The end of myself

      My girlfriend and I decided to split 20 g’s of some mushrooms we had. I’m not sure what strain they were, but they were the bluest mushrooms I’ve ever seen. We started eating them at around 4:00 in the afternoon and washed them down with some orange juice. Usually we plan out our trips beforehand with something like a hiking trail or a concert, but this time we just ate them on a whim.

      Since we were just in her dorm room, we decided to hook up my itunes visualizer to her TV and put on some Pink Floyd. The trip started around 15 mins later. The room’s dimensions seemed really out of whack, as in it started to grow longer and wider, then would start shrinking or seem like a perfect cube. We were lying in bed, turned off the visualizer and started watching Catch Me if You Can. The plot of the movie really messed with my head and I was putting myself in the shoes of Leonardo Dicaprio’s character. If you haven’t seen the movie, Dicaprio plays real-life con-man Frank Abegnal Jr, the character had completely shed his identity and traveled the world assuming the roles of doctors, pilots, lawyers (etc) while he was still a teen. If a teen could appear to be all these things, then what constituted identity itself, I started wondering who I was, is a person’s identity something solid and tangible? If a person could convince everyone around him that he was something he was not and everyone would buy it, then to what extent do our personalities still exist?

      These thoughts weren’t as scary as they were fascinating to me. Eventually the physical aspects of the trip started to mirror these thoughts. My gf and I were lying under a blanket and I started to feel as if I had ceased to exist and that I was nothing but an invisible entity that occupied no space and had no concept of time. All of my senses began to merge into what I could only describe as one massive feeling of happiness. When the movie ended, my gf and I tried to talk about it but we were completely unable to communicate in any language.

      It took some time, but I was able to muster out enough to ask if she wanted to go outside and smoke a cigarette. The transition from the room to the hallway was rough. My spatial reasoning was nonexistent since I had ceased to exist as a person. I felt as though I was spinning through the hallways; and the lobby of our dorm building seemed gigantic to the point that I felt it would be impossible to cross. We held it together as to not attract the attention of an RA or anyone else really. The whole time I was wondering why it was humans felt the need to exist at all? To clarify, I didn’t think that we should all die, I felt that humanity as a whole should attempt to influence our surrounding as little as possible; our ultimate goal should be to create the perception that we no longer existed, because after all, it was nothing but our own perception that validated existence as a whole. And the whole pursuit of satisfying our own perceptions was nothing but an exercise of vanity.

      When we finally escaped from the building, I felt like I was falling straight down through the trees right to the campus smoking spot. My gf said she felt this exact same effect. We sat outside smoking our cigarettes on what is usually the bottom of the smallest hill. In reality, this “hill” is less of a hill that it is a slight decline in the earth, but at the moment it seemed like I was sitting at the foot of a massive mountain. It was dark outside but there were too many clouds to see the moon or the stars, but it was beautiful watching the clouds drift by us and as I looked into the sky it seemed that all of existence was nothing but grey clouds drifting through the vacuum of sky that was the universe. My mind had been going in circles with all of this cease to exist stuff, then in a single moment it stopped completely. I was acutely aware of the fact that my brain was no longer active. Everything that I had once considered myself was completely gone and I had no desire to think about anything. I thought that I had melted into my surroundings and that from this point onward this location would comprise  all that I was and that my energy had returned into the universe. We must have stayed out at the smoking spot for at least an hour, not smoking the whole time, just tripping to hard to talk.

When my brain finally started thinking again, my gf and I decided to walk through the campus gardens. We were holding hands and I felt connected to her to the point that I almost thought that if I tried to let go of her hand I wouldn’t be able to. The trees seemed to be dancing along the trail. We started thinking of how futile the concept of language was; I now believe that the first humans to every speak were doing so out of desperation, a desperation to be heard and to have their existence validated by an equal.

By the time we had walked through the garden it was 11:30 pm. We were still tripping but had come down tremendously from where we were. Hunger started to kick in and for a while I felt like I needed to eat or else I would vomit (which I’ve never done on shrooms but have certainly seen people do). The closest place was Waffle House so we decided to eat there. The restaurant seemed to put a damper on my trip, not necessarily negative, but my visuals seemed to subside completely aside from colors being brighter.

We headed back to the dorms and were both tired. By this point the only effect I was feeling was a strong body buzz. We sat in bed and talked our thoughts during the trip, it took  us two hours just to fall asleep.