My first shrooms trip

I'm 22 years old and about to drop out of studying to be a teacher after three years (better late than never?). I'm starting 12 months of civil service in September, mostly to buy time because I have no idea what I want to do with my life. I have a girlfriend (not E. from below) who lives 9536 kilometers away.

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On Friday, October 26th 2012, a friend of mine (B.) gave me shrooms as a present, liberty caps (psilocybe semilanceata). It was about 25 dried shrooms (caps and stems). I asked him about the dosage, never having taken shrooms before.

Actually I did once take shrooms (also liberty caps from B.) but the amount was lower. My ex-girlfriend (P.) gave them to me after B. had given them to her (she was scared to take them) and they were a few years old by then. The evening I took them, I was really really happy and uplifted but did not have a trip of any sort. Two weeks later I actually had a flashback where I had what felt like a slight MJ high for an evening where the clouds looked a bit more beautiful than usual and my mood was good etc.

So this was different. B. said that the amount was good for two trips, but that I could take them all, too. If I did take them all, I should have a sitter, because that would get me "into wonderland".

On Saturday I went to a birthday party with a friend of mine (E.) who only knew the person whose birthday it was and me. She's a good friend of P., through which I know her, and I'd been falling a bit in love with E.. After we were home at the student dormitory after the party, where we live, we stayed outside for a bit to get some fresh air. I used the opportunity and asked her if she wanted to be part of an experiment. That she could say "no" in an instant or ponder it for a few weeks, and that if her answer was "no" I'd find somebody else. She was curious, so I told her that B. (she knows him through P.) had given psychedelic shrooms to me and that I was looking for somebody to sit me when I took them.

She said "after the first half of the sentence, I thought you were going to ask me if I was going to do them with you." That surprised me because in the past she'd seemed a bit skeptical about eating hash cookies with me. I said "that would be even more awesome". She asked me when I planned to take them. I told her that I had plans for the next two weekends, unless we did them the next day (Sunday). That was half meant as a joke, but she said "okay, let's do it!" After we arranged to meet on Sunday, we went to my room. I showed her what the shrooms looked like and told her what stuff (possible and negative) they can do to you. She thought it sounded interesting and still wanted to do it.

On Sunday we met in her room at 1:30 pm. I brought CDs, amongst others "Bitches Brew" by Miles Davis. That had been at the top of my list of what to listen to on shrooms for a while. I can only recommend it, it's an amazing jazz album from 1970. Just even the instrumentation is insane: trumpet, soprano sax, bass clarinet, 2 to 3 (!) e-pianos, e-guitar, double bass and (!) e-bass, two (!) drumsets and 1 to 2 percussionists. The music is incredible, more or less free jazz with a couple of motives per piece with the tape cut apart and pieced back together in the studio. Just six tracks, but long enough to make it a double album. Definitely my favourite jazz album and the best soundtrack for shrooms that I can imagine.

We boiled water and let the shrooms steep in the hot water for 15 minutes (at B.'s suggestion). We put on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band which helped get us over our being nervous. At 2 pm we ate the shrooms (half of them each, so about 12 or 13 per person) and shared the brew.

(Some of the things described hereafter might not be in the right chronological order they actually happened - it was hard to recall. Not sure about the exact times, either.)

For half an hour, we didn't notice anything (but E. kept looking in the mirror to see if her pupils were widened yet =D). Then, for me, there was a very cool transition: Everything was still normal, but a colourful and detailed One Piece poster on her wall started to look a bit like a 3D hologram and moved ever so slightly. I asked E. if she could see it, too. At that point she didn't get anything visual, but her body started to feel different. I kept looking at the poster which gradually become more cool to look at. Then she said: "Don't close your eyes!" Of course I closed my eyes, but I didn't notice anything. Then she started to enjoy the feeling and kept lying on her bed with eyes closed while I kept looking at the poster.

A little later, we started looking at another picture on her wall, namely this one: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_qvts9qyh_9Q/SWTfqWGu2zI/AAAAAAAAABU/kySFa_eb6co/s1600-h/rousseau32.jpg (In reality, the colours are more intensive and a bit brighter than that .jpg).

From then on, she started noticing something visually, too, and for me the body feeling started to set in. From then on our trips were virtually identical, which for me was the most awesome part about it. The painting started to move as well and the objects began to flow into each other. We noticed the same thing for all the other cool stuff on her wall (really a great room for this experience).

I started dancing around her room while she was sitting on her bed. I was talking a lot (and asked her if that was annoying to her, which it wasn't). I said that I was having a great feeling of happiness and that all of this was really beautiful to me, and that I hoped it was just as beautiful for her. It was just 2:50 at that point, so we hadn't even been noticing something for half an hour yet. It seemed like more to us. By then, it started to affect our minds as well.

I looked on her carpet and saw insane patterns, Indian elephants and thousands of eyes. The floor curved like it was breathing. I asked her if she could see it as well. She tried as well and said "I can only see it if I concentrate and focus on it." I said: "I see it all the time as soon as I look on it. How couldn't I? It's really there!" During the whole trip, we wondered how we failed to see the patterns before the trip, saying how it all was real and had to have been there before our trip, and wondered if it was going to stay this way after the trip. I said: "I don't know if I can say that, but I really like you a lot at the moment."

Then I said that now I understood everything, how everything is connected, how everything works. She went to the bathroom and didn't come out for a while, but I'd heard her open the door again so I went to check on her. She was standing two or three feet from the mirror and looked into it. She said she was able to see extremely sharply. I said that so could I. She said she saw every single pore in her face and her pimples. I said: "I don't see THAT." (I really didn't. XD) But her facial features were flowing into each other and her eyes were big.

Then we lay on her bed and looked at her wooden shelf from below. There, too, we saw awesome moving stuff. She saw ships and I saw Lysop from One Piece. We talked about how beautiful everything was and felt. I said: "How can this be forbidden? We aren't doing anything bad! No one is in any way harmed by what we are doing." She said: "How can it be forbidden if it is so beautiful? Without the shrooms we are limited, only now we see all of this."

Then she said she wanted to go out to the postbox to put in a letter. At first I was skeptical because I was afraid of meeting other people. She put on her jacket and shoes and I didn't want to stay in her room alone, so I ended up going with her. I kept forgetting what she wanted to do. I didn't know (even before the trip) where the postbox was and it was relatively incomprehensible to me where she intended to go, to who the letter was, and what a letter was in the first place. When we left her room, I stopped thinking of other people as really being real. Just she and I (and a Mexican soulmate of mine whom I'd promised to think of him during the trip) were real to me.

E. lives on the second floor above ground and usually doesn't use the elevator but the stairway. Everything there seemed new to me. I knew each room but was surprised where each door led, everything seemed connected in a new way. We went outside (the postbox is about 150 metres from the dorm). We stopped every 10 metres or so and gazed at the stone-tiled way. We talked about how detailed we could see them and how every last pebble looked perfect and fit in. Everything flew into each other and the contours, although very sharp, kept changing and moving.

I said that it seemed to me like she was my sister. We felt very connected. On the way back, two old ladies passed us. When we were past them, we started giggling, saying "we know something that they don't know."

We went back inside. There, everything about the intense understanding started to reverse for me. First, I didn't know anymore which things in the room were hers and which were mine. I didn't understand how the things could only be hers and thought they were also mine. I took several things, picked them up and asked her if this or that was hers or mine. Then I ceased to understand really basic things. Where people come from. What a family is. What a language is. What a computer is. What Mexico is. I said, "now I don't understand anything anymore" and: "love must feel like this trip."

I asked her how it was possible that there are so many people, all who have a separate consciousness of their own. How it was possible that all of us did not just exist as one person with one consciousness. She said that some people believed in part-incarnations: That before birth, you know everything that is going to happen, then you forget it. That then you split up and disperse the parts of yourself around the world. That all of them perceive for you, but that before death you don't know any of it, and everything only re-combines after death. Then we tried (and failed miserably) to draw the patterns we were seeing. E. wrote down things that I said:

"Who is a human and what isn't?"
After putting down my glasses: "Everything is less clear, but it isn't wrong."
"Oh man/Wicked/This is beautiful." (I said all of these a lot. =D)
"Where does a human come from? I mean, they exist beforehand." (By that I meant before we had taken the shrooms. =D)
"Everything is alive/pulses/in 3D."
"Why is this your room? Why am I allowed to be here?"
"I mean, I already knew Snoopy" (meaning before the trip). "He is still there" (a plush snoopy that she had.)
"I'm not imagining this... I mean, it's there!"
"The red is a little yellow."
"What is a colour? What is Wednesday?"
"All of this is new. Where is this stuff usually? All of this is so absurd."
"Because usually I only talk nonsense. How can you even write German anymore?"

Then we cut up chestnuts for baking. While doing that, we looked out of the window, watching students build a snowman. E. said: "They're like little kids, that's beautiful"; I thought so, too. Then she showed me things she owned as if they were completely new to her, because she found them so beautiful. Again I asked her why she wasn't my sister, and she said "because we don't have the same parents." I didn't understand that.

We decided to go outside once again. By now, it was almost dark outside. To get to the staircase, you first need to go over the smokers' balcony. There we stopped and looked into the evening, impressed. Everything up to the horizon looked like painted. The trees had very red exotic leaves for me (to her, the leaves looked like "optical illusions"). I wondered how I could never have noticed that we had exotic trees growing around here and not just normal ones. E. asked me if I believed in rebirth. I said "not so far, but now I'm not so sure anymore. Do you think that God is watching us from out of the clouds?" She said: "I think everything in the world is a part of God." It didn't seem like that to me, but I didn't say it.

On our way through the staircase, she said something that I already had (she couldn't remember): "Being in love must feel like this trip." Funny in retrospective, since we had each been in love with someone even before the trip. But during the trip, we thought that only now would we understand how something like that must feel.

So we went outside, in front of the dorm lawn. The snow from Saturday (the day before, which was the first day of snow in that part of Germany) was still there (which was really beautiful, especially because by now it was completely dark and the only illumination was the light coming out of the dorm windows). We went onto the lawn and up to the sculpture, danced and felt like little kids. Then we marveled at the snowwoman. (She had a skirt, thus the sex.) E. said she would like to give her a slap in the face. I asked her why, but she didn't know either. Then we went behind the bicycle shed behind the dorm and looked at the earth wall in front of the street that consisted of moving patterns. We wondered how it could be that we didn't usually see that, after all it were there and not imagination.

Then we went inside. It was 6pm by now. The visuals started fading for both of us, but I was still really confused. I sat on the kitchen couch while she cooked. (I marveled at her ability to still do that. It even ended up tasting decently, although she more or less randomly put stuff in it - rice, coconut milk, chestnuts and vegetables.) Before that, she'd gotten the laptop from her room and said: "Why do people make life so hard for themselves? Why don't I usually take my laptop to the kitchen to listen to music?"

I was sitting there more or less closemouthed. In the beginning of the trip it was me who was talking all of the time, by the end it was her. I still wasn't completely together again, but because the visuals were gone, I thought I was more or less sober again and was a little afraid that I'd never be completely like before again and that the big confusion about what keeps the world together and what humans are would stay forever now. But after dinner we both more or less ended up back in reality at the same time. It was about half past seven now.

The next 45 minutes we were sitting on her bed listening to music. Then a friend of hers (Ph.) came for a visit. We had decided to tell him what we'd done. But then we only made jokes and made vague hints and told him to have a guess. He said he'd been hiking. Me: "Us too... in a way." E.: "Not true though!" Me: "I meant that in a metaphorical way." We were giggling all the time and sitting there like two children who had just done something unseemly. Ph.: "Well, you seem to have had a lot of fun and done a lot of nonsense. Really, E., when someone does something with you, they really don't need drugs." That caused a one-minute eruption of laughter for us, which slowly caused him to see through it.

Him: "Aaah, you've smoked cannabis. I saw you" - meaning me - "with the beetle collector in front of the dorm yesterday and smelled that you were smoking pot." (E. had told Ph. before the trip that B., who is a beetle collector, had come to visit me the day before, and who he was.) Then we let on to him that we'd taken shrooms. He asked what kind. Me: "Psilocybe cubensis." (I didn't know it was semilanceata and only guessed that it was cubensis because I'd thought that that was the most common kind, and it was also the only kind whose name I knew.) That didn't tell him anything and he asked for their German name. I told him "there's none, but in English they're called magic mushrooms."

That knocked him out of his socks, because that did ring a bell. He sat in front of E.'s laptop, googled the Latin name and for half an hour read aloud Wikipedia articles about psilocybin mushrooms. (That's when we found out that cubes do have a German name, which translates to Cuban baldheads.) E. and I were still sitting on the bed, making fun of how he'd rather inform himself on Wikipedia instead of letting us tell what all had happened. Us: "We saw patterns on the ground, and it breathed! We felt like siblings and little children!" Him: "Monoamine oxidase inhibtors... psilocin... 5-HT2 receptors..."

After half an hour, he let us tell. (We were excited to, and even before the trip we said that we'd love to tell everyone.) Ph. was still somewhat out of his socks and had (but more through the Wikipedia articles =D) arrived at the conclusion that what we had taken was sick stuff: "The alcaloid is so small, it passes the blood-brain barrier! That stuff is really good for everything! Did you have to puke?" Us: "No..." Him: "Because if you HAD had to puke, that stuff would have been great for your nausea!" Me to E.: "This is the best nauseant I've ever taken!" Ph.: "How does your digestion feel? It's supposed to be going really well right now! You'll really have to tell me how you'll have slept tonight, this stuff is supposed to be great for that, too!" We said he should rather try the shrooms out himself sometime, but he said that at the moment he was rather contemplating of growing and selling them, surely there was some money to be made out of this. E. and I didn't like that idea too much (=D) and I said he should be cautious not to run into conflict with the keepers of the law. He said that he wasn't stupid after all... We swore him to secrecy (which wasn't necessary, point of honour for him), then he left.

It was nine then. For another half hour, we were lying on E.'s bed, chilling and listening to music, which was very beautiful and the perfect conclusion. She asked: "Are you just as perfectly happy right now?"

It was a really beautiful day. E. said she had to think back a long time to recall something as memorable. We had the feeling that the experience was going to last us quite some while before we were ready to do a trip again, if there was going to be a chance.

Even at the end, around 10pm, both of us could still see the moving patterns on the carpet a little and wondered if it was going to stay like that for another couple of days (but they were gone for both of us the next day). When I woke up the next day, I felt so well-rested that I estimated I'd slept for eleven hours. I looked at my clock and it had only been seven!

In retrospect, I was really happy not to have taken the shrooms alone. Not because I'm afraid of a stronger and more intense trip, but because the incredibly beautiful thing about the trip was that both of us seemed to be experiencing more or less the same stuff. Alone, you can only tell the other person: "I see these patterns! They have to have always been there because they are real, I'm not just imagining them!" and the other person thinks: "Uh huh... you're on drugs, dude." But if it's two people, both seeing the same things, and you think "only the two of us are real anymore", that's one of the most beautiful feelings I've ever had. To me, it seemed like E. was my sister and as if the two of us were God's children and he was watching us. That sounds (even to me) really cheesy in retrospect (especially since I'm an atheist-leaning agnostic usually). But during the trip it was very profound and touching; spiritual, actually. I can't imagine that it moves you this much alone.

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I wrote all this two days after the trip (re-wrote some of it for posting it today). B. has given me liberty caps again, and I'm going to put them to good use with two friends in a week from today. Can't wait! =)