Pharmaceuticals:
200mg Lamictal
1mg Klonopin
Trip
7g (?) Psilocybin mushrooms
Experience
My previous
highest dosage was 5.3g, an absolutely earth shattering experience, though
nothing could prepare me for what was about to happen. My past few trips have
had some degree of anxiety; in fact, the previous night, I called off a trip
with my friend because I was getting some sort of weird vibes.
I had purchased a half-ounce of dust
and gave half of that to a friend, leaving me with roughly a quarter. I dumped
about half the bag into a glass of orange juice and drank it. I went for a walk
while I was waiting for the come up, but after roughly an hour, I was feeling
little more than a tingling sensation. I decided that the rest of the dust
would be consumed by the end of the night. I find that marijuana usually helps
a trip to come on, so I took two vaporizer hits and closed my eyes; something
was definitely happening.
I stared at another glass of orange
juice and the bag of dust sitting next to it.
Should I do it?
I turned the bag upside down over the glass and watched the
shredded remnants of the mushrooms sink to the bottom of the glass. I drank the
glass, got a beer, and proceeded to go out back onto my patio.
What the fuck did I just do?
I sat down
on a reclining chair and opened the beer, taking a few sips. I observed my
surroundings, seeing if anything began to look “different.” I was sitting on
the chair for about 5 minutes before lighting a cigarette. I cocked my head up
as I was taking a drag and saw a plane flying by, leaving white powdery trails
in the sky. And at that moment, everything fell apart.
The
universe revealed herself to me, naked in all of her glory. The clouds begin to
swirl in beautiful geometric patterns, leaving trails of grey-blue mist behind
them, and the infinite blue sky began to reveal its constituent parts to me, as
billions and billions of blindingly bright pixels met my eyes.
Oh my God. Is this it? Is this what it’s like?
I knew it was happening. I put my beer down on the side
table next to the chair and got up. I began to walk into my house and up my
stairs into my bedroom.
Please don’t take me yet. Let me get into my bed.
Inhale
Exhale
Inhale
Exhale
I begged and begged as I made my way up. By the time I had
entered my bedroom, I was experiencing a noticeable loss of coordination. About
10 minutes had elapsed from the time I took my second dose to the time I got to
my bedroom. Using every bit of physical finesse I could muster, I put a record
on my player and dropped the needle as it spun. I crawled up onto my bed. And
then, dear reader, your humble narrator turned into a complete fucking animal.
Every
hi-hat click and snare hit reverberated to the depths of my being, echoing inside
my skull for an eternity, constantly overlapping each other. I began laughing
so hard I cried. Within a few minutes, my shirt came off, then my pants. (I
don’t know why, but I hate clothes when I’m tripping). I clutched a pillow with
one arm, running my other up and down the side of my body, causing a never-ending
wave of sensory orgasms through every synapse in my brain.
My hands
were in my mouth. I began to cry hysterically – I was experiencing joy in its
purest form. I looked out the window and the sky was blue. I rolled over and
managed to change sides of the record, then turned back. The sky had turned
orange and red, reflecting itself off my bare walls (think what Mars looked
like in Total Recall).
I got up to
go to the bathroom. I have never had visual distortions this strong on any dose
of any drug, ever. After I dumped a glass of water on my self, while still in
bed, I got up; I was miles high, towering above the limitless threads of my
carpet, rising and shrinking and waving as my feet dragged across it. As I
stood above the toilet, my feet seemed to grow larger and larger as the toilet
shrank smaller and smaller – imagine pissing down a well.
The visuals
were still heavy at this point, as only about an hour had elapsed. I looked
around the room, seeing lotion in a bottle crash back and forth like the waves
of an ocean, my sink grow to the size of a swimming pool, the blindingly
glistening bits of shimmer in the granite countertops, my ceiling rising and
rising until the differentiation between my bathroom and St. Peter’s Cathedral
disappeared.
I walked
over and stared at myself in the mirror, naked except for a pair of underwear.
Inhale
Exhale
Inhale
Exhale
I splashed water on my face and continued to stare. My hand
touched my face and I felt every individual hair on my beard go back and forth
against my palm. Suddenly, my look of astonishment turned into a grin and I
began to laugh.
A bad trip is all in your mind
Fear is not real
I laughed harder and harder and harder, until tears were
streaming down my face, glistening on my bare chest. After several trips that
provoked a significant amount of anxiety, this adventure was a welcome gift. I felt
like I had finally found the unchanging, unflinching core of my being. For a
single moment in time (or for an eternity, who knew at this point), I realized
that fear and anxiety and hatred and loathing are creations of that initial,
central nothingness that all sentient beings share.
There’s nothing to be afraid of
I ran back into my bedroom and
jumped on my bed, rolling around, embracing pillows and stuffed animals,
wrapping and unwrapping myself in a tangle of sheets as I tried to utter sounds
of elation (at this point, I was tripping too hard to form sentences in my
mind, let alone speak them out loud). The record ended and I got up, attempting
to put my pants back on. I flipped sides and dropped the needle, and within the
first 15 seconds of the first song, the one pant leg I managed to get on was
ripped off and the pants thrown against the wall with a garbled, incoherent
exclamation of “no more panths!”
This process went on for at least
another hour, my senses uninhibited, reacting to every click and pop of the
record with vibrations of pleasure throughout my entire body, as I cried and
cried and cried, knowing that I had won the battle. The years of anxiety and
depression seemed to disappear for those few hours, and they disappeared by the
power of my own will. I was invincible.
Fast forward and I finally got some
pants on. At this point, I was still tripping harder than I ever had before;
visual distortions were still very strong,
and I was moving around with residual ataxia. After what I had just experienced
though, nothing was too weird for me.
I stepped back out onto my patio,
where a half a beer and a half cigarette awaited me. I fell into the deck
chair, feeling like I had just woken up from a nightmare, an onslaught of
foreign visuals and mental confusion, which had been overcome. I was
victorious.
After a sip of my beer, I was filled
with a sudden sense of energy. I ran off my deck and jumped into the grass,
landing on my stomach. I rolled from left to right, back and forth, feeling the
gentle prickle of the grass against my bare chest and my bare feet. I stared up
at the sky; it was dusk and the sun was beginning to set, casting a pinkish
haze along the horizon.
What a beautiful world we live in,
I thought, eyes still filled with tears, my body still encapsulating
all the joy and gratitude in the entire universe.
***
In closing,
I would like to praise Psilocybin. It is a chemical that makes your body tingle
and gives you the giggles, or it is a chemical that takes you to the absolute
deepest reaches of a man’s mind, beyond his personality, his traits, his ego;
it takes you to absolute nothingness.
I have, by
no means, achieved any sort of instant, overnight “enlightenment” from this
trip. It has been about a month since and I’m still trying to piece a good
amount of it together – some details will probably not be in this report.
Overall, however, I feel that I have learned valuable skills and the residual
knowledge that this experience had departed on to me will never truly go away.
I have seen the void, the blackness, the nothingness that lies at the center of
all things.
These
substances present us with a chance to enter a psychological playground, where
conventional rules of reality do not apply. In the blink of an eye, consensus
reality turns into a garbled mess of confusion and fear and apprehension; accepting
these alternative visions of the reality and of the world around us are
experiences that not everybody can handle.
Through the
practice of meditation, I entered, endured, and exited this adventure with no
fear, no anxiety, no disappointment, disgust, hatred, loathing; these negative
states of mind are simply an illusion, coming into being only when we let our
egos take hold – our past experiences, our expectations, our way of perceiving reality
in the present. This experience has taught me to let “me” dissolve into the common
denominator, the constituent part of any human, the core of unbridled joy and
ecstasy that lays latent and sometimes even unknown within all of us, until we
take the time to sit down and find it.
