Quarter Ounce

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.