First Time: alien.

Welp, I’ve been tuning into the shroomery for quite some time now, s’pose it’s only fair I share my stuff. I have a feeling it’ll be long, but I’m just gonna start typing so here goes...

My first of 3 experiences with mushrooms was a whopper. It was April 22nd, ’96, a few weeks after my 21st birthday. I know this specifically for reasons I’ll say later. I’d been stoned mebby 50 times, and been drunk only once years before. I hated the stupidity that came with drinking (still do, rarely partake) but my few close friends and I had a creative blast whenever we smoked together. I’d always been into underground comix, especially of the 60’s-70’s…drug lore stuff, Robert Crumb, etc…and my curiosity was peaked. What interested me the most based on my limited understanding was that hallucinogens could distort one’s perceptions of time and space. WOW!!!! I’d always been a pretty hardy realist about them things, even when stoned outa my gourd, so the thought of being forced into a skewed perception of reality had me interested. Not so much the visuals I was looking forward to, but the breaking free of what is normally concrete notions of existance had me fiending. I figured I’d try mushrooms or acid, whichever came my way first.

It was to be a fairly normal gathering at a “R”’s house…his parents were out of town, and we (5 total) were all gonna smoke till we passed out. A week before “C” had been camping with some other friends and had aquired 1/8 of mushrooms…cubesins or whatever…the cubey kind. He’d done almost all of them and had a grand ol’ time watching trails and colors and bla bla bla. Couldn’t wait for me to try, so he offered the rest to me that night, ONLY three small dry cigarette-butt sized stems. He figured if nothing else they’d make me feel dizzy, I knew nothing about it and thought they’d do nothing. I downed them plain…tasted bad but not deadly, and we went to play frisbee at a nearby school for awhile. About a half an hour later (around 7pm) we headed back to the house cuz the remainder of our troop had arrived. On the walk back to R’s place, I felt normal but noticed a glittering haze around streetlights, and the lights inside houses seemed brighter. It was cool, I thought that would be that.

Got back to the house, R’s brother (younger) and his moron friend were there. R, B and G went to get food, leaving C and I at the house. We packed a bowl and C gobbled most of it, I had a single hit. The brother’s friend became all inquisitive, wondering if I had more weed…would sell it, etc. C blurted out that I was on shrooms and to leave us alone (I still felt totally sober, just heavy in the legs). The friend went off about how the walls were gonna start moving and stuff, I was all “yeah yeah.” They split, C and I went upstairs...now pleasantly lit…to go lie under a ceiling fan in an upstairs room cuz we were toasty from running around. C was hella stoned already, kept asking me how I felt…it seemed he wanted to share my mushroom vibe. I was laughy stoned, that was it. We plopped head to foot on the bed staring at the fan and the ceiling. Disappointed, he said something about how there was no way I took enough to feel anything, but after about 5 minutes, things started to happen.

C was in his own stoned doofus world. It caught me by surprise that in the textured ceiling I saw a small group of indians carrying a canoe…that is the textured shapes outlined them perfectly. In the course of about 20 seconds, they were fully animated, launching the canoe in a shimmering lake that sent brilliant reflections onto the surrounding walls. I was pretty friggin amazed! I told C and he mumbled stuff “yep, yeah” wasn’t really paying attention to me. I lifted my arm to point at them and became fixated with it. My arm hairs were all stocky looking, and my mind rapidly carried them to the stature of towering redwoods in a desert canyon. It’s not like I was watching a movie of it, or that it actually looked like redwoods in a canyon, but they were so metaphorically similar I couldn’t distinguish between the two. I recognized, in that brief moment of time, that my body should be protected and cared for in the same way that the living earth should be protected and cared for…this is an understatement of the actual thought process that hit me, but it was all there POW! It felt beautiful! The thoughts were nothing I hadn’t thought of before, just extremely REAL and CRYSTAL CLEAR, million miles a minute, like receiving some kind of divine acknowledgement of my correct understanding of things. BEAUTIFUL!!!! I still hadn’t grasped the fact that I was tripping though, in fact I never really did allow myself to realize that I was under hallucinogenic influences…it all seemed so real! It WAS real! Thoughts are real…imagination is real…but I now know for the sake of safe tripping, it’s good to keep in mind that the sober state is an anchor to it all. I was inexperienced and into something totally new, I didn’t know all that yet, and I had totally let slide my goal for the trip (to experience time/space distortion, though it would hit me later) sooo…..

I sat up on the edge of the bed and tossed my shoes on the ground. Physically I felt stoned numb, that was it. My shoes looked like cartoony old men yawning. I laughed out loud at this. I looked at the green splotchy wallpaper and saw a mass of cartoony faces competing for my attention, blending in and out of eachother and the wallpaper. The colors seemed like a hologram, two dimensional shadows and color variations in the room hovered inches from the surface on which they were painted or cast. I told C all this and he sat up. When he used to smoke with us (now a pothead), he’d always claim to mildly hallucinate…at that point I believed him (I still really think he did though.) He took one look at the faces in the wall and then he said it. “They all look like alien faces.” Shit he was right!!! This kind of dumbed me. It wasn’t his acknowledging it that triggered the alien thing, it was already in me…he just brought it to my attention…hard to describe, it was like I saw in my mind every thought as I could think of, every incident of everyday life that came to mind, as ultimate metaphore for everything else open for interperetation…life was all creatures and shapes and colors and movement that was thrown at me to interperet. All it really was was “alien-ness”, everything is open to interperetation…the alien is the personification of that which is to be interpereted…good, evil, yellow, red, up, down, mischievous, retarded, slipping on a banana peel or pissing on the wall beside a urinal…the ultimate generic that just infinitely IS. Perfect generic and infinity are concepts we really can’t grasp in the same way a squirrel can’t grasp the concept of the telephone wire he’s running across being a tool of communication for a species of being that has totally built an organism of a society around it. Thoughts were happening fast, overwhelmingly fast because I was so dumbfounded. It was all stuff I already knew, but there it was being spelled out for me, SHOWN to me and thrown into my head as pictures, feelings, words and tangible understandings. I entered a state of amazed, content dumbfoundedness…and just began to realize the magnitude of what was happening.

I stood up and went for the door, it felt like my body wasn’t there…like I was a floating perspective. It was funny, and I pretended to be the bionic man running in slow motion out of the room, making the ‘doot-doot-doot-doot’ sound from the t.v. show…in my head the sound was there. C and I were laughing at it, when R, G and B returned (hey! RGB! Heh heh…anyways…) They had with them fast food and alcohol…opting to drink rather than smoke. R asked how I was feeling as he approached me up the stairs. It was funny that he was coming toward me to communicate, WHY?!?! He looked perfectly still as he hovered up the stairs. I told him I felt bionic and he laughed. He put a tub of icecream in front of me, I had no desire to eat it but began sliding the lid back and forth on the railing, making the sound. Everybody laughed and went downstairs to chow, I followed.

I kinda wandered around in a daze while everybody consumed, C smoked more and got mega-munchies…headed for the pantry and returned with a carton of those fish crackers. He tossed one at my head from about 4 feet away and I swear in that fraction of a second of it’s flight I had enough time to lay a piece of tracing paper over the air in front of me and follow with a pencil its parabola of motion, along with notes of it’s changing velocities. He handed the box to me and it felt weightless. Everybody was surrounded by a golden aura, they simply “looked good”. The tv was on and I could see it’s sound as melting bubbles of air bouncing off the distorted corners of the room and hear their every echo until they disappeared. It was the Blue Lagoon and I couldn’t lend it a second of attention before being distracted, nor could I really pay to music I really liked. Whenever I brushed against a wall it pulled me to it; with suction cup sounds my molecules blended with its and I was perfectly comfortable lying on the wall…stuck unless with effort pulling myself away…but it was so comfortable I opted to stick around awhile. Everybody was messed up and laughing at the senselessness of it all…little did they know the extent of it in my head. I felt waves of euphoria flowing through me, like VISUALLY too, from the other side of the galaxy or something…infinitely huge and I was tuned into their frequency.

At one point in the night, R's brother and friend returned, and the friend was heavy into talking shroom stuff to me, saying how he was gonna grow them, and how he knew all these seller and how great they were, if I'd trade my pot for some, etc, did I want acid too? He could get it all! I was having a blast, it was an incredible experience that I wanted to revel in for as long a time as I could. I asked him if he was addicted to shrooms. He said "Hell yeah! I got addicted the first time I did them!" He suddenly changed in my mind's eye into another creature...still human and looking the same, but evil. He was part of a group that wanted to control keys to mental freedom, a power monger. The source of the mushrooms I'd eaten were from one of them? I didn't know, maybe they were made to keep me coming back for more? Keeping them in control of my sanity? My entire environment became dark and I was stuck in a universe of someone else's influences who wanted nothing more than to control everything, and I'd recognized it but it was too late. It's like I'd been thinking thoughts I wasn't supposed to think, like a universal law had been broken by these evil bandits. Luckily they left again, and I was left with my good friends who were having a good time. I pretty much regained my composure and good sense of things, but time was everywhere and nowhere...then I noticed it was.

I looked at my watch, it was about 8:30, but that made no sense…I mean literally I didn’t know what that meant, I was in forever. I knew about time and stuff in the back of my mind, but it was like a memory or a dream that I had awakened from. My whole life, everything around me just WAS. There is no today, there is no tomorrow!!!!! What the hell will tomorrow be!??! WHAT IF THERE IS NO TOMORROW?!?! I said this outloud, all inquisitively low, trying to keep my cool…obviously panicked though because R tried to comfort me (great guy, very relaxed and upbeat about it) “ah man, you’re just tripping, you don’t know it yet.” He had no hallucinogenic experience though, not like it would have mattered what he said or knew…I felt like I was everything, and now I was on the same level with my infinite surroundings. I looked at my watch to try and comfort myself…knowing that somewhere there still existed the sense of time. The seconds clicked by at very odd intervals, numbers changed but it meant NOTHING. I tried with blabbered words to describe that tomorrow didn’t exist, but was brushed off. “you’re okay” etc. then on their way…It was like I was invisible to them. I thought about having to spend eternity like this, conversing with everyday people, with the concept of eternity staring me in the face. I was insane! The air in front of me was alive and looking at me, the walls had whacked things happening…worst was a rocky fireplace: the rocks were alien heads protruding out, changing, signaling, LOOKING at me! The universe was letting me know it was alive and there! It scared the dickins outa me and that’s an understatement! I was 110% sure I was dead…I had died. No joke. The future was totally predictable, dictateable even...it was just going to be more of this FOREVER!!! I understood and saw it all, time was nowhere to be seen! The past meant nothing because it was just the moment before it became what I was in right there, all just the same stuff anyway! I could see people as they really were...how they fit into EVERYTHING and where things would go, therefore already were! It's really difficult to describe the feeling, but it was full sensory and REAL. For what must have been a few seconds because I didn’t fall, but seemed timelessly eternal and instant, my whole field of vision became a pixelated mass of trillions of zillions of points of light all sloshed together like liquid, moving and changing and flashing and mixing and melting and blending…..no objects were discernable, no sound was legible, it was just an infinite EVERYTHING AS ONE, YET STILL ITSELF. I immediately went for the couch and burried my head in the pillows.

I can’t describe what I saw there, basically I kept making my perspective of the big picture of real-reality bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger until I was pressed face to face with this huge alien, staring into it’s infinitely deep eyes, it’s grey flesh spanning my entire peripheral range of thought, surrounded by the neutral buzz of nothing. I quickly pulled my head out and grogilly sat back, with a very brief but comforting whiff of sober reality that instantly disappeared, but it was enough. I thought I’d been under the pillows for mebby 10 seconds tops, but later everyone was telling me I was out of it for about a HALF HOUR!!!!

It was approachng midnight and t.v. was the savior for my sanity at the time. If, when the hands on the clock came to be positioned in a certain way, a specific television program would be on as it had been predeemed to be, then time was still there and I was still able to comprehend it. Most of the visuals had stopped…every now and then the fireplace would act up and my heart would race and I’d look away, but my friends were having a good time, cartoon was about to start and that worked for me. Midnight on public access was old episodes of the first season of Robotech! I’d raced home from school to catch it when I was a kid, and was so much looking forward to losing myself in it’s world and taking a break from mine that night. The episode (for those of you who are Robotech savvy) was the one where the SDF-1 transformes into the robot for the first time. You see little cartoon citizens engulfed in explosions and sucked into the vacuum of space…great stuff! Anyway, the whole episode was perfectly metiphorical to the trip I’d just experienced. A little TOO perfect in my mind…in a comforting way because it made me realize I have the power to understand everything that had happened to me and make sense of it all, if not in a way that can be communicated to others then at least for myself. Enough so to ultimately use it help me understand and work with the world around me…never stop learning, and know that when you’re backed by your own good intentions the universe helps you as you help it. A friggin new-age funkadellic awakening of sorts, for crying out loud. By the time the show was over, everybody was passed out. I was awash with feelings of relief that I was again in a world where unpredictability kept us guessing. "Embrace the unpredictable" was running through my mind, and I was incredibly content to be back in the puzzle of time. I checked myself and was cool for the 5 minute drive home.

The next day (Saturday), after a VERY refreshing and long sleep, I rushed to the library and dug up as much info as I could on magic mushrooms. They were basically all anti-drug books, all of which shot holes in the hard stuff but had little info and a hard time putting down shrooms. I read between the lines and learned loads that I wish I’d known the day before, but oh well. I had a 10 page paper due that Monday for my Contemporary Approaches to Visual Culture class that I was 3 pages into and at a dead end. Right when I’d woken up I knew I had to write about my experience…and did so as a perfectly valid topic. In fact I was 15 pages into it and going by Sunday, had to edit to ten. Gots me an A!!! Saved my ass in that class and mebby poked the brains of some of the stiffs in there. I was just digging through some papers and came across it, is what spawned me to write this trip report…that plus the fact that the shroomery really deserves wide attention and support. There’s too much anti in the world, not enough encouragement to think for ourselves…or rather not enough trust given to us TO think for ourselves. But that’s another story and I’ve drained myself of type-ability for the next month.

I guess as a sort of epilogue I’ll say that I’ve since done mushrooms twice more…both level 1 mebby 2, great time each! but I’m afraid to take more for a repeat of what happened before…what’s the next level if it seemed like I’ve already experienced it all? I’ve done acid four or five times, the first just a few weeks after the mushrooms. Tripped out hardcore, nothing like mushrooms…much more personally psychological and spiked with a man-made feel, not real magic, leaves you physically whacked too. No more for me thanks! I’ve learned to make the most of marijuana and literally hallucinate from just two bong rips…just remembering the mushroom state of mind, imagining consuming them, sober or stoned, can open the mind. Crezzy stuff. I forgot to mention that for awhile when coming down from the mushrooms I swore they were the most evil thing in existance and that I’d never do them again. Then I thought about it. Also, this was all from just three half-a-pinky sized dry stems…more isn’t necessarily more! Must stop typing NOW. Try not to be afraid, be yourself, know goodness, use it don’t abuse it, and….uh…..listen to Nuclear Rabbit! www.nuclearrabbit.com (hadda plug em, sorry…but they kick ass trust me!)

~NerfX