Here's one I wrote about a year ago. Posted it in the wrong place and never got any real feedback. Would be interested to know what you guys think.
Enjoy..
...so, yeah, I just turned 30. Haven't touched any drugs or alcohol save for tobacco since I was 21. But this nagging curiosity about psychedelics has been bothering me for six months now, and I finally decided to come back and check things out. Although I had done them a bit before, it was always in a party atmosphere and always muddied by layers of other drugs and booze. I really wanted a quiet, clean, trip to really have "the psychedelic experience". Acid would have far and away been my preference, but I was only able to find mushrooms given my now limited list of contacts in that world. By the way, this is really long. I'm writing it in large part to process the experience and document it so that 20 years from now, I can look back and remember.
I had originally intended to do them solo, but coincidentally, a friend from college decided last minute to come out and visit. We had a ski cabin in the woods to ourselves for the weekend, and the plan was to do them there. He is somewhat experienced with psychedelics himself from our college days, but was apprehensive and in the end only took about a gram - just enough to feel the effects but leaving him sober enough to sit for me. It's a pretty stereotypical ski cabin, if you know the type - 80s oak paneled walls, old shag carpet, fireplace, etc. The living room, where we spent all of our time, is comfy with two couches in an "L" shape, TV, large coffee table and the like.
The big day came. At about 3pm I measured out 3.6 grams for myself (just to outdo the 3.5 I have done previously) and 1 gram for my friend. He took his in tea and promptly started smoking pot (from which I abstained). I ate my mushrooms the old-fashioned way: down the hatch no-chaser. The mushrooms were the prettiest I have ever seen - well formed, unbroken stems and golden caps. The bruising was a striking shade of blue I've never seen. Although I know the look of the mushroom, in theory, means nothing about potency, these mushrooms were as potent looking as I could imagine.
We decided to hit the hot tub. I didn't want to stay there all night, I just wanted to give us something to do to distract ourselves from the "I just dosed" anxiety. We agreed that we would leave the tub as soon as we started to feel the effects. When we got to the tub, there were already some people in it (the hot tub is shared by the complex). They were kids from Denmark and the only person I've ever met from Greenland. Nice people, funny accents. I smoked a cigar, and they left before we did. Pretty soon we could both feel the knot in our stomaches and knew that it was time to get out.
Before taking the mushrooms, we had decided to watch Grateful Dead's View From The Vault III, and it was already queued up in the DVD player. We changed and made our way to the living room.
We sat down to watch the movie, and rather abruptly I began to feel the effects. At first, I felt stoned, remembering with a kind of nostalgia the droopy-eyed feeling and the lethargy. Soon, however, I began to feel heavy - intensely heavy. The body load was enormous, I felt like I couldn't lift my limbs and could feel my own weight from head to toe. The feeling centered in my forehead and I felt like I might pass out, it was so intense. Almost like my circuits were going to fry. I did remember this feeling - although not this strongly - from previous trips, and calmed myself. I could tell that this was going to be an intense afternoon.
We had been monitoring the time since ingestion, and at this point we were only about 30 minutes in. I was now starting to have visuals - the room would stretch and bend - and the paneling on the wall would shudder in place, shift to the left, back to the right, and reset, all with a liquid, afterimage feel. The strength of the sensations and visuals, given the short time since ingestion, started to make me worried. I started to feel like I might have bitten off more than I could chew and that the peak would be too intense. Just as I was starting to have that fear - that panicky fear - Jerry and the band, quietly and smoothly, went into Friend of the Devil. I've always found it a beautiful song, and in this instance, it was enormously comforting. I could literally feel the acoustic rhythms wash over, and felt the sound settle on me like a warm blanket and I knew two things: that the trip was on and it would be intense, and that it would be alright. I lied down on the couch, kicked off my shoes, propped my head up on a pillow, and stared blankly at the TV and watched Jerry's hair twist and twirl above his head in bizarre tendrils of psychedelia.
Time and the order of events gets a little messy at this point, but in the end it doesn't really matter how exactly things happened, and I should be able to describe the essence of the trip. I probably made it through two or three more songs, but soon the open-eyed visuals were too intense for me to handle. With my eyes open, the walls would droop and stretch, then run like watercolors to the left, then the right, then back to start. Lights would radiate moving halos, and the kitchen - opposite the living room - would stretch into the distance and then abruptly snap back at the movement of my head or blinking of my eyes. Anyone who has seen the View From the Vault movies will know that they're filmed in the early 80s (I believe), and at times when the band is getting pretty "out", the video will go into this cheesy 80s psychedelics thing with flashing neon, negative images, tracers, and what-not. At this point, I was unable to distinguish between whether or not the colors and tracers and negative images were actually on the DVD or not - my entire field of vision was becoming consumed my shimmering colors, tracers, and after imagines. The TV flashed insane colors and merged with the wall behind it. Gerry's hair looked like fire burning from his head, and it waved up out of the TV and smeared on the oak paneling in a blurry transfer of color.
I felt extremely heavy and lethargic, and the visuals were too much. Very simple decisions, like the fact that I wanted to stretch out my leg or scratch my face, would be difficult to process and decide upon and would be discarded, only to realize later that I still wanted to stretch out my leg or scratch my face. Between the intense visuals and anxiety and indecision, I finally felt so overwhelmed by the situation that I mumbled to my friend that I was going to close my eyes for a while. I could tell this worried him, but I didn't have the energy to explain that I was alright but struggling, and would be okay. I was pretty anxious, but hanging in there. My previous experience with psychedelics and the vast amount of reading I have done over the years taught me to keep in mind that these feelings would pass, I would come down, and that it's best to just chill and hang on when things are intense. So that's what I did.
I rolled over and stuck my face into the fold between the seat cushions, arms crossed, fetal position. Although little decisions were still difficult to process, I was remarkably coherent, mind unfuzzied by alcohol and marijuana. I knew where I was, knew that I had taken mushrooms, knew that the experience I was having was not terminal and that I would come down eventually. I was able to maintain my "inner dialogue", or the voice of my own thoughts. As I dove deeper into the trip with my eyes closed, this inner monologue actually grew in sharpness and clarity - I could actually "hear" myself thinking.
The closed eye visuals were intense, but not as anxiety producing because I didn't feel like I had to make sense of them. With eyes open, I was plagued by the fear that I would see something I couldn't handle or that the walls would melt away to nothingness and I would have to try to maintain my sense of place and self while the world literally melted around me. With eyes closed, however, I was able to simply observe, and didn't feel as much fear or the need to make sense of what was happening.
With eyes closed, my "inner world" and the experience of self and consciousness became three-dimensional. Normally, when you close your eyes it's like the shades are drawn and you're still basically within yourself and looking at the two-dimensional backs of your eyelids. Now, however, when I closed my eyes, I experienced a tangibly three-dimensional space. Remember: I am not having an out of body experience per se - I know where I am, know I'm lying on a couch dosed on mushrooms. But with my eyes closed, I found myself "floating" perfectly in the middle of a sphere, like suspended in the middle of a massive, dark, ping pong ball, and on the inside walls of that sphere, my visuals played out, like they were projected there for me to watch. My sense of self had shrunk, and I felt like a minuscule point of light floating in the middle of a vast and empty world. When I thought, I could audibly hear my thoughts with extreme clarity, almost as if they were coming out of a old-fashioned radio. The locus of these thoughts was distinctly "behind" me, so when I had a thought, the thought came floating out of the din from behind.
At one point I realized that the Grateful Dead clearly timed their setlist to coincide with the stages of an intense psychedelic experience. When I became anxious they provided a calming version of Friend of the Devil. Now that I was letting go and succumbing to the trip, the band was getting more and more out there, in this case insanely so. Jerry was using some sort of heavy wah-wah effect on his guitar, to the point that his playing had an electric organ kind of sound. The music was atmospheric and ominous, and lacked any vocals or structure - definite psychedelic jamming. They were probably well into "drums" or "space" at this point, although I have no recollection of the time or actual songs.
At first when I closed my eyes, the visuals that played out on the wall of my sphere were typical - kaliedescopes, swirls, spinning tendrils. Now, as the band played, the various notes from each musician took on tiny points of color projected on the walls of my sphere that flickered in intensity and wandered aimlessly around my field of vision. Jerry's wah-wah guitar was an obvious brown point of light, while his regular guitar effect was an obvious neon blue. The keys were red and vocals floated in and out with their own signature. The drums were faint pulses of light that consumed my vision. I noticed that I could still taste the cigar that I had smoked in the hot tub, and this taste was clearly perceived as distinctly brown in nature.
These visions continued for an indeterminant amount of time, and slowly progressed into more concrete forms. At some point, complex images started to play out on the walls of my empty sphere. Vast walls of letters glowing in metallic reds and oranges would float in front of me and swirl. For a long time I found myself floating through a massive corridor with walls on either side of me stretching infinitely above and below me. On the walls were patterns etched in color, and I floated slowly forward observing everything.
Now, the experience of this vast sphere started to change. Instead of seeing visuals/visions projected onto the sphere, the sphere itself started to ripple and flow. It started to stretch and I knew that if it stretched too far it would tear and I didn't know if I was ready to see what was on the other side. At some point the wall of the sphere started to take on forms. Almost like something was pressing on it from the other side, like the old toy that has a frame with a bed of little nails - when you press your hand or face into it, the other side shows a mirror image. One form was obviously an animal. It was a cartoonish pig of some sort, fat and sitting on it's haunches. I sensed but didn't really see another form, obviously humanoid in nature and female. At this point, the "projected" visuals took the forms of a massive pattern of small swirling eyes. They were all the same - individual left eyes of a woman I did not know.
Although all this was going on in my mind, I was still aware of my body - arms, legs and all - that were almost distant memories lying on a couch in a ski condo. And in that temporal body, I started to have the most bizarre sensations. While the intense visuals played out on the inner surface of the sphere, I started to feel a pressure on my nose. It felt like someone was taking their index finger and pushing directly on my nose - hard. If I moved my head, the feeling would disappear only to come back moments later. I resolved not to move in order to see where the feeling took me. Soon enough, the pressure changed to a feeling of movement. I would distinctly and clearly sense my nose stretching to the left. I could feel my nose stretch six inches off to the left, effectively off of my face. Then I could feel it in my teeth, and my chin and my eyebrows. My nose would stretch left off my face, the corner of my mouth would stretch up to take the place of my nose, my eyebrows would collapse downwards to meet with the corner of my mouth, and my teeth would stretch out in front of me.
The feelings intensified and ran though my body. At one point I felt my left leg distinctly stretch down to infinity while my right shoulder stretched upwards. None of these feelings were pleasant - they didn't hurt, exactly, but the stretching and pressure was obvious and unpleasant.
In my inner world, the sphere that had become my universe continued to take forms and stretch more and more. I started to sense that it was tearing or about to tear as I could see slivers of light starting to filter through it's walls. When it moved, it rippled back and forth and I could see light pouring through in the folds of the ripples. I did not know what was "behind the screen", and I didn't really want to find out. Finally, perfectly in the center of my vision, the walls of the sphere started to part. As the wall opened, light rushed in and I could see on the other side the clear vision of a large, singular, female eye - the same eye that had filled my field of vision in patterns before - but larger, stable, unmoving, and shrouded in light. The eye did not feel like it was a part of my experience, but was outside, observing. I looked at this eye as it looked back at me for an extended moment, and reeled myself back in. I wasn't ready to go there yet, and as I struggled to push that vision away, the sphere closed back up shutting out the eye and the light.
Somewhere in here, I started to feel intense emotions regarding the love I have for my wife. She was at home and didn't know and wouldn't have approved of my trip. We're sober, upstanding adults. Don't party, don't do drugs of any kind, have high paying corporate jobs, and here I am having a full blown psychedelic experience. I felt guilty knowing I wouldn't be able to tell her about this experience or experience it with her, and felt sad that I had to hide it from her. She is so good to me, and in that moment I was filled with gratitude and love for her. I felt it intensely in my chest and wanted her to be with me. Oddly, although I felt separated from her, I started to feel connected to her 300 miles away. I could sense the existence of a fabric between us, almost the way they say that gravity is more like a fabric than a force, I could feel this mystical connection between us. Although I could not feel this connection as strongly with other people, I became aware that it existed, at least in the state I was in. I accepted the love for her that I was feeling - in fact encouraged it - and felt that I could transmit it to her and that if I focused, she would feel it too.
My experience in this realm lasted an eternity. As far as I could tell, I hadn't moved for years and the visions played out endlessly on the walls of my new universe. My sense of the passage of time had been completely dismantled. Soon, however, I realized that The Grateful Dead was still jamming - they were still in that part of their set when then songs are basically unrecognizable and may fade in and out of erie drum solos and what is, essentially, non-musical noise making (that's not a judgement, they literally just get that "out" sometimes). Suddenly, I realized that if The Grateful Dead was still jamming and hadnt yet returned to more sensical and recognizable songs, as is their habit, not more that 30 minutes could have gone by since I had closed my eyes, and this idea shocked me. My friend later told me that I actually rolled over and closed my eyes before they started to really get into their jam and laid motionless for probably 45 minutes to an hour, but nonetheless, my experience of time had ceased to exist.
Although I was still substantially tripping, I was finally starting to come down. The hour that I had laid on the couch with my eyes closed had clearly been the peak of my experience, and I was finally on the long slow road back to normality. The Grateful Dead was still making noise (literally), and I finally generated enough energy to open my eyes, roll over, and say to my friend: "good God, this music sucks!". He laughed and with some relief that I wasn't going to die said, "welcome back". He later told me that while he was pretty fucked up from the gram and the pot he was smoking, he was trying to keep an even keel in case I needed help, and was trying to force himself to make it through the lengthy jam. We finally gave up and skipped a few songs forward to more recognizable music.
The rest of the night was filled with laughter. After numerous encores and bonus footage, The Grateful Dead finally exited the stage and we switched the DVD off to find that a playoff football game was still on, which seemed like the most perfect thing to watch. We giggled at the announcers and the absurdity of the commercials and were disappointed when the game finally ended later in the night, as it had been the perfect diversion for a smooth re-entry into the real world.
I was still pinned to the couch until 10:30 (remember, we dosed at 3PM), and when I finally made my first venture to the bathroom on the other side of the room, it was with some trepidation. The walls continued to breathe and the toilet stretched and sank into the floor a bit, but the effects were much diminished from their earlier power. We stayed up until 12:15 drinking water and re-hydrating, and when we finally went to bed, it was like saying goodbye. I was, frankly, scared to go downstairs to my bedroom - it seemed cold and alien, but as soon as I hit the pillow I was fine. Closing my eyes, I still saw faint patterns, but they danced around on the back of my eyelids and weren't projected into the vast empty universe I was in earlier. I fell asleep shortly thereafter and slept soundly.
I woke up the next morning around 7:30 to new snow. My friend decided not to ski (he was sore from the previous three days), so I went out on my own. I was shocked - upon getting up I felt about 95%. No serious daze or tiredness, just a little shaky. Coffee and the fresh air of the mountains quickly cleared that up, and I ended up skiing the entire day by myself in about knee deep powder. The solo chair rides gave me a great time to ponder the experience, and I skied hard "bell to bell", as they say, to the end of the day in awe.
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