the more likely you will have something that will 'fit' the situation. Video's and DVD's work well as distractions but will leech away

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precious hours if you are not careful. Comedy shows are a better diversion, like Family Guy or The Simpsons. Something short and engaging that will leave you in a better mood. Write out a list to refer to for when you are blasted out of your mind and hope you are able to read it ; ). Set up as much ahead of time as possible (DVD in the player, turned on and ready) to eliminate confusion.

5. Additional steps

Ensure that no one will interrupt you. Turn your phones off. Lock the doors. Prepare as if you are expecting someone to come looking and you don't want them to find you, that way if someone does come around then you are prepared to avoid contact. Interacting with outsiders means you must try and think like you are sober so you can interact and this is almost always a drain and a drag to do. Decide ahead of time who will deal with these distractions should they arise.

Plan your meals. Depending on your drug of choice the effects could last anywhere from 15 minutes to 12+ hours. Eat healthily beforehand and according to the drug you will take (Some require empty stomachs) and plan to keep your body nourished throughout. It can be difficult to gauge hunger while you are tripping, in fact, most people completely loose all appetite so it is important to make sure your body and brain has nutrients available. Fill up a quart bottle with water (Stay away from caffeine and too much sugar) and prepare a few small meal(s). They probably won't taste good regardless of what they are so make them small, healthy, and easy to chew and swallow. Plan the quantities out ahead of time and stick to your decisions.

Plan your mood. Do not embark on a psychedelic trip if you are in a negative mental state. A trip begins with your existing thought patterns (but the come up will often trigger new ones as well). If they are negative then your trip will begin negatively. You want to be in a good mood, and in a positive thought-pattern cycle. Try and begin your trip after doing something that consistently leaves you feeling good, like getting laid.

So you are now a genius in the area of your chosen drug. You understand where it comes from, how it works, how to identify it, possible dangers, how to dose, what effects to expect, what others have experienced, and you trust your sources. Procure slightly more of the drug then you are planning on taking and several days before the real thing, take a very small, trial dose. Based on your research, set aside a good dose to just barely feel some effects and take it when you have some free time. This will serve to gauge your bodies reaction. Some people are hypersensitive to certain drugs, you want to make sure that you are not one of them before dosing any higher. Other drugs, like mushrooms can vary greatly in potency from batch to batch so test carefully. This will also for the most part rule out adverse reactions and give you a very minute taste of what to expect. If all goes well then decide on a good dose for your planned experience and give your body some time to drop any tolerance you built up during the test (5 days - 1 week is usually plenty) Last minute prep

You're now ready to go and you feel 100% confident in your preparations. Congratulations, you are in control. Here are a few things you can do to reassure yourself of this FACT if you begin to doubt it at any time in your trip.

Write some notes to yourself. Put post-it's on everything you are not supposed to do. Put a post it on the phones with a simple, SHORT, clearly written message reminding yourself that regardless of how you feel, whatever it is can and should wait until you're sober. Put a note everywhere you know you shouldn't be poking around. Write a brief "freak-out" note to yourself along these lines; "Everything is fine, your safety has been completely planned for. Have faith in your preparations." Just something simple and easily readable that will remind you of the confidence you feel in your decisions and planning. Do not mention specifics in any of these notes as they can cause you to attempt to reevaluate a decision mid-trip. Always remember that your judgment may be flawed and have faith in your preparations. All you should be focusing on is are positive, fun things, everything else is already taken care of. Enjoy it!

Test your friends mind-states. Ask them open ended questions that aren't obviously designed to find their mood. Make sure nothing is "on their minds". Creating a fun atmosphere and getting everyone laughing works wonders for preparing friends. If you can't make them laugh then something is

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wrong, or you are simply not funny. In this case put a little forethought into it, if you know what tickles your friends minds then you can design something to do or say to make them laugh pretty easily.

Keep yourselves occupied during the onset. Some drugs have easy come-ups and hard come-downs, others have the opposite effect. Know what to expect and if anyone speaks in fear during the come up help them direct their focus elsewhere with control and confidence. Engage them in something that requires their whole mind. The waiting is the hardest part, so have something to do like video games or cards. Anything but sitting around waiting. Happy, calm music works well at this stage.

Take note of the time you dosed and the time you first started feeling effects. Depending on the drug you should already know how long the peak will last and an approximate amount of time for it to set in. From now on you can use the clock to gauge your progress through the experience if you feel the need.

Arrange everything neatly and simply. Your music, diversions, food, etc. Assume that you may confuse easily and make sure there will be nothing complicated for you to have to do. Nothing is worse then trying to comprehend how to set something complicated up when you are trashed on psychedelics.

Be prepared to help a friend. Just because you are well prepared mentally doesn't mean you friends are. Exude confidence (not arrogance) and let them have faith in your plan. Remember that a bad trip is nothing more than negative thoughts prevailing in the mind at the time of intoxication. Recognize any indicators that your friends are beginning to think negatively and direct their focus to better things if they are. Do not engage in a group session of feeling your own heart beats. When a negative enters your focus (and they will), just let it pass on through along with everything else you experience. Trouble only comes when you grab the negative idea and focus on it, this causes your mind to explore it and elaborate on it. The process is very natural and logical and once you understand then it will be simple to control your state every bit of the way. Remind your friends of this when the need arises.

Remove everything that could become dangerous. Take note of places that could be dangerous, especially if outside. Do not engage in dangerous activities like rock climbing, swimming or driving.

That's it, I hope this guide helps you in some way. If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions please drop me a line here:

This site was made to help everyone so if you see something that should be changed or have something valuable to add please let me know so we may improve it for the benefit of all who find it.

May wisdom find you in your journeys

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How to Avoid a Bad TripA document with some good advice for first-time trippers.

I plan to post some mushroom trip reports here, but, since advice from others has helped me avoid any bad trips to date, I feel it's my "civic duty" to post my precautions for newbies.

I like to compare psychedelic drugs with rock climbing. In neither case should you attempt the adventure without proper preparation. You should thoroughly educate yourself about what you're doing, preferably from somebody experiened whom you trust. Make sure you are fully cognizant of the dangers involved. Treat the activity with the respect it deserves. Understand that things do not always go as planned, and be prepared for the worst. Just as you wouldn't try to go out and try to conquer Mt. Everest on your first rock climbing excursion, you wouldn't want to go out and eat 3 grams of mushrooms or drop a hit of acid (I choose to abastain from acid/LSD after my own research) as your first foray into psychedelics.

The only two pschedelics I've researched and experimented with thoroughly are marijuanna (pot) and Psilocybin mushrooms; these are the only two I personally can say are relatively safe, benign, and enjoyable. I recommend against LSD and Ecstacy, and in fact most other drugs, as too too strong or as having (known or believed) medical dangers, or has having inadequate research and/or history (although others who are willing to take greater risk than I (or who are foolhardy) will choose to take LSD. Other (naturally) occuring psyhchedelicssuch as peyote and DMT may be candidates for safe research/exploration (but are much stronger than pot and shrooms). I have read and heard often that while cigarettes and alchohol are known to cause hundreds of thousands of deaths per year in America alone, nobody has ever died from marijuanna usage. I also read recently that the required dosage to die of a Psiloscybin overdose would be 20 pounds of mushrooms - about 700 times the typical dosage - and you'd die of stomach distension long before you could ingest that much. (the greatest (and real) risk of taking mushrooms is ending up eating the wrong kind, the kind that causes total kidney failure and/or death. It is only their illegality that creates this danger, it is worthy to note, as otherwise we'd have safe, regulated supplies).

The key to safe, wise and fun recreational drug use is KNOWLEDGE. Research the drug the thoroughly before you try it. You should educate yourself to:

* How to get the drug you think you're getting in the dosage you think you're getting (generally only get it from somebody you know and trust, and who has experience with the drug, preferably with the same batch as you'll be using). * How to make sure the drug has no other undesired drugs intermixed (for example, if you take enough Tylenol Cough Syrup to "trip" on its DXM, you're also getting so much Acetomenophine (sp?) as to ensure total kidney failure in about 16 hours. * What dosage you should take for your first time. * The effects of the drug (what you may expect to experience) * The side-effects of the drug (what else you may expect to experience, or what else might happen to you that you may not even know). * Any known dangers using the drug (besides the obvious danger of addiction and abuse inhernet to any drug). * Possibility of "bad trips" on the drug - how frequently to users of the drug panic due to its (potentially scary) effects * Any rumored dangers. The final word is not in on all drugs. It pays to educate yourself about what is believed to be potentially dangerous about the drug, even if it may not yet be proven (for instance, currently LSD is suspected of causing genetic damange, and Ecstacy (MDMA) is suspected of causing brain damage).

Only when you know all the potential dangers are you capable of making an intelligent, educated choice, as an adult, as to whether or not to risk the experiment (I naturally don't recommend the use of heavy psychedelics by minors). Also, knowing all the effects in advance, as well as potentials for bad trips, can help you to avoid having scary or unpleasant experience.

Only an intelligent, rational adult, with all the appropriate information, is qualified to make the personal decision as to what risks they personally are prepared to accept in order to use "mind-expanding" or psychedelic drugs recreationally and/or spiritually.

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Somebody considering trying mushrooms or any other psychedelic drug for the first time should be mature, stable, and fairly confident in their ability to flow with the experience, to manage fear if it arises, and not panic and create a big mess. The way to avoid a bad trip is thoroughly educate yourself as to what effects to expect, and then plan what you'll do if you start to get scared. Whenever I start to panic on a trip, I say to myself "No, I don't want to do this. I want to feel good. Then I just focus my mind on relaxing and the fact that everything's okay, and I'm safe and sound, and I just need to relax, I know what drug I took, I know how much I took, I know it's safe, I know I'm going to come down, so why stress out? That usually does it, and boy does it feel good to put down a panic and feel relaxed and mellow. Another thing I sometimes say to myself, vehmently, is "I CHOSE to do this, and I'm going to brave it out!" almost like a parent scolding a child.

Again, the most valuable thing you can do to avoid a bad trip is to study the drug in depth before you use it; read as many trip reports as you can (or talk to as many people as possible who've tripped). That way, when something really wierd happens, instead of saying to yourself, "Holy shit, what is happening to me" and getting all worried, you say to yourself "Oh, okay, yeah I've heard about this, what a trip." The key is not to allow yourself to be taken by surprise. Recently I was tripping on a new drug (DXM), alone, and started to panic. As the drug was coming on stronger and stronger I asked myself a dumb question ("Should I be doing this?" - it was too late to be asking that). All of a sudden I felt like I was sinking deeper and deeper to I knew not where. I started to panic.

I quickly regained control of my mind and brought it back to tranquility (by saying to myself the things I recommend above). That felt so incredible I grabbed my pen and wrote enthusiastically in my notebook "Relaxation is the gateway!". Tripping more than anything else has taught me that relaxation is the key to solving any distressing problem. Later on in the trip my mind was really exaggerating things. I was writing in my notebook all sorts of interesting or heavy things that came to mind. Suddenly it occurred to me that if I died my writings would be interpreted as a suicide note. From this my mind somehow jumped to "Maybe I am dying, maybe this is a suicide note." I started freaking out again. I started thinking about calling up a friend or a relative and confessing I'd taken a drug and I was scared. Then I thought of the look on their faces and the ensuing consequences and that brought me back to reality. Before doing anything on a bad trip, you might think to yourself "How will this look tomorrow, when it's all over." That should snap you back to reality. This goes for any interaction with non-trippers you may be considering. For instance, on the above trip, I got it into my mind that I'd seriously wronged a co-worker of mine. I was tempted to pick up the phone right then and there and call and apologize, even though it was late in the evening. Then I said to myself "No, I'm not going to do anything stupid while under the influence of a drug." (The next day I could see that I was correct in that I'd been unfair to this co-worker, but it was not as serious as it had seemed a the time, and was of course very glad I had not made the call). Later, I almost went looking for one of my neighbors to explain to them that I'd discovered the meaning of life. Thinking about the consequences the next day of what you're considering can often provide a necessary perspective. But the biggest key of all, once again, is knowing what effects to expect. This particular drug had dissociative effects. There was one point where I looked down and my arm and leg did not appear to be part of me. They looked foreign. If I had not read in advance about this, I probably would have thought for sure that I was dying. This drug in heavier doses also is said to make you feel like your heart has stopped beating (you can no longer hear or feel it). Imagine having that happen to you if you weren't expecting it!

Make sure you're tripping ideally with others who are more experienced and whom you trust. Also, take a smaller dose than them so you know you're "safer" than them. If you're not tripping with more experienced users, you should still try to trip with a trusted friend. Another option is to trip by yourself, but have a sober friend who knows what you're up to stay with you in case you get into rough waters. Unless you're really brave, I don't recommend tripping alone for you first time.

Make sure you have a safe sanctuary you can retreat to if you start losing control (laughing uncontrollably or getting scared). I would never trip, for example, on an airplane, or at work. If you intend to venture out into public, have a retreat plan mapped out in advance. Camping trips are very popular for tripping.

NEVER, EVER take a psychedelic drug if you're feeling down. It will only magnify your negative feelings 1000 times. Take it only if you're feeling relaxed and positive. You should only trip on a day when you don't have to work (don't trip before or after work). Preferably after at least one full day off of relaxation. Some like to prepare for a trip by fasting before the trip (possibly eating fruit and other very light foods only), and meditating. Another bad trip avoidance guide I read recommended packing well (your mind) the day before the trip - fill your mind with beautiful sights, sounds,

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thoughts, and feelings. The worst thing you could do is to take a drug while depressed in order to help you feel better. In some cases it might work, but that's an inappropriate use of drugs which leads quickly to habit or addiction, but more than likely it will only make you feel worse and lead to a bad trip. If you have a borderline mental illness, a trip could send you over the edge into mental illness that does not go away when the drug wears off.

I recommend against mixing in other drugs on your first trip. Don't drink after eating shrooms, or get stoned after dropping acid (if you choose to drop acid (take LSD) - which in my educated opinion is overly dangerous). Marijuanna sometimes causes things to take on an extremely deep, serious, intense look (as well certain things should appear to us, not the least of which is simply being alive, a mortal being on a fragile planet hurtling at 60,000 miles per hour around a burning star which is in the arm of a gargantuan galaxy which itself is rotating (at our radius) at billions of miles per hour), but you don't want to view the world from such an intense, romantic, existential look on life when you're already embarking on trip of the mind/imagination with the other drug. Alcohol is a depressant and also can cloud your judgement, thinking, and overall stability. This is the opposite of the direction you want your mind to go in on a psychedellic trip (you want it bright, light, cheery, happy, and bouncy, vibrant, inside of you and without). I ususally smoke pot, even on a trip, but only becuase I'm very, very experienced with pot.

Potency of mushrooms is said to vary widely, and if you accidentally get ahold of the wrong kind, you could get very sick or die. Accordingly, always start out with a very small dose as an experiment with any new batch. The more unsure you are, the smaller the piece of your first bite should be. Wait at least two hours after a tiny bite to see what happens. If you're really unsure (such as if you picked the mushrooms yourself), I'd wait at least 24 hours after a small bite to make sure its not toxic. And under all circumstances, don't panic, realize that you will come down in a few hours and everything will be back to normal, so if you go freaking out you're only needlessly causing yourself alot of grief, and drawing undue attention to yourself. The peak of a shroom trip doesn't last for more than about 2 hours (but I suppose that can be a long time if you've never experienced an altered state of consciousness and decide you don't like it or get nervous or scared, or just decide you don't like it). After eating shrooms, your stomach will fill a little upset. You may feel naseous, and you may even vomit and feel really sick. However, the nausea is usually very brief and mild. You also may feel short of breath, like you can't seem to get enough air, and you might feel a little dizzy. This phase is when the shrooms are starting to come on. In about 15 minutes, all of these effects will subside and you'll start feeling flowing, relaxed, giggly, and generally good.

Rock climbing is inherently dangerous. It can and sometimes does result in injury or even death (most often by those who took foolish risks or weren't adequately prepared - but rarely also with even safe and experienced climbers). This does not mean that rock climbing should be outlawed or its crazy to do it. It means that it should be entered into only with proper knowledge, training, and respect. All the same is true for psychedelic drugs.

A safe and experiened climber or tripper maintains a calm, relaxed, and focused mind, manages fear if it arises, and makes only smooth, fluid movements of body and mind, never allowing her/himself to be swept away with sudden thoughts, emotions, or circumstances into reckless deeds or senseless panics.

Here's to safe, sane and enjoyable tripping!

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