This happened in July 2018 but still a trip that I think about all the time and has continued influencing me since it happened. This is going to be a little long so apologies in advance.
This was my first time doing a full 3.5g dose of mushrooms - prior to this I had done acid 3 times and a 1.75g dose of mushrooms. As an experienced stoner who hallucinates with enough THC plus these prior trips under my belt I was confident, I figured doing a full eighth would be no big deal and much like the smaller dose of shrooms I had done in the past. I was wrong, lol.
I didn't realize fasting was a thing that people did before dosing until recently, although I suppose I could see why. The day I took this dose I had only a few bites of WaWa mac and cheese beforehand but not with the intention of a stronger trip. I also, for some reason, thought it would be okay if I just did edibles too. So I had a few bites of mac and cheese and then about 3 tablespoons of homemade infused coconut oil made with really fucking good weed that I decarbed before infusing. I ate the mushrooms straight up, dried. My then bf now husband, N, grew them so they were recently dried and still fresh with not too much butthole taste. I recorded the time of eating them in my sketchbook as 1:22p - I did this my first time doing shrooms and it took about 20 minutes for me to start feelin them. This time it only took 10. I started out by watching a few episodes of sponebob and then some funny youtube videos. I was definitely feeling heavy stoning effects at this point and started getting active visuals. I had a poster of a unicorn on the wall that started melting as well as some spatial hallucinations involving the tv.
About 45 min - 1 hour in, I realized that I had to pee, so I decided to go upstairs. The room I was living in was in the basement, so it was much brighter upstairs and I started tripping way harder and I've always attributed it to the drastic increase in light and the location change. I used the bathroom and then decided to look at myself in the mirror. This is where I realized the mushroom trip is way weirder than acid. My reflection looked far off and distant to me like it was down a tunnel and when I looked away I saw an after image of my reflection creating patterns in space, most pronounced in the texture of the bathroom tile. It was a pretty intense feeling, and I was able to ignore it only because I was so distracted by the rest of the upstairs I wanted to explore. I went into the dining room and pet my cat who was sitting on a persian style rug on the floor. The pattern on the rug was changing and moving and I saw moving eyes in the fur on my cat. Around this time I also saw a shadow figure lurking in the background, but it happened only once and I was able to write it off because I was still aware I was tripping at this point.
I went into the living room with N and we chilled on the couch for a while, which is where I started peaking. The room was changing spatially a lot at this point and the way the afternoon light was shining into the room made it look continuously different. A snake plant in the corner caught my attention for a while, the horizontal stripes on the leaves were moving in their own contained pattern. The ceiling fan was on and the air on my skin felt nice. I felt like I could hear my blood pumping and my throat working when I swallowed spit. I felt like I could hear my body working. The cat came back in the room and I hallucinated him morphing into a hybrid of himself and my late hedgehog with vivid coloring. I started playing with him with a string toy and felt a little scared of how ferocious I felt like he was. The screen door was open in the room so the mixture of the sounds outside (nature sounds, suburb-y neighborhood sounds) and the gray noise of the ceiling fan inside started giving me intense auditory hallucinations. It all sounded like onomatopoeia that were noises from my memories, specifically my childhood. These sounds became very melodic and started to actually sound like a song. I wish I could have somehow recorded that song my brain was producing. Around this time I was also speaking to N and holding a conversation with him but realized that I didn’t recognize any of the words I was saying - they all sounded like gibberish to me. But I asked him if I had said ‘real words’ and he confirmed that we were talking like normal. I started forgetting where I was, the room was changing so much that it started looking really foreign but then really familiar to me. Because of the summery vibe of the whole day plus my nostalgic auditory hallucinations, I felt like I was in the back room at my grandma’s old house for a little while. Because of that nostalgic quality of the trip it was intensely emotional - I realized that I was crying. I remember specifically thinking about Blue Diamond from Steven Universe because the tears felt huge and were spilling out of my face uncontrollably. I forgot what a room was, and who I was and who N was. As he spoke to me I remembered him and the feeling of realizing who he was again was incredible. The best part is that this is a part of my trip that I looped on - I feel like I forgot and remembered over and over again who we were and what being a human was for what felt like an eternity. It couldn’t have been too long though. After a while N got up to get me a tissue and I had no idea what a tissue was so I was perplexed by it in my hand. The ceiling fan current was kind of catching it and making it shudder so it kept catching my attention and through tears I would say ‘and what IS this THING??’. This happened a few times. N went outside to see what the weather was like and the fact that he could leave the room blew my mind. I was giddy and hysterical at this point, everything was funny and strange to me, this was somewhere around 1.5 - 2 hours in but I’m not entirely sure.
The next part is a little hazy, but somewhere around here I tried standing up to do something, maybe get water, and I fell backwards onto the floor and was unconscious. I have a tendency to pass out if my blood sugar is too low so I’m assuming this plus all the substances are why I went unconscious. N got me back up onto the couch and tells me that I was out for about 10 minutes total. He let me come to on my own as to not scare me or make the transition too tough. And truth be told, I had no idea that I was unconscious until later when I was coming down and he told me about it. But this part of the trip, although the scariest was definitely the most insightful for me.
I guess at this point I was having an out of body hallucination? I used to pass out a lot in my teen years, enough so that it almost always resulted in an awful fear reaction when I came to. The most recent time prior to this that I had passed out I was getting blood drawn and I was screaming bloody murder when I became conscious again. This reaction was pretty much the norm at the time. But while I was out I was hallucinating experiences where I had passed out previously and where I was in pain. They were part memory part fabrication. It was kind of showing me what actually scares me about being unconscious which is rooted in a simpler fear of being in pain and being out of control. Although I didn’t scream or thrash when I came back I was still kind of distressed and I felt like I was in overdrive. I couldn’t recall why I was like this and then suddenly all at once remembered it was from the mushrooms. Seriously cannot understate how well N handled this situation and how grateful I am that he was there sitting me, I know this experience was scary for him but he really kept his cool.
I asked N a bunch of weird and terrifying questions all at double speed at this point, its like my brain was coming up with them faster than I could really even process them. Of these questions I asked, ‘What’s a hospital? Why did my dad cheat on my mom? What was the Holocaust?’ And other upsetting, weird questions. N did his best to answer them for me and when I asked more abstract questions like ‘what’s time?’ He said things like ‘oh its on the clock.’ Which still makes me laugh. I also asked him why Willy Wonka was so creepy, and around this point I started to settle down because things were funny to me again. We chilled and talked for a while and I remember noticing when the digital clock in that room read 4:20 and recognized the time so I was starting to come down around this time. I was definitely still tripping but certainly past the peak and the rest of the trip went in waves of sober feeling to still high. I rode it out watching cartoons and finally eating a real meal which I desperately needed.
This trip showed me so much about myself. I don’t think I really understood how much I hated being out of control up until this point. And I ended up gaining really valuable insight about some personal situations at the time which for the sake of brevity and privacy I’ll just say I decided to cut ties with an emotionally abusive person in my life after this. Losing control and being forced to let go is really what helped me put all this together. I’ve tripped on less mushrooms 7 more times after this one and I still find myself digesting this trip when I do.
|