My First Trip, and Also the Scariest

At the time of this writing, I am twenty two years old. I tripped shrooms for the first time about six months ago, and since then I've tripped twice more. The first was not the most intense or fun, but it was without a doubt the scariest night of my life. I've smoked weed, taken ecstasy, and tried tons of pills, but this was going to be my first time with psychedelics. My roommate had tripped hard a few times before, and he agreed to get some and let me try them out.

So, it ends up being me, him, and two other guys. One is a friend of mine from work, but the other I've never met before. He seems like a cool dude, but little did I know that strange accomplices do *NOT* mix well with your mind when you start tripping.

Anyway, we are smoking a bunch of weed, sitting at the table and playing poker. The shrooms finally arrive, and I eat maybe an 1/8th, possibly a little bit more than that. I figured it was a standard amount, but I didn't know weed can amplify your trip by quite a bit. As I'm playing cards after about thirty minutes, I notice that everything begins to get really bright and colorful. I'm looking at my friends and saying "Oh, this is cool. I'm glad we decided to do this." Little did I know that this was like a "warm-up" buzz, and the real trip wasn't even close to kicking in yet.

We decide to go in to the living room to play Madden, and we are also hitting a giant-ass bong inbetween plays. After maybe 20 minutes, I am expecting to feel high and good like I always do, except I don't feel high at all. WEIRD stuff begins to happen. My trip kicks in to full gear and hits me almost INSTANTLY. One moment, I was returning a kickoff, and the next, the reggae music in the background is fucking with my head and I feel like the whole room around me is melting. I didn't know about the "downward spiral" effect at this time because I hadn't read anything about shrooms, and I thought that I was pretty fucked up. I look over at my roommate and I ask him if it's normal for the room to be spinning around and melting and shit. He said he was surprised it took that long for me to see hallucinations.

At this point, I am freaking the fuck out. I really want the paranoia and the guilty feeling to go away and just enjoy the buzz, because it's actually pretty cool had I not been so terrified. I don't think I was scared of the experience, but scared of not having experienced it before, and not knowing what to expect. So, I told him I wanted to go in to my room and lie down for awhile.

"Dude, trust me, do not go in that room by yourself. It will make your trip way worse." This is what he was telling me as I sauntered off in to the bathroom to piss, and then in to my room. I closed the door and looked around.

I keep a Marlboro neon sign in the corner on the wall, and it's pretty bright most of the time. This time when I look at it, it's so bright that I remember thinking it was going to electrocute me.

This is when my trip decided to go really out of control. I started thinking about dangerous shit that could happen to you when you're on drugs, and for some reason I had halfway convinced myself that if I didn't sit down and mellow out, I was going to end up dead by accident. Of course, in reality, this wasn't true, and looking back I know it sounds retarded, but this trip was freaking me out so bad that I thought I was fucked up permanently in the head and about to live my last moments.

So then I lie down, and as I'm looking around the room, everything takes on this dark, horror-movie kind of vibe. If you've seen the scene from "Forrest Gump" where Jenny does a bunch of cocaine and stands on the ledge above the city, then you might have an idea of what I'm talking about. The shrooms were making me feel like I was a complete failure in life, that I had disappointed everyone around me, all kinds of crap. I wasn't so much scared at this point as I was just completely mad because I wanted to have a good buzz from my first batch of shrooms. I laid there for a long time and closed my eyes, and thought in circles for what seemed like forever. I knew people meant about a trip changing your life and causing you to see things differently at that point. Before, I thought they were full of shit and trying to sound cool, but now I realize your mind goes completely free. I thought about everything from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and what it would be like to hang out with them in real life to my ex-girlfriends and how bitchy they used to be. It was literally fun to sit there and think, but every now and then, a "negative wave" would tear in to me and I would feel scared for a minute. I literally experienced every range of emotions from complete ecstacy to absolute and perpetutal fear that I was not going to live. It was seriously one of the craziest things that has ever happened to me.

The suicide line of thinking and all the depressing shit in my head eventually started to clear up, and I went back in to the living room to hang out with the other guys who were tripping. I ended up talking to my roommate for a good 3 hours about all the shit that I had experienced, and he basically confirmed that I was only having a bad trip because I didn't accept the fact that I was on drugs and I had induced the trip myself to have fun. Once I did do that, everything was fine, and I was having a pretty good time.

Since then my other trips have been amazing. I didn't have a single negative vibe from either of them, and I think that's because I was ready. I ended up having sex, dancing, drinking alcohol, smoking weed, and playing video games all in the same night during my last trip, and had some of the most fun I've ever had. That first one scared the fuck out of me, but now that I've learned what to do, it's something I don't regret. I will probably continue to trip a few times a year, but I want to do it sparingly. Smoking weed is something you can do every day to mellow out and enjoy yourself, but I think a trip has its own special time and place. If you are not prepared, you will not maximize the amount of "enlightenment" that you will receive.

-Drew W, Nashville TN