Of Panda Bears and Insanity...

    I had been searching for shrooms for many months with no luck. After deciding that I was never going to find them I decided to go ahead and drop some acid instead.  My first trip on acid was amazing and I was very excited to trip again. About a week after my first trip I recieved a call from my friend tom telling me that he had a whole bunch of magic mushrooms. I met him later that night and bought $125 dollars worth of shrooms: an eighth for my self, and eighth for my friend Al and 2.5 grams for my cousin P who had never tripped before.
    We had decided that we would trip the next night when my cousin and I would be staying at my aunts house and my friend Al would sneek out and meet us. The whole day before the trip, P and I ate nothing but a small bowl of cereal, a little bit of fruit, and juice. At 10:00 that night, P and I took a vitamin C pill to intensify the trip. At 10:30 we took another vitamin C pill, dimmed the lights, played some trance and consumed our mushrooms. We listened to music and walked around my aunts basement while we waited for the first effects to kick in. After about 15 minutes we sat down and I started to see the chair and door infront of me moving around. after about 25 minutes I could tell that the trip was going to be very intense. At first my trip came on very intense and i had lots of built up negative energy and was almost unable to move at all. My cousin P began to become very disoriented and started saying nonsensical things over and over like "I think I'm licking my tounge, am I licking my tounge?". Finally i realized that there was really nothing to worry about and my bad trip started to go away and I embraced the wonderful body high and visions of the mushrooms. I saw kalidoskope patterns all over the walls and ceiling and the moving fan looked amazing. After listening to pink floyd for a while me and my cousin decided that the music made the trip too intense and turned it off.
    My friend Al called us and said that he had just eaten his mushrooms and was now sneeking out of his house to come and meet us. Going outside to meet Al seemed almost impossible because it was so hard to move around. P and I talked and laughed for a while while we waited for Al to arrive. Everything around us seemed to be wiggling around and the colors became very vibrant as they had on my previous trip on lsd. Finally Al called again and said that he was near my aunts house. P and I snuck out the back door of the basement and ran towards the path in the woods where Al was waiting.  We ran at Al who was now tripping hard and scared him half to death, then we continued running down the path across some stepping stones. The woods at night looked simply amazing and all of the leaves of the trees looked like floating faces. By this time I was convinced that I was a panda bear and when ever anyone would call me by my name, I would answer "nope. My name is Panda Bear." Al, P, and I continued walking down the wooded path and after talking to a branch that seemed to be alive I remembered that we had left the basement door open and decided that we should go back. P and Al didn't want to go inside yet but I felt like I wanted to be by myself anyways so I told them that I was going to go back to the house. I ran back inside and went into the bedroom, took off my shirt and started talking to some stuffed animals and my ipod in a euphoric state much like a small child. I then called my friend Liv and talked with her for a while asking if Al and P were with her even though they obviously were not. Finally Al and P came back inside, leaving the door open again.
    P, Al, and I all sat around and talked about how much we loved mushrooms and about how we all felt for a while and watched my strobe light in amazement. P and I decided that Al should go home so that if our aunt came down we wouldn't get in trouble. It took a long time for Al to finally leave because it seemed so hard to finish any task. After he finally left P and I sat around and watched all the moving objects and shapes for a while longer and decided that since the effects of the mushrooms were not as intense anymore we should smoke some marijuana to bring the peak back. P turned the shower on all the way hot so that the bathroom would fog up and turned on the fan; meanwhile I packed a big bowl and made sure my aunt was still asleep. After we smoked the first bowl the trip had started to come on harder but the feeling was different than when we were just on the mushrooms.  We smoked another big bowl and by that time we were tripping even harder than we had been at our peak.
    After we were done smoking, i decided to take a shower with no lights on in the pitch black. This turned out to be the most incredible, intense, and terrifying experience of my life. Once I turned off the lights and stepped into the shower i almost immediately lost all sense of direction and started spinning around in circles. It was then that I started seeing intense swirling visions of walls made of mouths, tounges growing off of tounges, eyeballs, faces and other strange things. It no longer made a difference whether my eyes were open or closed. As I was spinning around trying to figure out which direction I was facing and seeing these crazy hallucinations I broke into uncontrollable histerical laughter. At this point I knew that I was experiencing the most crazy thing I had ever experienced in my life so I kept pushing it further and further. I kept pushing it further making the hallucinations grow stronger and laughing harder until i finally past limit. I began to hear insane laughing in my head and sirens that would get louder and louder and more intense untill it would fade for a little and then come back. I invisioned myself as a boy and watched myself grow up although the life i saw myself go through was not actually my life and the young man that I saw myself as was not actually myself. I forced myself to try and concentrate enough to finish my shower, figure out which direction I was facing, get out of the shower and turn on the light. I then looked into the mirror and saw my crazed face still laughing histerically in an almost frightening way. As I looked into the mirror i invisioned myself fighthing myself and started punching towards the mirror without actually hitting it. I felt as though I was both myself beating the life out of another person and the other person looking up at me while I beat the life out of them. Although I never actually hit myself or the mirror I felt like I had actually hurt someone. I would still hear the raging laughter, sirens, and low and high frequencies going on and off and I felt as though I had gone insane.
    I left the bathroom and went back into the bedroom where P was waiting and sat down. When he started to talk to me it seemed impossible to pay attention to what he was saying and the longer he would talk the louder I would hear the laughing and sirens. P began to look like a bronze android and I started to freak out but kept my cool because I knew that he was still himself and not really an android. It now was almost impossible for me to do anything even talk because of the repeated insane sounds and hallucinations. I was seeing spirals and it seemed that my vision was a picture within a picture withing a picture ect. I felt trapped within my mind and worried that I had serioiusly gone insane and that i would still be crazy even after I started tripping. I picked up my guitar and started playing which calmed me down for a little while but every 2 minutes or so the insane sounds and visions of tounges and eyeballs would return. I sat in my bed for what literally seemed like eternity and the insanity never ended. After feeling hopelessly insane for who knows how long I finally fell asleep. When I woke up the next morning, to my relief, the insanity had stopped and although the insane experience had not been enjoyable it still seemed very exciting and cool.
    My first experience with magic mushrooms was overall a very magical and wonderful experience. I will most definately trip on shrooms again in the future although next time I'm not sure if I will mix it with marijuana again. Shrooms open you up to new realms of the human mind and are something I think everyone should experience.