Respect the Shrooms

So I grew my first batch of little Mexican babies. I had eaten shrooms two or three times prior to this, and reckoned that I'd reached about a level 3 trip. Curious monkey brains being what they are, I wanted to see how far I could go with shrooms. But the obvious thing to do would be to prepare for this in the best possible way. Here's my cautionary tale for anyone who, like me, is a newbie to this kind of thing and is curious as to what a really mind-blowing trip can be like.

First off, I broke the Golden Rule Number One - I wasn't completely cool and chilled when I took them. I had had a big argument with my girlfriend which hadn't been fully resolved. No nice comforting presence if anything went wrong, then. Also, my girlfriend's team had just been eliminated from the Soccer World Cup (I'm European), and we were sad, but not angry, about that. Secondly, we hadn't actually prepared at all. She suggested we take some shrooms on a whim, and I agreed. It was a Saturday, she had worked from 10am until 6pm and I hadn't worked at all. Nor had I had dinner. Third, we got the dosage all wrong. Before the strongest trip we had been on before, we had eaten 3 small dried shrooms each (I don't have a scales), with 3 more about two hours later, and that led to an extremely pleasant trip, high level two or low level three. But last night we ate 2 small shrooms, 1 medium and 1 very large each. Then we went to the park to walk the dog, at 11.30pm.

I hadn't eaten so it hit me early and hard. I knew it was going to be heavy - 20 minutes and the patterns, shifting colours and spatial distortions were all there and growing fast. I was still ok, but not at ease and we went home. I drank a mixture of dried ginger and water as soon as we got back, to ease the nausea, but that needs to be done before eating the shrooms, not after. So, the heat of the ginger burned my throat and set my body tingling like a motherfucker when it went down and when it came up again five minutes later.

I couldn't find the music I wanted to hear - St. Germain, lovely French electro-jazz (highly recommend it) - and this didn't help my anxiety at all. I live in the south of Spain and it's late June, so I was very hot and uncomfortable, so I took a cold shower which did nothing, and only freaked out my girlfriend, who was also coming up fast. I was hallucinating like never before, seeing things that weren't actually there, instead of merely seeing new aspects to real, present objects. I had to find a refuge, so I went to the bedroom and lay on the bed in my boxer shorts.

From there it's difficult to describe what I went through. Lying in the semi-dark I completely lost contact with reality. It made no difference whether I had my eyes open or closed, I saw the same thing. Active, malevolent hallucinations assaulted me. From the light fitting in the centre of the ceiling, dark lines stretched to every corner of the room and formed a cage of claws. I curled onto my side in a foetal position, but had to move again because I was aware of an infinite darkness stretching below me. I repeat again, these weren't ideas, they were very real. The only thing that helped me is, ironically enough, my history of reckless drug-taking. I had experienced the usual teenage unpleasantness of too much weed while drunk, and taken too much ecstasy on a couple of occasions, so I knew it would pass and that I just had to ride it out (I'm a twenty-six-year-old lawyer, so I have a good rational mind).

This was made a lot more difficult when I experienced a complete, total loss of my sense of self. I didn't know what day it was, who I was, or even what gender I was. For a long time I was aware that I was a female. I'm a guy, and heterosexual, so this, combined with visions of huge throbbing penises, was excruciating. My room dissolved in a fog of grey, from which appalling experiences, half-seen, half-felt, swirled at me for what seemed an eternity.

Despite this detachment from reality, a corner of my mind was still blessedly aware that I had taken mushrooms and that it would pass, it would pass, if I just held on. So I lay on my bed, at first because I couldn't relate to my body enough to move it, and then because the nausea and stomach cramps were too much. The effects came in waves. I don't know when it happened, because I had no concept of time, but I became aware of where I was, if not who. I would lie there, not feeling too bad, and then a wash of horror would come over me. I could hear my girlfriend in the living room, cursing the mushrooms and gasping, just like me. I was horribly worried for her, because I knew that if I did anything, I could hurt myself, and so couls she. I could taste blood in my mouth, and my jaw was locked tight, and I felt that I had chewed my lips. Every now and then I became aware of liquid on my body, which my eyes saw as blood. The lucid corner of my brain knew that not only was it not blood, but that in between these feelings I was bone dry, which in 90-degree-plus heat is a Very Bad Thing.

Then I looked around and I realised that I could make out my surroundings. My bed was its normal shape, more or less, and my bedroom had resumed normal dimensions. Somebody in a neighbouring building was playing music which I knew and liked, and I held onto this. It helped. I knew who and where I was. Things weren't dancing around too much any mor. My girlfriend came too about the same time. Five hours had passed since I had started to feel the effects. Exhausted, but above all, relieved, we went to sleep at 6am or so.

Here's where we went wrong. As soon as I came up and started tripping hard, I knew that I did not want to be having this experience. I wanted it to stop. This is suicide with mushrooms. Even the cogent part of my brain was freaked out, wondering if any of the distortions would stay with me when I came back. Thankfully nothing did. If you're going to take more muchrooms that you ever have before, prepare. Eat well. If you suffer from nausea, drink a ginger mixture fifteen minutes before the mushrooms. Make sure you have the music you like at hand. Above all, be cool with yourself and whoever you're with. Me and my girlfiend were not cool, and that meant I had no base to fall back on. Mushrooms can be a wonderful thing, but they are always a POWERFUL thing. Be careful with them, and never think that you know everything that they can do.

Lumpy