Vividly Yours

I was in Amsterdam a few weeks ago with some mates and decided to try some mushrooms. A friend and I split a bag between us (so I have no idea how much I took, it was a regular bag) and ate it with some cold stale pizza. Two other mates of ours took a bag each. After about 30 minutes, one of them started tripping. We were in our hostel room and she decided to go to the toilet. She was looking kinda down so I thought I'd go in with her. We sat there on the floor in darkness and she was telling me about the things she saw with her eyes closed. I was trying to tell her to chill cause she was starting to get her paranoia when it suddenly hit me. I could feel the darkness as if it was some sort of tangible matter and was a being sitting down next to me. Grinning at me. And it felt really good, warm and familiar. Then I could see spinning pictures in neon primary colours and the meaning of the word psychedelic suddenly struck me. It was just weird to be able to see it with my own eyes and not just imagining it. From frogs turning cartwheels to penguins with tophats. Bizzarre. Then we switched on the lights - too bright. But the mosaic on the floor was fastinating. There were some abstract blurry patterns on it, but now I could see it as if each tile was a frame from a fantasy story, with dragons and mages and dream lords riding high on clouds and waves and whatever else it was. It was pretty cool. Then I went back to the room and sat on the bed looking at this other friend of mine, and the wall was suddenly moving towards and away from her, so I looked at the wall instead. It was textured and suddenly the textures were running like veins pumping hard or snakes under its skin. I began to feel the paranoia, and saw some ghoulish figure at every corner. But that's because I'm a dark morbid sort of person anyway and see them even if I wasn't tripping, except probably not so vividly. But I wasn't afraid but instead felt like I knew them all my life. I then started gibbering non- stop and talked about nothing and everything. Went into the toilet again and was staring at this blob in the wall for about 20 minutes cause it looked like a hurt cherubim. This woman outside was waiting for me and boy, was she fuming! It was then things started going uphill and hilarious. Everything was so funny. We tried to get out of the hostel and ended up playing pool downstairs. That was just completely out of this world. The balls were flying up and down and the colours were so amazing. Everything was moving and every line had a picture. The floor was swaying as if we were on a boat. We were intensely paranoid and couldn't act normal at all cause all yardsticks of normality was just gone. So we clambered up to our rooms and I took out my sketchpad and started looking at this picture of a troll-tree hybrid i just drew and it was alive! The lines were so fluid I thought it was going to pop out and shake hands with me. So I started drawing and every line just continued itself into another picture. I suddenly saw how Esher could do all the stuff he did, and thought HE was probably on shrooms!! I felt really detached from the real world and contemplated deeply on the barriers and defenses we put up as people and bla bla bla. It was really weird. Started to have really profound conversations about life with my mates but gave that up cause we couldn't remember anything we were talking about a second ago. After about 5 hours, we came down. My mates went to sleep and I was just staring at the canal and lights outside my window to bring myself down and it was really really amazingly beautiful. Felt like I was looking out this world through Van Gogh's eyes. Unbelievable. The one thing that I remember the most is having the blasted three second memory and not remembering anything I was thinking about or saying or doing a few seconds before, and that was quite funny. All in all, it was a great trip and I'm looking forward to go mushroom picking in October!