"This is me, crazy..."

My second mushroom trip occurred when I was a Freshman in college on a Saturday night/Sunday morning. I was accompanied by 2 good friends who shroomed as well, and 3 sober people.

Start time: 11:00 pm.

The 3 of us had around 4 grams each, maybe a little more. The shrooms were grown by a friend in his dorm. Immediately after eating the shrooms, we smoked several bowls of grass until initial effects were felt about 25 minutes later. These, for me, included tingling of the limbs and minor disorientation.

The effects grew very strong in a short period of time; so much so that I spent the first 2 hours of the trip sitting, practically motionless, on a bed. During this time, moving and speaking were all but impossible. A little past the hour mark, I became hypnotized by tiny swirling patterns that covered everything I focused on. Roughly a half hour after this began, the non-shroomers began to stare at me and consistently comment on "how fucked up" I was. This got me thinking...how fucked up was I? What if i was too fucked up? This paranoia ultimately blossomed into the main theme of my trip: I thoroughly believed I had tripped so hard that I'd lost my mind. Needless to say, I started to panic.

At this point, my mind was trying to comprehend thousands of things at once, while simultaneously questioning everything to the same degree. The only solid thought I could trap long enough to understand was this: "I have gone insane." I repeatedly heard this phrase being echoed through the room, and I kept looking at everyone in an attempt to pinpoint to origin of the voice; no luck.

One of the non-shroomers, observing how hard I was tripping, started jerking his body around, ultimately putting his nose to mine and shrieking in a very high-pitched tone. This was when my trip really turned bad. I heard his shriek over and over, getting progressively louder. I nearly cried.

Someone put in a psychedelic DVD, filled with colorful swirl after colorful swirl. These swirls slowly crept out of the TV screen and gradually overtook everything I saw. I tried enjoying this, but my mind couldn't focus. I almost cried at another point, and sought comfort in conversation. I asked one of the other shroomers how his trip was going. As soon as I did this, a psychedelic "Jimi Hendrix Experience" poster behind him morphed into the most intense visual I've ever had. Jimi, a cartoon in the poster, came toward me, out of the poster, and became 3-dimensional. The various Indian cartoons on the poster started to swirl behind him. Jimi's arms, and eventually body, began to ripple. This pulled me out of my bad trip, because I was utterly mesmerized by the movement and brightness of color. A shroomer pulled me out of that by telling me I was tripping too hard and needed to smoke a bowl. The weed did not convince me that I wasn't going to be institutionalized. Nothing could get through to me that I wasn't going to be stuck like this forever.

I remember closing my eyes and perceiving black with my mind...every thing was black. Eventually, I saw what resembled stars. I recognized the other people in the room as non-existent. They were there, but they may as well have been robots or wax. I saw them as lifeless, soulless beings and felt empty and far away. I felt weightless and as though I came out of my body.


In a moment of clarity, we tried to leave for a party across campus, but hardly made it out of the room before one of the other shroomers vomited in a trash can. We resolved to stay in that night.

The next thing I recall is wandering around the hallway wearing a shirt and only boxers as a shroomer told me I was freaking him out. My pants, as I found them the next day, were on the floor of my roommate's closet.

We shroomers locked ourselves in my room a little later and tried to bring eachother back to sanity. It mostly failed.

I remember lying in bed, unable to sleep, and seeing bright colored patterns moving wildly on my wall, and trying to touch them. My thoughts, though still racing and largely nonsensical, became clear enough for me to identify my trip as something outside of myself; an alter-ego of sorts. I then realized I had not lost my mind, but was rather being shown what it would be like if I had. "This is me, crazy," I kept repeating, "and these are the things that I do when I'm crazy." The phrase was found written in marker on a wall in the hallway the next day.

After enough self-calming, I was able to sleep. The clock, when last I saw it, read 5:42 am.