First Solo Trip

I am a male, 35 years of age. I dont know how much I weigh, but I am not a real big guy. Here I detail some of the events leading up to the trip since in my mind they were strangely connected with the trip itself.

It was winter again and I was feeling a desire to collect some mushrooms. I have tripped on shrooms a fair few times in the past but haven't tripped for about five years. I decided to trip alone. I am generally very comfortable with being alone, but I hadn't tripped alone before.

I went to one of my old spots and found a decent amount of Psilocybe subaeruginosa. While I was hunting, I chewed a bullet and held it under my tongue. As I expected I felt a subtle but noticeable sharpening of my senses (it helps you find em!). I didn't eat any more that day since I had to go to my sisters house for a BBQ. It was my fathers last night in town before he flew back to Queensland.

So I went to the BBQ then went home, and later that night while I lying in bed in the dark going to sleep I was kept having visuals of orange dots like a abstract image of a sub cap. I was surprised at the vividness of the visuals since I had only eaten the one little bullet about 12 hours earlier. After I fell asleep I had a dream where I was working on some job site, and there was mushrooms everywhere. I was picking and eating them but they were weird, they were orange in color, and in the dream I became quite nauseous. The nausea was quite real, when I woke up it was as if I really was nauseus during the night, but it was just a dream.

The next day I went mushie picking again. Even though I already had enough to trip, I was planning to take advantage of the season, and preserve some to take in the summer. I went to another of my spots, and I kept remembering my dream and the nausea, and thinking I had better be careful about what I pick (I am experienced and have no problem IDing these shrooms). I found a huge patch of subs, but they were all mingled in with these other mushrooms which had the same shape as the subs but had orange caps. The older mushrooms were harder to distinguish so I left most of them. This was an interesting synchronicity to me, in the light of the orange dot visuals and the dream with the orange mushies the previous night. There was a sense of the mystical connectivity about it.

I went home and started preparing for my trip. I cleaned my lounge room and kitchen since they were both a mess. I organized an appropriate playlist in iTunes. I plugged in and tuned up my electric guitar so it was ready to go.

Evening came and I was feeling really hungry, since I had only eaten a banana and an orange since breakfast. I lowered the lights and did some stretching, yoga postures and meditation for a while. I felt really calm and lucid, and positive about the trip to come. At about 10pm I chucked 30 grams of the wet shrooms into hot water for a minute, and then poured in some cold water, added a peppermint tea bag and strained the liquid into a cup. I wasn't concerned for maximum potency since I had plenty of shrooms and wanted to ease myself back into tripping.

The trip came on really fast. Within ten minutes I was getting breathing visual effects etc and an intense euphoria. I felt a bit nauseous so I turned out the lights, turned on the music and lay on the couch. The couch was sooo comfortable and I was getting a huge body buzz. I was squirming around on the couch in total ecstasy! When looked around the room and I saw all the various objects around the room slowly shrinking and expanding independently, and I watched an indian painting on the wall slide across the wall. But when I closed my eyes I was in total awe. It was like watching my brain operate on a molecular level. Really indescribable, but I'm sure you trippers will know the sort of thing I'm talking about. Billions of tentacles, nano-machines, incredible complexity, words fail me. It felt like I was inside the machinery of the earth. I watched gigantic millipedes moving through molecular structures like gigantic machines. Then all of a sudden the visuals slowed down to an infinitely slow rate and it felt like time had almost stopped. I realized that I could hear the music playing in the background but it was irrelevant noise, but I was fascinated that I could perceive time progressing in the music, but that my perception of time in my internal vision was almost stopped.

I felt the trip getting stronger in waves. By this point I was keeping my eyes closed the whole time. I started oscillating between waves of bliss and waves of confusion and disorientation. I realized I was feeling very cold, so I lay down on the floor near the fire. As the trip intensified the waves of bliss became weaker and the confusion much stronger. I started feeling a fair bit of anxiety. I tried to examine the nature of my anxiety, and I became aware of feelings which I felt were extremely familiar, fears and insecurities such as the type of anxiety felt when I am feeling shy when amongst a group of strangers, the fear of being embarrassed etc. But the feelings were magnified and I could perceive them as entities separate from myself, but intimately familiar. Some time around this point I felt my self, ego, my "I" blur outwards, and I got scared, it felt like my mind was being wiped. I opened my eyes for a moment but couldn't keep them open. I closed my eyes again and was subjected to a few more waves of self blurring outward, and I was feeling quite scared. I felt like I was going to pass out, but just I couldn't let it go. Every time I blurred, I fought it and kept trying to rationalize what was happening.

After while I stopped peaking and I decided I needed a change of scene. The peaking subsided really fast. By this time it was about 1am. I turned on the lights and I ate a banana and an orange. Then I smoked a cigarette. As I smoked I became very calm, the confusion gone. I wasn't hallucinating much, but I felt like I was sitting in a different time and place. I felt great. I spent the next hour or so reflecting on what I had just experienced. Then I had a bowl of weed and went to bed in my pitch black bedroom. As I was falling asleep I again became immersed in amazing visuals, very nature oriented, as if I was in a dark primordial rain forest, moss, vines, snakes, very crystal clear. And everywhere I saw orange mushrooms. At one point I stared in amazement as I looked through vines and trees at a dark and cloaked sparrow headed humanoid who was standing in a boat on a still water. The sparrow guy was just staring at me with intense green eyes, solemn and serious. It was an image which has haunted me since.

The next day I felt tired but my sense of the magic and wonder of life and nature much refreshed. It gave me what felt like an objective view of some of my insecurities which normally are more below the surface. It gave me some real food for thought. This was the first time I went for a specifically 'internal' trip, and it really blew my mind. In the past it was usually me and my mates tripping in a forest, wandering around the bush like lunatics, lots of fun. But I think I will be doing more solo trips in the future, since at the moment I feel I can benefit more from it that way. I plan on tripping in a similar setting on a higher dose in a 2-3 weeks time, or whenever it feels right.