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Magic Mushroom Blog | The First Mushroom Trip - May of 1997

 

I was fourteen, going on fifteen, and I’d spent the first year of my life doing drugs very depressed.  I was coming out of my bipolar depression in the Spring, however, and began to feel better and have more good time.  Around mid may of that year, the year of our Lord 1997, my group of friends purchased some magic mushrooms.  We decided to eat them at a park where we often stopped to smoke pot. We’d been smoking pot all year from the previous fall, and among the four of us I was having the hardest time.  However, we were still all together, and we went to that park to eat our shrooms.

We stopped at the first location along the trail through the wooded section between two major roads in the town of Springfield, PA, and sat down on some logs that were always there.  We ate the mushrooms, but decided not to smoke until they started to kick in.  Waiting around was hard, as we were impatient to feel the effects. After about forty minutes, we still hadn’t noticed anything, and we wanted to smoke, so we made a decision to follow the path farther down the trail to a fallen tree where we would sit and smoke. 

On the way down to the tree, one of my buddies, Ben, jumped and shouted out loud.  We all stopped and came over to him.  He was looking at the ground and pointing at a dead animal.  “What the hell is that?!” He asked, and we all crowded around to take a look.  It was hard to tell what it was, a rodent of some kind, but we could not distinguish the type of animal at the time.  At that moment, the three of us that had eaten shrooms all started to feel a little “otherworldly”.  A bit different, a bit high.  We left the dead animal and continued down the trail to the fallen tree.

My friend Jay packed his little metal bowl with shwag weed, and we passed it around, smoking silently.  That’s when we really came up and peaked.  I recall a sense of dreaming awake, in the mid Spring in the woods, and I felt like I was in an enchanted forest.  There was the sound of running water nearby and the scene was very beautiful. The forest was full of ferns and the sound of cicadas, their rhythmic song waxing and waning around us as we soaked up the scene.  It was really truly beautiful, and a wonderful feeling of peace and contentment filled me at the time.  I felt a connection to my friends in a way that I had not before, and a connection to the environment that was very powerful. We sat and smoked until the bowl was empty.

Without talking, we made a silent consent to go back to Ben’s house, which was about a fifteen minute walk away from where we were sitting.  The four of us got up and started up the trail again.  Quite spontaneously and without warning the four of us began skipping and laughing up the trail like little kids playing hopscotch.  When we came out of the woods at the top of the hill, all of us were laughing and the shrooms were fully kicking in very nicely.

As we walked up and down the back streets on our way to Ben’s home, I was filled with this kind of simple joy at the beauty of the perfect May evening.  The sun was beginning to set as we walked, and the colors of the dying day were lush and full.  The world looked so deeply beautiful that I was in a state of perceptual ecstasy for the entire walk through the suburban neighborhoods with the trees now budding fully and the climate welcoming and warm.  I was young, healthy, and happy, and on my first mushroom trip, and from the get-go I fell in love with the experience entirely.

I don’t recall every detail of the trip.  We were basically in the house once we got there in the top story which was one room that Ben used as a bedroom.  I recall smoking weed and blowing hits out of the window, and at one point after taking a hit, I was struck by a sort of revelation, or so it seemed.  All I said was “I’m retarded”, and of course my friends thought that was the funniest thing anyone could say.  I also recall playing Mario Kart 64, which was brand new at the time, and I was totally kicking ass on every level I played.  The rainbow level especially was incredible, another smorgasbord of visual candy to look at and interact with.

My father picked me up at around 9 or 10, at the tail end of the effects of the mushrooms.  I was quiet in the car the whole way, thinking that I was very capable of being ok to handle being around a parent without worrying about freaking out or anything.  In fact my whole body felt good, strong, and happy.  My mind was clear, and my previous depression of the winter before forgotten for the time being.

One other point of interest occurred on this trip.  Just before bed, I smoked a bowl in my room and then while I was rummaging around on my desk I found one lone whippit, a  nitrous oxide canister that was still full and uncracked.  I did the only sensible thing to do in a situation like that and put on Pink Floyd.  The special track for the special moment was “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Groovin’ to a Pict”.  If you’ve never heard it, it sounds like what the title implies.  It lasts about three minutes or so, which is plenty of time to peak on a whippit and come back to Earth.  I turned off all the lights, got under the sheet in my bed so it was like I was in a tent, and huffed the whippit, peaking at the same time as the song.  The result was very interesting.  I actually felt as though I was in a cave with animals that were dancing and jabbering.  It was so vivid that with the remaining magic from the shrooms I had an actual vision of this, as though I was really in the picture. 

After I came down I quickly went to bed and slept the night through.  I don’t recollect any other thing from that night, but it was very memorable and a pivotal moment in my history with psychedelic drugs. For what it was worth, it was a beautiful and enjoyable introduction to the wonders of magic mushrooms.

 

The Wacky Mushrooms – Fall of 1997

This was a sort of failed attempt to have a mushroom trip due to complications with my diet at the time.  If you are going to eat magic mushrooms, it’s good to have little in your stomach at the time of ingestion and to avoid food throughout the trip itself.  Before this trip, I ate a very large amount of Italian food, and though it was delicious, my body was physically stuffed at the time of ingestion of the shrooms.  This caused a complication in the onset of the effects and the potency.  Basically, I had to wait about two and a half hours before I started to come up, and the duration was shorter than normal and less intense.  I recall buying them from my friend Ken’s sister, who was older than us and a very cool chick.  We at them shortly after paying for them in Ken’s room.  His sister told us they were called “wacky” mushrooms because they were a special kind that were extra potent.  We actually split a half an eighth three ways, which means about a half a gram each, and yes, they were certainly wacky enough.  I recall they had blue veins running through the stems and bright reddish/maroon caps.  For only having eaten about a half a gram, it was very intense actually.  I wonder what specific strain they were, as she didn’t give us a scientific name or anything.

I don’t recall much of anything from this trip, only at one point we were sitting on a park bench in the rain, and I was aware of the entire scene in a way as the psilocybin coursed through my veins.  It was mostly uneventful, though definitely a strong trip for the small amount we ate.

 

The Three Trip Week – Summer 1998

The Beastie Boys Concert

We bought an eighth of shrooms each in the summer vacation of 2008 after our sophomore year of high school ended.  I decided to eat a cap at the Beastie Boys concert we went to.  It wasn’t a whole lot to eat, and if anything it just increased the energy that I was already feeling so much at the time.  We huffed a lot of nitrous oxide balloons and I recall having an actual Cuban cigar I had pilfered from a collection my rich friend was showing off to us that his dad owned.  Not very nice, no, but I was a juvenile delinquent and not always so savory.  That goes without saying.  Anyway, the concert was awesome, it was the Intergalactic Planetary tour and there were of course great light shows and tons of people going nuts.  Lots of fun.

 

The Spirals are Power – Second Trip

The rest of the eighth I ate with my friend Ben alone at his home in the same bedroom we spent the first mushroom trip.  Great room he had for that, posters, black lights, a futon and chair to sit on facing a nice big TV with video game consoles, a bed and window outside with a fan to blow weed hits out of, and a desk for any serious business we might have.  Perfectly suited for our needs. 

I recall that maybe twenty minutes to half an hour after eating them I had a sort of indigestion and felt a powerful urge to take a dump.  I went downstairs to his bathroom, and as I sat there the mushroom started really kicking in.  It was like part of the reason for the indigestion was the shrooms themselves, and also the fact that the consciousness within them was becoming awake and taking over the reality that I knew.  My body required a sort of cathartic release of unnecessary weight, so I did my business and then got up, tripping harder than I ever had before. 

When I walked back upstairs to Ben’s bedroom and sat down, my visuals started really kicking in intensely.  I noticed that everywhere I looked, if I just stared at any point on the walls around me, a point set in infinity composed of pure light would manifest and begin expanding in spirals light energy and fractal patterns coming towards my physical body.  I could actually feel the sensation of being touched by that energy in a physical sense, as though my body was being suffused by the spiraling geometric light pattern.    I could also choose to shift my focus to another point on the walls, and a similar but subtly different effect would occur wherever I focused my gaze.  I spent time just perceiving this and feeling what it felt like for a while, possibly half an hour went by without any thoughts or speech like that.  It was actually very beautiful and very powerful and the effect had my full focus without any break in concentration. 

I don’t recall interacting with Ben the whole time this was going on, though I’m sure something happened in terms of communication.  He was there anyway, physically if not otherwise.  At one point several other people showed up that we knew who were there to hang out, though we did not tell them that we were tripping.  I don’t think they even knew at all, they never said anything about it.  One kid brought a movie with him that was very gory, and he was obsessed with us watching it.  I found him very annoying, especially because I couldn’t tolerate viewing the violence on the TV for any amount of time without feeling physically nauseous. So instead of watching it I just ignored it and made fun of the movie instead.  It felt far better to do that.  The new Primus album was playing in the background, another friend had brought it over and I was enthralled by the auditory stimulus it provided.  I thought every song was excellent and it was pure pleasure to be immersed in the world of sound that Primus created.  At one point a girl that was there just spontaneously sat on my lap.  Girls often wanted to hook up with me when I was on acid or mushrooms, and they would go out of their way to touch me.  I was on a spinning chair and I just did nothing about it and enjoyed the sensation while it lasted.

That’s all I recall about the trip, it was all done in the afternoon and it was still light out by the time we came down.  That was my third trip on mushrooms total and by far the most intense both sensation wise and visually.  It was a great success.

 

The Third Trip of the Week

The third and final mushroom trip that week was done with a buddy of mind, Jay, who I’d had a very mixed up and abusive friendship with for the past three years.  We started hanging out as drinking buddies in eighth grade, and at first I loved to spend time with him and the rest of the crew.  Typically if we were drinking I would steal bottles of hard liquor from my parents’ liquor cabinet and then transport them in a backpack across town on a skateboard.  I’d end up at a house or in the woods somewhere with about four or five other guys getting as hammered as possible on cheap vodka and gin as possible.  I was well liked and admired because at the time I could drink hard liquor like water, in fact I would impress them all by taking off the pourers from the lips of the bottles and just chug back gin by the pint as fast as one would chug a beer.  After that we would go somewhere and probably wrestle or fist fight and have a good time not feeling pain. We were thirteen or fourteen years old so that kind of loss of control was both new and novel in and of itself.

The next year we all gave up booze and began smoking pot religiously every day.  Of the original crew only four people were left.  Me, Ben, Kenny, and Jay.  Jay was like the head honcho, being both the most familiar with drugs as well as the largest and coolest person in the group.  I was the loser of the crew at that point because I was the only one who couldn’t handle his high.  I always made an ass of myself and often felt horrible and unhappy during those times that we smoked in Bens room the freshman fall and winter of high school.  It was my first major depression and first incident of what I would consider severe mental disorder, both directly caused by the negative effects weed would produce in me and my unhappiness with who I was and how I felt.  But I was continuing to smoke, which is very unfortunate, and also stupid, because the biggest no-no regarding psychoactive drugs is to never do them in a way that your mind and body does not like.  That alone can cause deep psychic wounds and long term disability and suffering.  The hippies knew that as a lot of them ended up on heroin as a byproduct of failed LSD experiments.  I ended up an alcoholic, but that’s much later in life and another story to tell.

So the third and final trip that week and that summer vacation was started by buying the bag of mushrooms from an older boy in his car on a street in town.  If I recall, we were pretty close to the police station at the time, but we conducted the drug deal without any concern.  We bought an eighth each, and we ate the whole eighth each together as soon as we bought them.  Then we spent the next few hours walking around town as we often did.  We were completely alone that night, no other delinquents to cause trouble with.  It was the last summer in that town that I grew up in until the fall that I was moving up to Connecticut, which was four hours away and meant I’d be going to another high school.  My buddy Jay, although having had an abusive friendship with me, actually cared about me a lot and we became kind of emotional while we tripped, talking about old times and how our friendship was going to be broken up by the move.  We walked all over Springfield and into Morton; it wasn’t unusual for us at that age to walk for ten or fifteen miles in a night to get around, getting high in public, or aiming for a friend’s house to party at.  Towards the end of the night, Jay decided he wanted to sleep over so we could talk some more.  His dad did not want to allow it, however, and Jay became very upset and emotional.  He ended up going home anyway.  The next day when I talked to him, he confessed that he had cried about me moving and that he was very affected by all of it, and he was sad about it. Big, strong, tough Jay crying?  I was touched, he really cared.

 

Summer of ’99 Party Time

In the Summer of ’99, I took a train back down to Philadelphia from Connecticut to party with my old friends in the big city.  Once in mid summer when I came back, there was a lot of mushrooms in town available for sale from a local popular druggie/dropout, who was interesting because of his obvious experience with psychedelics, as well as his family background, as everything said his father was in a mental hospital. 

Ben and I went to his location and picked up a quarter pound of mushrooms about two days before a Roger Waters concert that we were going to in the city.  After arriving back at Ben’s house, we took the shrooms to his bedroom and proceeded to eat about half an eighth each. Then we went for a walk.  I don’t recall many nights of my life that were so bright under the sky and the street lights, glowing their electric buzz to fill the night up with energy.  We ended up in Powell Park and luckily there were a few girls there at the time. I had a guitar that I knew how to play moderately well, and I proceeded to serenade the girls with my classic rock skills.  As a result, I got one girl on my lap to give a back massage to for a while as we hung out there, and it felt quite nice to be seventeen, healthy and happy, and tripping on mushrooms with a teenage girl giving me a lapdance.  It was a great night. 

I felt ecstatic as we walked back to Ben’s house a while later, and when we arrived I felt full of the invincibility of youth.  I told him, “we should fill up cereal bowls and just eat as much as we want”, and that’s what we did.  I brought two cereal bowls upstairs from his kitchen and we filled them with shrooms.  It’s hard to say how much we portioned out each, probably more than a quarter for sure, and we ended up sitting around and eating them like popcorn.

The onset of the trip was intense.  We both felt nauseous at first.  I went to the bathroom and again took a monster crap, and felt woozy still when I came back upstairs.  Ben was not feeling well at all, he was clearly sick. In fact, he puked out of his window and one point if I recall.  After that, he told me we had to bag up with shrooms right then and there, and that he was too sick to do it himself.  So I obliged and brought baggies up from his father’s workshop in the basement, and as soon as I could stomach looking at the quarter pound of mushrooms sitting under the bright desk light at his desk, I began to weigh out and bag up eighths of shrooms. At first I was feeling still nauseous a bit doing this, but soon I began to laugh, a rolling and maniacal laughter that was just a byproduct of the psilocybin in my blood.  During this time, Ben was doing what he could to play his guitar to try and focus and help himself feel a little better.  I noticed, even as I laughed out of control, that I could hear his thoughts in my head.  If I heard his voice say “help, help”, his guitar playing would falter, and I would respond in my head, “it’s ok, it will be ok” and he would pick up the music again and continue playing.  It was like I was psychically providing emotional support to him because of the effects of the shrooms, us being telepathic at that time anyways.  It went on like this until all the shrooms were bagged up and we went to bed.  The following morning I asked him candidly about whether he was aware of the thoughts in that regard, but he denied it.  I believe there was a real connection, but he was not conscious of his own mind enough to be aware of it at the time.

Those trips and the peak of the summer of ’99 led to my first complete and total mental breakdown in the fall of ’99 winter of ’00 which was my senior year in high school.  It was the most difficult part of my entire life up to that point, and I got through it mostly on will alone and also the help of a shaman that I was talking to as a social worker.  He was a good man, both trained in counseling and also trained for twenty years as a Native American shaman, and he was very influential for me at the time.  The side effects of psychedelic drug abuse, if anything goes wrong, can be horrendous and it is always advisable to take as much care as possible to be safe, mentally, physically, and emotionally, and not cause permanent damage to one’s mind and body.

I stopped tripping and smoking pot that senior year, and I didn’t try tripping again until a few years later.  The next round of mushroom trips were initiated in 2004, at the beginning of the summer after my first semester away for college.

 

Philly Shrooms 2004

I had done well in school that year and was feeling high and happy about the summer coming in.  Myself and two friends drove down from Connecticut to Philly where I used to live to visit and party.  There was Brandon, a guy I’d gone to high school with and who I’d met up with in college and been very close to, and a girl, Krista, who was in my younger brother’s year of high school and had just graduated. 

We were down there for about four days, and the first three I stayed awake pretty much the whole time just drinking constantly.  On the night before the day we would leave, we went to a party in town, and there was a guy with a lot of shrooms there.  I bought three eighths off him at the time, and me and Brandon each ate about half an eighth together and went for a walk.  The suburban town was quiet at that time of night, being around 2 – 3 am, and it was warm and welcoming.  I recall talking a lot about Carlos Castaneda with Brandon at that time, and also spirits and forces at work in the world that could affect us all.  It was a pretty good feeling trip, but my body was wrecked from the several days of drinking previously with little to no sleep.  There was one incident where at the friend’s house where we bought the shrooms, after I was tripping on them, someone said I had threatened the kid’s mom who came down to the kitchen.  I’m not sure what it was about, I don’t recall even seeing anyone at the time, but I was tripping so who knows.

There was a second mushroom trip from those three eighths which was the following night back in Connecticut.  There was a girl, Irena, who I had kind of a crush on, and I had kissed her once or twice before earlier in the summer.  She came over to my parents’ house alone and we ate the last of the mushrooms together.  Almost the whole trip we spent on the balcony my bedroom was attached to, her sitting in the chair there outside and me standing and just glorifying her beauty. I would kiss her sometimes, and she was basically just laughing at me and humoring me.  It was kind of a good feeling trip, and we never actually hooked up after that, but the trip itself was enjoyable.

I ended up drinking through that summer more than I ever have in my life, before or after, and living with a psychotic belief that I was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.  It’s amazing how powerful a psychosis like that is, though absolutely and terminally faulty, I could perform superhuman feats with the sheer force of madness I possessed.  I was fueling my insanity with a half gallon of the cheapest vodka I could get a day.  One bottle a day, that is.  What we call a “handle” of vodka a day.  No dehydration, no hangover.  I’d wake up and have two vodka cranberries right off the bat, which was about 6 or more shots in fifteen minutes, and then the day would take care of itself.  This ended with me in a mental hospital for the first time in my life due to an overdose of Thunderbird wine, Ambien, and Ativan.  I was doomed the way I was, and I believe the result was in a very real way God stepping in to stop what was happening once and for all.  I hadn’t slept for like week and had been drinking non-stop, and I took all the pills to have a nap, then decided to go out for some food, and the rest took care of itself.  I passed out in public and woke up in a hospital bed, and by the time I got out two weeks later, I was permanently cured of that psychosis.

 

2005-2006 Mushroom trips

I had a friend starting in the Spring of 2005 when I came back from my last attempt at college for the time being, and I used to love this guy for his sense of humor and good nature.  We started as drinking buddies, and by the summer of 2005 we had taken acid twice together already.  We also took mushrooms several times from the fall of 2005 to the summer of 2006, when I had my last and most devastating mushroom trip on this side of the universe. 

I recall bits and pieces of those trips.  There were probably two or three total before the one “big one” in July of 2006.  I remember sitting in my buddies car on mushrooms, listening to music that I’d never heard before, and being able to predict accurately the changes in the music.  It was some kind of trippy electronic music.  While I listened to it, I recall noticing in my awareness perceptions of how the music was going to change that were completely accurate.  At the time I thought that the music was changing on the spot based on what I was thinking, as though it could change instantly and was being created in the very moment of listening.  I actually asked my friend if he had procured the album from aliens, I really thought at the time that that was possible.

Another moment I recall is when we were sitting in my living room with no media on and talking.  I was speaking in a many layered way somehow and I was conscious of what I was doing and so was my friend.  I tried saying a few things and he actually told me to stop talking by saying “stop using words”.  I felt like I understood where he was coming from and gave up linguistic communication for the time being.

I actually believe I ate mushroom more than two times in this time period but those are the only two memories I can pull up before the doozy of a trip in July of 2006.  It was the day before the last day I would live in the house in Connecticut.  My father had switched pharmaceutical companies because of company politics at his previous job with Pfizer.  My friend and I decided to trip one last time in that town together before we moved.  My whole life changed forever because of the decisions I made with that trip, and I still live with the consequences.

I made a major mistake that night which cost me a great deal of good time.  I decided to drink hard liquor at the same time as I ate the eighth of mushrooms.  I drank four shots of vodka.  The combination was a disaster.  For one thing, it was a lot of mushrooms.  For another thing, the timing dictated that the effects would be catalyzed by real world changes affecting me, i.e. the big move from one location to another.  And for a third thing, you should never, ever mix magic mushrooms with anything but weed.  In any case, after that night, the life that I had known was over forever.

I went insane.  I mean like, absolutely, raving mad.  No restraint, no control, no concept of anything that wasn’t too intense to not be terrifying me out of my mind.  After six hours of this I became a permanent insomniac, when just the day before and every day before that night I never once had problems sleeping.  My body was completely out of control for most of the trip. My buddy (who hadn’t drank anything like an intelligent person just smoked his weed as usual), was driving, also tripping, and somehow tolerating my physical presence as I lost all control over my hands, arms, and mouth in the passenger seat.  It was the most intense hallucinogenic experience I’d ever had in a decade of intense hallucinogenic experiences, and by far the most devastating.  When the starting kicking in, we were on foot walking on a grassy knoll by the beach.  I remember feeling a deep rooted terror even before the intensity kicked in.  My body was very aware that something very wrong was going to happen and it was too late to do anything about it.  A guy appeared out of nowhere and asked for a smoke.  He said “I’m Johnny from the beach”, or something like that.  It would have been funny if I wasn’t so scared at the time.

In the car afterwards, driving around, I was talking with a vision exploding in my perception and out of control feelings a mile a minute at the top of my lungs while I gesticulated madly, also with no real control over my actions.  I could see/hear/feel a literal tornado of thought/words/meaning/energy exploding out of the top of my head in spirals going up and out into the universe at light speed.  Also, if my vision stopped anywhere on the environment, in an instant a vision/sound/feeling/energy tornado of other voices would instantly explode from the point that my eyes stopped and rage up and out into the cosmos.  This was like a veritable apocalyptic energy vision of tornadoes of thoughts in a hierarchy spiraling up and up and out into the sky, into infinity.  This went on for probably about an hour without being checked by anything, until at one moment I had a visual image of flashing blue and red lights and I had either an auditory hallucination of a police siren or I heard a real one that made my body physically vomit up everything I had in me.  It was the only time I ever puked on mushrooms and it happened just once out of the passenger side window.

When we stopped we were in a grocery store parking lot with tons of cars and people around.  My buddy was annoyed that I puked on his window and so I got out and began trying to wipe it up with an old, dirty towel that was on the floor of his back seat.  As I was doing this, a police patrol car slowly cruised by in the parking lot with both of the cops in the front staring directly at me the whole time.  I was absolutely certain they were aware that I was tripping face and that I was now being watched by them.  I tried my best not to look back at them and appear casual in my wiping of the mushrooms I had puked up while I lost control of all my faculties.

I have a few other memories of that night, at one point my buddy Jay from the town I used to live in called me, and I just continued talking wildly out of control but into the phone.  At another point, we were sitting in the car outside of an ice cream parlor and arguing about going in line to get ice cream.  I couldn’t cope with the anxiety of being around people waiting that long while tripping, so we decided against it and moved on.  There was another point when we were arguing madly out in a lit parking lot by the restaurant we’d both worked in in 2005, and I remember seeing people standing around and walking by, watching us argue like madmen and seeming to be amused by our antics.  At one point, a tall man came towards us from the bar and he looked freaked out, and I started yelling about how he looked like he wanted to jump me.  He just kept going while looking freaked out the whole time, nothing happened.

At the end of about 5 hours of this kind of insanity I finally came down enough to stop hearing and seeing things and to feel like I had control over my mind and physical body to some extent again.  I recall being on the street in our neighborhood in the dark of night and talking about the trip at the end of it, just before going home to sleep naturally for the last night of my life for a very long time.  For the first time in my life, I was amazed that I actually came back at all, and in reality I had lost a vital piece of my own true self in that trip that was torn away from me through the raw intensity of it all, and isolated in a kind of nexus of energy in a dimension of fear and pain.  As a result of this one mushroom trip, I lost natural sleep up til the present and continuing every day in this year of 2017, I lost my sex drive drastically by not being able to control at all how fast I would come, when before I had total control over that. Now I last only a few minutes tops no matter what, unless I’m on another drug like marijuana or Adderall.  I also lost a ton of ability to feel and to think straight.  And lastly as a result of the intensity of madness pertaining to voices and the projection of my own, I began hearing voices, horrible voices of people who only hated and were angry at me coming as hallucinations from the heavens.  That’s how it started, but the voices changed over time.  The trip went entirely wrong from the get-go, and as a result a sort of alternate universe of experience was created.  If I had chosen not to drink, and we spent the night in front of a fire in the woods smoking weed, my entire experience of life from that point on would have been drastically different, safer, less painful, and easier.  It was the most definitive moment of my life, at least up until then, and is still affecting me to this day.

 

Fall 2013

I spent the next seven years dealing with a perceptual nightmare, insomnia, sexual dysfunction, and alcoholism as a byproduct of my magic mushroom trip in 2006 that went haywire.  In 2012 I had kind of an epiphany and “woke up” to spirituality more so than ever before.  In 2013 I was struggling with many issues, trying to figure out what to do with my life, and having a hard time looking for success.  In the fall of 2013, I decided to take mushrooms at the end of a long drinking bender, and a friend of mine came to visit my parents’ place near Boston from Connecticut, the same guy I tripped with before in 2006.  He left me an eighth of mushrooms before he went back home, and I ate them later that week.

The trip was mostly uneventful, I had some visual activity but it was a muddy composition.  Mostly I felt exhausted, very tired, and sleepy.  After about half an hour, I took a bipolar medicine and went promptly to sleep.  There wasn’t much to talk about.

The aftereffects were far greater than the actual trip itself.  For one thing, my cat ran away and never came back. I feel like he caught a vibe off of me from the mushrooms, maybe he was ready for his grand adventure, and he decided to hightail it out of our home.  I was very sad.  I even cried some, I really loved that cat.  I stopped drinking shortly after this and made a decision to become a full time pothead.  I was still dealing with my PTSD and other mental symptoms and I wasn’t able to just stay sober at the time.  When I switched from alcohol to marijuana, the change was drastic.  I went from hallucinating a voice that I hated so much I wanted to kill, to just spontaneously and easily reciting poetry improvisationally as a byproduct of my high on weed. I took to it very quickly, and decided to work on a poetry book, which I did all fall and winter.

It was a blessed time for me in many ways. I felt open to the world and in good spirits in a way that I’d not experienced before.  The only thing is, I was always smoking weed.  My “good spirits” were largely because of my high, and I was covering up major issues that I was unwilling to face. My father and mother were not necessarily happy about me smoking all the time either, and there were often spats between us.  But time went on from winter of ’13 – ’14 to the spring of ’14, and in march I became depressive again, although I didn’t quit weed.  I decided to try Ayahuasca again to see if it would clear me up or at least treat my depression and maybe help me quit weed. 

I used Ayahuasca four times between the beginning of April and the end of May, and around that time I started growing and eating magic mushrooms.  There were about ten trips from mid-May to the end of September, and these turned out to be the most devastating of my entire life.  But I will start at the beginning, in the late Spring of 2014, when I was flying high on the Ayahuasca aftereffects and getting into some very intensive spiritual experiences.

 

Spring 2014 – Fall 2014 Mushroom Madness

I started a kamikaze run of magic mushroom trips in May of 2014 up until about September of the same year.  The result was the largest supernatural disaster that I could have ever conceived of, possibly one of the largest in the history of mankind.  It began innocently enough, I thought I would try my hand at treating my insomnia by eating mushroom, because in my delusional mind I actually believed that the cause might be the cure. Very stupid, but I was already going pretty manic and feeling invincible which is a recipe for disaster.

The first time I took the shrooms that I grew, which I got as growkits from Avalon website at a good price, 4 extra large with the 20% discount of course (Thanks Avalon! J) I had the first flush within three weeks and I picked then and ate some from.  I also took an MAOI; it was a harmala alkaloid freebase extract 95% pure, and the mixture was intense, out of control, and actually frightening to my physical body.  I started by trying to watch Alice in Wonderland, laughed uncontrollably for a while until I was too stimulated and physically uncomfortable, and then dosed myself with Zyprexa, an antipsychotic antidepressant and promptly went to sleep.  When I woke up my body felt safe, but my life was permanently skewed in a way that I had no way of predicting from that moment on.

I tried them again, this time also eating them fresh, one day when my friend Olivia was over.  I ate a couple whole shrooms and we went out for a drive.  I noticed the colors were very bright and vibrant, it was a beautiful June day.  I felt comfortable and at ease.  There was nothing out of place at all, and nothing intense or extraordinary.  Just a nice body high and a tuned up set of eyes.  A bit more real than real, I’d say.  I noticed a woman looking at me with interest at a store we stopped at for Olivia to return things she had bought, as though the woman at the register wanted me to talk to her, which she definitely did.  I wasn’t able to do that because I felt too self-conscious, so I just left without saying anything or approaching her.  I don’t recall anything else happening during that trip, and I didn’t have to medicate to come down either.

Another random memory is of eating some and waiting until they kicked in to go to the convenience store and buy a scratch ticket.  I thought my psychic perception would be heightened from the psilocybin, and I think I did pick a winner the first time.  I used to be obsessed with doing this before I gave up gambling entirely, as I liked to test whether I could “see” the winner.  I’ve come to the point where I believe in Biblical ethic regarding pretty much everything, so it’s an abuse of something sacred, i.e. a divine power like a sixth sense, to use it in any way that is sinful.  I feel and think with much more clarity and less mental problems as a direct result of sticking to a New Testament (teachings of Christ) ethic, and I’d recommend using that ethic to anyone dealing with mental problems of any kind, especially regarding the misuse of psychotropic substances.  Christian ethic can treat effectively many diseases of the mind if understood and practiced correctly, and the power of faith and knowing how to live is to heal hurts and open ways of fully experiencing joy and love, which all heal mental distress.

Anyways back to the mushrooms.  Because of my tripping, I was experiencing a lot of intensive spiritual experiences, astral projection, spirit contact, even a few instances of telekinesis, consciousness over matter effects where a solid object would move, or a loud knock on a wall or ceiling would happen just as there was a presence or a projection, things like that that are documented by the spiritualist church.  I had a kind of power trip/mental breakdown on a three day period around June 27-29th, which was just at my birthday on the 28th.  I actually woke up one morning thinking I wanted to use telepathy to push congress into openly admitting they need God’s help, and I spent those three days projecting telepathically at congress with everything I had.  On the third day one the news the senate was in a prayer circle and asking God to help them.  I thought it had worked, and I went to sleep.

As a result of this, I had much more mental problems that led to an ultimate crash of my psyche on August 11th, 2014.  But there was another mushroom trip in between.  I made another mistake and did something very stupid, which is to eat mushrooms with hairs growing on them.  I felt very sick, and lay down in bed as they kicked in, feeling worse and worse, until I got up and dosed myself with a high dose of an antipsychotic/antidepressant.  I felt terrified that I would puke, I wasn’t sure why, but I felt like it would make so many horrible things happen if I did that I was terrified.  Instead of puking, I spent the whole trip walking around the kitchen island, crying like a baby about my lost youth and innocence in my Christian and safe, responsible upbringing.  I cried for the years of torment, mental, physical, and emotional, and the loss of life and love.  I cried my heart out, and after three hours of that I was exhausted and I fell asleep.

So my mind slowly fell completely apart after this, until one night I blew up and had a complete mental breakdown.  I woke up the next morning with a bunch of mental and physical problems that I’ve been living with since.  It was excruciatingly painful, and also horrible for me on a mental and emotional level.  It was like I was being humiliated telepathically in front of anyone and everyone who were all laughing at me, and my body was feeling worse and worse as a result.  I basically have been recovering from that stretch of time and the final collapse of my previous world on August 12th, 2014, since then.

I’ve been doing well.  At first I was drinking heavily and depressed and going to a hospital without any hope for help.  I quit by taking Ayahuasca in March of 2015, and when I turned the corner on drinking I never looked back.  I was still smoking two packs a day, taking Adderall when my doctor would prescribe it, and also smoking weed sometimes.  My body was a wreck and I was still very depressed.  In January of 2016 I took Ayahuasca again and quit smoking tobacco, weed, and Adderall, and by June I’d quit gambling and whoring as well.  I went from needing up to 480 mg or more of my bipolar medication to cope every day to only taking 60 mg once at night to sleep. My life has gotten better and better.

As much as mushrooms can and will be beautiful and wonderful, its always important to exercise caution with using and not abusing them, as they are life changing and must be treated with respect.  I feel grateful that I’ve overcome the obstacles put in my way as a result of my abuse, and I have hope for my future now more than ever.  God bless and good luck!