Experience:2.5g - Swim's first mushroom trip

So it was the twenty-eighth day of the twelve month of the year which a majority of the people in my time period on Earth label with the number two-thousand and twelve when I ingested dried mushrooms which contained an illegal psychedelic compound known as psilocybin for the first time.

I was in the company of my companion who is dear to my heart and who I label as the closest of my friends. He was more experienced with psilocybin, and had also ingested at other points in time the chemical known as lysergic acid diethylamide. As he was both experienced with the act of mind-alteration via the use of substances while at the same time being another conscious entity with which I hold much meta-cognitive dissonance, I was fairly comfortable with my choice of consuming what may have been roughly two-point-five to three grams of dried psychoactive fungi.

Expectations were something I nearly lacked in all entirety. It was to be the first psychedelic experience I would have beyond large hits of cannabis derived oil. There was this idea in my head that I may see things like colors that should not regularly be seen given the circumstances had the circumstances not involved a foreign thing acting upon my neuro-transmitters. While this was as much an idea in my head at the time as these words being read are an idea in my head now at the time of writing, it was also true that I was skeptical of these thoughts considering that if there are things within the confines of this universe which are truly only understood once experienced, a psychedelic experience is one of those things. The psychedelic experience as a generalization was, for me at the time, understood to this extent without any such experience prior. And so I could only narrowly guess that certain things may be perceived to me, such as odd colors or some form of spontaneous enlightenment regarding reality that may or may not persist longer than the neurological effect of the psilocybin upon my mind.

I did not expect these happenings to be happenings that would happen- instead I was very anxious to experience something for which I would know and recognize as rather unexplainable without extreme extrapolation on the many things the experience is not which someone being informed of the experience must rely on if they had never experienced such a thing. Without experience, I believed already that the experience would be something to escape the grasp of laymen’s terms as if it were a highly technologically advanced space vessel traveling past the Earth of ordinary perspective close to the speed of light.

Indeed, I currently believe that the psychedelic experience is something which transcends typical explanation because everything within it is only vaguely relatable to what most sober hominoids would consider to be reality. Reality seems like the only thing that is actually the same between being sober and being under the influence of something that does not send you past reality- which some things do, but which I’ve yet to experience. Provided you are aware of what reality is, your physical set and setting will never change- only be distorted upon, or your perceptions of it drastically altered by that fact that your psyche is being vigorously twisted by the will of the molecular bounds between a substance of the correct chemical composition and the neurological chemicals within your brain which, alongside the neuro-electrical aspects of consciousness, are the very thing which generate your thoughts through their sheer interconnected complexity.

When the effects of substances are typically analyzed, the categories are often that of the mind and that of the body- what a drug user feels as a “head high” and a “body high”. A head high may be slowed or extremely fast thoughts, or creativity. A body high may be a feeling of extreme relaxation or of feeling so heavy that one can only reach for the cheetos in vain as your buddy takes the remote and moves it somewhere you are far too lazy to go for, leaving you to your fate of lethargically observing a documentary on the television relating to lions that roam the Great Australian Outback, having you contemplate the mindset of an aboriginal warrior consuming drugs before going to face these lions in unarmed combat.

I cannot describe the fashion in which I thought while I was under the influence of mushrooms at that time. Partially because meta-cognition is something very abstract and which takes much effort to fully explain in itself while sober, but mostly because it has been so long since I have been in a psilocybin-influenced state-of-consciousness. However, I can say that it did things to aspects of my personality, or perhaps simply my energy levels and impact of positive things upon me. Once the effects were verily upon me, I was hyper. I was energetic and almost indescribably happy.

But before this, I was simply… Content. Eager to learn what this whole mushroom yibbity yabbity was really all about.

My friend and I talked, I knew I was going to have mushrooms with him- with him not only in the sense that I would be under the influence of mushrooms and also under the influence of him, but that I would be under the influence of mushrooms while he is also under the influence of mushrooms. I don’t remember what we talked about. We put our portions of manna into containers meant for drinkable liquid and then doused them in lemon juice. The purpose of the lemon juice is for it to pre-convert the psilocybin in the mushrooms into psilocin so that ones body does not have to- the result is that the drugs hit you faster, harder, and for a shorter duration. In other terms, the effects of the sacrament are condensed because you are not actively converting the main psychoactive and instead it goes into your system more at once. Actually, I believe mine was in a brown bowl. It’s rather funny how memory can work like that- I’ve put my mushrooms and lemon juice in a glass on other occasions, and so it led me to think of my first experience in this same fashion- but the reality seems more likely to be that it was a bowl now that I am writing of the experience.

Through the tool of language, I symbolically asked the mushrooms and/or the universe of a couple of things. I asked primarily of for information or some form of enlightenment- I knew that I very much wished to take something out of my five-hour trip that I could keep within my mind that would overall impact my life in a positive fashion and to also retain whatever this abstraction could be. Happiness was another thing I asked of. I also requested that, while it was not my primary reason for the ingestion of the mushrooms, that some level of fun be had on my trip- if the mushrooms saw it as something fitting.

A bad trip was not something that I think I considered. Jumping out of a window due to perceiving large worm creatures was not something I would expect to occur, either. No, jumping out of windows seemed very much like something to occur with a drug like Salvia Divinorum instead of mushrooms. I did not have a bad trip, and sadness was not a part of my experience in any way. Before I gulped down my bitter, sour soup of lemon extract and dried mushrooms, my mind was very clear.

I had a laptop with me- and now that I think about it, that date was but a few days after Christmas, when I was gifted the laptop I am typing on at this moment. Indeed, this laptop and the laptop beside me during my first mushroom trip are one and the same. There was an internet connection which I used to contact those with which I held a relationship with online. In particular, I contacted privately a man who lives in Australia. He is a homosexual man and he, at the time, wrote computer programs in the python programming language as a hobby. He is a man that myself and my companion gave the label “That gay Australian python programmer” for when we refer to him. He was given information from me through the internet that I had just eaten mushrooms, and I asked if he had ever done such a thing. He had not, but he allowed me to passively talk to him as I prepared for the psilocybin to hit me.

I sat down in a comfortable chair after both me and my buddy had our drugs. The first thing that I noticed was that the walls began to breathe. Ecstatic emotion shivered down my body as I realized that the mushrooms were doing things to me. My fingers typed messages to my gay Australian programmer friend and my mouth let out words to inform my friend of what was happening. At first I had to make sure that the wall movement was not some form of a placebo, but soon I was verily convinced that it was really the work of what I had put into my body. Very interesting- how eating something can make the walls seem to move in such a fashion. The more I observed, the more sure I was that this was definitely an effect of the mushrooms.

So far so good. The mushrooms had given me something easy for me to describe and easy for a sober person to imagine- it was much like the result of optical illusions, like when one sees a spiral for long enough and then looks at a surface only to note that there were still odd movements. The breathing of the walls was definitely a subtle and more stereotypical thing to expect of hallucinogenic drug use. It was something I would have expected.

My knees unbent and my legs ceased to be limp as I got up. I moved about to see how I was adapting to this changing state of mind. Not too far from this moment did I notice something far less easy to describe. When I looked over to the wall opposite my friends door I witnessed a beautiful transformation of color which requires an understanding of what the wall looks like without the aid of drugs. It also serves as a rather touching story.

When he was a child, his mother wanted to paint something for him on that wall- I forgot what it was, and so I just asked him. “A pond, which would have had frogs.” is the information he exchanged to me when prompted. So the wall was to be a pond, and she used a sponge to paint it. Eventually, his mother came to believe that she wasn’t a good enough artist to accomplish the task, and she was very emotionally impacted by the thought. As the emotions had brought her to some degree of tears, he told her encouragingly that what she painted looked like beautiful mountains. She composed herself and added red stars atop the mountains.

As a result of that event, his wall had reddish brown triangles coming from the bottom composed of sponge-squares. You know that sponge-texture, right? Imagine that, especially at the edges of the color, there were holes where the wall was untouched by the paint with the same degree of holes upon the otherwise solid flat surface of a sponge- because that’s what it was. Above the mountains was light-blue sky, also composed of the same sponge-texture. The texture was undoubtedly beautiful.

As a result of my choice to partake of a psychedelic, his wall appeared to be fucking holographic. You know those holographic cards and such that could be used to form animations, right? Imagine that, especially at the edges of the color, everything was shifting in a fashion that was as if it was animated but at the same time not diverting too far from what it really looked like- because that’s what it looked like to me. The effect was absolutely astounding.

My eyes admired it for the moment when I first came across the effect. It was very alien from anything I could have imagined the mushrooms doing to my visual perceptions. The breathing walls were so simplistic- and then I was hit with this. At the same time, perhaps the odd cognitive effects of the mushrooms had taken hold of me. I looked around the area of color shifting- my friend had a bunk bed against that wall with the lower bunk missing. In its place was a table used as a desk with his laptop on it. My eyes scanned that area for signs that the laptop or some other light source could possibly be shining on the wall in a way that I was not consciously aware of.

There were no foreign sources of light. My focus shifted back to his wall. I was heavily awestruck by the experience. I conversed with my friend regarding what I was witnessing.

My body fell back into the comfortable chair. The conversation between me and my friend somehow turned into him talking about the fashion in which I am a unique individual. He stated how I am likely to exit the universe simply because of the degree to which I am unlike other conscious entities. I allowed a distinct effect of the mushrooms upon my body to be become more pronounced- it was an odd sensation felt all around in conjunction with my highly elevated mood. As I was being informed of my form of individuality, my informant began making hand motions around me. With his language explaining my escape from the universe and his fluid hand motions, my friend gave me the impression that I had indeed been separated from the rest of space or space-time somehow. It was as if there were a thin layer around me like either a force-field or space warping just outside my skin as to enclose me in a personal bubble disconnected from everything else. Of course, I didn’t believe in my mind that I was anywhere other than the chair in a room on planet Earth.

Shortly after, we trekked into the hallway outside and then into the bathroom adjacent his bedroom. Again, the alterations of psilocybin upon my visual field had left me in a state of complete amazement.

Time has not treated my memory of the event kindly, but I like to believe that simply entering the bathroom let into another reality. I was aware of where I was, who I was, and why I wasn’t quite how I would normally have been. I also knew the properties of the wallpaper in the room did not account for their gracious shape-shifting appearance. Once the experience is analyzed, it does seem that the wallpaper of the bathroom and sponge-painted mountains of the bedroom were very similar. For the bedroom, it was a beautiful shifting of the colors because of the texture. For the bathroom, it was an astonishing shifting of the repeating flower patterns which seemed due to their prominence and repetition around the room. The mountains were a wall to be looked at in awe- but the wallpaper surrounded the bathroom and encompassed my friend and I. The atmosphere was joyous and speckled with a rather indescribable feeling-

Most typically experienced emotions are very charged in descriptions, but at the same time relatable for a majority of people. But while influenced by mushrooms, there are feelings which can be somewhat explained, but at the same time are not just normal emotions extrapolated- they can be something completely alien, as if the spectrum of emotion has been given a new dimension. And so I was joyous, but at the same time I was energized and filled with a feeling that can only be described as “I am on mushrooms experiencing a new form of consciousness for the first time and I’m in this bathroom and the walls are currently one of, if not the most beautiful things I have ever witnessed.”- because everything we describe in our experiences is relative to everything else because the rest of reality is our medium for comparison- and even though it was a feeling or a sensation of the overall setting or atmosphere of this trip, it was completely incomparable to anything else.

After some discussion with my buddy about the properties of the wallpaper, we ended up sitting in his bathtub. There are two doors in his bathroom on opposite walls, I sat in the tub on the side with the door which we did not enter the room from, and so my amigo was to the left of me. My fingers traced all along the wet shower-head which was dangling down to my side as the man beside me playfully strummed his electric guitar. It sported a rather unprofessional paint job and was not plugged in- but neither of these things were seen as negative. My body was in a blissful laze, my eyes transfixed on the flowers laid flat against the wall as they were morphing in and out of position. Once I had my strange fix of caressing my friends bathing apparatus, I had to jokingly inform him that I no longer approved of him giving me drugs that would make me feel up his gross shower. We laughed and I came to a realization.

“We’re on mushrooms sitting inside an empty bathtub. I’m feeling the shower-head and you’re playing a guitar that isn’t even plugged in.”, I paused. “This is EXACTLY what the right-wing conservative Christians think us liberal drug users are doing!”, we shared another hearty laugh. Eventually I tore my hand permanently from its eerily sensual attraction to my friends shower head before we returned to his room.

There was a song I once heard in the past that I dearly wanted to find once again. I hopped on the laptop of my friend to discover a new song- the same which I’m listening to at this moment. The Pot by Tool. To this day this song is very special to us. This is when we busted out the paint. My friend had an interesting ritual of putting art around his walls while under the influence of substances. And so we designated portions of the wall for ourselves. My fingers dipped into the paint. I flicked. Woh.

I spoke his name- “I understand splatter art now!”, he chuckled and I flicked more green paint over his large pencil-drawn pac-man. We talked about art that is called art for the sake of art and made fun of a subculture known as hipsterism. Some of my paint went over into a larger area than I was intended to cover and he told me that I had done enough art for the moment, so as to stop us from going too far. I understood well enough and refrained myself from turning his entire wall into splatter art. In reality, the green paint didn’t cover too much, but it was over some of the other art on his wall.

During this time I was constantly going back and forth between the bathroom and the bedroom. Before I went into the bathroom alone, my friend told me not to get too engrossed in there and made sure I was in a good state of mind. The first time I went I stayed in there for quite a bit. It’s hard to say how long, because I didn’t look at time much like a sober person would. Especially when I was alone did the idea of time seem less and less applicable to anything. When I was in the bathroom, it was my private time alone with the effects of the mushrooms. At one point I looked into the mirror for a long period of time and I saw the distortions upon my facial features. To me, all these constant shifts in my appearance were like different paths in the future that I could take that would subtly impact how my face would turn out. They were all different possible realities for me to choose from.

There were knocks at the door.

“You doing alright in there?”,

“Yeah.”, I opened the door and I believe I went directly back into the bedroom. But my friend believes with a certain level of clarity that this was actually when we sat in the tub. Alright, we just concluded that we sat in the bathtub on two occasions.

So after that I would return to the bathroom for my private time every once and awhile, but that was likely the longest time I spent in there. It was nice going between the two settings- I would be with my buddy and we would be very connected and synchronously working on the other like a form of perpetual motion applied to our communication and exchange of information. We are so alike cognitively that is as if there is no neurological friction between our brains. We fluently understand eachothers mental models and very pathways of thought that when sober, we spiral into a form of informational singularity where we both say “We know exactly how this conversation will progress from this point.”. When we are high on marijuana it is even more grand. At this moment though, we were both under the influence of beautiful psilocybin- and the result was an unexplainable connection between two human beings.

I put on the album “If” by Mindless Self Indulgence and painted on the small piece of wall between his door frame and closet. The result was a tree with blood and mycelium like things as its roots, and in the middle was the word “If”. Straight red lines and white organics beneath the tree on the left and right were meant to be contrasts to one another- at the same time that I painting this, I remember imagining the tree in different frames, as if it were a part of a film reel. Something were there in my consciousness regarding a non-traditional interpretation of time. Whatever the specifics of the thought were have escaped my memory through the course of the same concept which I contemplated.

Small shifts were noticed in my art as I slowly crafted it into material existence against the surface of the wall- minute little phases similar to the magnificence of the sponge-mountains when I first observed them. In terms of magnitude of course, it was less than a moderate effect. Cognitive effects had been reduced to only a glowing feeling and a surplus of happiness.

Throughout the experience there were heights of more extreme cognitive shifts- such as when my friend was on the phone. The thought process and change in the very form of thinking is currently too lost in time for decent retrospection, let alone description- as such the “feelings” are what I have described.

Needless to say. there were little to no cognitive shifts left over that are not accounted for by a generalized happiness and excitement when me and my friend left the house for a walk, and if there were any more visual ones then it was only that everything was a bit brighter.

Happiness was definately not only a highlight of the mushroom trip, but also something I took from it- I understood that there were things I couldn’t control, yet happiness was still possible. Not only was it still possible, but happiness was something I should make a goal of for myself. Passively during the trip, I thought about my ex, whom I was still highly attached to emotionally. Normally, thoughts of her would demolish me- my mind would spiral into negative loops because of how much I missed her, because I knew how unlikely it was to find someone like her, and because of how I felt I could have stopped everything from falling apart. We dated for a short period of time- definitely less than four months- but I truly feel as if I’d never been happier. Ever. She came to me as I was pulling out of a dark place in my mind- when I would spend every day going to school and communicating but hardly ever feeling real. To some degree, possibly a rather high degree, I was dissociated from the impact of the beauty of my life and from emotion for most of my time before we were friends. And so she elevated me- she snuffed out all the negativity residing within my psyche. And when things broke down, I fell further than I was before.

She was the only thing, I realized sometime around the painting period, which catalyzed my ability to recognize beauty in life and the universe more than the effects of the drug I’ve ingested. The drug showed me I may never experience that degree of happiness again, but happiness was still something to be sought. Perhaps this was an influence on the conversation me and my friend had on our walk.

Never once do I really recall thinking about the girl I was romantically involved with during the bulk of the trip. My lovestrickeness was moreso with the girl I was hung up on. As the feet of my companion and I bounced joyfully down the street, we somehow got to the topic of my current romantic involvement. At the time, I didn’t see her as a complete dead end. But we had been together for an awful long time, and she gave me only a fraction of the happiness that my ex gave. At the same time, it’s important to note that my girlfriend of the time of the trip was rather psychotic- her hallucinations showed that we had very different interpretations of the universe, and that they were incompatible because I believed her visions were related to neuro-chemistry and not spirits. It was understandable though- her system of belief was given to her overtime by her mental issues and by the people that she spent most of her time with- which would be the ghost-hunting grandmother she lives with because her mom was a crack-addict.

Perhaps I mentioned how she used to talk about marriage with me when I was uncomfortable with the very thought- seeing as, at the time, we had been together for less than four months. With our afterglow of psilocybin, we might have gone down a slope to the lake by his home. Around that area, and on our walk back to his residence, I had him make me a promise. In our heightened perception of the colors around us and that lingering mental clarity he said that no matter what the circumstances, if me and my girlfriend of the time were before him in the act of getting married, he would not hold his tongue. He would rise and say my name, followed my something similar to, “We made a promise after taking psychedelic mushrooms that, were this day to ever come, that I would object to this.”. We laughed and chattered down the street and into his house.

Edit: Fin

Submitted by - Anonymous

• Drifting - "I noticed was that the walls began to breathe."
• Geometry - "the mountains was light-blue sky, also composed of the same sponge-texture. The texture was undoubtedly beautiful."
• Colour shifting - "I looked around the area of color shifting"
• Emotion enhancement - "my highly elevated mood"
• Delusion - "I had indeed been separated from the rest of space or space-time somehow."
• Novelty enhancement - "I’m in this bathroom and the walls are currently one of, if not the most beautiful things I have ever witnessed."