1st Trip, 4 grams

First off, I'm not an avid drug user, I've only done cannabis twice before, and neither have I actually gotten high. (The first time I didn't smoke enough, the second I used a bong incorrectly so I wasn't efficiently getting THC into my system). When I heard about shrooms, though, the entire 'psychedelic experience' intrigued me, so I did my research on it for a few months before finally being able to get my hands on 4 grams on some. I really wanted my first time to be profound and memorable, where I could really think about things and see things differently.

I didn't have anyone to trip with, so I didn't have a sitter or anyone around with me when I went through with it (which I know is advisable and not recommended, especially for a first time), but I had a friend (I'll call her Irene for this report, she's also the one who knew the dealer and got me the shrooms to begin with, although she's never done any psychedelics, nor wants to.) who I could call to come and be with me if I started to feel anxious / have a bad trip. I didn't mind having a solo trip, I'm relatively a loner-- I dislike parties and being in crowds or around too many people. The plan was, I would do it early on Sunday, at around 11 or 12,  by a bike trail next to a canal within walking distance from my house. I would ride by bike to a spot that I had biked to many times that is really relaxing, peaceful, and comfortable to me (also very secluded), and I would sit under a tree and simply enjoy the day and the experience, then head home at around 6 or 7, maybe later, after the entire trip was done with. I couldn't do it at home because I still live with my parents (I'm 19 and a full-time college student), and I certainly did not want them to realize I was tripping or under the influence of drugs. My father is very old school in that he things all drugs are bad, addictive, and lethal. My mother, who was a hippie back in the 70s, has had plenty of experiences with LSD, cocaine, angel dust, cannabis back in the day, but never really enjoyed any of them, and did not want me to go through the same unpleasant experiences she did. A week before the trip, I asked her if she ever did shrooms, and she said she never did it herself but knew a guy who (apparently) put mushrooms along with cannabis into a cigar-like joint, and actually went into a coma. When he woke from the coma, he had suffered major brain damage and was practically mentally disabled; she remembered him sitting up in the hospital bed, drooling with a blank stare on his face. Of course, at this point, It was ridiculous to assume mushrooms had caused that, since if you smoke/burn mushrooms, you pretty much destroy most or all if it's potency/effects. (Or so I've heard). So I didn't pay it any attention, but I could see my mom whole-heartedly believed that and would certainly have a problem if I told her I was going to trip on them.

Anyways, Sunday morning came along, and I had put on my book bag, and taken a notebook with me (so I can write down my thoughts or what I was experiencing and read it later on after the trip), and a bottle of lemonade (which I heard enhances the potency of the trip as well as washes the taste down. I rode by bike the long way around to the opposite end of the bike trail. I hadn't expected it to be so hot, and I started sweating mere minutes after leaving my house. By the time I got to the spot where I wanted to be, I was sweating profusely, sticky, humid, and panting. I took off my outer shirt and used it to wipe my face and my arms. I caught my breath and sat under the big tree that offered plenty of shade. The wind was nice, and I could see a few ducks waddling about in the canal a little further off (I wasn't directly next to the canal). I noticed it was 2 PM already, but didn't mind it too much. I took out the bag and ate all 4 grams within a few minutes. They didn't taste as bad as I expected, and I likened it to stale potato chips or really old fries that were still some-what soft. I didn't know what strain of mushrooms I was eating but I figured it didn't matter at this point. I texted Irene letting her know I took them, and she replied that she actually got called into work, and won't be off until after 8 PM, but she assured me that in case of an emergency, she would leave regardless to make sure I was alright. I told her I would be alright, and she replied to not think about what my experience might be or else I "won't trip." (I knew that 4 grams was going to make me trip hard regardless, so it didn't matter if I thought about it or not.) I pulled out my headphones and started listening to the playlist I made myself beforehand with serene music, or music that made me feel relaxed and happy. I was pretty content at that point, and was confident that my chances for a bad trip were low. I took out my notebook and started writing how I felt before the effects came in, and drew a few doodles.

-The Actual Trip-

At around 2:45, I got up to walk up and down the bike trail a bit, expecting the effects to start coming shortly. At that point, I could feel very minor nausea. (I hadn't eaten anything all morning/afternoon so that I wouldn't be so nauseous after eating 4 grams of the stuff). I was excited to start seeing things, so I went back and sat down under the tree again and write down what I was feeling. At 3:00, I began to notice that the white paper in my notebook seemed fluorescent, and slightly glowing, like if someone was holding a blacklight towards it. The pages were looking slightly purple than white, and with this, I had remembered reading here in the Shroomery that looking at your hand is also a fun thing to do when starting to trip. So I looked at my palms, and I didn't notice anything different at first but then I could see very slight color changes in the hue of the skin. They were slightly red, then slightly orange, then slightly yellow, then slightly green, then slightly blue, then slightly  purple, etc. I looked upward at my surroundings, but nothing was really happening. Nothing melted or shifted yet, and so I decided to close my eyes for a bit and see if I could see some closed-eyed visuals. And what I saw was magnificent. Typical kaleidoscopic shapes changing and morphing, but it was all in a very vibrant bright red, with shapes in purple and blue floating across and melting through each other. I opened my eyes and began to write what I saw in my notebook, when I noticed the gray clouds close by.

It was very ominous, and there was even lightning appearing in the gray clouds. I definitely had not planned on it to rain, and there was no place I could go except home if it started to rain, which was definitely not an option, I did not want to face my parents especially when I peaked. It was around 3:30 when the storm started reaching where I was, and I could feel the small droplets beginning to fall. I figured I would ride my bike further into the neighborhood where it was still sunny and cloud-less. Making sure I could still keep my balance and ride the bike, I headed back through the bike trail into a road that led within my neighborhood. This is where the effects accelerated and where I REALLY started tripping. While riding, I noticed that I could not for the life of me, stop smiling. My thoughts were still in-check at this point, and I noticed that every emotion I thought of in my head, my face would immediately take on and express to the fullest. If I thought about something sad or unfunny to stop my smile, my face would become grim and sad, but when I tried to make it so I wouldn't look so depressed, I started smiling again, and then laughing at how strange this was. My neighborhood is pretty quiet, almost no traffic at all, but every so often a car would roll past me and I was sure they saw some weird guy laughing his ass off on his bike, and that thought made me laugh even more. I knew I couldn't go home like this.

I biked into an elementary school near a side of my neighborhood. Since it was Sunday, there was practically no one, not a single car was in the parking lot and the school was kind of hidden in the way that it was surrounded on 3 sides by people who owned an acre or two of farm / agriculture. It was around 3:45 when I biked into the lot, and thats when I noticed how incredibly beautiful the sky was. I was facing away from the storm that was behind me, and the sky infront of me was pure blue with only a couple white clouds sailing by. The color however, was unreal. It seemed to be a fluorescent gradient of blue, starting with dark blue directly above me, to a bright aquamarine and finally reaching a very light teal towards the horizon. It wasn't a consistent 'sky blue' color that you see when looking at the sky.  Then, I looked at a vertical cloud above me towards the right, and was fascinated by it because I could see pure light coming out of the cloud, as if the sun itself was encased inside of it. It was so inviting, like it promised me comfort and delight. When I looked back down to the gray of the concrete parking lot, it felt like I was in an infinite space of concrete floor, with only the storm on one side, and the beautiful sky and cloud on the other. I then thought that it was the perfect representation of my life-- there's always one end that is troubled, storm-like, negative, depressive, and volatile, and I'm always trying to reach the part that has the clear, radiant blue skies and puffy white clouds that irradiated light, but I'm just simply a kid riding his bike trying to reach something he can't. I looked at my arm and noticed that everything I saw was exactly like High-Definition television, or like in a high-definition photo taken by a state of the art photography camera. My skin tone was profound, and I could see each hair completely refined, I could see each pore in my skin coated by my sweat.

The storm was getting closer, however, and so I started biking again further into my neighborhood, toward a friend's house. I already knew he wouldn't be there (he is always either working or with his girlfriend), but that it wouldn't hurt to check, and that I would be safe in there if it began to rain here. On the roads to his house, however, I tried to keep a straight face as cars passed me by, and I wanted to tell them that they're going the wrong way; that they were heading towards the storm. But then I realized, they all had their own storms and bright skies in their lives, and their storm might be my bright sky and vice versa. Everyone was running away from their own storms in their lives, and trying to reach their own vividly blue skies even if it was in the direction of someone else's storm. I began laughing at this great realization-- why hadn't I realized this before? It's so logical and made so much sense now, that I find it funny how it took me this long to make this conclusion. This is where my thoughts began picking up pace, and I tried to keep them under control until I reached my friend's house. When I did, I saw that his car wasn't there so I wasn't surprised. But the storm is now dangerously close to my house, and there's so way I could bike further; the storm would simply envelope everything and I would be rained on, which would be even harder to explain to my mother. As I looked back the way I came, I came to another realization that this was my life's ultimate problem! I've tried so hard to run away from the storms in my life that I've failed to see what I was SUPPOSED to do, what I HAD to do. I can't reach the beautiful blue skies by simply running away from the storms. I had to go head-first INTO the storms and MAKE them become bright blue skies. Instead of chasing the blue skies and white clouds, I had to face my storms and turn them into such. I knew this was all metaphorical, however, and despite my thoughts building over and over on this idea, I tried to focus on the task at hand- Should I return home to avoid getting wet? Or will my parents know I'm severely out of my mind right now?  I decided to just bike back into the school that I came from.

When I got there, the storm was directly overhead. Lightning and thunder appeared more frequently though it still hadn't started raining. I sat by a curb close to the school, just to take a rest. I was thirsty, tired, extremely sweaty, and physically worn out. I looked at the sky again and saw skulls, menacing skulls with aggressive expressions. They didn't frighten me, but I was worried that I might start having a bad trip now that I saw something negative. But then I thought about what I read here on the Shroomery, that people are more likely to have bad trips if they read trip reports before they trip themselves, because then they start thinking about avoiding bad trips themselves, which indirectly causes a bad trip because you don't enjoy the experience. It was around 4:20 at this point and my mother called. I answered and she told me that it was going to rain hard, and that if I was still out biking that I should come home. I told her I would, since I just wasn't in the state of mind to lie. We hung up and I had made myself sound normal, but my thoughts were really racing at this point. I looked at the ground, and it was beginning to shift and morph. I looked at the sky and the gray clouds coated the sky, and I saw patterns of skulls within the clouds, and the clouds themselves seem to 'breathe' together, morphin in and out of one another. I tried to empty my thoughts in the notebook I still had with me in my book bag, but I couldn't organize my thoughts, I couldn't get a single word down without thinking about something else. I started laughing again at all the realizations I was having, but at the same time I was getting nervous and anxious about how my mother and father would react to seeing me like this, and how I was so stupid to not have planned this trip more carefully and more responsibly. It started to drizzle again, and I had to make a choice. I went home.

Once I got home, I composed myself as best I could before heading inside. I put my bike in the garage silently. My dad was in his office, and I ALWAYS visit him in his office after I'm home from a bike ride or from college if he's in there, and I thought he might consider it strange I didn't see him there when I came home. My mother was in the master bedroom upstairs. I went in my dad's office to greet him. The moment I did, I thought of every single moment I greeted him, how he was always there and was always guiding me, always making sure I didn't make bad or stupid choices and being there to support me if I did, and I dreaded disappointing him, and how disappointed he will be if he knew that I was tripping. I tried to simulate my usual behaviour, and we talked for a bit about the weather. I didn't want to look directly at him, but figured if I kept avoiding his eyes, he would know something was wrong. He asked me if I was alright, and I said "yeah, just  very tired, I haven't eaten yet and I'm sweaty. I'm going to take a shower." He said "OK" and I left his office. I was positive that he knew I was tripping on mushrooms. I began thinking about how he would tell my mother, and how my mother would freak out and call an ambulance (she tends to overreact). The thought terrified me, and I went upstairs, past the master bedroom my mother was in (I couldn't bare to face her now) and went into my room, undressed, and got in the shower. My thoughts, still going a mile a minute, were all imagining the scenarios that would happen when they confronted me about tripping today. The water, also made me uncomfortable. I didn't feel like I was in my body. I felt like I was inside my head, piloting a robotic shell of a body, moving each body part manually.

After the shower, I went to go watch television in my room. It was around 4:30-4:40, where I was peaking more or less. I made another realization that we are all the same person, and that we are all God, that we created the universe and everything, and then made ourselves forget what we were, and made ourselves live in the life we made for each other. I'm not sure how to explain it, but I was so sure of it at the time (Keep in mind I was processing thought after thought after thought without pause). That when we die, we just come back as a different person in a different life, but that we are also separate in that we live through one another's lives so that we all experience sin, we all experience murder, but also gratitude, altruism, benevolence. We all live through one another's lifetime. And that infinity is just a chain of lives, and we simply become conscious at one particular link in the chain, and that this chain, and everything, was one giant loop. Again, I started laughing, but trying my best to suppress it, since I didn't want my mother or father to come into the room.

I got up and went into the bathroom to look at myself in the mirror. I looked like myself, but when I looked at my eyes, I saw that my pupils were REALLY dilated, and that you could totally tell (despite me having extremely dark brown eyes). I thought about how it was probably blatantly obvious to my father. I began to think about the Requiem For A Dream movie, and how it made so much sense now. Everything that happened in the movie happened to me (or so I was thinking). I was lying to my parents, putting myself at risk in dealing with drugs, then becoming addicted to them (obviously I wasn't addicted to anything but I was playing out the movie but in my own life). I looked at the clock. 5:15 PM. How long have i been tripping? Did I start at 12? No, I started at 2. But, shouldn't I be coming out of the trip now? Wait, I'm thinking about the trip, and not enjoying the experience, so I should stop thinking about it. I don't want to "spend all day under the covers" like one person mentioned on Shroomery after having a bad trip. But this IS a bad trip, nothing is happening how I wanted to. Wait, what if I'm thinking about the trip, then I never tripped at all, like Irene said. But I had to, I've been through all of this weird stuff. I looked at the clock again. 5:16. What? Time is so slow! Wait, I have no perception of time because I'm tripping. That damn Requiem For A Dream movie has me freaked out. Wait...if I didn't trip, I'm still under the tree by the canal. How can I be there when I'm here?

Oh My God...

I must've eaten too many shrooms, or gotten addicted and/or went and bought more and took too much and fell in a coma. I'm probably or have been hospitalized, and have suffered brain trauma and irreversible damage, just like the guy my mom mentioned when I talked to her about shrooms, and just like that lady in Requiem For A Dream, and how at the end she was so insane that she kept imagining her own fake reality in her mind. That's what this is. I'm drooling on a hospital bed somewhere, my mother and father devastated and in tears while I'm here in my own reality that I imagined right after I took the shrooms by the canal in the bike trail. The shrooms aren't even real! They were just an excuse my mind used to realize that I'm dreaming, and that people who have 'bad trips' realize they're dreaming, but deny it, and panic at the thought that reality isn't real, that their real life bodies are somewhere else in horrible conditions. And when people have "trips", it's actually them waking up in their real life body for a moment, very briefly, before returning back into their made-up reality, and because they didn't know that what they saw was the real thing, they attribute it as being heaven or spiritual, philosophical journey! Real life is where we go when we die here in our mind's reality! Real life is actually heaven! Now Inception makes even more sense! That's why Mol in the movie killed herself! Everything is connected! That's why people who haven't done drugs are afraid of doing so! They don't want to know the truth...I wish I didn't! I wish I could go back thinking reality was the way it was!

(At this point, I'm holding my mouth closed but laughing hysterically, at the same time I'm incredibly sad and conflicted inside, even anxious and just having a swirl of emotions. Everything made so much sense, and I was the only one that didn't know. Everyone else knew. My mother knew, that's why she told me about that guy (who my real body now ended up as), my friend Irene knew when she said "Don't think about it or else you won't trip" when she never even tripped herself, the director/writer of Requiem For A Dream was someone who obviously did shrooms or LSD and figured it all out, and made a movie about it to let others like me realize the truth, and in fact Donnie Darko and Inception were all films that I thought were just movies before but were actually messages left behind from people who have experienced the real world before! Everyone in The Shroomery knew because they've made the same journey. Just like in the movie, I would have never known I was dreaming, and even know I don't know at what point I made up this fake fantasy world of mine. Where is my real mother and my real father? Can I even return now? Is it better to live in the real world now that I'm disabled and mentally impaired, or to just live on in this reality, where my mind makes up what my mother and father were like, and where I can be happy if I just pretend to accept this fake reality?)

At around 5:45, I started coming down, but I still was trying desperately to deal with the fact that everything was fake. (I was also watching re-runs of different shows on television). The shows that I've been watching, I've already seen them, so I'm repeating a day in my own reality. My trip has already happened, even if it doesn't feel like it. I didn't realize it but I had a chance to see reality, but it's over now. I didn't trip at all. Everything in my future is already planned by my mind, and there's nothing I can do to change it now. If I don't want to lose my mind, I just have to start accepting this reality as being real, even if it isn't.

By 6:30, I was finally starting to get a grip on myself. Things didn't seem hazy, and the thoughts in my mind started slowing down, but I was still in that 'altered state of consciousness'. I looked in the mirror again and my pupils were still dilated. I began to get a headache.

At 7, my mom came into my room to see if I was alright. Now, I wasn't really as shaken up as before, and could control my facial expressions and told her how I tired myself out while riding my bike. She said that it really did rain hard shortly after I got home. She said that there was something wrong with my eyes, and I told her that I sweat a lot and was probably dehydrated and would drink and eat later. She said OK and told me to rest. And that was that.

At 8, my mind was finally back to normal, and I didn't see things so differently anymore, though I still thought about what I concluded earlier. My thoughts came back down to a normal pace. I had a crushing headache, severely debilitating, but I figured that I really was dehydrated and since I hadn't eaten anything in over 24 hours, my body was weak. It wasn't the mushrooms, though they probably did contribute since I had never experienced anything like it, with my mind processing so many things so rapidly.  I ate a few snacks and drank water and just watched TV and listened to music before I drifted off to sleep. The next day, I felt a little weird and shaken up because of the thoughts I had during my trip, but I came back to reality and realized they were just trip thoughts, and that it was stupid of me to take 4g with lemonade without a sitter and without a secure location and ending up going back home during my peak hours. My parents never confronted me about tripping-- I guess they really didn't realize it. As for myself, I won't be taking them for another few weeks, but I do want to try them again sometime, exept maybe only 2 grams instead and with proper, safe circumstances (like a sitter and secure location).

Sorry for the long read, but if you have any comments to tell me about my experience, feel free to do so. I know I messed up in a lot of places, especially after doing so much research. I just wanted my first time experience to be profound, I didn't just want to hallucinate things, I wanted to really see the depths of my mind. And in that sense I guess I did...but now I think I'll just be happy to take those minor hallucinations, lol.