The Elephant House

For a while I had wanted to try mushrooms because I had never done a psychedelic drug and I wanted to see what it was like to be able to see things that weren't actually there. So one day my friends and I decided to go for a little “trip.” There were seven of us – five on psilocybin mushrooms and two on acid. We sat in my living room and ate the shrooms, waiting to see what was going to happen. I had not eaten anything that day, and hadn’t really eaten much of anything for the past three days, figuring I could “trip harder”, but the thing is that, I didn’t really even know what tripping was. I ate half an eighth, and just sat there for a few minutes thinking that I should have eaten more because I wasn’t really feeling anything yet.

We decided to go out and get some dinner at the campus cafeteria, mainly because we were bored and wanted to just go out for a walk. That’s when it all started. As we walked along, the streetlights seemed to have rings of light around them, and they looked so beautiful to me. I pointed this out to one of my friends, but he had not begun to trip yet, so he had no idea what I was talking about. When we got to the cafeteria, I felt like I had to vomit. I tried my best not to, but I kept feeling like running to the bathroom. I was getting all giggly, and the others decided that we should get out of there – fast. They grabbed me by the arm and led me outside, where I began to get all emotional over nothing, and told them that I needed to go home.

We went back to my apartment, where it was “safe” again. We were all tripping, except for one guy, who was just sitting there next to me, and as I stared at him, his face became all red and his eyes began to darken and slant upwards, and he started to look like the devil. I told my roommate, Megan, that he had to go because he was scaring the hell out of me. Megan brought me into her room to calm me down and tell me that he’s really not the devil. I think she understood what I was going through, and she went back into the living room and told the guy to leave, that I thought he was the devil. I heard laughter and the door open and close. I came back out, and everyone was starring at me, smiling.

For that point on, we all just sat in the living room, laughing and talking, and having a great ol’ time. We has unusual conversations, though, like what color Tuesday was, and what role everyone was playing in our little “tripping adventure.” I was “The Judge.” I was quite content in being The Judge, too, because it was my house, and I decided what went on… only for the next few minutes though. As I grew deeper into the trip, I was talking less and less, because the sound of my own voice was so alien to me. After a while, I had gone completely mute. Mr. Language had left the building. All I could do was smile a lot and nod my head… and cry. For some reason, every time Megan came over to talk to me, I would cry. She was like a mother figure to me, although there was something very uncomfortable about it, and that uneasiness is what made me cry. I couldn’t really tell that I was crying though, I just thought that there were little plastic elephants falling down my cheeks. Megan would wipe them off with a tissue, and then she handed me the tissue, and it became one with my hand. I hated to touch things because they would just go right into my hands, and my hands would go into each other. My fingernails were purple and there where purple spots all over my hands. They actually sort of looked like mushrooms. I was also becoming part of the couch. I was starring at this strand of white Christmas lights, and they started to turn into these little multicolored glowing elephants, and they would walk single-file down the strand, and then drop off onto the ground. I thought that was rather interesting.

At this point, all of my senses had been put into a blender and everything was being put into image form – especially sounds. I had put music on that had been playing the whole time, and it was really adding literally, new dimensions to the trip. I felt as though I was inside a computer chip, or a clock as I watched all these psychedelic colors and shapes start to form all around me. As people walked by, I could see how they smelled. By then, there were quite a lot of people coming in and out of the apartment, much more than what we started with. Everyone who was not tripping, was really drunk, and this was bad, because they were talking to me a lot, and I had no way of communicating with them, other than just smiling and nodding my head. Every time the door was opened, dimensions and universes where created, and the person who had entered, was now the ruler of that particular universe. I was the ruler of my world, as I sat there on my little couch island.

The other people who were tripping where having a great time, walking around and doing stuff. They had gone into the bathroom to look at their morphing reflections in the mirror. After they got out, I decided to venture out of my safe little planet. I stayed in the bathroom for about three seconds, before I ran out, terrified. As I looked in the mirror, my skin melted away to reveal muscles, then bones, then black ash, and then all fried up and burnt to the floor revealing that I had no reflection anymore. My head was gone. I tried to lock myself in my room, as more and more people were scaring me. As I turned the lock, the “click” scared me so much, as I heard people shouting my name saying, “Oh, no! She locked herself in her room! She can’t be in there by herself – she’s going to freak out!” I immediately unlocked in, and ran out, and went back to my couch island.

People were beginning to leave and I was getting really scared. One of my friends took me by the arm and started to lead me out the door into the hallway, saying that we needed to be with people. I hesitated, but then decided to go. As we walked out the door, the sound of silence was so intense, and when we reached the stairs, I broke myself from his arm, for the stairs where vibrating back and forth and looked as unstable as a rope bridge. My feet were sinking into the floor as well, and I knew for a fact that it would not have been physically possible for me to walk down those stairs. So, I ran back down the hallway to my apartment, but the hallway just kept getting longer and longer, and I could not reach my door. I was so tired and felt like collapsing right there on the floor, but in the back of my head, I knew that to an outsider, if they had come across me laying there in the hallway, it would probably look really bad. So I made a second attempt to run and catch my door, and I ran faster, and as the door got farther and farther away, I jumped and caught it just in time. I opened the door, and at that moment, was the scariest thing I have ever experienced in my whole life. The apartment was empty, and there was no more music. I couldn’t even recognize where I was anymore. I managed to find my couch island, and sat there for a minute. I felt as though there was someone in my room, so I journeyed to it to find the two people who had taken acid where looking out my window at some naked guy across the alley. I managed to somehow tell them that I needed to have music on, and we went back to the living room, and they turned it back on for me. I sat there on the couch for what seemed like decades, as I was silently going crazy inside my own head. I could not control where any of my thoughts where going. Some idiot had turned on the stereo and was playing Radiohead while my computer was playing Nine Inch Nails at the same time. At this point, I felt as though I was dying and going straight to hell. My whole universe was collapsing all over me, and I couldn’t do anything about it. I thought this was definitely the worst possible way to die.

Suddenly, this girl entered the room, and brought me into a totally different dimension in which everything was being drawn by her, including me. I could hear her talking to me and asking if I was ok, and that I looked very scared. She wanted to hug me, but I had to get away from her. She finally left, and I finally started to come down. As I was coming down, I began to question everything… the universe, my life, religion, our society, relationships with people, just every major thing you could possibly think of. A little while passed by, and I was finally able to walk around and talk to people. They were all done tripping, and I appeared to be the only one who had a really bad time. Time had been absolutely meaningless, but in actuality, the trip only lasted four hours. Someone had left a video camera on in the living room the whole time, which I wasn't aware of. It's a pretty boring video - basically four hours of me sitting on what had come to be my little couch island. It was the worst and the best time ever, and I can’t wait for someday when I try it again.