Experience:3.5g psilocybe cubensis - Relinquishing of Material Chains/Fear and Desolation

Context: I had never tripped before, unless you include a failed attempt at a 30x salvia trip (will not get into right now), this was my very first experience with psychedelics ever. I didn’t really know what to expect, I had done mild amounts of research but wanted to be surprised. I knew how much was a safe amount and I knew that it would last multiple hours. I bought a quarter of cubensis mushrooms from a reliable source, they were dried and smelled quite disgusting. I measured out 3.5g on a scale and was sent into another dimension of fear facing and love actualisation.

T+00 - 01:30:

Seeing as I had never really engaged myself in psychedelics before, I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect. The friend who sold them to me had only tried them a couple times and told me that I would experience tracers, melting visuals, and that the world would breathe. He wasn’t very detailed, but it was enough that I had a general idea of what I was walking into. He told me it was a big commitment, seven hours at the most he said. I ate them raw, but would fill my mouth with some Arizona iced tea to aid the disgusting aroma and texture that the mushrooms had. I almost vomited while trying to eat them. I was sitting at my computer on TinyChat with some friends, they enjoyed watching me eat them I think. I waited about 20 minutes and then I smoked a bowl, hoping it would help with the sudden alteration in my bodily sensations. The first thing I noticed was this kind of writhing feeling, like all my cells were moving around in my body and like I could feel every little micromovement they made. At first this was unsettling, but as I settled into the experience I became more comfortable with it.

I got up to use the restroom, at this point I hadn’t noticed any changes in the external world, only in my body, and when I got into my robin’s egg blue bathroom I noticed that the normal textures of my walls were different. They were sort of drifting and swirling around, at this point I was getting very excited because up until then I had been very skeptical about the “visuals” that people talk about with psychedelics. I had thought that, of course, most of them would simply be implied and that if I stared at them long enough they would simply go away. Peeing was very difficult, my bladder was full but it took me a great amount of effort to get my urine out. After I was finished I turned around to see my mirror, and my reflection. I stopped immediately, that wasn’t me in the mirror, was it? No, couldn’t be, it didn’t look like me, but at the same time the person I was staring at shared all of my physical characteristics. I stood there for a few minutes, mesmerized at how this strange person was staring back at me through this glass rectangle. When he moved, I moved, I knew that he was me, but it didn’t look right, he looked too real. I realized that I could not distinguish between myself and the reflection, it looked to be too much in the same plane of existence as I was.

I got myself out of the bathroom, [Tiffany] (a friend) had warned me about staring into the mirror before I ingested, so I decided it was probably for the best. I didn’t feel frightened by this new me, only confused. How did he get into my bathroom? Why couldn’t I touch him? I moved on, sat back down in my chair, turned on some Tycho and smoked another bowl, which settled out my crawling bones and flesh under my skin. My head started to feel light, at around T+1:00 I decided that I needed to get out of my place, the walls were breathing and everything was sort of swimming, I looked at my table and it was bending and bulging around in ways that a normal coffee table was definitely not supposed to do. I got my phone, keys, knife, whatever, put my headphones on, and opened up the door into the screaming outside.

T+1:30 - 5:50:

When I stepped foot out the door the world was immediately changed. The houses before me were swinging and moving with the breeze, rising and falling, incredibly saturated, the sky emanated a gorgeous purple hue as the sun began to set behind the slowly drifting clouds. Cars whizzed by, leaving tracers far behind them, at the time I called these “trails of energy,” I believed that I could sense the movements of the universe, that I was now in the ethereal pull and push of the great expanding everything. My body felt as though it were rooted to the ground, melding and swirling with the concrete under my feet, but my head was somewhere else entirely. It seemed to me that my head was at least two feet above my body, that my eyes were higher, I could not really feel myself doing physical things. I turned to face the direction of the park, where I knew that I must go, for that was where I would find the beauty I so desired to consume.

While walking, I couldn’t feel myself moving, I just thought about walking and my body moved perfectly, effortlessly. I realized where I was, what I was doing, and how incredible it felt and I got a wave of incredible euphoria up my spine. Now sure of what I must do, that I must use this power that I had been granted to discover the darkness in me, I made my way to the park. The world was highly saturated, color shifts were mildly apparent in the houses and flowers, which looked to be alive and dancing in the wind. When I reached the park I walked slowly around trees, they looked as though they had faces, young and old. Full of thousands of emotions and years of wisdom, they towered over my reeling form, breathed life into my confused mind. They were beautiful and mesmerizing. I stepped through this dark and brooding forest, filled with beams of light and slight fractals, my vision was highly improved, everything looked far more detailed than it had previously. I went through the gazebo and sat down at the fountain, watching the trees breathe and sway, music pumping through my body. At this point I felt an immense sense of love and compassion for the world around me, thoughts careening through my head, I could pick out any thought process I wanted to and expand or contract it as much as I pleased. I realized that the majesty of nature was unsurpassed by any other sight on the planet, that this, this was perfection. I started texting [Mel], telling her I hoped that she could see how magical the world was, that she could feel the love and wonder that I felt. Behind me a homeless man was standing on one of the concrete platforms around the edge of the fountain, shouting some nonsense, but I couldn’t hear him.

I sat there for a while and just watched the world move, completely bamboozled by how everything felt and looked. I kept thinking that I wanted more, it wasn’t enough, even though it was insane, I knew that I was still too grounded for my liking. I walked about the rose garden, staring at all the dancing flowers. It suddenly occurred to me that I still wanted more closeness with the galaxies, that whatever I was or wherever I was wasn’t enough. I was compelled to eat part of a rose that I held in my hand, it fluttered around and breathed and sighed and laughed, enticing me to devour it and join it in its togetherness with the universe. I ate three of its petals slowly, lovingly, they didn’t taste like anything noticeable, after I was eating them I was really confused and started laughing at how fucking ridiculous it was that I was eating flowers. I got up and left the rose garden.

Upon reaching the street, I wasn’t sure which way to go. I was met with a large greyhound and its owner, who was checking their phone. I stared at the dog and cocked my head to one side, thinking Which way should I go? It looked at me for a moment, turned its head from right to left to look at both directions, and then nodded to my right with a bark. I nodded and thought Thank you, wise one. The dog simply barked again and I went on my merry way. I started laughing again because I could not believe that I just took directions from a dog. What was I even doing with my life?

While walking down the street I was infinitely interested in all things around me, nothing was boring, the whole world teemed with immeasurably fascinating organisms, all which contained information that I could not possibly understand, but that I wanted to anyway. I was strolling down a neighborhood street, I wasn’t very far from home, maybe a mile and a half, and the friend that sold them to me called me. I picked up, he asked me how I was doing, I said I was absolutely splendid. He asked if I had taken them and I replied in the affirmative, I told him that while I was walking I had decided that I didn’t need to be so caught up in material wealth, that all these “things” I “needed” were meaningless, that I shouldn’t be frustrated with the way things are incomplete because my life is still changing, I am still changing, I told him that I’ve decided to be less rushed in my approach, that I need to focus on learning how to love myself and my fellow man, that I was done whining and worrying about petty things that meant absolutely nothing. He was a bit confused and just told me that those were good things to realize. He started to talk but then I told him that I must go, I had important matters to attend to.

I walked back to the park, sat on the swings for a bit, it was very fun to swing. I thought about all the aspects of my life, who I was, where I was, what I was, when I was. I decided I was still in a transition period, that I shouldn’t be taking life so seriously, that I needed to take a step back and try to find my place in the world before rushing into anything serious. After a bit of time swinging, it was starting to get dark, so I went home. I was very excited about all the wonderful things I was thinking, I wanted to share it with people, I wanted to share this beautiful experience with someone. My neighbor was a safe place, usually, I knocked on his door, eager to tell him all of my new thoughts. He opened the door, and immediately everything was wrong. His apartment looked different, furniture had been moved around, I got a flood of bad vibes and negative emotions, his face was wet with saline, he looked years older, lifetimes of hardships etched along the laugh lines, the furrowed brow. He told me that he was going through a difficult time and that he was going to try to stay cool, I was freaked out and told him I was sorry and that I had to go, that I didn’t realize I was intruding, I apologized again and fled into my apartment. I was terrified, horrified, everything was wrong, everything was different, I felt like I was intruding on the world, like I saw something I wasn’t supposed to see.

I paced around my apartment, which now felt oppressive, so I decided I would get up and leave again to face my fears and darkness that was flooding my brain. I stepped out into the now pitch city, walked to the park again, stood under trees and thought about all the danger and darkness in my life. I faced my fear of blackness and emptiness, the creaking forest unsafe, but I had placed myself there and slowly adjusted to the sense of urgency and danger. After staying there for a bit I felt a surge of pain and discomfort up my body, like the poison was taking some new toll, upon feeling this immense physical discomfort I realised that I needed to return home, my body was warning me that I was about to fall back down to Earth from the stratosphere, and I wanted to be in a safe place for this to happen. While walking back I saw an old man pushing a shopping cart with what looked like a child and a white dog in it. He stopped at the corner, took the dog out, left the baby, and walked down the street. I was far in front of him and very frightened at this point so I decided just to leave it. I quickened my pace and finally reached my home. It still didn’t feel right, nothing felt right. I sat down on the couch and tried to watch Jeff, Who Lives at Home, a movie that has (in the past) made me feel good, but it didn’t exactly work.

T+6:00 - 9:30:

Most of this is a blur, I just sat at my computer on Skype talking to my friends and smoking bowl after bowl. I ate most of my leftovers from the previous night, but I didn’t enjoy eating them. They felt weird, my body still felt weird, but most of the visuals had disappeared by this point. I told them all about my experience and what had happened, they kept me awake and I felt better after I had talked for a good two hours. Once I was finished with the Skype call and I felt safe enough to go back to bed, I showered, got undressed, and slipped into the sheets. They felt physically awesome, but I was still emotionally uncomfortable, the world felt oppressive, so I just tried to think about all the good things I had learned as I drifted off to sleep.

Submitted by - Phantasmagoria

   "I joined my energies with the ether,
   soaring upwards to the heavens,
   cosmos and blinking comets,
   stars circling my head.
             
   So I hung in the pitch filled opacity,
   searching far and wide for it,
   the ultimate, selfless end,
   to be found in the infinity."

• Visual acuity enhancement - All textures and objects were very highly detailed to a point I hadn't ever noticed before in my lifetime before.
• Colour enhancement - Massive amounts of saturation to the external environments, so much so that the sky looked purple instead of blue.
• Pattern recognition enhancement - Seeing faces in trees and in houses.
• Colour shifting - Movement of sky's blue/purple hues to the trees surrounding me.
• Drifting
  • Breathing - Seeing my walls and "the world" breathe with my heartbeat.
  • Flowing - Swirling textures on my bathroom walls or in grass.
• Tracers - "Seeing the energy" of objects that were moving.
• Transformations - Entire shifts of landscapes and the dancing of my lamps inside of my apartment, the difference in my neighbour's face, the way the trees looked like massive behemoths instead of regular trees.
• External hallucination - Superimposing of mood and positivism onto the world, seeing the rose as a living being, or alien, or whatever, having a telepathic conversation with the dog.
• Emotion enhancement - My mood was greatly lifted into a state of love and destruction of bias towards the world, all my emotional reactions were powerfully heightened and exaggerated.
• Thought acceleration - Quickness and decisiveness of thoughts, making choices became very easy, I was living purely in the moment the entire time.
• Rejuvenation - Extreme emotional euphoria and happiness with my state of being.
• Empathy, love, and sociability enhancement - The strong desire to share my wonderful experience with my neighbour, when I am usually very reserved and introverted (more so than usual) during psychedelic experiences, how much love I felt for the world around me.
• Thought connectivity See above.
• Anxiety suppression - It is typically very difficult for me to act in the moment, but during this trip I had absolutely no qualms about making decisions and I had zero social anxiety since I was around people in the park.
• Personal bias suppression - I was able to objectively analyse my life and personality without any thought to my emotional state or ego, it was pure analysis without any bias. Clear, logical, straightforward.
• Novelty enhancement
• Time distortion - When I started falling out of the time dilation (I think that makes more sense for this trip) I got really freaked out because it had felt like mere minutes and I wasn't quite ready to leave that state of mind yet.
• Introspection - Heavy amounts of time spent picking out and expanding individual thought processes, lots of focus on who I was and what I was doing with my life, very little outrospection.
• Conceptual thinking - Purely abstract thoughts, I didn't have one regular concrete idea the entire time.
• Autonomous voice communication - Left and right brain direct communication, limbic system acting on its own but not hindering logical capabilities, ability to see deep into my fears and desires.
• Unity and interconnectedness - Feeling as though I was one with the galaxies, eating those rose petals, being weird.
• Cognitive euphoria
• Anxiety - When I saw my neighbour.
• Paranoia - When I felt like I was intruding on the world simply by existing.
• Laughter - Uncontrollable fits of giggles.
• Tactile enhancement - All textures were INTENSE MAN.
• Bodily control enhancement - Needing absolutely no focus on my body to make it do exactly what I wanted without any issues. I definitely have had trouble walking on phens, but never on shrooms, it's always super controlled.
• Perception of decreased weight - Probably more of a lack of focus on my body, but I felt like I was just a floating head.
• Appetite suppression - Eating, the idea of eating, and digesting was very difficult to stomach.