DOSE:

100 seeds

oral

Morning Glory

(fresh)

BODY WEIGHT:

135 lb

Morning Glory Number Foury

Hi! I'm fascinated by psychedelics so naturally that means I'm -extra- fascinated by obscure, unfashionable psychedelics. As it turns out I've eaten morning glory seeds on a few occasions, and I've written about three of them, so with any luck I can think of something helpful to tell you if you're thinking of trying morning glories, or just want to find out what they do to people out of curiousity, or -something-. Somewhere in here there's gotta be something that'll help someone! It's -long-, after all.

And for that I apologize. :< If you want to just read the exciting parts, I won't mind.

My overall impression of LSA is that yes, it is psychedelic; it's abolutely a Real Drug and anyone who thinks that the only reason to seek it out is desperation or stupidity is a weiner. Is it a FUN psychedelic? Well, all psychedelics are fun, if you're in the right frame of mind -- right? I mean, if you're posed to enjoy whatever is about to happen to you, whatever it is. If you're in the -mood- for it. I guess I should try to explain what I mean somewhat...

My second morning glory trip -- the second one documented herein -- was the 'best trip' in terms of sheer psychedelic fireworks. It was a blast. But I'd also taken about 4 grams of mushrooms much earlier in the night that time, so who knows how much of the trip the seeds were responsible for? I had hardly tripped on those mushrooms but if the combination -was- responsible for the trip that resulted, then take heed: that's a -good- combination! ^-^

Note that I smoked a lot of cannabis throughout the second and third experiences [documented below, understand] which, yes, -helped.- In fact I don't plan to take LSA without cannabis ever ever again, at least, not soon; pot Took The Edge Off marvelously (and there -was- an edge, although it was a fractal-stretching-spiral-intellectual edge rather than, like, speedy, you know?) and if there's one real reason for LSA's unpopularity I suspect it's that it's so hard to take on its own.

Which isn't to say I don't think you could achieve some absolutely transcendant results on LSA alone if you were determined and took the time to experiment with it. I've personally only done it about five times and want to do it a few dozen more before I'll feel qualified to make any generalizations about the trip at all; so when you encounter such a generalization in the write-ups below, please keep in mind that I don't know what I'm talking about. ^-^

But I will, from my own humble experience, say this: LSA is subtle and trippy, magical and mysterious, and a little bit tricky and dangerous. It is not simply an inferior LSD: I've done LSD, and I'd like to do it again, but I'd like to do LSA again too. I think it might be -really- neat to combine them sometime. Just on LSA's own merits, see? Because it is a -different drug- from LSD, not simply a version of LSD which is less potent per weight or more likely to produce an undesirable trip.

But I'm done with getting my LSA by chomping up seeds, for now -- after I had an intensely unpleasant gastrointestinal episode involving ten hawaiian baby woodrose seeds, I decided it might actually be worth taking the time and effort to do an LSA extraction for once (which I haven't got around to yet). Well, actually, I already assumed it'd be worth the effort, I just hadn't thought it would be -necessary-. Maybe it's not, but I'm sure I'll enjoy it. ^-^

I've been messing with Syrian Rue lately, and I definitely want to give 'LSAyahuasca' a shot. I've read that LSA in combination with a MAOI can produce an eighteen-hour trip, and I find it very very difficult to imagine what it would be like to trip on morning glories and harmaline from the moment you get up til bedtime. Sheesh! But then, I've never done DOB...

Right! Three experiences in two write-ups. Note that I wrote the first write-up after writing the second one, so while it's about earlier trips than the third one, its narrative has a little more perspective on the experience (although not as much as I have now, of course :D ) -- or is it simply less accurate? :O

Here we go! Weee!

Thursday, January 15 2004, 03:28 PM
Morning Glory / Mushroom Story

Hey. Just because I never wrote it down, I'm gonna try to write about my first two experiences with Morning Glory. I posted my third one a while ago, but I'd like to submit a 'retrospective/summary' report including all three and there's just no real work to be done at my job at the moment so what the hell, I can take fifteen minutes to dwell on unrecorded trips past.

Let's see what I can remember about my first encounter with LSA. Back in the day, when drugs weren't available to me very often, I'd researched them less overall and I did them infrequently -- I'd only smoked weed, in fact (I might have had my one Dramamine trip already but it does not count [it was like hell don't do it]) -- I found myself feeling compelled to eat a bunch of Asher's mom's Morning Glory seeds. I was super curious about them, having read a few experience reports and also banking on the notoriety of LSD, which I'd never tried -- although I didn't know at the time quite how different LSA is from LSD, and I had researched the latter much more than the former.

It was a summer night, I believe, and a bunch of us were hanging out at Asher's place. So I went out and I picked something like 60 to 100 soft, green, immature seeds. I tried crushing them in a mortar and pestle but they were too squishy. I took the ones I had managed to crush, mixed them with water, chugged it down and gagged, to the amusement of those around me. I took the rest of the seeds, fifty or so, put them in a folded-over piece of bread and followed everyone off to Asher's room where we laid around and I munched my seed sandwich.

So I finished the snack and lazed around a bit. After an hour or two I felt very stoned, very heavy, and pretty sick. The nausea crept up on me slowly -- at first I thought it was my imagination, but it intensified after half an hour or so into the 'oh no, it's not my imagination after all' realm -- but I never vomited, and it never got so bad that I thought I would. I sprawled on Asher's floor moaning occasionally and talking very little while I waited patiently for the seeds to come on.

I was feeling some effects at this point although I didn't have much of a context for them. I was feeling pretty stoned and content, and definitely lethargic. The sick-feeling passed within about two hours, but when about three hours had gone by with no overt effects I started to feel disappointed that I wasn't tripping yet. I figured if the seeds hadn't come on in three hours they weren't going to, which is actually dead wrong -- LSA has a different curve from LSD and can indeed take several hours to peak. It can creep up on you.

So I was very surprised when at about the four-hour mark I started to get very very intense tactile hallucinations that were comparable to my entire body being electrified in pulses, or waves -- imagine a sine wave growing in intensity towards the middle and dropping off again towards the end. Now imagine that sine wave interfacing with all your nerve endings at once. It was -weird-. I had only an inkling of it at first... sort of a mild body-buzz, thrumming softly, which disappeared. I said, 'woah'. My companions, Asher and Cyan0sis I believe (and possibly a few other folks), looked at me and asked what was going on. I said I didn't know yet.

Then it came back, stronger -- like 'v-v-vm-vmm-vmm-vmm-VUM-VUM--vmm-vmm-vm', like that. That was how it felt, or how it sounded, or how it would have sounded if it was sound instead of sensation. You know? Anyway, it was kind of terrible. When it was building in strength I wasn't sure how far it would go -- each resurgence had a stronger and stronger peak, and when it got really strong I would lose coordination and drop whatever I was holding (although that could have been simply from surprise at the sensation). I was a little bit afraid that if it got much stronger I'd come apart, or die, or pass out or something. 'Fuck,' I thought, 'have I poisoned myself? Is this the feeling of my organs dying? Is tripping on morning glory a hoax?' I didn't personally know anyone who'd tripped on LSA and I was starting to get worried.

'Guys,' I said, 'if I pass out, call an ambulance, okay?' I was feeling pretty paranoid. They asked if I was okay and I was. 'Geez,' Cyan0sis said, 'the you of a year ago would be laughing at you right now.' He was right, he would have been.

Anyway, so after a few minutes I realized the body buzz wasn't gonna kill me. I hadn't had any visuals yet so I decided to play with my LED flashlight. When I turned it on it was pointed at me and bam -- out of nowhere -- 'VUMVUMVUM!!' There was the body-buzz, suddenly hitting me with incredible intensity. I yelped and dropped the flashlight, and it went away. 'Weird!' I thought. With some experimentation I discovered that the body buzz came on whenever I shone the light in my eyes. I don't know how to explain that, but it's what was happening.

So being very careful to keep the light pointed away from myself I shone it around the room and it kind of amused me more than it usually would have, but I was still fairly disappointed with these seeds. I knew I'd taken a small dose so I wasn't expecting to really trip anyway but I think I hadn't thought of the seeds as a 'real drug' -- it's an easy mistake to make with legal psychedelics. We tend to rely on drug legislation to know which drugs have, qualitatively, the strongest effects. Well guess what, drug legislation has *no idea*. So when I -did- start getting effects, especially ones I wasn't entirely enjoying, it kind of caught me off-guard.

Eventually the scary sine-wave body-buzzes stopped. It was about five or six hours since I took the seeds now and I wasn't expecting any further effects, so I closed my eyes and tried to go to sleep.

'Wow!' I said. 'I'm watching a spinning multi-armed spiral mandala divided into discrete cells of primary red, green and blue!' Maybe I didn't say it just like that, but I was! I was getting this one geometric closed-eye visual -- my first ever! -- and I was content to watch it for a long time. It was really pretty and unique -- high-resolution and pixel-perfect, not at all dreamy or amorphous. I've seen people describe LSA's 'computer-graphic closed-eyes' before, and there they were. Eventually, though, I think I fell asleep.

I came out of that experience unsure if I'd ever try morning glory again. If it was going to be that very same trip every time, the only thing that could possibly bring me back to it were the closed-eyes I noticed at the end -- I figured that if I'd been watching for them the whole time there were probably more near the experience's apparent peak, and I wondered what forms they'd take at higher doses. But neat geometric pictures in primary colours weren't really worth the bizarre body buzz and the feeling of having poisoned myself, I decided, so it was a while before I ever tried it again.

The truth is I was so scared off by that experience that I would've had to be in an altered state of mind to try it again, and one fine, cold night just a few weeks ago, I sure was.

==================================
A happy fellow named r00t had furnished myself and a few friends (Asher, Wizdom, Asher's sister Jenn and Jenn's boyfriend Pete) with some mushrooms. I was excited -- I love mushrooms, and I hadn't tripped on them in months -- and scarfed down my two or three grams eagerly.

On the whole, we all expected to trip much harder on the mushrooms than we did, but that's a different story. I went out to smoke a bit of weed a couple of times, and a few people joined me at that endeavour. I did have fun -- a lot of good thoughts and conversations, many of which were distinctly shroomy, and a very mellow, warm come-down on Jenn's bed listening to Portishead in her room, all candle-lit. It was a nice way to spend the night but I had wanted to *trip*, too!

So four AM came around. We'd eaten our mushrooms around midnight or so, and everyone was feeling like they'd run their course. Asher had been very quiet the whole time, thinking to herself and possibly watching Radical Closed-Eyes, and she later described the mushroom's presence as feeling like 'someone you'd want to sit down and have tea with.' I mention this because it was Asher's first mushroom trip ever. It was Wizdom's too, and he had a few near-open-eyes but otherwise mostly threshold effects (as far as I know). Jenn and Peter took a smaller dose and tripped very little if at all. Most everyone wanted to try it again sometime, possibly at a higher dose, although the doses we took really should have worked better than they did. Mushroom potency is so hard to predict or control... but I digress.

The point is, it was 4:00AM and I realized 4:20 was coming up fast. But who would smoke up with me? Was it really time for bed? I went into this night expecting to trip hard and hadn't, so I was wrestling with my dashed expectations. Suddenly -- an idea!

I asked if anyone wanted to come smoke a bowl with me to finish off the night, and a few people did. 'I'm gonna eat some morning glory seeds while we're out there,' I proclaimed proudly. I threw on my coat and my shoes, making sure not to disturb the couch-sleeping r00t, and stomped off to the outdoors. I packed a bowl in my bong and we all had a few tokes and then I flew into action, padding through the snow to the brown, crunchy Morning Glory vines in Asher's garden. A cursory inspection showed that, yes, there were still seeds hanging on them. I picked a pod, squeezed three hard, black little ovoids into my hand, and ate them. Great!

I picked a few more seeds off the trestle and ate them, then the folks who'd been keeping me company finished their cigarettes and wanted to go back inside, so I went with them. I'd eaten maybe forty to sixty seeds at this point. We got back indoors, and everyone went to sleep. 'What do I do now?' I wondered. The answer was clear. Coat and shoes re-equipped, I crept back outside and launched into my task with renewed fervor.

I began to engage my ancient nut-gathering gene-structures and picked, picked, picked those little black seeds. I had a mouthful of hamburger and I chewed the seeds up into that, which made the taste, texture and overall experience of eating them far more bearable. I smoked a bit more weed and reveled in my work, pulling down the seeds, freeing them from the husk and chewing them up as fast as I could. I ate maybe eighty seeds this way, maybe a hundred. I was feeling great, totally enjoying the hard-work nature-vibe. I sure didn't feel like I could go to sleep, but that was probably the mushrooms. Pick pick, eat eat.

Eventually I got bored of picking seeds and went back inside. I sat in the kitchen where the couch-bound r00t was snoring and wondered about what I'd done, and what was going to happen. As I looked around me, things seemed sort of strange. It had been perhaps an hour since I took the first seeds. I stared at a curtain over a window and it began to clearly swim and 'drip' -- things were definitely starting to not hold still. I know I shouldn't have been getting open-eyes from the seeds that soon after taking them but hey, there ya go. All the other drugs definitely helped. 'Awesome!' I thought, immediately going back outside to eat more seeds. I swallowed maybe another fifty to eighty (or possibly many more) seeds out there. I'm not sure. I kind of lost track of time, I just picked and picked and ate and ate and suddenly I remembered what I was doing and thought, 'yeah, that's totally enough seeds.' Pleased with myself, I went back inside.

My memories from this point on are a little uncertain. Somehow, I soon ended up on the couch in Asher's living room, occasionally cringing away from little psychic 'shocks' that reminded me of the body-buzz from my last trip, but which I found I could stay on top of pretty easily. They didn't bother me, but they were an exciting indicator of the potential of what I was coming up on. Static was crashing on another couch in the same room and I talked to him for a while about what I was thinking about, which was everything. I talked about the seeds I'd taken and how much the pot was potentiating them and how I was sure the mushrooms were helping too and eventually my rant turned to the spiritual and abstract. I think Static wanted to go to sleep. I remember Asher was with me for a while, and I was talking to her about what was going on in my head. By this point I was kind of hiding under a blanket with my eyes closed, staring at the clearest, smoothest looping geometric closed-eye visuals I've ever seen. They were like some wacky screen-saver on a high-res display. They knew all kinds of tricks -- sometimes I'd be watching colourful shapes move around each other on geometric paths, sometimes it would be mostly soft static with a horizontal zig-zaggy line scrolling down its length over and over. I don't remember all the things I saw and I wish I'd drawn some of them because I was watching them for a long time. It had been, perhaps, about two hours since I took the first seeds. Maybe less, like ninety minutes. On reflection it might not have been 4:20 until I actually went out to pick the seeds the third time -- I think that was what made me decide to go out and eat more -- but I'm not sure. The point is, the morning was coming, and I was just beginning to trip. Oops.

At any rate, I assured Asher I'd be okay and she went to bed. Suddenly -- diarrhea! Nausea wasn't really a big problem, probably because I'd smoked a fair bit of weed after taking the seeds, around the time when the nausea peaked last time. But boy howdy did I have the trots. So I went into the bathroom and pooped and pooped. Meanwhile, the LSA kept doing its thing, and suddenly Asher's bathroom wall was conspicuously and obviously filled with faces, shapes and portraits I'd never noticed before! They were defined by patterns in the wood, and by its knots and the distortions they made in those patterns. I saw a sad ghost! I saw an ostrich with a bullet-hole in its forehead! I saw a weeping woman's face shying away from the realities of modern life as represented by a 'spray' coming at her from the picture's border! And I still see all those things today. They're really there! I just never noticed and named them before.

I was amazed. I had a notebook and a pen in the bathroom with me just in case something like this happened [Ed. note: that's my favourite sentence in this entire document ^-^] and I started furiously describing each of the pictures I saw. I wrote pages about the one that looked like a crying lady. When I showed it to Static the next day, he didn't see it. I dunno.

Anyway, so I wrote about those pictures a little and then things really started to get weird and thinky. I started wondering why society wants to keep us from playing with our brains, and instead sells us computers and video games to play on. I thought about how society is doing this to survive, how we forgot that society wasn't our idea, how it's just here because we are, how it's a parasite, an opportunist, 'just a temporally localized phenomenon' was what I wrote in my book at the time. I thought about how it fools us with moral stigmas into not playing with our brains (not using drugs, ya) and instead purchasing other means of entertainment from it. Why do we let society do this, I wondered? Will we ever beat it? And what about...

Things were speeding up now. I started thinking about everything people do and why they do it. I started to see a common theme in life -- self-deception. We make ourselves care about things that don't affect our real lives so that we can play meaningfully. Is there anything else but play? Why do we exist but to play?

It all came apart. In long and short I saw God and it was me looking back at me and it was all me to begin with. 'Here I am again and again and it's just me after all,' I wrote. I wrote a lot of stuff like that. I realized that I -- my soul [yes, and yours too] -- was the only soul in the universe. I realized I was being me -- being Mister Snee -- by an act of self-deception, by intentionally forgetting that I was the originator of everything, that I was all there was, that I already knew everything, that I was everyone. I was doing this so I could enjoy this life, so I could revel in limitations and details and temporality. I was doing it to play. Every person I lived as -- you lived as -- was just for fun. So I'm everyone! So I can't hurt anyone! Hurting other people is just hurting myself! It's externalization, projection, self-deception, and it will come back to me eventually [when I live as those people!]. Woah!

Basically I compressed everything into a mote, into a microscopic point. The only point was to play so there was no point but there was as much a point as ever because nothing had changed but damn, what does that mean? And what's my nature? Why am I playing this game? Do I (you/we) have an independent existence as a soul outside of this universe?

If I was all there was and I was responsible for all this, if the universe was made by a 'human' (by a soul, by you/me/we) then I must have left signs for myself, hints, little things that I'll recognize and smile at. Easter eggs. That sort of thing. It occurred to me that I had planned out the life of everyone on Earth and that every time we trip, every time we have an encounter with the divine or in some other way become aware of our metaphysical independence and existence, I planned that -- I must have said, 'okay, while I'm being this guy I'll remember what I really am three different times, here, here, and here. And let's see what it does to him!' Everything in the universe was planned, everything was going perfectly, it was all just a game but I still had all the same roles to play. But it was just for fun. It didn't matter, but at the same time it was all as real and important as ever!

I was on the toilet for a long time, not because I couldn't stop defecating (although that too at first) but because I simply couldn't think of any reason to go anywhere else. I was mesmerized. I couldn't imagine being more occupied, more entertained, more interested, anywhere else than I was in that bathroom. I was ecstatic with the effects of the seeds -- I couldn't believe it was happening! I don't know how long I was in the bathroom because time had no meaning. Half of the bathroom wall was merging with the floor and half was running into the ceiling. Nothing was holding still. The bright, clear closed-eyes were still there. Eventually, though, my legs started going numb (from the toilet seat, not from ergotism) and I had to leave the bathroom behind.

I went back out into the living room, where Static was asleep now. I resumed the prone position on the couch and continued to marvel and marvel. I didn't write anything else, although I did doodle a bit -- drawing was weird in my distorted state but it was also easy and fun. It seemed to flow out of me in a totally non-critical way I had never, ever accessed before. Finally, at eight or nine in the morning, Wizdom's brother who had been sleeping elsewhere came up and found me awake and wide-eyed.

'You're up already?' He said.

'I haven't slept,' I said. He was incredulous. I explained what I'd done and we talked a bit about why anyone would do drugs, what it's like to trip, and the specifics of the little philosophy/cosmology I had downloaded in the bathroom. He was a Jehova's witness and had some interesting views on what I had come up with, but as we conversed our views started to come together, and we realized how they were more or less compatible [or indeed one and the same]. The only thing he had a problem with was the idea that God was actually me -- him -- since that seemed, on the surface, to make God less divine. But it doesn't -- God remains God -- he's just us too, that's the beauty of it! We *are* the divine.

So we talked for a long time -- talking was fun, flowing and easy on the LSA -- and finally some other people got up. By the time some folks were heading downtown for food my trip was certainly on the downswing, although I remained far from baseline. Wizdom asked me about my night and I had simply nothing to say about it, which was weird, because a few hours ago I had been blown away by the stuff that was coming out of me. It didn't seem any less interesting, accurate or applicable in retrospect, but I felt absolutely no desire to explain it on that car ride. My trip revelations seemed not to change anything -- in the end, I felt like I had discovered the ultimate answer to life, that I had seen, met and been God, and that beautifully, ironically, hilariously and utterly humanly, nothing was different for it. I'd always thought the big answers would be complex, jargon-laden things, full of directives and edicts -- like organized religion! -- but it was so simple. Just play, just because. 'Because we delight in it' was the enduring phrase of the night. [Ed. note: This is a lesson I've taken away from mushrooms more than once in the past so I'm pretty sure there was some psilocybin involved in the particular metaphysical tone of this trip. The mushrooms definitely seemed to be greatly potentiated by the LSA -- or vice-versa? I figure the roughly threshold dose of mushrooms I took provided sufficient 'psychedelic lubrication' for a tiny amount of LSA to start expressing effects on my psyche right away, just as if I had taken a bit more psilocybin to get past the threshold, you know? I think LSA has a lot of potential for exciting and promising combinations. For instance, I've read some really fun stuff involving LSA and Salvia! :D ]

Eventually I got to sleep that day, at home. I woke up feeling like my mind had been scraped out. There was very little meaning or point or joy in anything -- not really in a depressed way, but just in what I understand to be a pretty common acid-day-after way. I felt okay. Later I smoked a bowl which massively repotentiated whatever was in my system -- I was tripping again, for about two hours. It was nuts.

The aftereffects were almost entirely gone in about forty-eight hours, although there were visual distortions that lingered for weeks (I think I may have mild HPPD, since I don't think I've seen other people say they got this on morning glory, although it could have had to do with combining it with weed, mushrooms and sleep deprivation, not to mention that I took LSA again only a few days after this trip [which is inadvisable]). There were two main lingering effects -- when I looked at a uniform dark surface, like the black surface of my laptop, I'd see red, green and blue static on it. That faded slowly and disappeared over about a week and a half. The other effect lasted about a month and, while not disruptive, was weird -- while looking around, I would occasionally get the impression that some object or part of my field of vision was 'leaping' to the position it was in from somewhere else. It was just an impression combined with a slight visual effect that's impossible to describe, that some of what I was looking at had 'just got there'. That went away too, eventually. [Ed. note: I still get this very mild 'visual' from time to time and I'm beginning to think it's simply from getting stoned so often...]

So that was really something, but immediately afterwards I had no wish to write down the experience, and after that, well, I guess I just never bothered. But I was blown away, and I was determined to do LSA again. I contacted Grebin and Clemn and told them I had a plan for the Wednesday coming up, and that was what led into my third morning glory trip, which I wrote about a few weeks ago and which you can read about your damn self. ^-^ [Ed. note: that trip is documented next.] That trip, though, while a fantastic adventure, was on the whole somewhat less intense, very likely because I had taken LSA less than a week prior, and very possibly due to sympathetic effects with the mushrooms this time.

NOW YOU KNOW!
==================================

So, finally, let's move on to the third and final trip report! :D


Thursday, December 11 2003, 08:08 PM -- Morning Glory Oratory

I tripped on Morning Glories last night with Grebin and Clemn.

We each took 178 seeds (I had just over 800, we divided them 5 ways as I was making 2 bags for Mary and her boyfriend, but a fellow named Mike ended up with one of the bags. I'll get 'em back). We got pretty fucked up, parked the car at Sunnidale park, smoked a bowl, walked through the valley and up Cundles and to a Tim Horton's and kind of started to come up on the Morning Glories. I was getting visuals off the wall in the bathroom... I dunno.

One thing very much worth noting is that we expected severe diarrhea to accompany this, but it didn't. (We've got a theory that it's because of all the walking we did right after taking the seeds, which felt really good and held off any nausea for a long time.) We didn't leave the Tim Horton's and start making our way back to the car until about two hours after ingesting the seeds, and none of us were really tripping yet, but the effects were creeping up. We'd just passed through a quiet moment -- a couple of minutes when everyone was feeling too sick and lethargic to talk much -- but by the
time we got back to the woods we were starting to feel pretty good. 'I dunno,' I told Grebin, 'I think these seeds are starting to kick in.' Then Clemn puked everywhere -- we hadn't done a proper extraction from the seeds (we've been meaning to try it, with Diethyl ether and Everclear), we'd just munched them out of baggies. He cheerfully maintained that in a way he was lucky, and he was. He would stop tripping, later, since he puked up the seeds our stomachs were still grinding away at, but for the time being we were all pretty fucked, and since in all our own ways we'd conquered The Sick we cheerfully marched into the forest to smoked a much-needed bowl and continue our adventure.

So we went into the forest and down the snowy hill which was slippery and difficult, and down to this valley with a big drain. We smoked more weed there and walked around a little, since the morning glory was starting to get 'pacy'. Things in my field of vision had started to give me the impression of shimmering or almost-moving -- I felt as if the solidity and
stillness of everything I looked at was a fragile state, a balance that could easily be tipped. I was starting to get the impression that yes, I was going to trip that night.

So we got back to the car and put on the radio. Grebin was going to drive but once we listened to the radio for a few minutes he decided he was much too altered to drive. A lot of the trip so far was like that -- not quite sure if we were tripping. Part of me wondered if I was just too on drugs to realize how on drugs I was, which a later encounter with some sober people would prove to be true. The effects of the morning glory were coming on first not with overt effects like hallucination, but with insidious, sneaky effects, mildly altering our thought processes in critical ways. We were three flawed organic computers, I wailed, trying to survive in a world they by definition were no longer suited for survival in. But that was kind of a paranoid sci-fi vibe that went away fast. Some visuals and easier, more whimsical, less soul-baring tripstuff WERE to come, but this came first. We were fucked up. I don't know why it took us so long to come up to a point where we were all agreed we were tripping but in the meantime it left us in an awkward and dangerous decision- making never-land, which is probably why everything went wrong all of a sudden.

We were sitting in the car and listening to music and watching visuals and marvelling at how stoned we felt, when suddenly a cop pulled up next to the car (I very barely recall any of this).

I doubt I can sufficiently emphasize how high this ranks as a worst-case scenario. We were sitting in the car for god knows how long, with the engine running to keep warm and the radio on, the windows all steamed up from our breath and the cold and fog, so tripped out that we were content to do this indefinitely. I honestly don't know how long we were there. It could have been five minutes or half an hour that passed between when we got back to the car and when the police showed up. We were having -fun- when they did. The trip had cycled around to a very easy, rewarding, heady point. We felt comfortable, indulgent, old-school and vindicated.

But then these cops pulled up. So we all acted very calm and in a sudden flurry of scrambled non-deciding, we got out of the car, lit cigarettes, and walked away.

'What are we doing?' I said. 'Going to Asher's,' Clemn said. 'That's our goal. We'll define ourselves as -walking- travellers.'

'Oh,' I said. 'But... are we also fleeing?'

'No,' he said.

'Okay,' I said. And by the time I got to Asher's door all of three minutes later and was attempting to explain the situation to Mary, the nice girl I know who lives with her, I had honestly forgotten about the cops, and I wasn't making any sense about anything. And I was to forget about the cops again several times that night. But we'd defined what we were doing and I wasn't worried. I was just acting, just sort of tripping. I could only plan very direct courses of action.

But then all these people who weren't tripping showed up and everything went nuts. Grebin wanted to go home so I said that was okay if he really wanted to and then Clemn went walking with him and thought Grebin was tripping too hard to drive so he came back and told us that and Asher dispatched two cars to go prevent Grebin from driving and I couldn't decide if he should drive or not because now they had taken the fact that he was a little intoxicated and cast it in this new light in which it carries a menacing moral imperative... the idea that driving while wilfully 'on anything' is wrong no matter what. What about taking a Dayquil before you leave for work? Life is shades of grey. Some people would say I should have let Grebin drive home. A lot of people would say he shouldn't have driven home, that when he took the morning glory he committed not to drive until its effects were over. Which he did commit to do. Not to do. Erm.

But then some people would say we should have let him indulge his sudden drugged-out urge to go home, which from the stuff he was saying sounded like it came from an extremely negating and nihilistic trip. And that we should have let him drive home in that case. But of course there are better alternatives if you look closer -- people offered to drive him home in his car and bring a second one to get home in themselves -- but he refused. Who knows why? But now we were talking, potentially, about driving on not only drugs but scary new drugs and someone had to be an agent of some sort of social responsibility or many people would get very upset. So I went out and found Grebin, and I got him away from all the people and said a bunch of stuff the gist of which was that it was necessary that he not drive until he was sober, that we had pretty much committed to hang out all night anyway (until we finished tripping from the seeds we ate), and that we'd all been getting pretty hasty and hysterical in the last hour or so and that we really needed to regroup, chill out and center. He agreed.

Then everyone went to Asher's place except me and Grebin and Mary. Mary had Grebin's keys and we went for a walk and smoked a few bowls. Later, I asked Grebin if he was hallucinating like he couldn't believe and he said yes. We tripped until 3:00AM. We took the seeds at 7:00PM. It was insane. When Grebin and Mary and I got back to Asher's house we joined everyone in the living room.

So now I have one bag of seeds lost somewhere. I hope the guy I left it with doesn't eat them. I guess he might go crazy if he does.

I don't know if I'll ever eat morning glory seeds again. In a way I really want to do the proper extraction and try the morning glory trip without all the nasty toxins, which lent some parts of the night a very subduing, earthy, heavy sick-feeling. But those parts were generally the exception, not the rule, and at no point during the night did I ever feel real dismay or horror. Except maybe briefly, at the cops, but I forgot it fast.

Basically, personally-observed effects on perception and thought aside, the morning glory obviously deeply affected our mood and decisions. Except maybe for Clemn, later. But Grebin and I, who held down the foul knot of stinking, stringy thorns long enough to trip off it, for better or for worse, were completely useless. We were entirely fucked.

An interesting phenomenon happened that night. When we were all tripping together, Grebin and Clemn and I, and communicating and stuff, the trip was going great. It only broke down when the cops pulled up next to our car so we decided to adjourn before they talked to us, and ran to Asher's house. We reacted hastily. Oops. Even at that point, though, we could have handled ourselves, because -this is what we do-. The ideal thing would have been for nobody to be home (or for us to have walked to a coffee shop instead) so nobody would have been bothered by us in our crazy, asocial shaman-trip-mode, so we'd be forced to fend for ourselves until we weathered the whole trip. That's one of the RESPONSIBILITIES of tripping. 'It's scary and dangerous,' everyone says, and you say 'yes, but that's my problem,' and you have to try to stick to that as much as you can, or, you know, you shouldn't be tripping.

Because if you declare sanctuary on some poor, unsuspecting family that isn't tripping at all, they always ask very difficult questions in very serious voices and suddenly the situation you were deftly navigating as a group before turns into a fractured process of headless committee decision-making...

Anyway, that kind of thing can turn a trip into a nightmare. And it went on for a long time, maybe half an hour or so, during some of which I actually expressed a desire to simply stay in and hide in Asher's room while everyone went out to find Grebin. That was an escapist, regressive urge, though, and it passed immediately when I thought about it. It was the Drugs Talking (well, I guess technically it was genes I share with the opossum talking), so I made a conscious decision to try to un-screw-up everything. It's not that I (and/or Only I) could calm everyone down, but every single person who's committed to calming down helps. When you have enough of those, everyone's calm.

Anyway, I guess that's what I thought. So we went and did all that. And I'd like to thank Asher and Jenn and Mary and Mike and Nancy and Peter and Tyler (in alphabetical order ^-^) and everyone else who accidentally hung out with us for a while last night, because eventually we ended up crashing out in their living room and chatting, which was really what we needed. Grebin got to play with a vial of blood, which was -not- what he needed, but we'd had a nice walk in the park and I could tell his mood was changing. He still had little talking to do but he was smiling more, which is good. Up and down!

Soon we all decided we'd like to go out, so we drove out for coffee and donuts. With the nausea from the beginning of the trip behind me and all that weed I smoked working its way through my system, I definitely was in the mood to eat. I had a hot chocolate too, since the last time I'd had a coffee, while we were waiting to come up at the first Tim Horton's of the night, the caffeine made me more jumpy and paranoid and sick than I'd like. Maybe you shouldn't combine caffeine and morning glory. Later in the night, though, when the trip would finally be winding down, I'd have a coffee, and it would be the best coffee I'd had all week.

Grebin no longer seemed to be anywhere he didn't want to be, and was staring into space tranquilly, smiling. He looked over at me at one point and, with a big grin, gave me a thumbs-up. It was good to know his trip had gone from bad to good, which I read about happening on LSA a lot for some reason. 'I can't believe I changed my mind about this trip,' people say, 'but I did.' We were in a good place and were feeling re-centered, back to zero, and once more prepared to complete our night on the terms we'd started on.

We asked if Mary and Tyler would like to smoke a bowl with us and Mary did (Tyler did too, but will do it another time) so five of us drove out north of Barrie a bit, Mike and Mary and Grebin and Clemn and I, I think, and we walked down this trail Mary knew about. When I wasn't watching blue and white strips of eyeballs and pyramids swirl out from my fingertips in concentric circles, I was walking and smoking and admiring the scenery like everyone else. It was cold out and my shoes were filled with water but it was a blast. We were smoking Clemn's pot from his pipe and mine from my bong. I guess it must have been one or two by this point. The trail ran out through the woods for a long way and bordered a few fields, and it went on and on for kilometres. It was a melty mid-December night, unseasonably warm for Barrie in the Winter -- we were simply lucky in this respect, as we'd expected it to be too cold to do any long spans of walking at all that night, before we took the seeds -- but still just cold enough to drive you indoors eventually, which after we'd walked some distance it did.

So we went back to take Tyler back to Asher and take Mary home, and we went to Grebin's car, and there were two cruisers there. We decided not to stop there and we drove away, back to Asher's house.

Then Mike asked what we were gonna do and we shrugged. I said 'I dunno, go home, I guess,' and someone had to remind me about the cops again. That happened a lot that night. I spent a lot of time thinking about other things, I was pretty distracted. By this point, though, all the nausea I'd felt earlier had left me, and I was tripping very hard -- shimmering outlines radiated from everything I looked at, patterns swam and walls crawled in a way that made me think of waves of heat, as if the air was very hot and it was distorting the light in the room... like mirages. But the mirage effect was a background thing more pronounced near the end of the trip, whereas the clear, geometric visuals that lasted for most of the peak of the experience were simply ridiculous, surprising me again and again with either the fact that my brain was making them up so fast or that such strange information was being relayed to me by some outside source -- the explanation for them must be one or the other and either amazed me.

So in the end it was the kind of drug that I liked and hated and it made me want to swallow mushrooms in my room all day until I go crazy. But it also made me realize that if I really cleaned up my room, like, really made it nice, then everyone I know would have a new nice place to hang out. If they liked hanging around in my room for short spans instead of finding it oppressive (it's a mess), that would be nice of me. And I should do nice stuff. So morning glory made me want to clean up my room, and I'm going to do it for real because it's not an abstract intellectual goal, it's a compelling moral imperative. [Ed. note: I did not end up cleaning my room.]

Anyway, so we took Mary home. I had been automatically operating on the assumption that both Mary and Tyler wanted to go home and get to sleep, so I absently dismissed Mary at her house without seeing if she -did- want to stay out a while, for a walk or a bowl, which she might have, since she's pretty cool that way, and in which case it would have been surprising and rude of me to simply and awkwardly mumble something about not wanting to keep her out and then run away, which is what I did. Oops. At least I was starting to come down by that point. I was still pretty intoxicated but I was grateful for the parts of reality I recognized that had started coming back. The weed I'd been smoking helped with that. Weed's a good tool for tripping -- it relieves nausea, boosts or re-potentiates most psychedelics safely, and gets you somewhere you remember being (grounds you) with both the familiar old high and the ritual of smoking -- and it smells -great-. But I digress; I think maybe I owe Mary an apology, because I was pretty dumb just then. But then, I was dumb at -everyone- that night; this was just the last time it happened before we parted ways with the only non-tripping-on-LSA-people who I 'didn't want to freak out' for the last time that night, and thus my chances to excuse myself were up. That was weird and scary and kicked the trip over to kind of a different mode, but it was a retrospective, playful mode, like a responsibility had been lifted, and like a trial was over, and that regardless of how I performed in it (a matter which would be made clear for me by hindsight) I should revel in its completion and in exploration of the new world in which I can find something else to do.

That's the kind of stuff I was thinking. Or maybe not, maybe that's just how it felt. There was a -lot- of feeling stuff with this trip, a lot of divine compulsions. A lot of things had meaning that seemed arbitrary. The way it seemed to me the last time I took these seeds was that it was allowing me to immediately decide what anything I was looking at -looked like most-, even if it didn't -really- look like anything. If I looked at -anything- I could figure out what it looked like, and the form was undeniable -- I'd ask people if they saw it and they would, and they'd tell me I was crazy for noticing. So that happened a lot... sort of a hallucination without actual visuals, you know?

Not that there weren't actual visuals that night. But that other thing happened too.

Grebin and Clemn and I decided to go for coffee while we waited for the cops to leave the car alone. We went to Tim Horton's and marvelled at the role police have assumed as immune agents of the rigid social structure, discouraging anyone who experiments with their life and chooses to have authentic experiences, shielding nice, normal people from them, propagating the myth and stigma that mystic types are crazy and just maybe dangerous. Shielding THEM from US. The police are the military force of conservatism. 'Fucking jerks,' we thought -- it really got us mad. I had mentioned earier in the night that it was easy, on LSA, to spiral into paranoid thought and this was the third or fourth time we'd come to contemplate how social pressures had put police into roles which clearly and wrongly violate their social contract that night. I guess it was sort of a theme. We weren't really angry though, we didn't really come to feel oppressed. Everything was very abstract, like we were discussing a game, or a subculture we were only remotely involved in -- but we were discussing everyday life, society, reality. That detachment just came naturally. We weren't trying to be cool -- we were suffering a serious crisis of scope and existential detachment. It was bizarre. Neither pleasant nor un-, just very very thinky. The kind of experience during which you run your brain so long and so hot that in the end you're compelled to feel good about it, probably from the endorphin reward you get for not thinking so abusively hard anymore. Whether or not such experiences can enhance your practical life experience and accumulated wisdom is beyond the ken of any man.

Or is it?

Anyway, we all walked out of that Tim Horton's and walked back to Grebin's car and smoked a few bowls and asked Saint Bud to please let the cops be gone. We talked about a lot of things on the way back, and sometimes we talked about the cops -- what they could be doing there, how long they'd wait there, what the chances were that they'd -ever- be gone -- and I decided if the police were there I'd tell them what really happened, perhaps without mentioning the morning glory because the police might not let us go at four in the morning after mentioning we were on a drug they'd never heard of. But anyway, we had it all worked out -- we knew what we'd tell those cops.

I'm pretty convinced that's why they were gone when we got back.

Grebin said goodbye and drove home. I'd worked that day and had work the next day (I didn't go [don't do morning glory if you work the next day]) so I wanted sleep, and so did Clemn. We walked down this crazy foggy pathway to this school I like to smoke up behind. Everything was beautiful. Earlier in the night I had seen a valley near my house looking the most attractive I've ever seen it.

Whether you're on drugs or not, if you go outside and look around and spend time outside your walls you'll find beautiful things. If you stay outside too long your hair will get long and you'll start to smell and stuff, and eventually you've got to eat. So, you know, everything in moderation. But for a couple hours at a time, sometimes, and for a couple of days at a time, sure, now and then. But do it for a couple of minutes often, and for a couple of seconds constantly, and it's unbelievable how much you see. And each new 'beautiful picture' I see adds something to me in a way I don't quite understand yet.

In long and short, it was a long and great night and was not a party the whole way. It had brief difficult parts but so does everything and they were fairly easy and merciful in the big picture, and they were rewarding to resolve and make it through. I thought it was funny that the point that we left behind the nausea and draggy coming-up and started really tripping was when we finally made it all the way back out to the Tim Horton's we'd designated as our coming-up spot and back, through the literal valley between it and the park where we'd parked the car. So we went through a real-life valley while we were in the valley of the trip. Symbolism! Blaargg!

Anyway. I think I've made the point that I was seeing connections everywhere, but MAYBE NO MORE THAN USUAL, which was the really interesting thing. To make an interesting night takes more than drugs, it takes an adventurous, risk-taking attitude amongst a group of collaborating, communicating individuals. It's a complex process of play.

Mark those words. To make an INTERESTING night is a complex process of play. To make a FUN night is a SIMPLE process of play -- just play. But every now and then it's fun to complicate things -- to trip! :D

Anyway, morning glory seeds are a legal psychedelic which will easily mess you up entirely if you take about 200 of them. Look them up on Erowid if you're even thinking of trying them yourself. They have a marvelous amount of potential -- in my three experiences with them I have quite simply run the gauntlet of human experience, or at least it feels that way the day after. It's true that last night was bizarre by any counts (I forgot about how Grebin and Clemn and I went to Bayfield mall on the way back to the car the first time and looked at ceramic dragons and castles and stuff in this geeky weapons store), but morning glory has rendered even mundane situations bizarre in inexpressible ways. It's a weird, alien-yet-earthy trip with qualities that invite and qualities that repel. You usually get amazing, vivid, high-resolution closed-eyes. I'm gonna try the proper extraction next time, if I try it again. I suspect you could use these seeds for meditation, camping, concerts, raves, theatres, sex -- I think they've got some serious potential.

But if I'm going to try them again, then I need to establish a methodology for tripping on them, because so far they have simply kicked my ass. I keep taking it and honestly forgetting that despite my noblest intentions it makes it impossible to clearly make decisions or interact [normally] with other [non-tripping] human beings. So I keep trying to do those things. But that's not what it's for -- take morning glory for the other stuff, the stuff it's -great- at, and while you're on it, avoid the stuff it makes you bad at, like acting sober, and driving.

And also remember set and setting is everything. (I wonder how many matches Google has for that phrase.) It's true over and over again. You don't realize it until you're on a crazy intense garden psychedelic for an hour in a Tim Horton's at midnight and then you're on the same drugs in a foggy wooded valley under soft, diffuse lamplight and the ambient blue light of pre-dawn, and you can't -believe- how much better you feel now than you felt at the Tim Horton's. And it's just because of how nice the place looks and feels. Who hasn't switched from one big, colourful desktop wallpaper to a different one, and felt switches in their head suddenly click? With the new look, the computer -feels different- in a way which is intangible and which we generally feel a bit guilty about since we know it can't technically affect our efficiency at using it. And that's psychedelia. Set and setting, like desktop wallpaper. Drugs, magic, shamanism and for that matter, all of life is the hobby and science of engineering life and experience, of not just using pretty desktop wallpapers but going to pretty places.

That kind of stuff is fun. ^-^


---

So that's that. Like I said at the beginning (and just now), I definitely want to do an extraction of a fairly large amount of LSA this summer. There's a strong spiritual/magical feeling to the trip, as if the substance of reality is somehow 'filled in' with some new, saturating quality of mysticalness and potential. It's a nice quality for a psychedelic to have. I've so far found LSA to be totally a hyperactively intellectual drug (it wasn't pushy, though; I'd simply disappear into whatever one thing I thought, until it occurred to me that I had done so and to think something else) which is great for conversation and rabid empty theorizing. It's fun! It's not fun in the same way that, for instance, MDMA is fun, nor is it fun in the same way as lots of other things; but if you look at it right, I'm convinced it's fun.

In conclusion, morning glories can destroy you, even if you've heard they can't. Cheers! :D

Exp Year: 2004	ExpID: 33390
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Nov 21, 2004	Views: 758
[ View PDF (to print) ] [ View LaTeX (for geeks) ] [ Swap Dark/Light ]
Morning Glory (38) : Various (28), General (1)