DOSE:	1.5 g	oral	Mushrooms
	1 g	smoked	Cannabis

BODY WEIGHT:

125 lb

It was a chilly september day. My friend and I had obtained some extremely potent shrooms from our friend who kept warning us that these shrooms were more powerful than anything he had ever come across. We took his word with a grain of salt and then drove back to my empty house for a night of fun.

I had taken shrooms once before but it was a very small dose and didn't really effect me too much. So I figured this time I would eat more. I put about 1.5 grams on a taco and ate it pretty quickly. My friend had about 2.5 grams. It was my friends first time trying shrooms but we were both experienced with other psychedelics.

Within 15 minutes of finishing the taco I started to feel nauseated but I wasn't tripping yet. I couldn't really tell if it was anxiety or nausea I was feeling but I figured both would be cured by smoking a bit of weed. So I suggested to my friend that we went upstairs to smoke a bowl or two to settle our mutual queasy feelings.

We were in the middle of smoking a bowl when suddenly I felt like I was becoming very large and my house was shrinking. My friend also felt the same way at the same time as me so we stopped smoking and started walking around my house, exclaiming about how big we felt. The roof felt like it was just inches above my head (although it was nowhere near - I have a very spacious house and the roof is very high) and the staircase to my upstairs balcony seemed extremely small. We began walking towards my patio door. We intended on going outside to see how big we felt outdoors but upon approaching the patio door we realized it was very dark out. And one glimpse into the dark outdoors blew us into the most intense bad trip we've ever felt.

My friend first said 'Dude it looks really scary outsi-' but I interrupted him by saying 'Yeah I know. Its kind of freaking me out. Lets go do something else.' I was getting more and more fearful of the outdoors with each passing second. 'Its really scary out there' my friend kept repeating. I suggested we go back upstairs and look for funny things on the internet to keep our minds off of the scary outdoors. We got to my computer and I turned on the monitor just to be greeted by some really intense visuals. My computer screen was warping all over the place and I couldn't read anything it said. The visuals made me feel so dizzy and out of it that I, without warning, started vomiting uncontrollably all over my bedroom floor. My friend was terrified by this. He cowered into the corner of the room covering his ears all while crying. The vomit I expelled consisted of taco meat and mushrooms so I came to the conclusion that since I puked out the shrooms, I woud no longer trip. And that was true for about ten minutes. I felt completely sober, not even high despite the weed we smoked. I tried calming my friend down by telling him everything was going to be fine. He didn't believe me. And after a couple of minutes when I started tripping again, I didn't believe myself either.

My friend and I were both freaking out. We couldn't leave my room because all the lights were off outside of it. My living room was completely dark and this sudden irrational fear of the dark was completely devestating our trip . My friend suggested we watch anime to get our minds off of things. I dislike anime but I agreed to watch it because I was desperate to rid myself of this overwhelming anxiety and panic. We put on an episode of 'Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood' and watched it from my bed quietly. It made absolutely no sense. I could not follow the plot of each episode at all. Everything they were saying in the show was complete gibberish to me (despite it being in English) and my mind felt so overwhelmed by everything that was going on. I could not focus on the show and the trippy japanese animation techniques were making me feel sick so I closed my eyes.

Suddenly I was in a different world. The closed-eye visuals I was having were unfathomably intense. Everything seemed so glitchy to me. There were geometric patterns just swirling around in my vision and that too was freaking me out. I opened my eyes after what seemed like hours and found my friend completely asleep. I figured he must've blacked out or something and I was kind of releived because his presence was freaking me out when he was awake. So I got up from the bed and left my room.

The darkness made no difference to me because I was already at the maximum anxiety that a human could feel. Nobody else in the world could have felt more terrified than I did in that moment. I turned on all the lights and began pacing around my house. I just felt this overwhelming sense of impending doom and I could not focus on getting rid of it. I laid down on my couch in the TV room and went to hell and back in my mind. Each thought I had would slip from my mind within a matter of seconds. All I remember thinking was 'Am I going to be stuck like this?' I had completely forgotten about the fact that I had taken a psychedelic drug. I was tripping so, so hard and I just wanted it to end but minutes felt like hours and to make things worse I couldn't even remember my own name or where I was.

I decided I must kill myself. There was no other way out. I was convinced that I was going to be stuck like this forever. So I stood up and started walking to my kitchen with the intention of finding a knife and stabbing myself with it. But on my way to the kitchen, a sudden burst of reasoning hit me and I convinced myself that I shouldn't commit suicide. So I laid back down on the couch and watched the clock for what seemed like forever. The idea of killing myself came back, and next thing I knew, I was walking to my kitchen again, with the intention of finding a knife and stabbing myself with it. But on my way there I was hit with a sudden burst of reasoning and stopped myself. So I laid back down and it was then that I realized that I should probably kill myself.

I was stuck in a suicidal time loop with the cognitive level of a three year old. I kept thinking 'I want to die. No I don't. Yes I do. Maybe I don't. But I do.' Suddenly like a gift from god, in this psychotic state of anxiety and panic, I began speaking to myself. 'If this trip does not end by 6 a.m. Then I WILL kill myself.' So that was my plan. I laid on that couch for 3 hours (which feels like years when you're tripping) crying and screaming and moaning for it to end. Everything was just awful. There is no other way to describe it. So many thoughts were racing through my mind, all of which made no sense to me. My thoughts felt like a relentless storm of bullets and my consciousness was the one suffering from it.

6 o'clock rolls around and I had slightly come down but I was still a mess. I stood up and started cleaning my house because it made me feel a little bit better. Afterwards I kneeled down by the toilet in my bathroom and tried forcing myself to puke because at the time I thought my anxiety was just manifested nausea. I had never felt such a strong feeling of terror before so I never made the connection during the trip that it was just fear. The whole time I thought it was nausea. I never got myself to puke and I blacked out in front of the toilet. I woke up about an hour later and woke up my friend. We talked about how that was the worst experience we've ever had in our lives. Even after the trip was over we were still scared. I could see it in my friends face. We were just exposed to the most horrifying emotions and they carried over into our sober lives.

I stopped taking all drugs. Later that same month I had a panic attack in class after my friend mentioned something profound about the concept of time. I stood up and ran out of the building. I sprinted to my mom's house across town and once she let me in and saw how much of a mess I was, she called the doctor asking for advice. The doctor said I should go to the emergency room. Neither my mom or myself knew that I was experiencing a panic attack. I wasn't coherent enough to tell her how I was feeling so she assumed I was having a psychotic episode or an existential crisis. I stripped off all my clothes because I felt like I was overheating and I turned the shower on cold and just sat in it crying. All of this just because my friend mentioned something about the concept of time! My mom refused to take me to the ER because she knew they would admit me to the psych ward once I got there. After about an hour my mom discovered that I was simply having a panic attack. She explained it to me and it slightly calmed me down but I couldn't feel myself recovering. She had been prescribed Clonazepam as an anti-convulsant but she knew it had anti-anxiety properties so I took 1mg. I felt so much better. Every ounce of fear in my was completely gone and I fell asleep very quickly.

I started going to psychotherapy. I became addicted to the Clonazepam. I could not go a day without thinking about that terrible shroom trip and the panic attack that resulted from it. Without the medicine I was always on the verge of another panic attack. After about 4 months of going on the Clonazepam (which wasn't even prescribed to me) and getting off it, I decided I needed to quit cold turkey. I stopped taking it and felt very anxious during the days following but the therapy was helping me immensely.

It has been 6 months since the shroom trip / panic attack and 2 months since I stopped taking Clonazepam. I am finally back to my old self. My irrational anxiety and panic attacks are completely gone. Although the shroom trip was, quite frankly, a living nightmare, I am still grateful for the experience because it taught me a lot about myself. Coping with generalized anxiety and panic disorder for half a year was the most difficult thing I ever had to endure. But it is finally over and I am writing this story as a celebration of my recovery.

Shrooms aren't for everyone. I do not plan on ever taking them again. They can be extremely powerful and completely take you off guard. Even when the trip was over, I found myself having even more difficult experiences.

Exp Year: 2013	ExpID: 102366
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Sep 4, 2018	Views: 2,240
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