vision quest

here is a report of my most recent mushroom trip. i ate four big stems sunday night and i was totally bent! the streets of my city became looped back on each other in my mind so that i would walk by a place, walk 50 feet, turn right, and then magically come upon the same place all over again. every minute detail reflected this twisting of the fabric of reality, even the road signs, the trees, and the cars. i walked past the same fucked up fractallized scenery for hour after subjective hour! (actually about 10 minutes.. hehehe...) the trees all had such powerful presences that i could not even look upon them without quailing in fear. everything was horrible and evil, especially at the spooky graveyard. i had also been drinking rum and smoking pot earlier, so i had some serious cottonmouth and gut rot (my stomach problems didnt help either). i threw my root beer on the ground, convinced i was now diabetic and dehydrated and dying of liver failure. my tripping companion, who had eaten a 3 gram cap, reminded me "there's no water in the desert", alluding to the tradition of the visionary ordeal. this didnt help much, because i wasnt in a wilderness, i was in a hostile city of crackheads and alcoholics and power-tripping police officers. every bum was a serial killer waiting to torture me and kill me. every light coloured vehicle was a giant police car filled with baton-wielding heat-pigs. every drunk pouring out of the bars was part of a conspiracy to drown me in the river and it was all orchestrated by the wild, evil magick that filled the trees and the river and the sky all around me, just like in the graveyard. during the whole peak was a most terrifying deja vu - i knew every moment of my trip before it even happened. it was like i was in a movie, playing out a cosmic archetypical role like a legend or a hero. life became crystallized as a sequence of preprogrammed scripts like plays, each representing a specific spiritual truth. i finally understood solipsism and the concept that my entire history and sensorium is just a symbolic way of perceiving the things around me in the spirit world, that i am constantly tripping on serotonin, which is only one of the keys to the doors of perception. on shrooms, i perceive the exact same things, except i interpret them according to a different modality of consciousness. i also experienced other cliches of things being recursive, etc. now feeling thoroughly like shit and like i was going to die, i searched my psilocybin-space for my friend, more by ESP than by my very tenuous connection to "reality", but he was nowhere to be found! i walked all the way home and when i got there, i curled into a ball with a blanket and cried! (btw i am a 17 yr old male not often accustomed to crying ever, much less on drugs, and i have had difficult drug experiences... anticholinergics, dissociatives, etc). i felt so awkward and acutely aware of how i always feel out of sync with other people (i am slightly autistic). i couldn't play my piano because everything sounded horrible. thoroughly saturated with disgust and self-loathing, i crawled to the bathroom where i stared into the mirror, expecting more of the same. to my delight and surprise, i looked exactly like luigi from the nintendo 64 game luigi's mansion. i had the same shroomed-out facial expressions, the same chattering teeth and desperate but determined eyes facing the ghosts and goblins of the haunted house. this made me laugh, and it broke the spell of illusion that had bound me my entire life. i finally understood that my awkwardness was just human nature, and this cognizance of my own imperfection and failings is called shame, a feeling i had repressed many years ago to hide the damage of some negative things from my past. i embraced the shame and incorporated it into my personality, at which point i instantly changed forever. no longer would i be limited by my idiosyncrasies, now forever i will love them as a treasured part of who i am, a special aspect of my rich and compassionate personality. my voice lost its usual monotonous drone and sounded like that of a stereotypical dyed in the wool hippy, filled with compassion and perspective. i began to speak unhinged, quoting shakespeare and greek mythology in new, powerful tones of voice. i jammed along to emerson lake & palmer on my electric guitar while dancing a spontaneous dance, matching my body poses perfectly to the tone and lyrics of the songs, feeling their full awesome import. (if you've ever heard ELP you'll know what i mean!). i acted out every song until i merged with the music itself and drifted away into a surreal hyperspace, with my eyes fully open. i looked through the 3D shades which i bought on MDA at a gordon lightfoot concert last summer and plunged into the trippy wallpaper while a giant bud on my high times calendar turned into a serpent and spiralled into the air. closing my eyes i saw a black and white hall made of living human heads stretching out to infinity. my guitar playing was getting ultra psychedelic, and i began to sing in a new, high but resonant tonality, imbued with freedom and meaning: my good old acid voice! i hadn't heard it in three weeks since i last dropped acid! how refreshing! i felt like jim morrison on stage, ranting and raving poetics and classic words of psychedelia, insane and soaring into the air on leaps of shamanic dancing. facing the south a red heat covered me and tongues of crimson flame and pain. wherever i turned i experienced the magic element appropriate to my direction. i soared over the yellow watchtower of the airy east, and plunged into the turquoise waters of the west. at the north my roots spread out across the black earth and i melted into the ground, growing and decaying, expanding and contracting, every moment decomposing and replenishing, biodegradable compost material, animated dust. i am alive! but the plateau was winding down, so i stepped out to smoke some weed. my ex called later and our conversation was so deep that i felt i was physically present with her. even more than physically present. i entered her headspace and totally understood all the subtle nuances of what she said, for i knew what her words meant to her. beautiful transcendant empathy. i got her crying when i described my vision of the billions of people suffering and dying all over the world in abject poverty and fear. i felt the demons of "ignorance and want" like out of charles dickens' "a christmas carol". it was wonderful and horrible and beautiful all at the same time, when i understood how even in the midst of excruciating pain you can have inner peace, that many in the third world are much happier than we are. i had been reading the bible, and understood that it contains the totality of human experience. no archetype is left out. it is the perfect manual for human existence. as i spoke from my heart about my faith, i understood for the first time what it felt like to preach. i simply opened my mouth and effortlessly expounded the truths i knew from my personal communion with god through jesus christ in the holy spirit. when the phone call was over, i laid down and pathetically attempted at sleep (no luck there). visions of the past and vivid dreams deluged my mind, but the visuals were winding down. i pondered how i must have purged an enormous amount of bad karma, and that, in fact, purification had been the main reason for my trip. in that context, the excruciating pain and despair of my peak seemed completely understandable. i wanted a hard, no-nonsense, life-changing trip and i got one. the shrooms didn't pull any punches... they never do... acid lets me pick my own mindset and trip crazily from there, but the shrooms plunge me into an uncontrollable healing psychedelic tour-de-force. my reverence for the mushroom deepens with every use as it brings me more and more into harmony with nature. these shrooms were straight from the meadows of british columbia, and their natural upbringing gives them a deep spirituality. excuse me while i go buy some more! that was only four grams!