DOSE:	1.5 g	oral	Mushrooms	(dried)
	2 bowls	smoked	Cannabis

BODY WEIGHT:

185 lb

About me:
I am a 23 year old male college student, weighing 185 pounds. I consider myself a seasoned tripper as I have done mushrooms 10 times and LSD once. I have never had a bad trip before besides one really disturbing occurrence during my LSD trip. I have taken an eight of mushrooms in the past and have had a relatively strong psychedelic experience but have never fully lost control or had an issue distinguishing my mental world with reality. I have tripped on mushrooms once before by myself, on a relatively small dosage and had an enormously pleasant insightful time. I have a pretty good understanding on what we know about the universe based on scientific fact. I also have a fair understanding on how the brain works and how various psychoactive drugs affect the brain on a neurological level and what behaviors and shifts of consciousness results from psychedelics. I am a psychology major.

The set and setting:
The date was November 15th and I live Massachusetts. It is starting to drop below freezing some nights as winter is just at the doorstep. I had purchased 11.5 grams of mushrooms from a friend that I have bought from in the past. We were both searching for a few months. He finally found some and ended up getting an ounce (dried). I was ecstatic. I was just about to give up on my search. I decided to use what little money I had to purchase 11.5 grams. The mushrooms themselves were relatively large, thick, dense, and had purple at the end of the stems and large caps. If I were to judge a psilocybin mushroom’s potency based on how they looked, these looked like they were plucked from a mythical forest that was possessed by spiritual energies one could not begin to fathom^666. Needless to say, they looked great. I had these 11.5 grams for over a week locked in my metal cabinet. After many attempts to coax friends into tripping with my during the coming weekend and failing each time, I decided to just sample them all by myself remembering the amazing experience I had last time I did them alone. The friend I bought them from had also tried 1.5 grams of the same batch a few nights prior and warned me on their potency. My logic was “hey I have ingested an eight of quality mushrooms in the past and it was something I did not have a problem with so how bad could 1.5 be? Besides 1.5 grams is still a low dosage based on my past experiences on mushrooms.”

Well I was wrong. I underestimated psilocybin and was not prepared for the introspective mindfuck I was about to embark on. I have read a fair amount of bad trip reports and knew that some particular strains of the psilocybin mushrooms were much more potent than others. Keep in mind that I typed the first draft of this trip report 5 hours after the trip itself. I still felt the after effects which made it very difficult for me to render sentences that grammatically made sense. I wanted to write down everything I could remember while it was still fresh in my head. I of course edited this draft the next day when I was sober. (well I still don’t feel 100% sober but good enough…)

The trip:

7:30 PM - I talk to my good friend that I have tripped with before and asked him what he thought about me doing it alone. He knows that I have done this before and he was all for it. He was going to watch the patriots game while I embarked on my journey and by the time the game was over we planned on playing starcraft II as I was coming down. The patriots game started at 8:15.

8:30 PM - I take 1.5 grams which equated to one large mushroom I had in my bag. Almost took 2 grams but decided against it. My friend (the one I bought the mushrooms from) said he took the same dosage from the same batch a few nights prior and warmed me on their potency. Immediately after I ate the mushrooms, I smoked a bowl of really dank weed. Mary Jane always numbs my stomach so that I did not experience that dead weight feel I usually get when I ingest mushrooms. I put on a few of my favorite youtube videos of mostly my favorite bands playing live. After about a half hour I felt like my depth perception was slightly altered and my hands were a bit clammy. I started to hallucinate the band that was playing on the youtube video I was watching, as playing a set right in front of me. It was then I realized “oh yeah I took mushrooms tonight”. (I really get into live performances on youtube especially when I am high). Coming into this trip, I already had a rough idea as to what I wanted to do and accomplish.

9:00 PM - I went for a walk into campus. I like to be prepared so I brought my backpack with my ipod, a bottle of water, a snack in case I got hungry or if my stomach was upset, I could eat something to dilute shroomy acidy mix. (my stomach was mostly empty but not fully, I had eaten dinner earlier and chased the shrooms down with a bottle of water.) I put my ipod and sweatshirt on and begin my journey. The campus is always a delight to walk around when the visuals and body high kick in. There is a ton of different buildings with unique architecture and lights strewn throughout the campus illuminating paths. The up kept aesthetics of the campus is also a treat because it looks to perfect, almost like the place is artificial. Keep in mind that the sun had already set a few hours ago.

9:20 PM - The campus pond looked beautiful as I could see the reflection of library (a 32 story tower) cast back at me, distorted in the ripples of the water. I would like to point out that the walk from my apartment to the campus pond (located in the center of the campus) is roughly a 20 minute walk.

9:30 PM - I soon feel like I am tripping pretty hard and decided to walk back to my apartment. The first big wave ready hits in hard. The shadows threes cast over the landscape were haunting yet fun to look at. I remember at this point how friend warned me on how potent these were but I was reassured that everything is cool based on the low dosage I took and my previous experiences on mushrooms. However, the onset of these mushrooms were much stronger and quicker than I had experienced in the past. Usually for me, the body/visual high lasts a solid hour in a half before the mental fuck kicks in. I noticed the metal fuck coming much quicker then I had experienced in the past.

9:35 PM - I turn my music off because I was having trouble following the flow of the song. Time at this point seemed to really slow down for me. I also wanted to soak in nature and not allow my mind to cascade into thoughts. I was watching the sidewalk roll under me with different patterns and faces. I am always amused by this aspect of tripping and going for a walk. At this point I remember thinking that I was this orb of awareness floating 6 feet over the sidewalk traveling at 3 MPH. This cool outlook was interrupted by something very real and disturbing that I have never experienced before. This is also what I consider to be the linchpin that turned the relatively pleasant trip sour. I forgot that I was walking and was now conscious over the control of my legs. I felt as if my brain put the live feed of sensory information that it usually processes in a coherent flow on que and it built up then boom my brain processes everything at once. Imagine a computer that is bogged down by its software and handling the information in chunks. I felt as if I just moved through time from a state in the past to the now with no in-between. This of course scared the shit out of me as it is something I had never experienced before.

That occurrence really frightened me and it was all the more reason for me to be back in my room where it is safe and I didn’t not have to worry about getting hit by a car because my brain’s ability to process a coherent flow of information. I started to wonder if I had damaged my brain which of course is never a good thought to have while under a psychedelic drug. I felt as if my apartment was so far away and I would never get there when in reality it was only about 10 minutes away walking at a brisk pace.

9:40 PM - I soon starting realizing that I was experiencing discomfort and it took a lot of conscious effort to determine what it was. I had been forgetting to blink and my throat was dry from smoking the weed. I kept checking my phone to see how long it has been into my trip was having a very difficult time retaining the knowledge I just gained by looking at my phone or understanding how I should be feeling this long into the trip or how far away I my apartment was. I was baffled at the fact that I had only been walking for about 20 minutes since the first real wave hit me.

9:45 PM - As I neared my apartment, I started to prepare myself with things I could potentially say to my roommates if I encountered them before I got downstairs to my room. They did not know I ingested mushrooms nor have they ever done them themselves so I would have a hard time trying to disguise my obviously impaired perception of reality.

9:50 PM – I made it! Luckily, the door was unlocked and no one was around so I went straight into my room and locked the door. A new wave hit me since my brain was trying to adapt to a new setting. I always felt as if the waves come when ever there is a change in setting.

9:55PM – 11:15 PM = ???????????

I don’t recall what happened at this point but I know I was in my room, cascading in thoughts. I remember the thoughts being enormously introspective and negative. I felt as if I was becoming a horrible person in life with the decisions I have been making lately like doing shrooms by myself with no real direction or purpose. I had decided that I was thinking too much and that I was going to lie down and try to momentarily stop myself from thinking and possibly fall asleep. I was burning up but it was pretty cold in my room. I couldn’t decide if I wanted the blanket on me or not. I ended up wrapping myself in a blanket and closed my eyes. The thoughts start coming back but now I am really analyzing my life in a negative light. I had the impulse to call and or message important people in my life and tell them that I am sorry for being such a bad person but I quickly decided against that as I realized I could not even form a sentence that made sense. My thinking was in brain language, not English. When I tried to think using English, I could not connect the meaning of words to the words themselves.

For a while, I lie in bed with my eyes closed. My increased paranoia made me open my eyes and I just reminded myself that I was intending to relax and stop my mind from wandering and try to explore the now and be amused by the hallucinations I was conjuring up. Whenever I shut my eyes, my imagination took hold and I could not tell if what I was perceiving reality or if reality was when I had my eyes open. Whenever my eyes were closed I felt a crushing sensation on my head. Also, every time I made the transition from eyes open to eyes closed, it felt like an eternity has passed since whatever state of awareness I was in (eyes open or eyes closed). This was actually pretty interesting and I remember alternating from eyes open to eyes closed every few seconds. I decided to keep doing this because it was a good way for me to stop over analyzing everything in my life. Of course I could not keep doing this for the remainder of my trip which was a few hours (few lifetimes from my mindset at that time).

I just wanted this to be over so I considered taking some melatonin to make me tired and go to sleep. But I then looked at the clock and realized that it would take about 40 minutes for the melatonin to kick in and time was moving REALLY FUCKING SLOW at that moment so I decided against it. I smoked a prepacked bowl because that usually helps me calm it didn’t help. I went back to bed and laid down and thought about things I could do right now that would divert my attention but decided against every option I threw at myself because once I wanted to do one thing in particular, I immediately wanted to do something else. For an example, I wanted to listen to some music with a few songs in mind but whenever I started to play the song I had already lost interest and knew that I was not going to be able to follow along anyways. (Usually I do not have a problem listening to music while tripping but this particular trip slowed time down more than I ever experienced. I come to terms with my situation and tried to make the best of it. I wanted to right down some of the insights that. I had written something on a piece of paper and immediately crumpled it up. (I found this paper the next day and it reminded me of this incident I otherwise forgot).

11:15 PM - I felt as if the peak of the trip has passed and I was coming down rather quickly. I went to check my phone and saw that I had a few missed calls and a txt. They were from my friend that I tried to call earlier before my trip. He was also the person that I bought the mushrooms from. I tried to text him and I remember having enormous difficulty again with the structure of my sentences. I would keep deleting the sentence and rephrasing them and then rereading it to see if it made sense but I could not tell if it made sense or not. This is what I typed exactly “yo ****** I did 1.5 of those mushrooms and those are some potent things. I am having a very inward trip right now and it is making me realize how crappy of a person I have become and I want to make some major changes in my life. but I cant tell if that is just me right cause im tripping and if I will fell the same way when I am sober. Time is so slow. Do you ever feel like that?” @ 11:15 PM.

I continued to lay there wondering why my friend did not respond to me instantaneously via txt. Every second felt like at least 10 seconds. I then lay there and I am still hallucinating pretty hard. However this is when I feel like my trip became fun. My room to me was no longer a 3 dimensional rectangle but more a 2D painting encompassing my visual field and time connected everything together. I felt like my room was an X Y coordinate that allowed matter to interact and my perception of how the mater interacted was what I considered time. (I am in a relativity class this semester so it has me thinking along those lines a lot.” I then started to think about what my brain does at the subconscious level. Once I became conscious of my breathing I noticed that I would keep forgetting to take a breath because I felt like I was always short of air. I just wanted this trip to be over because again I felt like I could not consciously keep up with everything my body needed to do to survive even though I was just laying there in bed. I am glad I never started to think about my heart beating!

11:45 PM - Eventually my friend gets back to me as which I remember being a huge relief. Keep in mind that this entire trip I was by myself and did not verbally speak to anyone. My friend tells me that he also had a very introspective trip on the same batch and also his friend had taken 2.5 grams and said that was the last time he was ever going to take mushrooms. I felt comfort knowing that it these particular mushrooms gave others bad trips and that it wasn’t just me and my inability to cope with them.

Midnight - Eventually my other friend txted me. (the one that was watching the patriots game, who I had planned to play starcraft II with later that night.) He was the only other person that knew I was tripping. We get on teamspeak and start talking. I immediately find myself trying to verbalize what seemed like a decade’s worth of experience I just encountered over this trip start feeling embarrassed with my inability to say what I’m trying to say. We start playing starcraft and I am having a hard time planning for the future as I still perceived time being a snail. The game also requires a lot of foresight and planning which I had a hard time doing because I could not even cope with the “now” let alone 5 minutes into the future. After we played for an hour, I decided to type as much of this trip as possible while it was still somewhat fresh in my head.

Afterthoughts and lessons learned:

I can trip balls on just 1.5 grams of shrooms. There are varying degrees of potency per strain of psilocybin mushroom.
Have mental preparation for a psychedelic trip. Do not go into a trip by yourself if there are issues in your life you need to deal with. I did not get into the details of paranoid thoughts because they are rather personal and I would like to keep them to myself.

Even if you are 100% positive you could never have a bad trip, you are wrong. I was not in control at some points of this trip and had no idea where my mind was going to take me to next. I have no idea what that “linchpin” I described earlier that set my trip awry. Whatever that was, I hope to never encounter it again as it was out of this universe.

If you are going to trip alone, let someone know that could potentially come and give you company. I was absolutely alone during that experience the presence of a trusted friend would have helped out.

I am really glad I sat down and tried to write down everything. When I look back at my trip now (the day after), I view it as a distant nightmare that I will most likely not think about much as the details seem a bit distant now. I am glad I lived that through that experience. I feel like most people would agree that even though a bad trip sucks, they still wouldn’t trade in the experience for anything else.

I am done with mushrooms for a while. I am not going to let this bad trip ruin shut out any potential of me tripping in the future. In my opinion, the psychedelic experience is most valuable, insightful encounter an intelligent conscious being can have. Psychedelic are not toys, nor is your brain. Never underestimate and always respect both.

Exp Year: 2010	ExpID: 88281
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 23
Published: Sep 23, 2020	Views: 3,816
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