Puuc Architecture, Ego Death and Alien Languages: My First Mushroom Trip

I was going to put 'Reborn' or 'Born Again' in the title but figured what I just said was enough. But me having such a powerful feeling of being reborn or I guess being born again was one of the main things that happened on this trip aside from experiencing ego death and a valid and powerful introduction to the world of psychedelics. It's like being born again and this whole intense rebirth feeling was on the other side of ego death and I just needed to break through by dissolving the ego I guess. Felt like I killed my ego and then was born again which Timothy Leary talked about in his books but I never really put the pieces together until now. I figured that since I got to a Level 4 psychedelic experience that they were both just symptoms of that particular level but now I’m starting to see how they are directly related. Looking at how tripping has changed the way I view things so much (especially certain trips) it's hard to tell how much exactly this particular trip changed my view alone or how this single powerful mind opening experience changed my future psychedelic trips. This was a solid strong level 4 trip. I had an eighth but if I eat an eighth these days I'll only have a strong level 3 and I probably won't experience full ego death so this experience was unique. 

I ate the eighth at I think exactly 12 noon. Pretty good time to eat them if it's your first time by the way. Anyways obviously since it was my first time eating mushrooms I have to at least mention my first impressions about the taste and actually eating them. For some reason this time I had pretty much no problem with the way they tasted, to me it just tasted like stale popcorn. However now when I eat them they're so hard to stomach and just get down without gagging. It's like every single time they just taste worse than before. 

But whatever eating them this time wasn't that bad. This which was my first psychedelic experience was in summer of 2011? Either 2011 or 2012 I don't know. It feels like 2011 though.

My parents were out of town in Hawaii so I have the house to myself. After I eat them with some orange juice in front of the mirror for some reason lol I walk in my backyard to my 2 friends who were there. One of them was one of my really close friends that I had known for years but he was just stopping by and didn't know I was taking shrooms. 

When I walked outside with them after having eaten them I told my old friend that I'm doing shrooms today for the first time and told both of them that I ate just ate them. My old friend was surprised and was like kinda off put by it in this weird way like an "I'm crazy" kind of way. I can't remember what he said but my other friend who was a lot more chill about it who I'll just call my filipino friend said "Oh you should have ate them in front of us” because he already knew I was gonna shroom that day and was gonna be there during my trip along with another different friend. 

My old friend soon leaves after this and eventually sometime very soon my other different friend showed up who I'll just call my Mexican friend. He tripped with me on my first acid trip but not this trip and this is all before any of us had ever even fucked with psychedelic drugs. We had no idea what they were like and I was jumping into a full fledged life changing level 4 psychedelic experience all by myself with no prior experience and only limited knowledge. At least I feel like shrooms have a mind of their own and are more understanding of human error and stupidity even though they are often times even MORE critical than most psychedelics but when it comes to this first time thing they do it pretty well and generally try to take care of you. Mushrooms definitely filter themselves the first time (even the first couple times) you do them and it doesn't bust out all the tricks on you if you're a newbie. Shrooms have an endless amount of tricks up their sleeves. It has “resources” as Terence McKenna puts it.

Anyways 25 to 30 minutes after I ate them with OJ (on an empty stomach) I first started to feel the effects. The first sign was bright colors. VERY very fucking bright. I think maybe even the brightest I have ever seen colors were during this short come up period and I wanted to say something to my friends at the time but didn't. I was really impressed by this though but showed no emotion towards it. It's weird because it felt like I had resting bitch attitude or something coming up or I was just feeling 'different' but not happy like I would be if this were acid. Usually when coming up on shrooms especially hefty doses I will get fairly apprehensive and even a tad pessimistic and dysphoric at times along with a feeling of regret. I didn't really feel any of these emotions during this particular trip at least not explicitly but I would say the coming up was fairly neutral not happy not unhappy. At least not too unhappy. I guess since it was my first time I was “happy" to just be feeling anything at all and seeing these intensely bright colors but my mood was not enhanced, mushrooms can feel pretty contradictory. I was not giddy or giggly or happy or easily amused in this state of mind I was entering. I guess this was my mind's first encounter with the ominous and great timeless essence of mushrooms. It didn't take me long to find out that psychedelics were not gonna be a "fun" thing or something to simply just pass the time. No I saw that they were some serious serious shit, a whole new territory that is beyond anything you can relate to or that the human imagination could possibly conjure up in the context of our normal lives. Mushrooms had to show me this more than one time though because it definitely didn't stick from just tripping once however the overall idea was planted there from the start. It just took time to grow. 

Maybe it's because I was able to just lie to myself and tell myself that I could somehow use powerful psychedelic tryptamines recreationally or predominantly just for hallucinations even after my first experience but I learned very fast that this was just not possible. I should have learned earlier. Not really related but a lot of psychedelic users will find that after a particular or certain POWERFUL psychedelic experience or trip their ability to use any psychedelics recreationally or "just for fun" is completely diminished and just no longer possible. I see this a lot with Ayahuasca and DMT. I’m starting to think that it has something to do with Satori awakening which I achieved later on down the line with psilocybin.

Anyways I'm rambling but the point of me rambling is just me trying to emphasize how bizarre and indescribable it is to go from the sober conventional mind state to the sacred aboriginal headspace of mushrooms. It's a very primordial and bizarre headspace. It's like going waaay back in time. And I'm not talking about ancient times, I mean even before that. Straight up primeval ages. 

If you want some ancient shit take Mescaline; maybe even Ayahuasca or Iboga.

If you want some Land Before Time shit take mushrooms. However mushrooms can have many different archetypes. A few of which actually seem to almost contradict each other like how it can feel like you're going ten thousand years in the future and ten thousand years or even ten million years in the past all at the same time and they all have the same elements like how it feels very shamanic and spiritual but like a science fiction movie at the same time? It just doesn't make any sense but mushrooms are the science fiction drug alright. 

So hard to capture the headspace. Anyways now since I've rambled and shed light on at least the gist of the unique mushroom headspace and its aspects I can continue on just what psychedelic effects I got and how the trip went about. The mindset was only coming to me very gradually and it was mostly the visuals that were giving it away that I was on something legit and....and..elfin?

It looked so elfin. Everything in my backyard (including people) every solid object looked so colorful and so mythical. Interesting how this happened on my first acid trip as well later in the future but this was my first time experiencing any kind of mythological headspace or perception (it was and always is largely perceptual). There's a lot..A LOT of things you feel on shrooms that you don't see but this mythical headspace seems to be one of those things you can feel and see. You see it projected onto everything perceptually.

At this moment I'd say about 45 minutes after I ate them I see my friends start smoking out of the bong because they figure I already feel the effects quite a bit and this bong looked amazing. It was black so you couldn't see through it and it had these designs on it that were in color and I can't explain it it was just so cool and it looked so glossy and specular and artsy. My Mexican friend who was smoking out of it looked like a mythical creature or just a mythical gnomish version of himself and his long hair looked trippy is all I can say. Looked like a gnome.

At this point I was really intrigued because I have never experienced my perception of reality differently before and so.. visually…. ..

I couldn't understand how I could look at something or view something as a mythological fantasy yet it still somehow looks the same? Well that's perception and that's when I learned what perception really was. And this of course can lead to seeing things that aren't there like extreme distortions of reality or the way we creatively see things but I had no idea about any of this prior. All I "knew" was that shrooms is supposed to make you see shit. Obviously not fairies and unicorns (well maybe fairies) but I certainly knew I wouldn't see dragons flying across the room and shit I had done quite a bit of research before this actually. That was just barley enough lol. If I hadn't had known the moderate or little amount of info that I did going into it my trip it could have turned out so much worse. Level 4 Trip/Ego Death isn't a thing a lot of first timers shoot for. Especially when they don't even know what that is or that there are even ‘levels'.

These "visuals" were a lot more perceptual than I had anticipated. I had just figured that I would either see clear distortions and things that weren't there to some degree or just feel 'so high' and mentally crazy that I think I'm seeing shit like with high doses of marijuana but it was really neither of those it was just perception. It was just looking at things differently and nothing can really prepare you for this effect. It can't be imagined or drawn; only experienced.

I remember the way the smoke looked surrounding my Mexican friend when he hit the bong was magnificent and enchanting. It was ridiculous, I wanted to laugh at how elfin and how much like a fantasy it looked like but I wasn't in the mood to laugh. I was keeping to myself for the most part. My friends were probably preparing or waiting for me to start acting all tripped out and high as fuck or something and talking about seeing crazy stuff, I mean they don't know they've never done this before. They also don't know how to be trip sitters really other than to just not fuck with me or make things confusing or bad. They're close friends though so who cares

 

I remember I smoked kind of a lot of weed out there and in a short amount of time kind of. I asked them earlier about a half hour after I ate the shrooms why my friends weren’t smoking and my filipino friend said “We’re waiting for YOU to come up”. That was earlier though and 15 or 20 minutes after that they for some reason just decided to start smoking. I don’t even know if they knew I was feeling it or not.

After smoking for a while I saw my outdoorsy Australian neighbor walk through the side of his yard and I can clearly see him even though there's trees and covers and shit; my fence separating the two yards is only waist high though. Well as I see him this extremely primal and exotic feeling or archetype from within shows itself or is awakened and it wasn't simply just me seeing my neighbor walk through his side yard anymore it was more like (me) an animal very on edge and paranoid seeing another animal pass through our local habitat environment. I felt hyper aware of my environment in this strange ‘wild' sense and all the noises and my neighbors pet birds and their chirps were adding to this effect. I can only imagine how many people and living things have taken these mushrooms deep in nature and heard nothing but birds and wilderness while completely perplexed and in awe at what was happening to them but very very aware of their environment. Almost too aware. It was an animalistic headspace and attitude. Everything was taking on a slightly more exotic look and vibe. Deeper and deeper. And yeah I felt like some kind of wild animal I suppose. Deeper…

Things also began to really distort and look sort of melty, at least the colors on certain things did like on the screen of my phone. 

My friend who sold it to me was texting me asking if I took them yet and if I took the whole eighth at once and everything. He even called me. He was kind of a really fucked up kid. I mean he had common sense but he was still a big time trouble maker and rebel and is pretty much is known for that and is known for really messing with people so it kind of pleasantly surprised me how much he cared or wondered enough to like text me and call me and tell me all these things. I was really curious as to why he even cared about my trip or what was going on with me at the moment. Maybe he just really didn't want to fuck up my first time and ruin it all for me because he knew eating a whole eighth I would be in for quite a ride and also I was kind of the first one of my close friends to try a serious psychedelic and he probably wanted it to leave a really good impression on us as a group. He probably wanted me to get them into it which I later of course did because psychedelics are obviously phenomenal especially psilocybin.

He called me during the trip and I remember lol the sound in his voice had such the element of hospitality and compassion in it. It's so funny looking back now and I mean mushrooms are a very emotional experience. The people in your life that you know or associate with get dragged into your trips too. Your thoughts and feelings about your friends and your family on mushrooms is so different and so virtuous and life changing in its own right. 

On the phone he advised me that I should go to the lake or something right by my house and I could hear the hospitality in his voice lol. Looking back I really should have gone to the lake and even at the time I knew I should've but I also knew my non-tripping friends would not be down. After I stopped talking to him on the phone he texts me saying something like "3 hours in is when things will start to get REaLlY trippy" meanwhile as I'm looking at this text my phone is so completely distorted, not warped but just distorted in a rounded way and it already looks totally trippy the words on the text itself are rounder and I'm already starting to get confused about everything and nothing is making sense. I start to get mindfucked.

We eventually get up to go inside to watch a movie (bad idea I know) but for some reason before going in through my side door we go back and fourth or maybe just I do a few times and for some reason I was the most confused I had ever been in my life and I think still to this day. I remember I had a skate rail on the side of my house that was blue and it looked SO blue so intensely.

 How much time went by during this period I don't know but eventually as I'm going to unlock my side door I start hearing voices in my head and it sounds SO zany and bizarre the voices and it was some language that I had just never heard before. It was seemingly male and female voices together saying different unknown words and at some point much more nonhuman voices with even more bizarre hard to understand words. I’ve heard and seen trip reports of this happening on pure DMT. Like some weird alien but audible language that just sounds super zany and almost like a bunch of frogs to be honest. Just a bizarre alien language like my mind was just opened to cosmic glossolalic weirdness. Very brief but honestly one of the parts of the trip I remember the most clearly and even think about the most still to this day. I have since then even heard the voices when just really high on THC once or twice. G13 mixed with kief. Lots of kief. 

After I unlock the side door as I'm putting the keys back in my pocket it felt like they melted off my hand into my pocket. There might have been a zany sound distortion during this time too that was separate from it but related somehow because everything is related. After I open this door I walk in through the garage and look at the car that's in there and how fucking fake and plastic it looked at that time. I remember the headlights looked like straight up shiny plastic. Like something that belonged on some kind of toy or toy car. 

We then walk into my living room to watch a movie and for some strange fucking reason they choose to watch Scary Movie 4 I have no idea why. It's such a horrible thing to watch when you're tripping. It’s also the most random ass movie ever and it’s not even like a really great movie or anything. Plus shrooms are already zany enough you don't need a 'kind of scary' really zany movie on top of that. Shrooms already have a dark side to them. And little did I know I was still approaching ego death which would not work with any movie unless it was Planet Earth or something. You get confused what’s real and what isn’t. 

After fixing and figuring out the T.V. because of course something technical about it has to act up since I'm tripping the fuck out, we start the movie. Unfortunately during this movie was where the real sort of bulk of my experience the meat of my experience really was so I'm gonna have to talk about a lot of the movie. Usually my trips aren’t part of the movies I watch on them but in this case it very much was which is why I have to go through the movie. I don't remember too much other than what happened during that part of the trip, unfortunately I had smoked too much weed so it kind of clouded my memory and clouded the experience in general. It wasn't as vivid or as hyperreal as my future trips would be and not as profound and enlightening either. This would just be really really intense and I explored deep and my ego completely faded. 

Another unfortunate thing about choosing this kind of movie was that it wasn't necessarily a terribly bad thing to watch Scary Movie 4 while tripping but when having full blown ego death that kind of thing needs to be avoided. Little did I know that I would get ego death and start losing my sense of self let alone what was going on in the screen. In other words: watching Scary Movie 4 when tripping isn't too bad but watching it when you can't tell real life from a movie and what's happening in the room and what's happening on the screen that's when things can seriously get dangerous and really go wrong. That’s how you get into deep water in this kind of experiences and it’s hard to get out of. Luckily I somehow was able to keep my composure. My friends were probably wondering why I wasn't acting crazy or over the top and figured that this stuff (shrooms) was probably just not too crazy or anything but it was. I don't know why I was just acting mostly normal which is something I tend to be able to do on shrooms sometimes. I'll be extremely fucked up and be so mentally gone but able to pull off being sober and normal. Maybe it's just because I feel so aware of my puny humaness that I know 'acting high' or fucked up will just make me look even dumber to myself and whatever ominous presence or intelligence I'm being examined by. I feel a need to impress the mushroom or make myself look like I'm worth at least something to it. It's like a slight ascetic attitude that washes over me.

This feeling or attitude was most prominent when tripping in the mountains. I find it’s related to a sensation of equanimity and spiritual control or balance as well. 

Anyways movie starts.

It opens up of course with Dr. Phil and Shaq in that opening scene where they're making fun of the movie Saw. What's again unfortunate about this is that visually speaking not mentally but visually speaking I was already getting confused on what was just in the room and what was only on the screen. Because since it was making fun of Saw it looked exactly like the Saw movie with all the blank white tiles and stuff on the walls that weird psychologically uncomfortable style and feeling and it was outside of the screen as well essentially in the room with me. The walls in my peripherals looked like that from Saw with all the tiles on the wall and the characters in the movie looking like they were popping out of the screen pretty much. This effect with the characters and things popping out was more intense at certain times it wasn't constant. It came in these hypnotic waves. 

The movie just seemed so cartoony and fake and cringy. An unexplainable feeling of disproval of what was going on on the screen. Especially after the first initial scene when it took on the War of the Worlds vibe and started talking about Biology and life and the universe but in a comical pretentious way. 

After this the mysterious and apprehensive Grudge vibe comes on quickly with a questionable soundtrack and it shows Charlie Sheen walking out on his deck looking bewildered and confused for some reason. I remember during that whole scene feeling just as confused as Charle Sheen looked. It didn’t matter how funny the jokes on screen were or how they looked because the musical score in the background sent my mind off in eerie pessimistic directions. This was throughout the whole movie but more in the beginning. 

When he looked at that picture frame of that family and sees that ghost face in the background of the picture it kind of freaked me out but I for some reason found it funny yet bizarre when he pulled out the razor blade and tried to cut his wrist.

But still definitely not in the mood to laugh. Every movement and occurrence in the movie was so awkward. And it was more just like..”yea..I get the joke but I’m not laughing because what’s the point..”

Things were just too weird and transformative for that and echoey and I felt like there was more important and profound things occurring in the universe or in other dimensions to take this crap seriously. I didn’t think that at the time but looking back that seems to be what it was it was just subliminal I believe. Under the surface.

The way Anna Faris speaks in the movie doesn’t help because it’s so passionately comical. Her face looked distorted and emotional throughout the whole film pretty much. The next scene was the scene where they were on the construction site and that’s when I REALLY started tripping the fuck out. As if the sounds of giant machines + the shrooms wasn’t enough that part when the monkeys were running and hopping out of the crate I was literally seeing things that were not there and seeing like these visual delays..mistakes in the movie. Time was slowing down significantly as well. 

The two black guys in the bar who were in Scary Movie 3 looked really trippy. I was also really uncomfortable when they made fun of Broke Back Mountain in that one camping scene. It was just really ridiculous and seemed too long. I was somehow able to understand their conversation about zombies and people who go missing but everything else was confusing and awkward or too ridiculous to acknowledge. 

That scene where the main character guy got his kids from their mother was odd (where they were making fun of War of the Worlds) because they were upset with him and didn’t like him and every time in the movie someone acted happy it seemed fake or exaggerated but every time a character was sad, angry or annoyed or even confused it seemed real and genuine to me. 

the next thing that happened was upsetting. It was the scene where “Cindy” (Ann Faris’s character) was getting hired somewhere and before she got the job it showed that one girl with her whole bottom jaw missing and a bunch of drool coming out. Just like in the Grudge that girl who got her jaw ripped off. Well ya that is one of the moments where what was happening on the screen seemed to also be happening in the room right in front of me and I had to keep reminding myself (especially during that scene) that it’s just a movie and is not actually happening in front of me. This never happens if I trip now. It was a rollercoaster of emotions and feelings though because something would scare me then I would ‘see the joke’ and have to accept it as a joke. Some parts were mildly amusing. 

“She slip and fall..”

The eerie music and sound of the wind in some scenes really did enhance my trip in some way. Probably wouldn’t have felt nearly as mysterious and crazy if it hadn’t been for the movie. Weird to see everything so saturated and zany though. 

The most gnarly part of the trip (or most gnarliest visual) was when Cindy was being taken on a tour of the house where the catatonic woman lives who is haunted by the curse whatever curse this is. The scene when there was black hair coming out of the corner of the wall was quite extreme. Not only was I getting the movie mixed up with real life again but I remember looking off the screen completely and literally seeing the same black hair from the movie essentially (maybe a bit more surreal and shadowy) start coming out of the dark corner of MY wall and in my reality. It was fucked up but quick and knew it was just in my head but damn. That was the only full blown hallucination I have had to this day while under psychedelics. The only time I saw something that actually wasn’t there. Maybe it’s because even in the movie the black hair coming out of the wall did seem kind of “shroomy” in a way. This was the real dark side of shrooms, the dark side people talk about when differentiating it from acid. I agree with this and even though acid has it’s own dark side I not only find shrooms ‘darker’ but also more spontaneous and apparitional especially in it’s visuals. Ghosts and the paranormal don’t mix well with shrooms either. It can have a very supernatural feel and headspace where it feels like there is seemingly no more separation from you and other worlds or planes of existence and no limit to what your imagination can come up with and shove in your face. 

Another thing I’ve come to learn about psychedelics is that they typically only cause REAL hallucinations like actually seeing things that are not there when the user is scared otherwise it’s mostly just visual distortions and extra sensory phenomenon that cannot be accurately put into words. Almost like you’re seeing hidden dimensions and worlds under normal reality. This is however different from “seeing things that are not there” like black hair flowing out of the corner of a wall. A good example would be entity contact/perception or vibratory fields. 

Every single word uttered by every single person in the movie also began to take on strange and ambiguous double meanings. The part when the asian guy giving her a tour of the house has to fight that asian ghost kid in the bathtub is when I really really start tripping and getting confused as to what the fuck is going on and what’s actually real. The mindfuck of shrooms cannot be explained. Let alone how crazy movies feel. 

The scene after the bathtub fight was when I was peaking and the mindfuck of the experience and the whole trip really began to take over and the concept of time and “me” was fading. It was that scene where he’s like “Ready for the Tom Ryan express?”. The part when he hits Cindy in the face accidentally with the baseball and goes to help her up was the very tip of my peak. When they first stated exchanging words before she was explaining to him how she has to clean and take care of that catatonic chick in such a ridiculous way was when I literally peaked and had full ego death and there was no more “me”

The part right before Cindy starts talking about cleaning that catatonic woman’s “dooty bubble” time started to almost come to a complete halt or stand still. Time was going sooo slow and this is when I REALLY didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t. I feel like the peak came out of nowhere but maybe not, maybe I was just inexperienced and plus it comes on in waves and is very undulating and the waves get stronger and stronger for about 3 hours. 

The emotions on Cindy’s face were obviously in slow motion but they also seemed to be changing and she seems very perplexed at one point. Forgot who I was, pretty sure I forgot who she was and that she was even part of a “movie”. I probably forgot my friends were there. I remember the whole backdrop feeling or vibe was very emotional but in a chaotic and dying kind of way. Looking back now it really did seem like death. It seemed emotionally separating and timeless and for some reason it felt like she was going through the same or similar emotions. It felt so timeless and I could feel like she and him were reuniting for the first time in a long time or something really sad happened between them and they were crushed by it. She was never going to see him again. This was all delusional and in my head by the way. Now when I watch that scene I don’t know how the hell I saw or came up with any of that. 

So I lost all concept of everything pretty much including reality and myself. I was just everything else just like everything else was me. Not really that I was “one with everything” but more so just there was no separations and no more “me” to make or create a separation. Anything could have happened in that moment and nothing about it can be explained. Ego death is completely unexplainable. You see when someone looks up the definition of ego death it tells them that it’s when they lose complete sense of self and forget who they are so a reader or newbie sees that and just assumes forgetting who you are or "thinking your dying” automatically means you got ego death but it’s not. Simply forgetting who you are is not what ego death is, what ego death ACTUALLY is can never be explained. It’s just that forgetting who you are is one of the SYMPTOMS of ego death. It’s not the cause of ego death or the meaning of ego death it’s just one of the things that happens and one of the only things you can relate back into this 3 dimensional reality. 

The T.V.’s image also seemed to be fully off to the left side outside of the screen even though the television was more on my right said since I was on the left side of the couch facing it. The screen was also kind of flashing? Or the sides of the screen looked like they were flashing. I really wish I paid attention better at the time. 

It was like everything was dark around the lit up screen and….and..ya I can’t explain. Just a creepy flashing vibe that felt like hypnosis and the picture was off the screen or the screen was off to the eft. 

Looking back it was a very otherworldly, ambiguous and ancient kind of hypnosis. 

There was such a feeling of multiple contradictions. Another part about it (the peak) was that it felt like a bubbling cauldron of emotions and possibilities but not “my” emotions instead the emotions of everything around me and the emotions of my visuals or what I could see. I saw all the ‘what ifs’ almost like I was seeing into parallel dimensions of many other cosmic possibilities. Like seeing the true meaning and the true nature of infinity and infinite possibility manifest in front of your eyes. This slow motion and saturated visual cascade of emotions and long stories that Cindy’s face seemed to go through felt like hours however it was literally only 1 minute. I know this because I looked at the clock before and after. Felt like multiple hours had gone by and time didn’t exist at one point I don’t think but I looked at the clock and literally only 1 single minute had passed and that’s when I HAD to say something out loud. It was 3:00pm before the peak and 3:01 after so in a way I really only peaked for 1 minute but it felt like hours and was like hours worth of experience. I then said out loud “Holy shit it’s only been 1 minute!” in a very surprised tone and my friends didn’t say anything. That was the only time during the whole trip I think that I described what was going on. 

I remember as my peak started to subside and I began to remember who I was again (before I yelled it had only been 1 minute) I don’t think I realized my peak was ending I was thinking to myself “How much more intense is this gonna get? Because I don’t think mentally I can handle much more..” well thankfully it didn’t get anymore intense and gradually became less headfucky.  I was kind of worried though and I remember I had no problem reminding myself without moving or getting up or even taking my eyes off the screen that my parents weren’t gonna walk in because they were out of town far away. Usually though when I’m stoned and on the exact same couch I’ll get MUCH more paranoid and irrational about my parents coming home than this. I was fairly rational during this crazy mind state and don’t know why. I think the paranoia on weed is just more irrational and psychotomimetic so I was just used to that. 

I remember during the peak itself I couldn’t even hear what was going on on the screen. It was like I was far away or everything was too echoey and transforming. It wasn’t just a high, there was actually something happening. Like a process taking place. A breaking down of reality and outside information. 

Right when their conversation ended is when my peak ended and she said “Okay Mrs. Noris time to dig out that dooty bubble” is when I sort of slowly came back to this world and the normal trip but I don’t think I full realized it yet. I didn’t even realize what had just happened and what else was gonna come. I just had to remind myself that no one has ever died from mushrooms and to stay calm. Amazing how I was able to be rationally anchored only when I was aware of “me”. 

Well of course this was the most scary and difficult part of the experience and the least fun part but I didn’t know this was how mushroom trips worked so I was just convinced this would just be a really intense mindfuck drug not enlightening or happy. 

So far I hadn’t "learned” anything but that’s just how the mushroom experience unfolds. None of what’s happening makes sense at first. It’s almost like you don’t really appreciate it until it’s over and that’s how I felt with this one. I also noticed that it seemed way more psychedelic and trippy the next day looking back on it than the actual day of the trip. I think I just got so tripped out that it actually convinced me that that was all normal. It does after all feel more real than reality. 

The next scene in the movie was particularly eerie. Cindy was taking a shower and felt a hand grabbing her. Seconds later the water stops working and the music changes and she hears a strange sound coming from somewhere in the house. The look on her face was haunting. Her face also looked particularly shroomy at this time but that’s all I can describe it as. I remember this part and the next scene ACTUALLY feeling and looking like a real horror movie. And the way that ghost thing crawled down the stairs was…I don’t know…disturbing. 

The movie had a very magical feel at this point but nothing was confusing anymore. Just like normal reality and situations but with the possibility of magic or mystery. Uncertainty. 

But at least my reality was no longer crumbling apart and warping and things were fairly more hyperreal and grounded.

The part when Cindy accidentally starts soaking and washing the catatonic woman with the bowl of her own piss because she mixes it up with the water was really funny but really messed up. I felt like Anna Faris (Cindy) was some kind of sadist or masochist that was taking pleasure in torturing this catatonic woman with her own piss so you could say I was still a little delusional but maybe my mind was just going off in creatively sick directions. I don’t even want to talk about how crazy it looked when she hosed her down and left the hose running as the catatonic woman was suffering on the ground and it looked very fake and cringy of course. 

Oh ya and just because I wasn’t peaking anymore and no longer desperately holding onto my sanity and reality doesn’t mean the scary and strange stuff in the movie still wasn’t freaking me out. Eventually I had enough and had to leave the room to go in the kitchen. I opened the fridge and went for the orange juice without even thinking about it and started chugging it. I think I was still recovering from the intense body load and the bit of nausea I felt during the peak. Being scared and so mindfucked might have contributed to the nausea and body load even. 

What happened next though it was like magic. As soon as the orange juice entered my mouth and I tasted it I felt literally 10 times better and my mood and spirits improved by 1,000%.

It was pure magic. And after that is when I felt full of energy. Maybe not “full of” energy but I no longer felt crazy sedated and unable to really do anything physically. Mentally I was still gone though I just came back to the living room with a totally new attitude. I laughed when Cindy got hit in the face with a ball again and they had an almost deja vu like second interaction. 

The boxing scene that came next where everyone’s neck broke and Mike Tyson bit everyone’s ears off was absolutely epic and even kind of profound and emotional towards the end lol. Everything was so shroomy. I think the only thing keeping me at least mildly entertained was the fact that it feels like a bunch of movies in one. 

The War of the Worlds theme of it was really 'out there’ and felt gloomy (like the real War of the Worlds movie). Also everyone who knows shrooms and where they take you knows the sounds of giant transforming alien machines do not go with mushrooms. Well I guess they do go with mushrooms but too much so…

Those things you will see and hear on shrooms no matter what if you dose high enough. Ya science fiction drug it is, giant machines seem to already be embedded into the mushroom experience. Something to do with aliens and their advanced technology. Another thing (archetype) that I cannot even begin to put in words. You can probably Google shrooms and alien technology or giant machines and see what I’m talking about. Utter galactic reality shattering outrage shining through from what are seemingly other dimensions or perversions of reality. 

Shortly after this I get the first “cool” visual hallucination or first one that I appreciate at least. It was when Cindy ran into the house during the alien invasion and had a conversation with the ghost boy about the aliens and who to defeat them. A message written in blood pops up on the wall and it seemed so cool because it was so much more wide and stretched out than it usually would and seemed like this bloody writing was actually on my wall and this is when I started to get a sick thrilling pleasure out of seeing “scary things” in the movie as oppose to how I was just feeling earlier where everything seemed confusing and just….wrong and the tones of people’s voices just seemed awkward and lumbering.

I was actually enjoying things like that (scary things) at this point even more than I usually do when sober because I typically like stuff like that anyways; horror and what not.  

Things started to seem very exotic again while still remaining hyperreal and bright. Not too crisp though, the edges of everything though they were well defined and were fairly soft and rounded. The mindfucking warped thinking aspect was still floating around in my consciousness to some degree I was just no longer really confused about simple concepts. My friends even tried to trip me out with this one app called trippy something but it all just seemed fake. It didn’t work on me. 

At this point after the blood appeared on the wall (what seemed like on my wall) the walls and structure of my house seemed to take on a VERY different look. A far more ancient look. In fact everything felt so overwhelming Mayan and I was embraced with Mayan imagery both with open and closed eyes. This was long before I knew the Mayans or Mazatecs even used mushrooms for thousands upon thousands of years for religious purposes. Ego death and entity contact is I’m guessing what they shot for. Interesting because one of my friends there was Mayan (my Mexican friend) but again this was before he or I knew any of this. I saw clear Puuc architecture form and appear in my house somehow and envelop in my living room. There was even Mayan symbols dispersed throughout space and on the surfaces of objects. It felt truly amazing and accepting. I think this is when my opinion on the mushrooms started to gradually change. Whatever opinion you form about mushrooms within the first 2 or 3 hours will be completely different from the opinion you’ll have about it by hour 4 or 5. That’s what people don’t get. You don’t just get hit with enlightenment or cosmic consciousness or amazing hyperreal visuals right when the trip starts, it’s a long dynamic process that has to go through several different stages and get it’s way over the huge ambiguous mindfuck so you can flow down gently into a clearer more loving space. A space with more general insights as well. 

No one ever told me that mushrooms have different stages which is honestly pretty dumb. No one ever told me that mushrooms are crazy in the beginning and really only insightful the second half. Most people even those who are experienced are pretty dumb about this stuff I’ve come to find and most people absolutely SUCK at explaining shrooms and suck at getting across just how bizarre yet dynamic and alive it is. It didn’t feel super alive this first trip but I now find that telling people there’s different stages to the mushroom trip to be the most important thing you can tell someone who’s thinking about doing them or going to do them. They absolutely have to know that however they feel by hour 2 or 3 they will NOT feel even remotely the same by hour 4 or 5. This is why I think bad trips on mushrooms (if you do have one) will only really be “bad” the first 2 or 3 hours. The last 2 or 3 hours though is pretty much always guaranteed to be euphoric no matter how bad of a trip. If someone claims to have had a bad shroom trip that lasted the whole 6 or 7 hours they’re completely full of shit in my opinion and it was probably just placebo because the whole experience is constantly changing. You go through a rollercoaster of thoughts, feelings and emotions. It’s actually not uncommon for someone during a mushroom experience to have the worst day of their life and the best day of their life all in one single trip. 

 During the movie I think the only person who really made me laugh and entertained was Leslie Nelson. That scene in the UN where everyone was naked was so epic and felt like I was actually there but in a much more pleasant way than earlier. A lot less mindfuck mostly just emotional and visual at this point. This wasn’t a super visual or even spiritual trip though. Just a huge mindfuck and a loss of self/ego and also a feeling of rebirth that had yet to happen. 

The part where Cindy walks through the wreckage of the crashed plane seemed kind of “epic” in a way too yet horrifying for some reason. Seeing the burning plane engining still spinning for some reason really effected me. 

Brenda and Cindy reunite in this scene.

The humorous, optimistic and lighthearted side of the mushroom experience began to show. A timeless cosmic giggly feeling that cannot be explained. 

Anyways they reunite and Cindy says “Brenda? I thought you were dead!” and Brenda’s just like “oh I thought you were dead too” lol and I thought to myself “Ha I thought I was dead too just a little bit ago.” 

The part when that black dude and Kevin Hart thought all the injured people were zombies and started beating them up was pretty funny. Especially when he started beating up his grandma and threw her down the well. So sad and wrong yet so funny. Some serious ’shaking my head’ type material. 

Oh ya and the scene where Brenda and Cindy are driving on that forested road on the way to the “village” the asian ghost’s face popping up in the window out of nowhere scared the shit out of me. I think I completely forgot about that part and didn’t prepare myself. It even scared me a little bit this time watching it now because I forgot at which moment it was supposed to happen. 

This is when the movie completely changed vibes and became a little more “folkloric” and mysterious as they began to make fun of that movie The Village. 

So it had a old timey folkloric charm but was still tinted with this hyperreal, alien, saturated perception/lens from the shrooms. 

It probably would have went better with acid. Pure folkloric mystery. No elves or aliens. Now that I think about it I kind of actually wanna watch The Village on acid or the Blair Witch Project or something that would be epic/hilarious. 

The retarded guy in the “village” I remember was so over the top in his ridiculousness. Was so strange to watch how the movie would go from ridiculousness and weird zany humor then go to some deeper meaning like Cindy asking the leader of the Village how his song died when her and Brenda were being dragged out of the courtroom. 

Then the UN part where everyone lost their clothes which was quite amazing. Like I said it felt like I was there. It’s very hard to imagine that though or understand that even for me now. It’s funny how the president’s advisor or whatever during that scene was being played by Bryan Callen who I had heard talk on the Joe Rogan podcast about a wild crazy trip he had on mushrooms one time on a mountain and he I guess ran down the whole mountain naked while on shrooming an dusting his mouth with wild blueberries. I didn’t know this back when I watched it though lol. I’m just noticing it now. 

Eventually the village get’s attacked by those monster things that come from the woods that wear those red coats and it just goes to show how MUCH less intense the trip was at this time because it was not scary at all not like it was before. Every “scary” thing or visual in the first half of the movie WAS actually scary.  

Oh ya and later on the part where that alien scanner camera thing goes down and scans the basement and fucks that vacuum was one of the most shroomy things I have ever seen. Even more shroomy than when the narrator towards the end starts talking about love and how it is our greatest strength as human beings and then proceeds to get hit by a bus. Classic mushroom humor. Humans are always the butt of shroom’s jokes it seems. 

So after this insanely ridiculous movie ends we decide to put on just normal television. My stoned friends are boring.

Some point in the trip and I have no idea when this happened; I don’t know if this happened in the beginning of my trip or after we watched the movie (I think it was after) but one of my friends spills some Sprite on my couch. I see this and they both start laughing hysterically because they see that I see it and I’m just staring at it and ya it was just funny I can’t explain why but I wasn’t laughing. Eventually I go to get some paper towels from the kitchen (and some more orange juice) and I bring back a bunch of paper towels but when I come back it’s already cleaned up or something so I am just confused and don’t know what to do with the paper towels. I’m not sure what I did during this time but they ended up scattered all over the living room, everything looked so warped looking back now and looking back even the next day but at the time it all seemed so normal. But things and objects were really really fucking warped. I guess it’s just not the kind of “visuals” I was expecting. It was more perceptional than actually “visual” I guess you could say. I didn’t realize some of the visions and distortions would seem so normal. Well my living room was no longer a mindfucky abysmal void to other dimensions and there was no longer any Mayan or puuc architecture around me. But I was still very well in the trip.

At one point after they clean my couch for me they say something funny or something funny happens that I can’t remember and I started laughing fairly hard with them and they probably thought everything was normal until I started laughing so hard that I fell down on one knee, that’s when they really started laughing hysterically because they knew at that point I was definitely tripping. Just something about that movement of me getting down on my knee was just so classic and legit to tripping. 

As we turn on normal cable television we begin flipping around channels and my Filipino friend is flipping through pretty fast and he passes the show Cops which is the show that everyone loves and for some reason it gets everyone who’s really high excited always and as he quickly passes it me and my Mexican friend just start screaming at the same time “COPS COPS COPS!!!” and we start cracking the fuck up because we sound so excited and I start giggling at the sound of myself literally like a little girl or some emotional giddy child. I was so giddy and so aroused by certain familiar things. When the show comes on the first thing I noticed was the classic red and blue lights of the cop cars flashing everywhere and illuminating everything on screen. Then the red and blue cop lights begin to project all over my living room and it literally seems like the cops were in the room with the lights flashing everywhere. I get kinda weirded out and look out the window and say in a perplexed tone “Are the cops here?” even though I knew I sounded like an idiot.

The mail man also came earlier when I was really tripping balls and he put the mail through the door slot like always. This kind of gives the illusion that someone might try to be opening the front door. My friends looked at me because they probably thought it would scare me because I’m tripping and I might think it’s my parents but I didn’t acknowledge it or my friends. I knew better even in my tripping mindset and knew that my parents would never come through the front door. They always come through the garage, my friends though their parents I imagine always come through the front door so the front door making any kind of sound freaks out my friends or "guests” a lot more than it ever would for me. Even when I’m tripping HARD. The sound of the front door just doesn’t trigger me like it would most kids. The deep booming sound of my garage opening was my real trigger. 

Eventually I decide that it’s silly and stupid that we’re still inside the house and tell my friends we should go outside because I am absolutely done with tripping inside in front of the stupid and pointless television. T.V. always seems like such a waste of time when tripping. 

They agree and we go outside to smoke weed and to just…be outside. That’s the real place to do shrooms.

Before I get outside though I go through my garage it felt like 2 or 3 times. I forgot what I was doing but my head was just now starting to clear up everything became less warped, ambiguous and weird and I started feeling introspective thoughts and revelations come out of nowhere. It was like magic. 

I just got hit with this short straight to the point inner insights about what the fuck I should be doing in my life and what I shouldn’t be doing and what I really need to fix. It wasn’t really too deep of a look into myself it was seriously just thoughts about what I need to fix coming out of the ether. It felt like it was telling me “Hey this is a luxury this realm/dimension you're in and we’re gonna give you an easy cool time but you can’t forget these things..These are things you have to fix and you already know you have to fix them. Seriously; need to get these things together. Fix them. It shouldn’t have taken this long.”

This extremely brief but very direct small period of introspection and personal insight that was just really direct was also very forgiving and taking it easy on me and then it let me go about my trip like normal after I left the garage.  

This introspection was not like any introspective experience I’ve ever had on anything. Not on Shrooms, not on Acid, not on DXM or Ketamine, not alcohol nothing..

It was so quick and so brief whereas my other mushroom trips and even acid trips dwelled deep in introspection for sometimes hours on end especially acid since it lasted so long and has more continuity than a mushroom trip. This was so quick and so clam and not brutal at all. Just a quick reminder more than anything whereas on my future trips introspection and personal revelatory insights was one of the main effects and most striking memorable aspects. 

I remember when these thoughts just suddenly come to me that was the moment that I knew something was up and there was something interesting and beneficial and kind of magical about mushrooms. I never had fucking realizations and insights just came at me out of nowhere like that it was the first time ever. It was odd finding this out. That this state I was in I could just receive ‘answers’ from my subconscious and see what I need to fix so clearly. 

We then go out in my backyard after I figure out I have to fix some personal things and we start smoking and the effects were brilliant. I can’t explain the way things looked other than just being relatively high definition, brightly colored, more vivid and 'avatar’ looking. Somewhat primitive too.  

I don’t remember when but I decide I need to listen to music. I started to just sit by myself as my friends were smoking (can’t remember if I took a hit before this) but I put my headphones in and started listening to House at Pooneil Corners by Jefferson Airplane. I can’t remember what else; probably some Wooden Ships and White Rabbit as well. It sounded pretty cool but not as good as I had hoped for. Little did I know music on shrooms only sounds really great and amazing the first 3 hours before your peak and during. Really wish I had known this or wish once again that SOMEONE HAD FUCKING TOLD ME THERE WAS DIFFERENT FUCKING STAGES! No one tells you this shit. It’s stupid. 

I was already past that peak and the really trippy stage, I was already past the mindfucking stage so music wasn’t that cool, complex or euphoric. Sucks.

I feel like I should have been outside or at the very least listening to music while I was peaking not watching a fucking zany comedy movie. Not complaining too much though it was still great to listen to. I even closed my eyes to try and “study” the drug and what I could make myself ‘see’. I only saw one thing when I closed my eyes and it was like this red spiral thing like a portal or something but it was literally nothing else but this red spiral thing and it was every time I closed my eyes. I assume it was just red because when you close your eyes and your outside in the sun behind your eyes it seems more red than it does black. This is probably why it was red however the spiral itself was even more red than the outer part. It seemed peculiar. 

I smoked a bowl of weed after this I believe and you know how when you smoke a bowl the weed in the bowl will start moving because you’re burning it? Well when I did it this time the weed was moving A LOT and in a really organic lively kind of way or like it had tentacles or something but either way I felt like it was alive and moving inside the bowl. It’s still the only time weed has looked alive to me tripping or not tripping. 

Everything in my backyard was so vast and alien and wild. Not super complex or anything but much bigger and more interesting. Like another realm. My palm tree that was closest to me looked super alien. Like it's not even funny. Literally right out of another planet or star system. Maybe some kind of cosmic video game. It looked like it could be in the Ratchet and Clank game. There’s also this other incredible feeling/perspective about my surroundings that I can’t even begin to describe and you know what? It’s never happened to me again after this experience. The only way I can describe it is it just felt like higher ground….a new level. A godly way of looking at things. I felt like I myself was a God and the world looked so small. Or maybe not small but I felt like a giant walking through this finite exotic ecosystem. An ecosystem that felt full of water and greenery but also rough dirt and terrain and shadows. Not as smooth of an experience as one might expect. Very savage and atavistic type perspective but Godly. Shadows and lights look a lot different, more spiritual and meaningful somehow. More epic and legendary. I wish I could somehow describe this space. 

There’s really no words for this strange legendary perspective I had, I can only call it Godly, exotic and primordial. Just something that you could never imagine. My friends had set up the skate rail in my backyard and started messing around on it. Well I tried skating flat ground and tried doing a tre flip and couldn’t concentrate on the trick because the visuals were so Godly and high up? Is all I can say or describe. Lie I still felt like a giant. At one point my friends start doing tricks OVER the rail and I try this but with just an ollie. The first attempt though was a hilariously bad fail and I fall back while kicking my board forward into the rail and messed up the whole set up they had and my Mexican friend was like “ahhhh”.

Well I fixed it and try it again and knew that I can’t make that same mistake again and knock it over but that I HAVE to make it over or I will hurt myself. I didn’t want my bottom truck to catch on the rail or anything either and have me eat shit so I fearfully leap over the whole rail and only landed it without falling because I was so scared of the contrary. One of the strangest ollies I’ve ever done and one of the strangest sketchiest landings. 

I think I might have smoked a little more after this. I close my eyes again to see if I can see anything different and it’s still that same damn red spiral! For some reason this annoyed me and confused me because I don’t know why I couldn’t get any other visions besides this freakin spiral and I think I even mentioned this to them. I didn’t understand the point of it or why it didn’t go away. I can only imagine now looking back that the mushrooms wanted to pull me deeper or go into somewhere silent and dark but I was inexperienced and unknowledgeable at this point about what I “should” be doing. I also didn’t understand how I could “see” megalithic looking faces everywhere but while everything looked the same. Just like I was perceiving faces everywhere and all around me. So yes at this point in my trip I was perceiving all these ominous ancient looking faces around me. Very serious and sacred looking faces. This would happen in my future trips as well these ancient faces but this first trip it wasn’t as vivid and clear but instead more “spiritual” and extra sensory. More clouded and forgetful too but that was probably because of the weed. 

The trip still had a relatively Mayan feel to it but the actual Mayan visions and visions of their ancient architecture and symbols were no longer present. In fact they appeared only very briefly shortly after my peak but that’s it. 

At one point when we’re in my backyard I start to really feel the euphoria and the feeling of rebirth. This was much much different from my other future trips that I would have. First off the euphoria on this trip was good and all that but it just didn’t seem as vivid and clear as some other trips that had yet to come, this euphoria from this first trip did not feel like pure ecstasy or bliss like again; my trips to come but I was still very very happy and full of life. I was amazed and not even sure what I was amazed about. I mean the visions weren’t too crazy at least I don’t think and I wasn’t like seeing Gods or aliens or anything so I still have no idea why I was so amazed because I can’t remember anything specifically that was astonishing. Maybe just because it was a really long time ago and I was pretty stoned. 

Maybe it was a perceptive thing. Or maybe it’s so beyond my normal 3 dimensional mindset that I’m not even allowed to have my conscious mind bring that memory or psychological sensation back. It wouldn’t be the only time. Some information is too crazy and incomprehensible to even bring back. It’s like there’s only so much you’re ‘allowed’ to really remember. 

I just kept looking up for some reason and was so happy and clearheaded and felt like I would always feel this way forever and ever because why would I not feel this way forever? I didn’t feel like I had gotten high on a drug and that I would never come down I felt like I had been asleep my whole life and I had just woken up and now it was impossible for me to go back to sleep again. It was just like waking up. It was real. I was just thinking how this is real. This is real life and this is where it’s at. I was convinced (or maybe just really hoping) that this feeling and headspace and perspective of the world would never go away. 

I really couldn’t see how it could but I later came to find through tripping more and more that it never does last and you always return to a relatively normal outlook on life just maybe the trip changed it a little bit in the long term. I couldn’t comprehend that at this time, at this time I couldn’t understand how you could NOT look at things the way I was seeing them. Well this whole feeling I had kinda came from feeling like I was new like I had literally been born again. The whole maternal rebirth vibe was strong. Sometimes people will say including myself that 'oh tripping in general feels like being reborn' which is right it kinda does..my other acid and mushroom trips do have a “rebirthing” element and feeling to them but not nearly as intense, clear and literal as this. This was much less metaphorical and far more like ACTUALLY spiritually and physically being reborn into my body. Fits in with what Leary said about ego death how once you kill it a “new one” will take it’s place and I think he said something about “the new ego being born” and your ego is essentially ‘you’ and so it feels as if you are being born and are brand new. 

Well this plus the euphoria was putting a big smile on my face and I felt changed.. Permanently. I mean it probably did change me long term and “permanently” in a small handful of ways but not nearly as much as I thought at the time. I thought I would never be sad or unhappy or how I was before in my normal thinking ever again. Or I guess my normal way of looking at myself and life and my just generally feeling. 

 We all soon decide it would be best to go somewhere like 7/11 or something because it was still the middle of the day thank goodness. So we all go and they wonder if we should skate there but I wanted to walk so we did. We might have smoked before we left I don’t know. 

On the way to 7/11 we are walking down this kind of main street from the suburbs to the more towny part and there’s not that many cars but every single car I see looks really fake and plastic and has this uncomfortable shine or glossiness to it that just makes me psychologically uncomfortable for some reason when I’m in shroom world. Like this rounded, organic, glossy transformer technological attitude that is accompanied by biological worry and a naturalistic fear. 

Something about big machines/tools + psilocybin mushrooms equals manic pessimistic thinking and the road to psychological realms of grueling insanity. A feeling of despair and vulnerability. Something that isn’t there when using acid. Acid just usually makes you see how freaky the world is and cars and machines can be one of those things but it doesn’t hold a bias against anything in particular like mushrooms do with machines and power tools. Or maybe acid does but instead with knifes not machines. But even when you just take half an eighth of mushrooms this feeling or bias is still there, it just doesn’t go with the enchanted primitive organic mindset. Psilocybin is explicitly boundary dissolving I’ve noticed which makes it unique even for a psychedelic. However this means it’s uniquely bad for heavy machinery or really any kind of machinery more than other psychedelics. 

Which is strange because when you take really high doses of mushrooms people will often see giant complex robotic machines and it’s just really weird and indescribable. There’s something up with mushrooms and giant machines. This I think becomes really noticeable in the 4 to 5 gram range.

Anyways all the cars looked plastic and fake and not something I wanted to see for some reason and I remember crossing the road and really wondering how the fuck people 'wonder into traffic' on shrooms or kill themselves doing something stupid while tripping. I just didn’t get it at all. I now think those kinds of people are incredibly stupid.  

Eventually we get to the 7/11 and I say I don’t know if we smoked weed right before we left because I really don’t. But when we went inside 7/11 my visuals were very strong. Maybe because I was in a really artificial lit up place? I don’t know but I was seriously on one but no one knew or could tell because I was acing sober and confident. Was like ecstasy but better and smarter and of course more natural feeling and meaningful as the feeling of coming back down to earth was there too which was humbling in itself. 

I remember me and my friends actually kinda causing a scene in the 7/11 especially me being all loud and shit and doing weird shit I can’t remember what and we’re up there buying stuff just acting really rambunctious for some reason and the clerk behind the counter was this like skinny black guy. But not like a normal black guy he was like African or Ethiopian looking which makes sense since he was working at 7/11. He was bald and skinny and everything. He looked kind of alien-like to me and ancient in a way. The Mayan visions were showing themselves again and I was feeling this exotic otherworldly feeling inside the 7/11 in front of this guy. It’s the same kind of deep indescribable feeling that also has to do with alien dimensions and giant transforming machines. This was all new to me at the time none of it I could put into words. 

The clerk’s face looked like half of it was missing but not in a scary or violent way more just like separated from reality kind of way or separated from this dimension. Things are just seeming really exotic looking and colorful and like they’re moving in and out of dimensions but in an organic melty way. 

We eventually leave the 7/11 and head directly across the street to a strip mall with a grocery store, restaurants, little stores and everything. We went over there because my Filipino friend who wears eye contacts apparently needed to get more (a refill) and apparently this eye place was in this strip mall and I had no idea. I pass this place all the time because I live right here and go to this strip mall all the time and didn’t even know. I thought wow that’s random and when we got there it felt weird partially because it was a place I walk by all the time and never went in but more so because I was on mushrooms and I couldn’t help but see everything out of context. When we’re in there my Filipino friend is waiting right at the front for his prescription my Mexican friend was just stoned standing there and I’m all on shrooms on the side of the room getting almost hypnotized by the picture on this magazine that seemed to literally be popping out of the page in the most gentle but obvious way. It was kind of luring. It wasn’t the picture of the magazine itself but it showed a small yet eye catching album cover. It was an artistic picture of a woman face. I actually have the 1000th issue of Rolling Stone Magazine here at my house and on the inside of the cover it has pictures of all these albums and this exact one is there. I guess it’s a semi iconic album cover or something. The album is called Winning Days by The Vines and yea it was just totally coming out of the page at me and I was really wondering why my eye was so drawn to it and why this particular picture was so intriguing. 

I don’t even think I knew why we were there I’m just staring at this shit and feel like it embeds itself in my memory and experience. My Filipino friend can see that we’re fucked up and off staring at this thing and still staring at it as we’re on our way out and leaving. My Filipino friend just started laughing. 

Right after we head out they go to eat at the Mexican food place that is right there and I remember as I’m sitting outside on the bench I’m really looking closely at the tiles and colorful cracks and designs and this is when I could REALLY see well and see all the details my brain normally filters out and doesn’t even let my conscious mind see because let’s be honest; it’s too much information. It is nice though and this is another thing that no one told me but I was amazed by. I was looking closely in the cracks and seeing so deeply and being able to see tiny purple cracks in this larger brown crack and they were really there. You just have to look close and some were even light pink. I was just staring at all the details in this table outside this Mexican restaurant. 

I don’t really remember what happened directly after this but we eventually head back towards our neighborhood in suburbia. The only thing I remember walking back was my Mexican friend saying we should have brought our skateboards. I didn’t really say anything though about that because I didn’t mind walking. Before we get to my house I decide that I want to take the long way through my canyon because I want to enjoy the nature or being outside or something. I don’t remember how but we somehow ended up smoking a blunt at this cool spot in the canyon with trees and shit like halfway to me house. I remember smoking the weed made all the leaves on the trees right in front of me made them look more heavenly and ‘greater’ if that makes any sense. At one point my Mexican friend’s neighbors which are also friends with my parents walk behind us and clearly see us most likely while just walking their dog. I am guessing they have to smell the blunt but I still to this day don’t know. I don’t think it really fazed me much at the time though. 

Walking through the other half of the canyon I was just looking up at the sky and trees in amazement, I still don’t know what was so amazing. Fucking weed. Clouding my memory of the experience. It might have been just more of a feeling though.

My Mexican friend was kind of making fun of me for wanting to be in the nature and wanted to head back and I was still just amazed by everything and smiling feeling like nothing would ever be the same again. My friend is not as stupid anymore obviously we have since then taken mushrooms many times together and now my friends both fully 'get it’. 

They would never make fun of someone who's tripping wanting to be in nature now. I don’t think my Filipino friend minded but ya they both (or at least my Mexican friend) probably thought I wasn’t even that high or that I was just getting a “few funny trippy effects”. He even asked me when we were by the eye place if shrooms are actually worth it and I just said with eyes wide open “YES..Yes..” without even thinking about it. Because by the way he was asking it he was implying that maybe it’s not worth the $30 or $35 but I said it was. 

We get back to my house and don’t know how long we’re there. They both eventually leave even though I’m still tripping because you know they were stoned and bored. I can’t blame them though. I just hate stoned people when I’m tripping. I hate being around sober people and stoned people when on psychedelics to be honest. It’s not even that I can’t be around sober people actually I just can’t be around "normal" everyday assholes or unenlightened people it’s just so disturbing and cringy. 

Eventually I’m just by myself at my house and it’s about 6pm or 7pm or something like that and just starting to get dark. My mushroom trip lasted up to 9 hours with my pupils still dilated and everything. They’re usually only 6 or 7 hours at the most but the fact that I kept smoking weed was probably bringing the rounded specular shroomy visuals back.

I think at one point I just decide to walk or skate around my neighborhoods and I even get a call from my mom while walking and I start talking to her because she’s asking how everything’s going at the house (because they’re out of town). All the cars still look plastic too. Eventually I walk to this kind of dark spot closer to my house and call my older friend down the street and tell him to come and hang out with me because I was on shrooms and just sitting there in the darkness by myself. He was the only one of us that had done shrooms before and he was older and in college and here just for the summer in California because he goes to school in Arizona. 

He had had shrooms once before and hyped them up a lot for me but I think our experiences were TOTALLY different. First off when he did them he said he didn’t really hallucinate and said he just had a really fun time and he loved everything around him (he told me that would happen to me) but he said it was more of a feeling and he was just really fucking happy. Well he only had about 1 gram or a little more, just a stupidly low dose like that or something and who knows; they were probably weak Arizona shrooms or some shit too. He said they were all white or something. I’m sure they weren’t even comparable to something like California Gold caps or Golden Teachers. I think it was gold caps that I had this trip and it was a pretty heroic dose at the time. Full ego death. My older friend has since then has tried the Gold caps here from California and has been amazed by them time and time again and how visual they were because the shrooms he had in Arizona were practically non visual. 

We’re just talking though and I’m kind of aware that my friend cannot even fathom the kind of trip I HAD because what he experienced just seemed like the light/weak side of shrooms. I think he was assuming my experience was like is. He probably thought it was fun and recreational for me which it wasn’t. In fact my first mushroom trip might have been one of my least recreational trips period and none of them are really what I would consider “recreational”. He was telling me how music sounds amazing when shrooming and I just didn’t get it. Once again sooo so stupid that no one tells you there’s different stages. This is why psychedelic trips sometimes go bad because people don’t get properly educated on this shit. It’s kind of sad. 

Well I assumed my older friend was assuming my trip was just happy and carefree like his because later on around 8 or 9pm me and him and my Filipino friend are all smoking weed in my bathroom and my older friend gets all rowdy about something I forgot but I remember he kicks me into the bathtub because I’m sitting on the edge and ya…kinda dumb and my Filipino friend since he now had his contacts in and could actually SEE he saw that my pupils were still very huge and dilated and it’s like 9 o clock and he’s like “damn..I couldn’t see earlier because my contacts weren’t in but damn your pupils are big.” 

And that’s the last thing I remember from this day. 

This trip wasn’t really super visual or spiritual or optimistic or even profound or enlightening and there was only a very limited amount of insights and introspection. It honestly didn’t even feel that much alive either because shrooms usually feel alive and have a personality. It was like I said mostly just one big mindfucking, ego crushing, deep drifting, rebirth. But it was somewhat filtered to a degree like it didn’t bust out all the usual tricks and vivid details that it would have it was also probably my most ‘clouded’ psychedelic experience probably because of all the weed. Not super alien feeling either more exotic and primeval and biological than anything. 

It didn’t feel like it at the time but looking back on the whole experience it wasn’t like a crazy psychedelic trip necessarily it just seemed like I just went beyond normal perception in the most organismic, primordial and saturated way and the edges of things were so..soft? But crisp. It felt weird. Like nothing else.

It wasn’t even that ‘psychedelic’ to be honest just really reality dissolving and ego shattering yet not super humbling or profound. It was a really really strange mushroom trip not anything at all like my other future trips except for a handful of effects and a few similar headspace qualities. It was obviously clearly psychedelic to some extent but just not even on par to what my future trips would turn out to be. 

The most psychedelic part of THIS trip was I think when I was seeing intensely bright colors in the beginning in my backyard when i first started coming up and later on when I was staring at that album cover on the magazine in the eye place. 

Looking back on an Acid trip the day right after you feel like it was just a crazy abrasive and surreal rush of patterns and colors but the feeling this trip left was so strange and organismic and moist.. Very ancient and powerful too but more powerful. Like I said it didn’t feel alive at the time but looking back on the trip right after it happened there was this strange organic, lifelike shroomy feeling behind it like there was a life or intelligence behind the experience but not in the way that you think and not in an alien way. It was not alien or ominous or dark it was just like this really moist full of water organismic really natural and primeval feeling that was associated with some kind of brownish tanish living matter that was rounded. Like a mushroom.

I kind of felt like I went through the stages of early evolution too and like I went waaaay back in time. This trip was definitely very primeval. The whole experience looking back on it felt like primordial soup. Not like any other mushroom trip I have ever had it was so weird and organic. Not really life changing just powerful. 

To get to that level of intensity again I would probably need at least 4.5 to 5 grams on an empty stomach. 

Oh ya and I think this is the only time I ever had a trip sitter(s) and…it sucked. I say do it without a trip sitter or just with someone who is actually experienced with psychedelics. My friends were good and close friends but they didn’t know what they were doing or what was going on. I mean they chose to watch Scary Movie 4 for fucksake. 

Oh ya and since this experience and a few others I am now (with a relatively low tolerance) able to see faint but colorful aboriginal artwork with my eyes closed on cannabis. Heck cannabis now just gives me more entheogenic visuals in general. Cannabis has become a more spiritual and almost shamanic psychonautic substance and ritual for me now. I take psychedelics and the mind much more seriously now.