Sludge Experiment

Here's a different way to shroom:

My roommate and I have been working on growing our own shrooms, and recently harvested our first crop. We're saving the fruit for later, but we tried the "Substrate Tea" mentioned in the Dosage & Ingestion section.

I boiled 3 half-pint cakes in water for a few minutes, then strained out the liquid and mixed in grape Koolaid. This only gave a light buzz. I boiled up 2 more cakes, this time for 10 minutes, and we chugged the hot liquid. The stuff looked so awful we decided to call it "Sludge".

We were originally hoping to try out a Level 2 trip. Within 20 minutes we were jumping up and down and rolling on the floor laughing because we were getting so fucked up. I didn't have much in the way of visuals yet, but I felt incredible. We turned off all of the lights except for an overhead light and a pair of lava lamps, put in a CD of Jim Morrison's poetry, and put The Wall in the VCR.

We shot through levels 3 and 4 within 15 more minutes. Reality sort of "snapped," and our living room was the entire known world. I started to commune with the light in the ceiling while my buddy was pulling all sorts of wires out of the back of the TV and stereo. I swear he nearly electrocuted himself, but he got the sound from movie to play through the stereo speakers. The Wall was OK until the part when the guy floats in the blood-red pool. This flipped us out so we paused the show, but the static lines turned out to be cooler than the movie.

After this I was definitely at a strong Level 5. I almost got sucked up while looking into a Pink Floyd poster (Pulse). I checked out a picture of me and several friends taken a couple years ago. All of the figures were jumping up and down and goofing off. I got pissed off at the picture since it wasn't supposed to be doing that.

At one point I was convinced that if I could just take us back in time to the Medieval Age, I could use my magic powers to fly my couch and rug around. I thought it would be cool to fly over the hills to look at castles and make fun of all the peasants who had to work in the fields. I realized that I had a bad idea after all, since you never know when a dragon could show up and breathe fire on us. (Don't ask me...)

After about two hours of similar crazy shit, my friend and I walked down to our pool. I was back in the real world (I guess Level 4), but I kept having intense visuals. The bricks on one apartment building rearranged into the shape of a bearded old man's face. I figured that it was either God or Santa -- in either case he kept smiling and nodding at me. Very friendly.

After another hour or so we were coming down and went back up to the apartment. We laid around on the floor, and I jabbered on about how I was going to drop out of college and just grow shrooms and write books.

An hour or two later I went to bed. I had the best sleep ever, and I woke up refreshed and in a great mood.

We haven't even tried the real shrooms yet. I'm looking forward to this weekend when we get to try the good stuff. I definitely recommend Sludge to anyone growing their own shrooms -- we've estimated that you can almost double the "bang" from each batch if you use the cakes themselves.