Amsterdam

There is a certain type of child who at some stage is his life needs to push the edge of reality. I hope that some people can relate to this.

I think a little background is important to understand the type of environment we were in and how it may have affected us. If you just want to read about the trip skip down a bit.

For a while now some friends and me have been talking about going to Amsterdam together. Well one day at 2 o'clock in the afternoon we decided we should leave the next day. We had all been away on Easter holiday from University. Our flight was at 8:15 and we had to get there an hour early. I woke up the next morning 10 minutes before the taxi was there.

There were three of us going. One of my friends was not interested in dosing and was happy to ‘baby-sit’ us. I have taken mushrooms several times before but only recently did I really get into it and realise you can pick mushrooms and do not need to get ripped off buying quarters of dried mushrooms for outrageous prices. There are some sheep fields near where we live where we went picking several times during the last season. Since then we have talked to a few local people we met and they were more than happy to share some nice spots to pick! Also whenever any is around the occasional strong acid trip is amazing. I felt that it left me with a sense of well-being and peace for months after every trip. Beauty was bursting from everything. I have never had this feeling after eating mushrooms.

Anyway on arrival in Amsterdam we decided it would be good to find a hotel but soon abandoned the plan after visiting Chills and Thrills and each eating 30 grams of fresh Thai cubensis (except our sitter). I wanted to try blue angels (p. azurescens) but apparently they are unavailable anywhere in Amsterdam??

We went to a cafe (not coffee shop) to sit down and rest after all the walking with our bags. I had not eaten anything except a roll on the plane since the night before and it was now about 11 o’clock in the afternoon approximately half an hour after we had visited Chills and Thrills. I started to come up in the cafe and got very giggly and due to the large dilation of my pupils decided it would be smart to put sunglasses on; on a gloomy day in a smoky café, hahaha. I am much more sensitive to psychedelic drugs than most other people with a similar build to me, I have noticed. It might have something to do with the way I am psychologically, what we all have experienced in life makes us all individuals and who we are. My friends realised we were becoming quite conspicuous and decided to move on.

So here we are standing in a strange foreign city with all our bags, no room to go to, not really sure exactly where to go, and I was coming up on a very strong trip. The worst thing you can do at this stage is wish the trip was coming down because this is normal when you realise where you are going. One thing I did learn that maybe useful is that to come down from a trip eat a large meal or any drinks with caffeine or vitamin C. It may not be a good idea to come down from the peak of a level 4 or 5 trip so suddenly though. Looking back that could be quite scary and maybe damaging. I was not concerned though and was enjoying the experience of everything immensely.

We walked forever. Our goal was to dump our bags in the room we were going to get in the Vondel park Hostel. The park by the way is very nice and a good place to trip and wonder round. Near by there is also a huge chessboard and loads of people hanging out playing and watching chess at benches and stuff. When we got to the Hostel, which took a bit longer than expected due to the bad directions from a postman (he hated us I think), it was fully booked until after we were due to go home. So we walked back up towards Centraal Station and stopped in a coffeeshop until that evening.

This is when the trip went to a whole new level above anything I ever thought possible but really wanted to experience. I was starting to lose trust in my senses. I no longer believed what I heard. The things I discovered and saw were very disturbing. I was not sure that I should ever tell or describe what I was experiencing. I am not even sure if I can explain it properly now. We bought some classic tourist ganja and chilled for a long while smoking spliffs, sipping drinks, and travelling in our minds.

Fractals and geometrical patterns appeared everywhere on everything. I realised how everything was made and related through the patterns. The world was revealing its simplicity to me. If you have ever seen Beautiful Mind where John Nash is seeing the geometrical patterns reflect from the punch ladle to the tie, it was like that but the patterns where always visible on everything. I did not notice when this effect disappeared. I think this was at the stage when I thought I could control my environments through perception.

Time began to break down and eventually no longer existed. I don’t think I can describe what I mean. If you have experienced it you will understand. I was out of my body and talking to someone else. I started chatting to them in my head. It was like it wasn't an individual person but a collage that sort of contained everyone somehow. We chatted about how the world was and how it was made. I began to hear voices I had heard at different times in my past, this was quite disturbing and became scary.

I think the best way to describe how I was feeling out of my body is to say that I no longer became contained in my body. I was contained in my soul and my soul was free.

The world exists the way it is because we all function on the same level of consciousness. I had left that level and gone way up (or at least to a different place in my mind). I was outside the normal level of consciousness.

What makes this also very difficult is that I have also realised that the relation of words to things is also confused. I have a hard time expressing what I want to say. Words can have many different meanings and the things people say are often misunderstood. It happens all the time in the press.

Because time had ceased to exist I completely forgot about it and as I was chatting away to the other voice about life and mankind I realised what time is for. Without time the mind breaks down. Everyday we are all changing and when we look back on our lives (especially while I was tripping) we may get scared at how much we have changed over time. Because I had forgotten time I did not understand the changes and forgot who I was. How I had arrived where I was. With time everything relates in a way we can understand. Things happen logically. We change a little bit everyday, always for the better.

This is only scratching the surface of what I experienced. Much of what I ‘realised’ is lost. Coming down slowly soothed me out a bit and brought me back to ‘normal’. I was very paranoid and scared for a while even after we arrived home. If anyone has been to Amsterdam you know about the people selling coke, ecstasy, heroin, guns, and who knows what else (??) on very busy streets with lots of people around. There were also back alley guys who tried to fuck with us but didn’t do much except follow us yelling menacing things. For some reason they always targeted us (at least it seemed that way). We were offered coke outside a newsagents on the main street (Damrak) at 10:30 in the morning after breakfast!

Towards the end of the trip I said to my friend I had been changed for life and that I had just had a life changing experience like none you could ever imagine.

I thought I would not be normal but I realised nothing had changed. People still carried on, they would whether I was there or not. I recovered quite quickly after that and I do not remember all of what I learned. I closed the door again until I open it once more. From my experiences though I realised I do not want to keep the door open as I once did before.

I have not written all of what I experienced down. Just maybe some parts people may relate to. I know a lot of what I have said is written in other trip reports but I hope this contributes something new.

The rest of the time in Amsterdam I visited a few smartshops but never got the same quality mushrooms. I never expect the experience to be the same as any other time I dose. The next day my friend ate some philosophers stones (20 grams fresh) in Vondel park and tripped out very hard. I had eaten some fresh Mexican cubensis (30 grams) (and 20 grams of dried Hawaiian copelandia the night before) but did not feel much of anything at all. We went back to the hotel and rested. My friend spent most of his trip going absolutely crazy just breaking apart mentally. I did not notice at the time but he had a strong thinking trip with visual and auditory hallucinations. When we did the Thai cubensis he was not affected nearly as much as I was. I think he had a similar experience to mine the day before.

It is many weeks later now and I am not experiencing anything too ‘strange’. For a while after I came back my housemates were saying I was acting a bit eccentric and I experienced auditory hallucinations especially in places with background noise. This has now gone.

Anyway sorry I rambled on. Hope this was worth reading. Shine on!