Tripping in a 6-bedroom student house

Anyway, the third and last time I tried them, must have been about a year and a half ago, I was living in a house with 5 other people during my second year of university during a period that I now think back on as "mushroom month" because during this period, for some reason, lots of different people, friends of mine, friends of housemates were coming over and doing mushrooms together. different groups of people, sometimes several times a week. I remember waking up one time and looking out the window to find people having a "magic tea party" in the garden. I think one of my housemates must have been selling some at the time. it was weird.

one night, I was just chilling in my room with some of my housemates and a couple of my other mates, having a few beers. not really planning to do shrooms that night. At about midnight my friend Sansby pulls out this bag of "Mexicans" and asks if anyone wanted to do them with him. At first I was like... nahh, not really feeling that right now, and neither were the other people in the room, so he decided to eat the bag himself. They looked like dirt. I think I had a bit but not enough to trip.

Occasionally we'd ask him if he was feeling anything yet, but it wasn't until about an hour or so later he said he was starting to feel a bit weird, and I was starting to wish I'd had some now. Having had a few beers and starting to feel a bit tipsy, I grabbed my phone and called the guy who sold him the shrooms. It was about 2am by this time, so not really ideal tripping hour. I managed to get through to him and we walked to his house and picked up a gram (I think? could've been more), and headed back to mine. It must have been verging on 3am when I finally ate my lot.

By now it was just me and Sansby, the others had either gone home or gone to bed. We just sorta lay around in my room going "what do you wanna do then?" over and over. we were bored. we put some tunes on and waited for something to happen. I was surprised that it hadn't hit him harder to be honest, he was just acting a little dopier than usual and seemed a bit confused by things. but soon I started to feel a little euphoric. We had the main light off and let the light from the hallway illuminate the room from the open door as well as a little lamp by my bed. I noticed the colours were a little more..colourful.. and got a bit excited. I suggested we went for a walk so we went out into the street, where things appeared to be 'sparklier' than usual. we walked a little way down the road when Sansby said to me that he wanted to go back in... so we did.

When we got back in my room, we just sorta sat around again, neither of us were feeling too enthusiastic about the whole thing because we were expecting something more spectacular. we wanted to smoke a joint to see if it would heighten the effects but we didn't have any weed. I don't give up too easily however, and remembered that one of my housemates, who was away in London at the time, usually kept a large stash of it in his room to sell. I'm good friends with this guy and I am an honest person, so decided to have a look in his room for some smoke, planning to pay him back for whatever we took. although we didn't find any actual weed, we found a large empty sealy bag with a small collection of dust at the bottom.

Sansby managed to scrape a good amount of dust from the bottom of the bag and rolled a suprisingly nice joint. It was 4am now and I was ready to give up on the whole thing, so we climbed out of my window onto the roof (there was a flat platform just outside my bedroom window overlooking the garden that was the perfect size to sit on) to smoke the joint. This is where the experience changed significantly for us both.

As we sat and smoked and watched dawn break, our conversations got deeper, and things started to get trippier, for me at least. I felt the marijuana take effect in a big way and with it, the shrooms seemed to kick in harder. We started talking about how the traffic sounded weird, as if they were some sort of distant vocal noise. I looked at the crescent moon against the dark blue sky and was amazed to see that it looked as though someone had got a wet cloth and smudged it. I saw about three crescent moon shapes on top of eachother, their shapes skewed or smeared slightly. It was beautiful. The garden seemed particularly captivating, and I finally realised why so many people describe a feeling of being at one with nature when they take shrooms. I only wished that there was more of it.

Sansby then proceeded to climb back in through my window, and I told him that I wanted to stay out here with nature for a bit. Suddenly I was all alone on the roof. I was staring into the sky having the kinds of thought processes I usually get when I'm high, but magnified. Some familiar negative thoughts involuntarily entered my mind, I can't remember what they were now but it was just my general worries at the time. I knew they were inescapable so I embraced them as I stared into the colourful vortex in the sky. Whatever point in the sky I was looking at, that was the center of the vortex. It looked as though the heavens had opened and I was receiving these thoughts from a god. I am not religious in any way, nor did I believe it was god, but I understood how people can perceive the experience as a religious one, because it just sorta looks and feels like you're communicating with a higher power. this began to freak me out a little so I began to climb back through the window to chat to Sansby.

I was about halfway in through the window, one leg in, one leg out, when I looked at Sansby, he was looking up at me with this look of bewilderment on his face, crouched down trying to use my laptop. We both burst into laughter for about 5 minutes straight at nothing. We both just felt really silly at that moment in time. Suddenly, my housemate- Dipo- who sleeps in the room next to mine, gets out of his room, stands at the doorway, points at us and says "go to bed!" and walks downstairs. we were both sorta shocked, trying to figure out if he was being serious and was actually pissed off that we woke him up. I got a little worried that he might be annoyed at us and the bad feeling got stronger

a couple minutes later Dipo comes back up the stairs and stands at the doorway and starts chatting to us, and we realise that he was just joking and he realises we're tripping and starts laughing. I'm still half way through the window at this point just perched on the window sill.  we're chatting and I'm looking at Dipo, and he's a black guy right, but my eyes were playing tricks on me- he was stood there sillhouetted against the light in the hall, and in my mind he just sorta looked like a cartoon monkey. I suddenly thought really bad for making this seemingly racist connection and the bad feeling got stronger again.

Dipo went back to bed and my feeling of 'badness' was becoming more and more. I just felt uncomfortable. I was chatting to Sansby and i could tell he was uncomfortable too. not about anything in particular but my mind felt kinda fragile. I decided to get up and walk around the house. as i left my bedroom i remember feeling as though the frame rate of what I was seeing had slowed down, as though I was blinking like three times a second and seeing the world in little snapshots. that was actually kinda cool, not so scary.

I grabbed my duvet and wrapped it round me as I wandered around the house in an attempt to occupy my mind or find somewhere to chill out. I started to go in loops like this: Be comfortable in particular situation, sit there for a bit, bad feeling grows stronger to the point of being unbearable, move to a new spot, be fairly comfortable in new spot for a short amount of time, bad feeling grows stronger, etc. I realised I was having a bad time but felt that it would be easier to move around to new locations than sit and feel my mind collapse. I wandered into the garden at one point and sat down with my duvet. it was lighter now but still very shadowy. I looked around me at all the plants and trees and grass and thought to myself "everything in this garden is birds!" like, every piece of plant, be it a leaf on a tree, a blade of grass, they all looked like birds to me. and they were all staring at me. the garden was birds. I drew a picture of it later that week and handed it in as course work haha

but, inevitably, the bad feeling grew after about five minutes and I had to move for fear of losing my mind. As I went back inside and headed towards the staircase, my housemate Lucy comes through the front door with some random guy she's brought back from a party or nightclub or wherever she's been. awkward. Lucy starts chatting to me and introduces the guy, who came across as really nervous, I didn't know if it was in my head that he seemed nervous or what but I remember that I had a brief, really awkward, conversation with him. because i was tripping though i was just really really not in the mood to talk to some stranger, regardless, Lucy decides that they'd both really like to sit out on the roof outside my window rather than go straight to their bedroom and have sex. I must have brought the roof up in conversation or something because they went straight to my room and climbed out of my window to watch the sunrise.

Me and Sansby just sat on my bed uncomfortably for a bit and then he tells me he's going home because it's nearly 6 in the morning and theres some people on the roof just outside my window. I was alone again. well not really, but I certainly didn't feel like sitting out on the roof with them. There was another girl in the house, Katie, who was asleep on her sofa in the attic room (she never used her bed for some reason...). I felt that i really needed to talk to someone because I was feeling like I was going insane so I went up and begged her to save my brain. she sleepily mumbled that she really, really couldn't wake up right now and told me not to worry and just embrace it. So i curled up on her bed for a few hours, unable to sleep, experiencing mild insanity while I watched this faint psychedelic imagery accompany my thoughts. eventually I dragged myself back to bed where I shivered intensely as I came down, Lucy and her friend were no longer outside my window so I watched some shit on my laptop that I was unable to concentrate on and finally fell asleep at about 10 in the morning.

Although there were some highlights, the smudgy moon, the laughing, and the birdgarden, this was undeniably a bad trip. In hindsight, I know I shouldn't have taken the shrooms at 2-3 in the morning in a busy house in a suburban area far from any real nature. I came out of it thinking that I might not be ready to try mushrooms at this point in my life- but when will I be? I've been really wanting to have a truly exciting, euphoric and generally good trip for a really long time now but I'm starting to feel as though I might just not be capable of putting myself in, and sustaining the right kind of mindset for a pleasant and enjoyable trip - I think I might have a tendency to be anxious, freak out or panic at the slightest hint of a bad trip, but can anyone offer any further advice for how I can achieve such an experience? ways that I can prepare my mind perhaps?

Thanks for reading