Myself and five acquaintances decided it was time for another
trip. All of us decided that we would exceed our usual amount and
dare to move into the realms of the unknown. I had three times my
usual dosage of dried mushrooms, the others increasing their doses
by a factor of a half.
The house was new to me and I purposefully decided not to
explore it until things were really moving. It was an old
weatherboard house and was mostly dark and cold. The living room
was small but it had a crackling fire burning in the fire place which
cast flickering shadows on the peeling paint walls. There was several
candles burning on the mantle piece above the fire place and the six
of use ceremoniously downed our dried mushies at "T minus 0
minutes" (around 8:00 pm)
I had brought my video player over and a "Trippatronics" tape
which I had created by editing bits from hundreds of MTV video
clips together along with exerts from various computer graphics
documentaries. Sid put one of his CD's into the CD player in the
adjoining room. It was something by "The Art Of Noise." I found
myself seated in a large beanbag facing the fire, with the TV on my
right at 90 degrees to my field of vision. I wasn't too interested in
being able to see the screen since I had watched it countless times
before whilst tripping.
Someone looked at a clock and announced that it was 8:10 pm,
I quickly calculated that things would be settling back to normal at
around 1:00am in the morning.
We all sat around, not saying much. The couple that owned the
house were not that well known to me so I was a little concerned
about tripping with them, but not too much.
Ten minutes later at 8:20 I noticed something jump out from
the TV screen and sail through the air towards Melony, she seemed
not to notice. Ah Haaar. The trip begins. I usually notice the onset
before everyone else so I wasn't too worried about seeing things this
early.
At this stage I decided that I needed to take a leak, so I got up
to go in search of the toilet. The kitchen was to my right and from
there I could glimpse the toilet door open through the adjoining
laundry. I wandered through the laundry, feeling myself move into
level 1. Once I was in the toilet I reached level 2. I closed my eyes
for a second to check. First there was nothing, then a couple of
seconds later the familiar two dimensional patterns appeared.
Opening my eyes revealed that the toilet was already beginning to
expand. The dimensions of the little room had suddenly doubled. I
quickly relieved myself as I pondered the rapidity at which the trip
was advancing.
Back in the lounge I sat in the beanbag again.
BANG! Things started getting really WEIRD!
The fire became an animated city, Buildings and Cars could be
clearly seen shimmering within the flames. Highways of tiny
vehicles made their way along the grains of the logs. Several of
participants began to "piss themselves laughing" at various things
and I joined in, laughing so hard all else became invisible. I noticed
that each time I laughed, the trip became more and more intense,
although whilst laughing, I could perceive nothing. Sid and Mel
were really getting into laughing. Mick and Carol, wandered out the
back door of their house, conceivably to investigate the garden. Sid
and Tim wandered to the lounge where the stereo was playing. Mel
seemed still infected with hilarious laughing and giggling, she
amused herself by watching some of the video. I was very quickly
moving into deeper and deeper realms of strangeness. The beanbag
vanished and became an incredibly comfortable wicker chair and I
was just pondering how comfortable the headrest was when I realised
that I had placed my hands behind my head and it was them
supporting my head not the imaginary chair. At this stage I launched
into uncontrollable shivering. "God it was cold" it seemed that the
temperature had dropped by at least five degrees. I had to keep
stopping myself from tensing my entire body against the cold. My
jaw was chattering mercilessly and I wished that these amphetamine-
like effects did not occur with psychoactive drugs. Eventually they
faded and vanished.
I was deep into Level 4 at this stage, time had ceased to have
any meaning. I watched holes open up and close in the floorboards.
The room kept expanding and shrinking and the fire became a
swirling blue vortex into which images from the TV were being
sucked. I closed my eyes. And the image remained, it actually got
clearer, so I opened my eyes again. No difference! I closed my eyes
and held my hands in front of my face. I could see them lift up in
front of me, but they were strangely warped and I could see the fire
through them.
Carol came back into the room and curled up into a ball in front
of the fire. A few of the others wandered in and out of the room
making various comments and then igniting more of the infectious
laughter. I was busy laughing uproariously and observing the
universe splinter and shatter with each cycle of the laughter. It
seemed as though the energy released from the laughing caused my
vision to fracture and fragment.
I noticed that Carol was in a strange mood, she seemed almost
angry and upset about all the laughing, she remained motionless and
dark beside the fire. Mel broke into another fit of helpless laugher
which gradually sounded stranger and stranger. Carol took this
moment to exclaim aggressively to her "Are you all right!!!"
"Are you quite right there!!!" This seemed to quiet Mel
down a bit, but she seemed to draw in upon herself like a frightened
rabbit.
The music was weird and unrecognisable. Sid had only
intended on letting the first two tracks play before the CD was
changed, but no one had remembered to change it. Suddenly things
started changing.
Mel seemed to be getting into trouble. Her eyes had widened in
fright and horror and she was making exclamations like "Oh no!,
NO!" and starting to shout with horror. Something was wrong.
Simultaneously my own universe jumped and flickered into new
heights of weirdness. Things were morphing uncontrollably now. It
became very difficult to work out what I was actually looking at.
I kept thinking "Damn! my eyes have stopped working."
Mel became more and more disturbed. Something in me started to
realise she was launching into a bad trip, and this something decided
that the most obvious answer was to change the music. I stood up. Or
I tried to. My legs leaped to the standing position, but they had
become detached from the rest of my body which was still resting in
the bean bag. I looked at my legs in surprise. I could clearly see the
backs of my legs and the top of each of them ended in a stump. Slowly the
rest of my body floated up and came to rest in its usual position. My
legs did not seem to re-attach properly and as I walked out of the
room, they seemed to be a couple of steps ahead of me. I found the
door into the lounge room and moved into the darker room, I saw
Tim seated by the stereo, at least I think it was Tim. The only way to
describe what my eyes saw is to compare it to the scene in
Lawnmower Man where one of the protagonists had broken up into
tiny marble sized pieces which were buzzing around like flies and
formed the approximate shape of the body. Tim's eyes were separate
from his body and I could see air gaps around them and I could see
the chair through him. The chair itself had broken up into pieces,
some of which were protruding through Tim. The vision was too
bizarre, so I looked away to increase my chances of coping.
Mel had started screaming by this point, the screams got louder
and more frequent, until it reached the stage where she was
continually screaming her lungs out. It sounded like someone was
"Axe Murdering" her. I listened for a moment to the screams and the sheer
horror contained within them. The fear and horror became real and tangible.
It solidified as a material object, some sort of mental snake which started
slithering towards the centre of my being.
I shuddered and purposely distracted my line of thinking into the practical.
Part of me started to realise that the Police were going to be called.
Another part of me remembered that I was going to change the music.
Finally I reached the point in space where the CD player was supposed to be,
but when I looked in the direction I thought it existed, my eyes had started
refusing to work again. The masses of swirling colours and shapes and
perspectives that I saw was definitely not a CD player.
With great concentration I managed to get the CD player to coalesce
into a Level 4 image and I bent down toward it in order to change the
CD. Halfway to the CD player the universe ceased to exist.....
There remains almost no way in which I can describe what
happened at this point other than to say that I had reached Level 5.
Everything changed and became unrecognisable. When I say
Everything, I do not just mean objects and people and self, but The
Universe Itself became undone. There was no-longer anything in the
ordinary sense. It was like being in an amazingly comfortable chair,
but not existing at the same time. Vision, Smell, Hearing and Taste
all became meaningless. They did not just disappear, but they ceased
to have ever existed. Time melted into nothingness. I did not
perceive time, but looking back later I can say that the subjective
experience must have lasted literally years. There was no point of
reference, I could no longer distinguish anything even slightly
recognisable, although something somewhere could contemplate a
great many somethings. It was not me. It was not anything like
thought or perception. It was not anything which could be described.
It is extremely difficult to even remember much about it but to say
that it was so different to anything that it defies explanation!
Woah, suddenly I was back, and I was still in the act of
bending down towards the strange mess of colours I thought must be
the CD player. I wondered who I was and why I was there. I struggled with
remembering, but I could not make sense of it. I had no idea about anything.
I knew I was tripping but that was about it. Whose house was I in? Who am I
tripping with. Did I drive here or did someone else. What was happening. I
really had no idea. This somehow disturbed me. But not too much. I recognised
a Tim-like entity swimming around in my vision and exclaimed to it,
"What's Happening?" and I meant it from the depths of my soul.
Tim didn't seem to know either. The CD player pattern made itself
obvious again and I realised that I was changing the music. My hand was still
reaching for the CD player. Another thought occurred to me.
"What do I do when I get there?" I could barely see the damn thing,
how am I going to operate it? At this point I turned to Tim for help.
"I need to change the Music," "Why?" Tim was enjoying it thoroughly and
had not yet noticed the trauma in the next room. I explained the situation
to the weird looking floating creature somehow, and between the two of us
It only took about "6" hours to manage to change it. The CD player
was new to both of us. It seemed to have way too many light and
numbers. The buttons had something marked on them, but we were
beyond being able to read. We resorted to randomly pushing buttons
until the required result was achieved.
The new CD was some classical guitar (Vivaldi) But after a few
minutes it became apparent that this was not going to help. Mel
continued screaming at the top of her lungs.
At this stage, her boyfriend Sid had found her and was trying to
comfort her. I was convinced that another change to the music might
help. I ended up changing the CD again, several eternities later, to
"White Winds" by Andreas Vollenweider, this seemed to have the
desired effect after a while. Mel seemed to be responding to Sid's
efforts at bringing her back to stable grounds. She related afterwards
that she had completely lost track of reality to such a degree that
she was afraid that she was going mad. All the normal anchors of reality
had vanished one by one until there was nothing recognisable left. She became
horrified that she was going to remain there forever. Sid told me later that
he was watching her face, and slowly the expression on it would change and
start to become distant, if he didn't immediately say something to her that
she could grip with her mind, then she would withdraw and start screaming.
Once she had reached this point, no amount of talking or touching could get
through to her.
My trip was still getting stronger, part of me was still worried
that the neighbours were going to call the police, and another part of
me was completely unconcerned and was in fact enjoying itself
immensely. By this stage my body had disappeared, I no longer had
any sensation of comfort/discomfort my eyesight was beginning to
malfunction again. I could no-longer see anything of meaning. One
moment I would be looking at something, then it would dissolve into
a mass of swirling colours. The rooms of the house were beginning
to move around and merge with each other. I decided that I needed a
glass of water, so some part of me got up and went to the kitchen,
leaving the other part sitting up against an electric oil heater. Moving
through the halls of the house was completely weird. Parts of the
walls, arches and ceiling protruded down into the hallway and passed
through my body as I walked along. At one stage I walked through a
wall and felt it open up and then coalesce behind me. Once in the
kitchen part of me filled a glass, then I split into two again, one
staying in the kitchen, the other walking back to the first body. I was
now in three places at once. One in the kitchen, one in the hall,
holding the glass, and the other sitting with Tim in the lounge. From
this point onwards I again moved into Level 5 for some 3 hours of
real time (I think!)
Tim said something to me and I raised my eyebrow, it detached
and floated off behind my head, I went to look at it out of the corner
of my eye, but the eye came away from my head and floated off
towards the eyebrow. Weird. I flicked my tongue around inside my
mouth, and my head seemed to detach itself above my jaw, my
tongue flopped helplessly about on top of the throat and lower jaw
like a fish out of water. My upper head continued floating upwards
and slowly bobbed around so that I could look down my own throat.
My body looked like the lower half of a decapitated buddha sitting in lotus
position up against the heater.
After a while I stood up next to the heater and drifted in and out
of the universe. For most of the time I had no Idea that I was
standing. Mel was still breaking out into fits of screaming
occasionally and at times I was so completely out of reality that I had
to ask Tim, "What's happening?" I had no idea who or where I was,
only that something was happening, the details of which I was
unsure! He seemed to be in a similar state and responded with a
shrug which separated his body into about twenty more pieces.
Level 5 became the dominant state, with momentary flashes of
Level 4, where suddenly the Universe would flicker back into view
for a moment and I would realise that I was standing up or sitting
down or more importantly, that I existed.
Slowly the flashes of Level 4 became longer and longer. Tim
said to me that He thought things were getting more normal. I replied
that I didn't think they were (I didn't want them to) Eventually I had
to concede, but I told him that we wouldn't be back to normal until at
least 1:00am, he then replied that it was in fact 1:10am. Whoah!!!
Things gradually became more and more normal as I sank into
the familiar morphy land of Level 4, then I dramatically dropped to
Level 3. The drop was so sudden, that I exclaimed, "What happened?
Something has changed!"
The final stages of the trip were long and slow. Mel had found
reality again, although she and Sid looked completely drained. To
my trippy eyes they looked as if they had aged ninety years, their
faces were long and drawn and Sid's face looked like something out
of the trenches in Pink Floyd's "The Wall."
Once we were down far enough, we drove home. The car
journey, as usual, was interesting and I was glad it was the middle of
the night and I didn't have to cope with any traffic.
I have noticed, that the various types of trips coincide with the
levels I have described to a reasonably high degree. The jumps
between these levels are usually distinct and obvious and when I
have consumed a dose which is close to the boundaries of one of the
Level transition states, the resultant trip is not a gradual merging of
the two states, but more like a ping-pong jumping between the two
states. The "Flashover" point is quite obvious with a striking change
in the observed reality.
Most of the trips I have experienced have been clearly at one
particular level and in one instance I consumed an amount of weak
dried mushroom (just the stems), the result of which was no
noticeable effect. After a couple of hours had elapsed with no effect,
I consumed a further amount (approximately 1/10th of the original
dose) at which point I was propelled into Level 1. (ie I had consumed
enough to cross the Level 0 - Level 1 boundary)
To me this is proof of the existence of a threshold effect. It also
coincides with a number of recipients of "weak" paper trips reporting
that they did nothing, whist others having the same dose reported
getting Level 1 or 2 phenomena. It would seem that for the former
recipients that their jump to level one dose is somewhat higher than
for the latter.
On other occasions I have noticed that (for me) the difference
between 1.6 and 2.0 grams of freshly dried mushrooms produces no
discernible difference, but that 2.1 launches me into a Level 2 trip. In
the first instance, the extra 0.4 grams was effectively wasted.
I hope this information is of interest. I have tried to remain as detached
as possible, and have consulted many FOAF's for their opinions on my "Level"
theories, most agree, but of course this type of evaluation can only be
subjective.
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