30g (wet) Dragon's Dynamite truffles

Saturday, 11:20am

My friend, J, who was tripping with me was quite inexperienced as far as psychedelics were concerned. We had tripped on 1g dry each before together, which had been a very positive experience for him. However, not wanting to push the boat out too far so early on, he was contented to eat 15g wet Atlantis truffles, while I munched down on 30g Dragon's Dynamite. This would be my 6th mushroom trip, the previous occasions having been low to medium doses, so unlike J pushing the boat out a little bit further was exactly what I was hoping to do.

We had woken up an hour or two ago and hadn't eaten breakfast, which explained how we both started to feel the onset of the psilocin within 10 minutes of eating the truffles. J was not used to the flavour, and, even with the aid of a Kinder bar, struggled with the taste. I admit 30g wasn't easy to get down, but I was expecting that. The apprehension turned to excitement as I started feeling a bit dizzy and weighty.

(my tenses will be all over the place here, so apologies in advance)

T+00:25

J starts feeling nauseous, I try to reassure him that some nausea is normal and that it typically passes. I am very conscious of the fact that his mood would quite rapidly drop if he were to vomit. The body load I had experienced begins to increase; I'm just anticipating the visuals by focusing on the patterns of the white and blue carpet in front of me.

T+00:40

J can't hold back the nausea any longer and goes to the bathroom to throw up, visibly distressed. I notice the onset of peripheral drifting and mildly higher colour saturation. The room appears to be whiter than it was before.

T+01:00

I'm hoping J's negativity doesn't rub off on my trip as I'm quite aware of the fact that as the more experienced tripper I'm still supposed to manage the mood where I can. I begin to realise that this will be increasingly difficult. J is in quite a bit of discomfort, he turns on the fan and lies down on my bed to get comfortable. He describes feeling very intense visuals where CEVs and OEVs overlap. He says he just wants to sleep it off. Meanwhile the fan is blowing directly at my like an arctic breeze. It fits quite well with the white of the apartment. I put my headphones on, as J curls up in bed, and begin to listen to Explosions in the Sky (The Wilderness album if anyone is interested - the cover art is very immersive and trippy). Music certainly starts to feel wider, and every song draws me further and further into the body high feeling.

T+01:40

J pukes for the second time and says he is now feeling a lot better. He appreciates that he has to surrender to the experience rather than fight it. We decide to watch New Kids Turbo in german, which is hard enough the understand when you're not on shrooms. The visual realm of hallucination really begins to deepen for me. I experience intense flashes of distortion and colour. Eyes in wavy formations begin to appear in everything while colours become much more saturated than before. There is a peripheral haze when my vision drifts.

T+02:30
After watching the film for a while the intensity of the trip has magnified extremely. I would consider this the peak as far as visuals and confusion are concerned. The film's plot does not make any sense, language begins to lose meaning. The character's faces are squashed and have extra eyes in them. I begin to see buddhist symbolism in colourful hallucinations that can only be describes as flashes of the third eye. Profound insights have not yet developed, which is disappointing for me, but probably because my attention is divided and we are watching possibly the least intellectual film ever made. J adamantly maintains that he is quite sober again and that he has already experienced exactly what I am experiencing. At the time of the trip I found that incredibly annoying because it felt like he was somehow suggesting he was superior to me in some way, however I realise that we were both just really high. I'm still not happy that he didn't get that much out of the truffles, as I know that will affect how likely he is to try them again in the future.

T+03:10

The film was drawing to a close and the visuals were plateauing. J suggested rolling a joint each of Super Silver Haze which we had bought precisely for this purpose. In my stupor I forgot that this was something I wanted to try, but I honestly really did not feel as though I needed to smoke weed at that point. Quite simply I thought that the purpose of weed was to get high, and because I was already much higher than a joint could make me I saw no value in pushing things (oh how wrong I was).
  I began to become even more confused because my thoughts were changing very rapidly and as a result communication was quite challenging. The clear green of the weed, the small diamonds on the rolling paper, the golden brown of the tobacco; the colour combination was just so distracting and intense. Every time my focus drifted to my fingers I would see small eyes on my knuckles. Eventually I gave up rolling and began listening to some music over my headphones again. It was just so much easier to relax and enjoy what I was experiencing than concentrate on rolling something I wasn't so sure I even wanted to smoke.

  J was talking a lot about what a bad experience he had when he had just eaten the truffles and how he was considering never trying mushrooms again. This was very disappointing news to me, as we are currently in the process of cultivating our own supply in our apartment (only a few more weeks to go!!),  which was of course intensified due to the dose I was on. I made a mental note never to trip on higher doses with other people after this, purely because I hated the fact that what could have been a very enlightening and beautiful experience up to this point was really rather confusing. I hasten to add I was still having a good time though.

T+03:30

I go to the bathroom to pee and look at myself in the mirror. I feel a lot more attractive and accepting of my appearance. I'm still in control on my bladder and aware enough to understand my physiological impulses. Small, alien, dark blue letters spark around my face. I want to stay here longer, because I think I could learn some lessons about vanity, but I know that doing so could mean spending the rest of the trip in the bathroom, and I had places to be.

T+03:40

I decide I'm ready to go outside, having seen the candy land that awaited me from the window. I find it's always hard to overcome the feeling of leaving the place you set your roots in on a trip, but as with all things you don't really learn anything if you never step outside of your comfort zone. J offers to roll my joint for me, which I accept. When we get downstairs and start walking to the supermarket 600m away to get some snacks (which seeing as I had no cash on me or an appetite I was pretty indifferent about), we realise that J isn't as sober as he thought he was.

From here I sorta lose track of time. As we were talking I started to notice J's speech patterns were very similar to how he spoke when he was first on mushrooms. I realise that he had unintentionally fooled me, as I was so high that I considered anything less than where I was to be sober, which meant 'sober' had lost its meaning to me. After a couple of tokes his visual experience quickly picked up from where it left off a couple hours ago and we carried on walking. We reached a rather large lawn of grass in front of the supermarket, but euphoria escalated quickly and we were so distracted by nature that we couldn't continue. The grass was so vividly green and luscious. The sun shone beautifully through the autumnal leaves. The pure fresh wind cleaned our polluted lungs. J and I made the observation that we really weren't doing anything other than standing around in this cute little dutch town and talking about how amazing everything was. We were experiencing what it was truly like "to be". By that I mean having the luxury of simply spending time existing, free from stress and physiological demands; being able to truly enjoy the moment. Paradoxically by doing nothing it seemed we were living life to the fullest, in open rebellion of society's prescription of what one needs to do to be happy. J and I were just marveling at it all. I know he was having a slightly different experience to be based on the difference in dosage and lack of previous experience. If he decides to write his account we'll probably post the report here too.

This is where I experienced a familiar form of ego death. The last time I felt this way I had eaten 22g of High Hawaiians, a space cake and smoked multiple joints during a previous trip to Amsterdam 7 months before. Through the haze in a restaurant with some close friends, however, I didn't really appreciate what was going on, I just embraced it as a really cool experience. This time it arose when I was so immersed in simply existing, that I forgot who I was and where I came from. It was as though, having overloaded my brain, the mushrooms had flipped a switch resetting my mind. It felt very much like mental de-fragmentation, the sort of routine maintenance one might do to the hard drive of a computer . My adult brain was switched off; my old self abandoned the controls of my mind, only to be replaced by a new, reinvigorated 'self' picking up where the old me left off. That seemed to turn my own childhood brain on again which was incredibly fascinating for me. I remember thinking very clearly like that as a child. Information, colours and sounds were all just bouncing around in my head. There was this supernatural space echo audible in the background of my mind. The only onomatopoeia i could use for comparison would be variations of "pnurple boop boop de beep". Funny, I know, but at the same time it was really really cool!

J and I appeared to be the only two beings in this new childlike world. The differences in our personalities gave me a strong impression of being physical incarnations of yin and yang. I was using our conversation as an anchor in relaity as we walked back in the direction of the apartment. I hadn't noticed before that a kindergarten was right next to where we were staying, it seemed like a massive coincidence, but to feel that way and see real children running around an playing only intensified how I was feeling. We sat an inconspicuous distance away and just sat and talked of a bench. I was still experiencing peripheral drifting and an old tree in front of us was particularly mesmerising for me. Funnily enough, just as J commented on how nice the view was, someone poorly parked a car right in front of us. We realised that just as people didn't give a shit about us being high off our nuts, we weren't allowed to give a shit about people doing their thing either.

Talking to J made me feel like I was back in the playground at my old primary school. Looking through the autumn leaves, I was reminded of the profile of a cerebellum. I began to feel like I was looking inside one, and I swear I could feel my mind restarting and rebuilding itself as I started piecing existence back together. Funnily enough, even though J and I are very close friends with a lot in common, we are very different in a number of ways and his overall personality in this instant reminded me of that of a bully, and by extension I had the personality of a victim. In reality this couldn't be further from the truth, and he said nothing negatively directed towards me. However, he told a few jokes that I interpreted as mean. While I was trying to be very non-judgmental and experience everything objectively, he had not experienced ego-death to the same degree as me and his lower dosage and potentially the negative vibes I'd felt off him earlier in the trip somehow meant that I interpeted things in this far-fetched way. The moral of the story is don't believe everything you think on shrooms.

We eventually went back inside, gathered ourselves and went to the supermarket. By this point I was still foggy, but sober. That lead to some confusion while paying in the store (I couldn't get my card to work) but everything was resolved easily enough.

Once we got back to where we study after the holiday, I was feeling very low for a few days due to the increasing realisation that I had a lot of work to get on top of again at uni. Also generally I needed to approach my work more seriously and readdress my priorities. My girlfriend arrived the weekend I got back from Amsterdam, and, with the help of her and J, I was able to sort my mental shit out and I'm now feeling a lot better. Without getting into details about my philosophy of life, I had been at a very high point as far as mood and well-being were concerned for a pretty long time. I knew that I was beginning to take that feeling for granted and a part of me wanted and needed to feel low once more to appreciate the ups of life again. Mushrooms really do give you what you need rather than necessarily what you would like to feel.

  Now that I've cut out my weed usage and occasional smoking habit (a challenge I've set myself to last a whole year - I'm under no illusions that it will be tough), my attitude to studying is much more disciplined and structured again. I feel so lucky to have my girlfriend and close friends like J in my life.

Done correctly, mushrooms/truffles can be the most helpful and beautiful therapy session a person can have, in my humble opinion. Every experience is a lesson, and it's up to the individual to learn and grow from it.