Most Intense Experience of My Life

It was mid-july and a bunch of friends and I had a week-long camping trip in the woods behind my house. Just some info  - I live in the middle of nowhere on a quarter section of farming land. There are two fields, a log house, and a river that runs through the horse pasture. Beyond the river is the forest that we were camping in, and there are no neighbours for a kilometer around. This was just at the very end of the camping trip, after most of the people who were camping had went home. Only 5 of us were left, and we decided to give up on living in the tents because it had been raining for 3 days straight. The 5 of us were me, Chey, Sylvia, Bruce, and Ruth. We were all freezing from the rain and dismal weather but still in good spirits, so we moved back into the house for the final days so we could be warm and dry. Everyone was fairly tired and disappointed that our fun was soon to be over, but we were still enjoying ourselves. We had some leftover drinks from the party earlier in the week so my friends and I decided to play Sociables downstairs. We invited Chey to join us in the basement, but she declined as she was going to go to bed. So Chey was up on the couch asleep as we were downstairs playing Sociables.

It had been on my mind all evening - I had been wanting to try shrooms for awhile now, but never had the opportunity up until now. I had only had one drink and wasn't even close to feeling anything yet, when we switched from Sociables to playing Truth or Dare. Finally it was my turn and I posed the question "Would any of you ever try shrooms?" There was mutual agreement that yeah, everyone wanted to try shrooms at least once in their life. I told them that I knew where we could find some, that I had some in my house right now. I asked them if they wanted to try them. They were slightly hesitant, but sort of began to realize that this was their best opportunity to try them. I didn't want to force them into anything they didn't want to do, however. We had never done anything other than maybe have a few drinks together and smoke a little weed here and there, so this would be an entirely new experience to all of us. I would like to say, we should have done more research and understood more about what we were doing before we did them. We didn't know anything about the different levels to your experiences, how much to take for a first timer, etc. All we knew was that it was impossible to physically overdose on shrooms and it would not do anything to you physically. We did about ten minutes of research before deciding to do them.

We went and we got the mushrooms and a jar of Nutella. The site that Ruth was on advised us to dip the shrooms in a flavor neutralizing substance since they can taste pretty gross. We all preferred Nutella over peanut butter so we grabbed that jar and went and sat in the library. Bruce decided not to partake as he was feeling pretty drunk and didn't think it was a good idea to mix substances. In the library we had some extra mattresses and put them down on the floor so that the room was fairly well padded. We all agreed that we would not leave the room for anything except the bathroom, to be safe and to not bug Chey who was oblivious to our actions. In all honesty, we had completely forgotten she was upstairs as she was kind of new to hanging out with us, as the rest of us had all known each other for 7 years. 

We each measured out 7 pieces of mushrooms each, all of them dipped in Nutella and eaten. Sylvia said she found the taste to be particularly disgusting, but I couldn't taste anything but Nutella with a weird texture in mine. After we had all consumed our mushrooms, we watched YouTube videos while we were waiting. Sylvia began to feel it first, and she had the most intense trip out of all of us. It was only us three girls on the shrooms (Sylvia, Me, and Ruth). Ruth stood up and said she had to leave to go to the bathroom. Sylvia was already tripping pretty hard and urged Ruth to take a big fluffy stuffed dog with her to protect her, dubbed 'protecto-dog' by Sylvia. Oddly enough, the name stuck.

"Why does she need a protecto-dog?" Bruce asked.

"For the monsters."

"But how do you know the monsters are even there?"

"I can hear them.." Sylvia muttered, looking as if she was going to cry if Ruth didn't take the dog. Ruth made a kind of annoyed noise, but took the dog and went to the bathroom. She was feeling pretty pissed that she wasn't feeling anything yet and we were, so when she came back she decided to take another mushroom. As soon as she took the mushrooms she began to feel it (and immediately regretted taking another mushroom). I had begun to see the cool shapes and colours all around me and was quite amazed by their beauty. We didn't stay in the room very long, even though we promised too. Ruth takes on this kind of extreme hippy alter ego when she is tripping, and she wanted nothing more in the entire world than to be outside in the beautiful country. The sun had begun to set at this time, and even though we kept trying to convince her to stay she decided to leave. Sylvia also decided to go outside with Ruth, and since I didn't want to be left alone I decided to go with them. At first we all just sat on the grass and looked up at the sky in my backyard. One of my dogs ran up to me and started licking my face, and I thought that the fact my dog loved me was the most beautiful thing in the entire world and I started to cry at the amazement of at all. At the same time I felt a little ashamed that this beautiful creature who was once in the wild had become a domesticated animal, like it was some kind of imprisonment for them. I don't know how long we sat on the grass. I looked at the shed in my backyard and it vividly looked like a face - I half expected it to open its mouth and tell me some secret knowledge. Ruth was sitting on the grass a little ways away from us, and she was crying as well. She told me later she was crying since she thought she held all of the knowledge in the universe and she didn't know what to do with this information. Unfortunately, Bruce at the time was freaking out about us being outside. Especially since Sylvia and I were completely out of our minds, while Ruth had some semblance of control. Bruce convinced me to go inside and I was sat down at the kitchen table and told to stay. Chey had woken up by this time and was making herself some soup in the kitchen. 

At first I stood up and wanted to go towards the stove - the prospect of heat coming from a big metal block was amazing to me, and I wanted to touch it. If Chey hadn't of been there, I probably would have badly burned myself - instead she commanded me to sit back down. So I sat at the table and tried my best to make conversation. Except that it felt like my tongue had expanded to 2x it's size, and that I couldn't keep a train of thought. I'd say something just to repeat  it 30 seconds later with no memory of saying it in the first place. My most vivid memory of sitting at that table is Chey taking a video of me (totally not cool to do while tripping), how she had four eyes instead of two and that the noodle in her soup looked vividly like worms, as in they were wriggling around and everything.

Now as I was sitting at the kitchen table, Sylvia and Ruth were still outside. They told me their experiences outside the next day.

Sylvia was just walking around my backyard when she spied our target deer. My brother shoots his bow off of the deck so they sit up a decoy deer to shoot at. At first she thought it was a dinosaur, just standing there in the shadows. She decided this dinosaur was her friend and she walked up to it and gave it a hug and started petting it. As she was cooing over the 'dinosaur' it turned its head and part of it's head had been shot off and it was melting. She screamed and fell over. After that she decided it was time to go inside. At that time, Ruth had walked down to the river - it has cold, rushing water, and it was already starting to cool off temperature wise -and dipped her feet in it. Sylvia and I were both now inside, but I was feeling hyper paranoid over Ruth. These people were like family to me, I don't know what I would do if any of them got hurt, especially if it was from something that was my doing. At this time, Bruce had started to cry a little from stress and worry (and being drunk didn't help). Chey told him that she would watch us while he went and got Ruth away from the river. I was obsessed with the idea of making sure she was safe, there was nothing else in the entire world to me other than making sure Ruth was ok. Sylvia, on the other hand, was having an entirely different experience. She was standing in the kitchen (oven was off and had fully cooled down by this time) and just swaying on her feet. Sometimes she made a noise like she was going to throw up and leaned over the sink, but she never did throw up. At this time I had gotten off of the chair to lie on the floor with my head on my dog's bed. Ruth had managed to get back into the house and was freezing, but now even more pissed off that she had to come inside. I don't really remember much about Ruth at this point, since her trip ended much before any of Sylvia and I's. This was about at hour 3 after taking the shrooms. I climbed back up on the chair with some difficulty. Sylvia had moved to the sink to the pantry, where the light was on - she fully believed that the pantry was heaven and that was where she had to go. Bruce was wearing a giraffe onesie and she believed that he was her guide to heaven. Chey was wearing black and she was totally convinced that Chey was evil. She went into the pantry, or 'heaven' and decided she wasn't well dressed enough for heaven. So she went out on the deck to get changed. Bruce told her not to take her clothes off and brought her back inside. That's when she caught sight of me and went towards me, her pupils as big as saucers.

"Alexa, you are so beautiful." She said and started crying. I took a moment to process that (girls compliment each other all the time, but this felt really sincere) and started grinning like an idiot. "Aww thanks boo," I replied, jokingly, but I was really touched. It took her a second to stop crying and then she looked at me again and burst out laughing. "He-man," She said, pointing at me. "You're He-man." I have the skrillex haircut and part of my hair flopped over the shaved spot to make me look like I had he-mans haircut. I started laughing with her, and at the time it was the funniest thing in the entire world. After that, Bruce and Chey told us it was all time for bed and I thought that was a pretty good idea, as I had to work the next day. Chey led me downstairs to my bed and we lied down in bed for a while. I begged her to stay with me as I didn't want to be alone. At this time I was getting to what I would call the really therapeutic part of shrooms - I've had some childhood trauma with my mom's drug abuse and my older brothers drug addictions (both sober now) and started to come to terms and accept everything that has happened to me and learn how to forgive as well as force myself to deal with questions that have plagued me for years. I won't go into too much detail for this part as it is super personal information. 

Eventually I decided I didn't want to be in my room, I wanted to be with everyone else. I asked Chey to go get them for me, and then immediately started panicking 6 seconds after she left me. I told her to come back but I still wanted everyone else with me. I had trouble understanding she had to physically leave, I thought she could mentally communicate with everyone else. Also at this time my temperature started to skyrocket up and down - once I would be really freezing cold , the next I would be burning up. Eventually we all settled down into the library. There I got into an argument with Ruth over the lights - I didn't want the lights to be turned off and she did. She started to cry because we were killing our planet with all of this pollution and Bruce gave in and turned off the light. Sylvia started to laugh uncontrollably after her eyes adjusted since she was feeling Bruce's face. She told me later that it looked exactly like clay and she could mold it with her fingers. Ruth joked about how Bruce was her 'clayboy' (instead of playboy). We all thought that was pretty funny, except Sylvia was too focused on molding Bruce's face. Later on, Sylvia was lying across Bruce and was studying my face. After what felt like hours, but I'm sure it was just seconds, I finally asked "What?"

"If you were a boy, I'd date you." 

"Thanks. If you were lesbian, I'd date you." Sylvia nodded with this information and rolled back across the annoyed Bruce. The three of us - Sylvia, Bruce and I were lying on the matresses on the floor and Ruth was on the bed. A couple minutes pass as we are all just focusing on the colours and patterns. At this time I felt the intense conviction that all of my teeth had falling out and my mouth was gushing blood from where my teeth should be. I didn't see anything, but I could feel it. "Bruce, my mouth is bleeding." I mentioned, just as casually as that I had mentioned earlier that the walls were melting. "Open your mouth," He checked my mouth with the flashlight on his phone. "You're fine," he said, patting me on the shoulder. I nodded. A few minutes pass again and I tell him that it's bleeding again. "Swirl your finger in your mouth and see if there is any blood." I did so, no blood. It was entirely bewildering, and I think that's the most confused I've ever been. I could feel, it, plain as day, but nothing was actually happening.

Meanwhile, Sylvia was diving underneath the blanket in amazement. "It's like a whole world under here!" She was amazed and entertained for almost an hour by that prospect, only coming up for air occasionally before diving back into her world. Ruth was silently staring up at the wall, quietly enjoying her trip. At this time I started to feel like I was nothing at all, and yet the entire universe at the same time. That's the best way I could describe it. I felt like I could feel every single atom in my entire body, yet I was just air. "Fuck," I muttered.

"What?" Bruce looked at me, making sure I was okay. He was a really good trip sitter, even though he had never done shrooms and was a little drunk. "I'm nothing, but I can still swear," I was incredibly amused at this prospect. "Nice," Bruce grinned at me. Ruth finally spoke for the first time in over an hour to ask if we could play some music. Bruce nodded and started playing the soundtrack from Halo 3 ODST. For a brief moment, bathed in the blue light of Bruce's phone, I was fully convinced that we were in a jungle. I could see the dirt floor, a fern and trees, even the sky above us. I knew that we were in the library, but I could vividly see the jungle. Bruce snapped me out of my reverie. "Alexa?"

"Yea?"

"If you were straight, I'd date you. We both have all of the same interests, in gaming and computer building, and you're a really nice person."

"Thanks Bruce. If I had to date a boy, I'd date you. Skinny nerd boy is my aesthetic," we all burst into laughter after that comment. After we all stopped laughing we spent a few more moments in silence. It wasn't an awkward silence, these were the kind of people that being silent with was entirely comfortable. After the silence, Sylvia started chanting all of our names. "Alexa, Alexa, Alexa, Alexa," "What?" I asked. She just kept repeating my name so I started chanting her name back at her. After a few moments we stopped, and she did this to Ruth and Bruce. After she was done with that, Bruce gave her his phone to play on to calm her down. I think he was scrolling throught Tumblr or something like that and he showed her the picture he was looking at. It was a photo of Obama holding an eagle. She was making amazed noises at it and started at it for five minutes straight. 

"What's she looking at?" I kind of wanted to know what was so amazing.

"It's just picture of Obama holding an eagle. That's all it is." She continued to stare at it. Sylvia told me later that she watched Obama go from being super old to really young, and the seasons in the background of the photo kept changing from winter to summer to fall to spring. 

After that she started to change the song, and every song made me feel something physically - like some songs made me feel physically sick, others gave me intense euphoria. It was a very weird experience. Sylvia told me she could feel the music too. This was about hour 5 of the trip. We were trying to sleep but found that it is literally physically impossible to sleep on shrooms. By that time I was feeling entirely done with the experience and wanted to be sober again, not knowing how long I had left to go. I was starting to come down again and beginning to feel my extremities again. I complained that it lasted too long, that it would be really good time if only it didn't last for such a long time. The next day we all got up early at 7:45. I got ready for work and was sitting in my uniform when I decided it would be a good idea to call in sick as I did feel sick and that way I could also say goodbye to my friends since they were going back that day. We all sat on my couches and had a conversation about what we had experienced the night before. 

TL;DR We are all horny almost adults who want to date each other but can't because of conflicting sexualities, Ruth was a very grumpy person and a super hippy while tripping, I learned a lot about myself and my mental health has increased by leaps and bounds since that trip and we are all hilarious on shrooms, when we are not doing stupid stuff.