So Far Beyond Reality

It was hard to decide where to put this because I have a hard time deciding what level this could be. Although I had some bit of logic at times during the trip, it seems like I must be able to somehow get farther, being that I only had 2.3g and there's always a higher point to get to. I definitely had a "total loss of reality" at times and there is so much that simply cannot be put into words. I wrote a lot about this (about 7 single spaces, size 12, times new roman in MS word) mainly because there is so much to say and even 20 words wouldn't scratch the surface of the experience. I do have a lot of minor details as well as a rather large backstory so if you are looking for a quick 5 minute trip report, you may be disappointed. Anyways, here it is.....

            Last night was by far the craziest, most intense event of my life, and my friend and I both agree, the best day of our lives so far. I had tried shrooms once in 7th grade (yes, I know that is a little bit fucked up and I still can't understand what crossed my mind to do such a thing at such an early age) and it was during school (of course, who would expect a 13 year old to be tripping on shrooms during school lol). Even though it was only about a gram that I did, that ended up being one of the most frightening events ever and I just wanted it to end once it started. After that, I didn't really "dislike" shrooms but I figured it would be a long time again before I would use such a powerful drug and would have to find a much better setting next time.

            Fast forward 5 years of a lot of experimentation with drugs, most of which is "regretful" although I have learned so much about life and myself that I have a hard time thinking that my life would be "better" if I hadn't endured all the ups and downs it brought me. I'm in my senior year of high school now, getting closer and closer to going off to college, grades still important, but the last 2 marking periods are really very insignificant towards acceptance to colleges unless you really, really bomb everything. Sitting in study hall, this pretty goofy, but really nice, funny kid, Matt, comes over and tells me he's been tripping in school all day. It was hilarious watching such an already goofy kid talk on shrooms and I started to think, it's been so long and I don't even remember what really happened last time because it was so long ago...why not try shrooms again one of these days, in a little bit larger amount, somewhere that I don't have to worry too much.

            So I figured that I wanted to do them as soon as possible, so I planned to do them the upcoming Saturday while snowboarding (lol). I didn't foresee myself actually boarding a lot but I'm in ski club and you get a nice 2 hour ride down to the resort place we go, a good 6 hours there, and a 2 hour ride back. My friend I board with usually picks me up at around noon or 1 and I don't get home until after midnight so I figured that this would be a pretty good opportunity. It's a rather large resort with 3 nice sized lodges and even when 100% sober, the lights in the woods always looked so beautiful to me. Although I later learned that my logic was somewhat flawed, I had thought that worse-case scenario if I get really paranoid I would either go upstairs in the lodge where there were only a few people sitting usually, or just stay outside and find a nice place to chill on some hill.

            Next I should explain my tripping partner, Shaun. He had always been pretty straight edge up to about halfway through our junior year in high school, but he was still pretty anti-drug in a way. He had been drunk maybe 5-10 times and although I had convinced him to smoke buds with me a few times and he had smoked with other people one or two times, he either was doing something really wrong or had some extreme tolerance (which is so opposite from me where my tolerance never builds and a few hits always takes me farther than my friends who need 3-4 bowls to even compare to my level of high). So in general he had a very, very small experience with any kind of altered state and it was really hard to decide whether he should trip with me. He always seemed to joke around about doing drugs like it was so cool and I often thought the little bit of experimenting he did was really just to fit in, and he would of course have to bring it up all the time about smoking weed around people when he had clearly told me he was never really high, and this behavior would always kind of annoy me. I thought that this was the chance to get him to really see how serious and powerful drugs can be and actually see what it is like to be in an altered state of consciousness. Additionally, I didn't want to make him babysit me all night when he was sober and capable of snowboarding, which would kind of be a dick move in way. Once I explained how safe shrooms really are (no one has ever died from the shrooms them self, etc) and told him how fun it could be, he was really interested and was pretty sure he would do it. The night before I texted him saying that he really needs to reconsider if he is ready for this because if I was pushing for him to do it too hard and he didn't want to himself, he could have a terrifying experience and if he got really depressed afterwards I would feel terrible. He said he would consider it a little more but he was pretty sure he wanted to do it.

            Next day, he picked me up and we went to go pick up the quarter ounce I had payed for earlier in the week. We got to the buses early and we were both so pumped for what we were about to do. Matt, the kid from my study hall who was tripping earlier in the week was on the same bus and he told me about how he combined shrooms, acid, and hydros at the big 3,000 high school student dance the night before. I told him that I had a quarter of shroom we were going to do that night and he asked if he could buy some. I originally figured me and my friend would split a slice and go from there depending on how strong it was and I would save the rest for some time in the near future, but I was in a good mood and if it weren't for him I wouldn't even be doing it, so I said what the hell and sold him a third of quarter. We had the back seats so I drank a few beers on the way down (I still can't believe that I was just sitting back drinking beers on the ski club bus). Drugs/alcohol were a very common theme at ski club and it seemed that everyone drank or smoked weed at some points in their time there. These juniors on the bus had a pipe out and were talking about smoking weed that night when I whipped out our bag of shrooms and they all were amazed. They were all saying "Dude, that’s sick! I can't believe you guys are really going to do that snowboarding". When we told them that I only tripped to a small degree 5 years ago once and my friend had only been a little bit high from weed a few times their jaws just dropped. With a nice beer buzz going at around 4:00, we split our 4.6g in half and ate them at around 4:10. I didn't remember them being that bad when I did them before but everyone talks about how bad they are, so I expected them to taste like shit. The best way I would describe it was old peanuts. Wasn't very good, but it wasn't that bad either. We were getting really close to the ski resort and I was really hoping I could get off the bus before any visuals began. Within about 15 minutes, we were about 5 minutes away and the vibrating of the bus felt really weird, and I started to feel pretty good, but was super anxious. One of the juniors had a visor on with the goggles and all and I couldn't stop laughing at how funny he looked. The first real "visual" I noticed was looking at my iPod where the screen was glowing pure white it looked like it was split into green/red/blue. I noticed this pattern throughout the night with all the lights and the snow. I really made everything look beautiful in a way.

            We got off the bus and I felt AMAZING. It had been between 0 and 20 degrees F for the past couple weeks and it was about 40-50 degrees this day. It was that feeling in spring that you get when it feels just right out. Not hot, not cold, just perfect. There were some fairly hard gusts of wind that just felt so wonderful. We got our boards and started walking towards the area where you take the main lifts that take you to everywhere else. There was a little road you walk down to get there and it felt like the end was a mile away even though it was only maybe 100 ft or so. There was like a crowd of people walking in front of us and a crowd coming from our school's buses behind us and with the equal distance between the two crowds it felt like we were walking but going nowhere. We both noticed at the same time that our knees felt nonexistent and it felt really goofy to be walking like we were clowns. I put on some Tom Petty and it said "Gonna leave this world for a while." It was so perfect as this was the absolute start of the trip. Eventually we got to the lift and waiting in line we saw Matt who moved up with us so we could go up together. There was this other kid our age who was alone who was going to go up with us because they try getting all 4 people on each lift to make it faster for everyone. We were about to try to just get up without him because we knew the nonsense we would talk but then we said fuck it and told him to come with us. I'd have to say this ride was the funniest part of the whole trip. Shaun and I were starting to feel the real strong effects and Matt was in the middle of his peak. Being higher than ever before, Shaun and I couldn't help but let everything we were seeing out. The trails that you could see behind the people flying down the slopes, the entire spectrum of colors in the snow that usually is plain, boring white, the idea that we would have to get off at the top and actually snowboard, and the intense feeling of the amazing wind that was warm and cold at the same time. It was unbelievable. I couldn't think of any time I had felt SO amazing. We were shouting out how good we felt and all talking about different random shit at the same time that made no sense and the other kid on the lift was just laughing his ass off. Eventually we got to the top and of course all crashed into each other getting off. Next thing we knew Matt was all strapped in and took off after yelling "Oh my god this is going to be amazing!!!" That was the last we saw of him for the trip haha. As much as it seemed like we would fall constantly, it was really pretty easy to board just taking your time and feeling the air blow by. I was listening to Tom Petty - Freefalling and it was unbelievable. When we got to the bottom we just looked at each other with the biggest smiles and laughed so hard.

            I told Shaun we should go find a place to sit and relax for a little bit and take everything one step at a time. We locked our boards and started wandering behind this building hoping we could find some nice chairs that wouldn't look suspicious sitting in but could just sit and watch as our world was warped. We ended up kind of lost and found ourselves sitting on a little ledge that was like a tiny fence around a patio. We were separated from the line that take you up the bunny hill by a little frozen stream and a few small trees and I was sort of paranoid that it would look weird with two teenagers just sitting on this fence behind a building. I also had completely lost track of time and didn't know how long we had been sitting there for. The icy snow on the ground was like a river flowing by and the shapes we both saw in it completely blew our minds. There was a large building that was under construction next to where we were sitting and it felt like there were evil people in their watching us and it really creeped me out. The auditory hallucinations where mind shattering. It seemed like there was always that sound like in a movie as the suspense is building where everything is getting louder and more intense and it was really kind of freaky. At this point I remembered how supposedly taking a Valium or Xanax was supposed to bring you back to reality and had I had one at that time I would definitely have taken it. Thank god that I did not though. As freaky as the trip got at times, I wouldn't change anything about it. These two freshmen that we drive to ski club every week that live by Shaun knew that we were tripping and coming from a terrain park they saw us just sitting on a fence starring at a squirrel in a tree and were calling our names which made me even more paranoid although it was pretty funny. One time when Shaun got up to go "walk to some place", I started to follow him and then I thought about how we were relatively safe around most of the resort, but if we wandered out of the boundary there was a world filled with danger, the first of which would be crossing a very busy road and I remember telling Shaun, "No man! We can't leave here. If we leave this place they will kill us." That was possibly one of the scariest parts of the trip. Everything seemed like it would lead to my death from the very thought that we were trapped in the resort and couldn't go anywhere unless we wanted to die, to this sign on a door that said Exit which seemed extremely negative to me and I thought through the door was the end of the world. We went back to where we were sitting before and I don't quite know how long we sat there but we watched the day go from somewhat sunny to pretty dark out with all the lights coming on and I thought to myself, "What the hell, we've only been here for like 10 minutes, who the fuck is playing with the lights out" or something along those lines. I was really starting to think that what we did was a very bad decision and how much trouble we were going to get into when someone saw us acting weird, called security, which would get us sent home and my parents would murder me. This is when I decided "Oh shit, this is going to be a bad trip." One thing I really noticed about shrooms is that it's hard to say that you have either a "bad trip" or "good trip". There were some terrible times during this trip and there were also the most amazing times of my life. Without the bad parts, the good parts wouldn't feel so amazing in my opinion.

            After who knows how long, Shaun really wanted to go somewhere else so we wouldn't end up sitting there all night. My mind was going crazy, a lot of it with paranoia, and I was thinking that we would just sit there until the shrooms wore off. Then I realized that the windows in the building in front of us might have people behind them who would see us sitting there for over an hour and might report it to someone, and I remembered that shrooms are capable of lasting 6 hours give or take, and I realized that I was a little bit cold, so I told Shaun to follow me. Walking towards the building was extremely weird with the snow and slippery ice. It felt like we were walking at an angle up everything but it wasn't even like the ground was slanted in one direction...it was like no matter where u walked you would be going uphill one second and downhill the next. I always thought it was so hard to drink a lot and be in public because everything you do is so out of the ordinary and you can't walk straight. For some reason I didn't consider this with shrooms and thought that this would be easier to pull off...well obviously I’m an idiot because we looked at least 5x more disoriented trying to get anywhere. I was planning on going to the upper level of the main lodge because there aren't usually many people there, but when we got to the stairs I saw a waitress bringing food up there and didn't know if someone rented it for a group party or something and didn't want to risk getting in trouble for going up there in the state we were in. We had definitely hit the peak which would last another 3 hours or so. We went to these seats outside where you could watch people go down all the main slopes. It was impossible to tell if it was warm or cold out and the temperature seemed to constantly be changing. Putting on my gloves was possibly one of the most unusual things ever. My hands didn't feel like they belonged to me and when I put them into the glove it was like I was putting them into another dimension. Weird thoughts about how many fingers I had and how flexible they were made it an extremely challenging task. The trees were fucking amazing! They all seemed like they had their own story to tell and weren't the insignificant life form we always look at them as. One tree in particular was this large almost puffy Christmas tree with lights on it still that looked so goofy and happy. I felt like I could just sit there and talk to it in a way. I must have spent what felt like an hour thinking about how I got to where I was then and didn't know if what happened the night before was real or not and thought maybe it was all like a dream or something and the more I thought deeply about it, the more I felt lost in the world. I was pretty paranoid of all the people around and put on my iPod. We both sat listening to music, occasionally looking at each other and blurting out some random nonsensical comment. Things like "Did you see the tree" and "The color is...it’s not there". I really wish I had recorded some of our conversations on my phone because looking back it seems impossible for us to have said such things that are so ridiculous, but made so much sense at the time. It's like even 1 minute of tripping would give you hours upon hours of shit to talk about because so much is happening everywhere, yet words can't even begin to touch on anything that you’re seeing, and your mind is so out of control that nothing you say means anything. You mean to say so much and it comes out as a five word phrase that has no logic whatsoever. Everyone walking by looked like a flip book where you see them in one place and then they are in another the next second but you didn't seem them actually travel between the two spots. The music was completely mind expanding at that state. Every time I thought of a song I wanted to hear my mind would get side tracked and I would never end up listening to it. I had made a playlist of really happy sounding chill, cool music to listen to if things got too out of control. Of course, out of control doesn't even touch the surface of how far gone we were. I found the probably 30 mins - 1 hr that we sat outside there to go from best feeling ever to "what the fuck have I done" at least 50 times back and forth. The music did help a lot to loosen up as much as you can when you are so far from reality. Whenever I would be feeling amazing, I felt like Shaun might be panicking like I was earlier and wanted to ask him if he felt good, but I knew it was no use to try to tell him what was going through my mind that made me feel so good at that point because every time we said something to each other we both had completely different things on our mind and with so many people around I was afraid to talk too loud. The enormous size of our pupils didn't help the situation with all those people around either.

            At this point, I would say that we went to the peak of the peak and anything in this paragraph really could be inaccurate because the intensity was beyond even trying to put into words. As far as I can remember, we went from the outside seats to the upper level that I was afraid to go to before. I was trying to find a place to sit where there was no one around, but of course there was someone everywhere. I felt like I knew each and every person and no matter how strange some random person looked it was match up to someone I know and I would be sure it was them and I just kept hiding my face so I wouldn't have to talk to anyone. We sat in these two chairs between two rooms for a while and looking back, I'm sure it was really weird how we just sat there completely lost in time trying to listen to music and feeling just so, so, so beyond weird. The kid who sold me the shrooms texted me asking how they were and I remember my white keypad was changing colors every second. I couldn't believe what I was seeing because I knew my keys were white and it was just enchanting. I would say that at that point sitting in those chairs, I was farthest from this reality than ever before. My mind was just...I don't even know and there is no sense in trying to describe it. At some point we got up and walked down the stairs and went outside. I really thought it was a bad idea but I knew arguing with Shaun would just end up making us look stupid and getting us in trouble so I followed him. He started wandering into the street and I was afraid he would get hit by a car and finally convinced him to come back. Some man was standing outside the door talking on his phone and he must have knew something was up as we were both just looking lost and clueless and wondering where we should go. Eventually we walked around the side of the building and found a little bench to sit on. I felt such a relief because no one was around but then Shaun said "Dude...I'm fucking freezing" and then it hit me how cold I was. We went back upstairs in the lodge and sat where we were before for another period of time that could have been 5 minutes or a full hour. There were these chicks that we had met last year who lived about 45 minutes from us and went to the same resort for their school's ski club and they wanted to meet us somewhere I guess (very straight edge to the point that they were against drinking usually even). Shaun showed me a text message saying "Are you ok?" and I started to think of all the possibilities of things he might have said to people in text messages and started to freak out. I tried taking his phone from him before he got himself in trouble but he wouldn't let me have it so I just gave up. I was imagining him texting some random shit to his mom and how terrible the consequences would be for both me and him. He was texting the chicks from the other school and I don't quite understand how much I was hallucinating because when he was typing, all I saw where jumbled up random letters that didn't spell anything and the next second I saw "Message Sent" and was like "oh fuck what did you do now". Then when I tried telling him he was going to really screw shit up he showed me his sent and received messages and they were all full logical texts. I thought I had lost my mind. The girls were coming in at 8:00 and Shaun wanted to go outside so we wouldn't see them. It was so warm in there that I didn't want to go into the cold and even though we decided the bunny hill would be best (we both have been boarding for about 4 years and don't usually go there lol), the lift there still brought you high enough that falling could definitely kill you, and I was really nervous about all the possible dangers we could face. Eventually all these people were coming upstairs where we were so I told him we should go. We walked to the boards and Shaun told me he was really hungry because he hadn't eaten anything all day. I realized I hadn't eaten for about 8 hours and we hadn't had anything to drink and I had already been through so much that I felt like maybe the lack of food was blowing everything out of proportion and getting some shit in our system would bring us back down. The thought of going to the main food place and paying a cashier for food freaked the hell out of me and I knew there was no way we could do it without getting caught so we went to the vending machines. Something that really stuck out was Shaun and his 5 dollar bills. They just felt so weird in a way because at that point the concept of numbers and money just made no sense and I wondered how much $5 really was and he had like 5 five dollar bills and just the thought of it made me stand there and think about it for what seemed like 10 minutes. I didn't feel that hungry and was just trying to get some food to make Shaun happy and of course the machine has to keep spitting the bills back out. Shaun thought it would be a good idea to just put coins in, and I watched as he put pennies in that kept falling out below. Eventually we got the $2 in and I got a Hershey's bar and he got Reese's cups. I wanted to get a drink and it felt like it took hours to figure out how that machine worked. Finally I got my bottle of water and turned around to like 7 people standing, waiting for us to go lol. We sat down outside and he had to go take a piss so I sat there drinking my water which made me really cold and I started to shake a little. These guys in their early 20s came out and were standing around the table I was at smoking cigs which somehow appeared to me like they were smoking bowls. I just sat there shaking with my eyes wide open, pupils blown up to all hell. They must have known something was up but I tried to play it as well as I could at that point. I got really scared that Shaun was going to get lost and I wouldn't be able to find him later but eventually he found his way back and we went to get our boards. I found it really weird how everything that is so familiar to you when you are sober is so fucking mixed up when you’re tripping. We had walked between the bunny hill, lodge, other ski lifts at least a hundred times before, but it all seemed new in my mind and I almost thought that they did some remodeling and changed all the paths but later found out it was all the same as before. Eventually we got on the lift and I remember yelling "Weeeee! This is going to be so fun!" And it was haha. As we got off the lift I started to feel really good and Freefalling was on again. The music was so good at this point. Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd is just something else completely. We did either two or three runs when I said "Oh what the fuck, why not go try to do something larger?" So we walked over to Mardi Gras, which is the main, long, medium difficulty slope and took the lift to the top. On the lift up we were so open with each other about everything and realized that we should have talked more during the trip instead of keeping it all in our heads, although that could have gotten us in a lot of trouble if people heard us. It was so nice outside and from this point on there were no more negative thoughts during the trip, just pure bliss. When we started to go down the hill, I looked over and saw none other than Isaac, the kid we sat on the lift with at the beginning of our trip, waving to me, smiling. With how many people go there and how large the place is, I really couldn't believe my mind. I thought he was an imaginary friend in my head or something. I was yelling to Shaun about seeing him but the next thing I knew he was gone. I didn't know if he was real or not at that point. We were in line to take the lift up again and there he was. We all rode up together again while Shaun talked about life and philosophy and I laughed hysterically. We had been telling each other that the shrooms were wearing off and we were feeling better since way earlier during the highest points of the peak, I think just because it brought comfort that we wouldn't be stuck like this forever, but now it seemed like it was really beginning to wear off. We went down Mardi Gras once more and I was playing Van Halen - Dream full blast, and that one run may have been the most astounding, best few minutes of my whole life. After all we had been through that night we were starting to come back down to reality a little bit and the song just meant so much and sounded so good. "We'll get higher and higher, straight up we'll climb" pretty much described the night.

            We finally felt normal and brave enough to go get some real food from the actual food place and went inside the lodge. We bought some food and went to sit down and relax and talked and talked about everything that had happened. It was like some invisible communication barrier was finally gone and we had so much to say. We made at least 10x more sense than we had earlier, but to a sober person would have still sounded insane. Somebody was cleaning up the place and Shaun had been rambling on about how much he loves life and how happy he is that I had him do shrooms and how different his life would be forever and I said that we better go because that person seemed suspicious from what they were hearing. We walked around the lodge a few times with nowhere to go and found ourselves back on the bench at the side of the building that we had sat on what felt like days ago. We just sat in awe of everything that was going through our minds and how it was possible for a few mushroom caps to change your life so much. We starred at the full moon as the clouds flew by them extremely fast and talked about how this was the best day of our lives and we would never ever forget it. We went back inside the lodge for a couple minutes but decided that we should get to the buses and avoid all the straight edge kids in the lodge who would know we were up to something.

            We got back to the bus and the juniors who were in the back with us on the ride there were starring at us, waiting to hear how crazy our night was. Shaun and I both just walked back to our seat with our jaws dropped like we had just seen the most amazing thing ever (and we really did haha). We had 30 mins before the bus would leave and we were really close to being sober but still nowhere near a normal mindset and talked more about everything that happened and the juniors were laughing their asses off at the random shit we were saying. We listened to music and just relaxed the whole way back and I couldn't wait to get some sleep, but at the same time, I didn't know how I would sleep after all that had happened. I found it particularly funny when my dad asked me "Anything exciting happen tonight?" I lied in bed for at least an hour or two just thinking about everything and eventually fell asleep.