My Trip Reports

[bmcnicho]

I thought I’d start posting my trip reports here, as I plan to trip several times this year and I wouldn’t want to spam the spirituality section with all of them.  I’m writing these to help me process things, and I like to include unnecessary details to make it feel more vivid for me. So if anyone wants to read these, feel free to skim over some parts.  I’m feeling excited for this stage in my journey!  I’ve spent the last 5 years laying a foundation in philosophical and spiritual reading and contemplation and handling things in my personal life. So now I feel ready to delve more deeply into psychedelics and spirituality!

[bmcnicho]

4.5 Gram Mushroom Trip - 1/13/22

This trip was from a couple months ago.  I haven’t thought about it much since, as I think I used quickly directing my intention back to my normal life as a coping mechanism to avoid emotionally processing what happened.  A few days ago I was hit with sudden motivation to delve back into spiritual work, and for the last few hours I’ve been vividly going through my memories of the experience.  So I thought writing it out would help me process things. (All time stamps are estimates, as I didn’t look at the time until near the end)

0:00 - I take 4.5 grams of dried mushrooms at 10:30 in the morning on an empty stomach and start walking to a nature preserve near my house.  My girlfriend is with me to tripsit. 

0:20 - Arrive at the preserve.  We find a spot to sit in the grass.  We’re in a large open field near a lake shore and a small grove of trees. There’s a large hill and small mountains in the distance. This area is adjacent to a public park, so once we’re settled I head over to a drinking fountain to refill my water bottle. 

0:25 - The effects start to kick in on my way back.  The familiar tingling and looseness starts to spread over my body. I’m feeling giddy, relaxed, and fresh. “Hahaha here we go!” I think to myself. I sit down next to my girlfriend, acting like an old pro, as at this point she had never done a psychedelic before (100% my ego btw as this was only my 3rd trip - I’m complete noob compared to most people on this forum) 

0:30 - I’m looking at the sky, there’s wispy clouds. They start to morph into fractal snowflakes. A few minutes later they become multi-layered, stretching out into 4 semi-transparent layers.  The normally flat looking blue sky appears to have depth.

0:35 - I become aware of the sky as a giant dome, overhanging and inclosing my world.  This is something I like to notice sober as well, it’s easy to think of the sky as flat when not paying attention. I then look around at the trees, lake and hills.  I find the sky much more interesting, so I return to it.  What happens next I view as deeply meaningful, maybe even spiritual despite its simplicity. My interpretation of the domed sky inverts, such that its curvature seems convex rather than concave.  I get the feeling that I am in outer space looking down rather than up at not merely the sky but the entire planet earth.

0:40 - At this point my experience shifts. While before it was dominated by my physical surroundings, at this point they begin to matter less and I feel my inner world starting to have more influence. I close my eyes unintentionally, and see the classic swirling, spiraling fractals.

0:45 - This is when it gets crazy! I open my eyes and my attention begins to be overtaken by my imagination. Physically and visually, I’m still myself and still in the same place, but mentally I’m traveling to other worlds! The distinction between imagining/seeing/being in these places was blurred. Imagining is the most technically accurate, but I’ll be using the terms going-to/being-in as they best capture the subjective feeling.  

I was in a cosmic void, I saw a techno-biological alien spacecraft. Barely have any time to look at it, 2 seconds at most. I pass through a dark portal, and now I’m in a field of green grass, vague fantasy vibes.  I then enter another world, and another and another! It was so fast!!! Part of me wishes it was just a little bit slower so I could interpret what was happening in each one, but the sheer speed was exhilarating! I wanted to tell my girlfriend about all the cool stuff I was seeing, but I realized in the time it would take to describe one, 2 more would go by! So instead I had to just concentrate on what I was seeing to try to absorb some of it. I won’t describe any of the others as I barely remember them and each lasted only a few seconds. All I remember is they varied widely and I was incapable of thinking about my life or anything in the real world during all this, I was so absorbed by the fantasy.  

I then mellow out a bit and my experience takes on this somber tone out of nowhere. It doesn’t last long enough for me to figure out its source. It doesn’t seem to be about anything in my actual life, maybe just vaguely that melancholy is an inherent part of life and existence. I sat with it peacefully, didn’t interpret it negatively, it actually felt nice in a way. The worlds resume shortly afterwards

0:50 - I become trapped in a hyper-abstract thought loop about solving a fictional problem in a fictional place. I couldn’t possibly remember it, but I’ll construct an example now to provide a sense of the general tone:

“Wait…so if the teal cylinder goes here then the lion’s head needs to go there and oh my the people are really counting on me to get things right…wait what’s happening…oh yeah we’re placing the things for the health of the world and oh yeah I’m doing a great job…this is pretty difficult and confusing…” (imagine this going on for another few minutes)

0:55 - The imagination stops. I look out over the lake and begin contemplating why conflict exists in the world. I vaguely decide that people have mutually exclusive identities, but then I think why couldn’t it just not be that way somehow and I’m unsatisfied with my answer at that point.

1:00 - I lay in the grass. My body and my environment seem so vibrant and surging with life. I look up at a large tree and it seems to be imbued with mystical significance.  I reflect on all the mental worlds I had just traveled to and become fixated on the idea: “You go to a place! You go to a place, and realize it’s all ok!” I said that over and over, along with: “You can go anywhere, do anything!”

1:05 - I hallucinate hundreds of tiny black insects crawling through the grass surrounding me. I was fine with it, as I knew they weren’t real. I looked at my girlfriend and she looked so out of place in this natural environment. It’s strange how a human face looks like the most bizarre object.  She was wearing a bright violet shirt and had large glasses and looked like a massive caterpillar in the grass.  

I also was hearing various sounds that I could only describe as techno-biological. There were long droning tones in stacked frequencies low to high, it wasn’t like a chord I’ve heard it was neither harmonious nor dissonant but still strangely beautiful. This was interspersed with sporadic chirping noises and electronic sounding wub wub noises, some so faint I could barely hear them. The whole experience seemed like I was intuiting a future where technology became so advanced that it was able to merge seamlessly with life itself

1:10 - I was surging with energy and vibrancy and my girlfriend asked if I was going to speak in a funny voice like last time. I spontaneously started speaking in a British accent (I’m American) possibly mimicking Alan Watts, or maybe some stereotype I had in my mind of an exuberant explorer: “You can go anywhere! Do anything! Be anyone!” and with a surge of euphoria, “And it will be magnificent!”

1:15 - A few minutes after that, is the first time I’ve ever felt fear on a psychedelic. I’m hit with a spontaneous insight. It felt deeper than could be expressed in words, but it essentially boiled down to the simple tautology of “it is because it is”.  This is an idea I’ve had before, but it felt so real, not merely an idea but non-negotiable, unavoidable reality.  I was mostly at peace with this idea. For the last 5 years I’ve dedicated a lot of time to philosophy and trying to find the reasons for things. But at a certain point I need to accept that there are no more reasons, it just is.

The fear came in when I got the feeling that I had been irreversibly changed by this insight, which was weird because this was already my belief before the trip.  A part of me wished I hadn’t seen it. I dug my fingernails into legs and hunched over. I got the feeling that there was this vaguely sinister, disembodied force, looking down at me, that had me trapped and was mildly mocking me. It wasn’t a particular entity, but in my mind it represented the living representation of reality itself. I was filled with a paradoxical mixture of fear and acceptance.

1:20 - I was feeling better now and reality started to seem like a waking lucid dream. It seemed like I could will my body to travel effortlessly in any direction far out into the distance. I felt excited by this limitless potential. I ran briefly in one direction. It felt like effortlessly and smoothly gliding along the ground. Then I stopped. I could go anywhere, but had no reason to. I was overcome by a frustrating sense of nihilism. I ran back to where I came and my shoes fell off as they were loose.

1:25 The last thing I remember I was sitting there for a few minutes and then I must’ve fallen asleep. Which was weird because I was just running and full of energy, didn’t feel tired at all, had slept well the night before, and it was around noon on a sunny day. My girlfriend said my eyes were open for some of it, so maybe my waking trip continued, but I lost memory of it. Whether I was actually asleep or not, I have zero memory of the next 3 hours

4:30 - What happens next is the most bizarre experience of my entire life. I wake up in a complete daze, it’s around 3 in the afternoon. I unconsciously put my shoes back on that my girlfriend retrieved at some point. I have no idea who I am, and have zero memory of my past life, or that I took a drug. I stare off into empty space and my experience feels timeless. It feels like I just now came into existence from nothing, completely from scratch. No past, no concept of a future, just a dazed experience of sitting there, body cold from being outside for hours.

4:50 - I check the time and it displays 20 minutes later than the last time I checked - 3:20-something. It paradoxically feels like either a very long, or surprisingly short time has passed. I look down at my phone, keys, and wallet laying in the grass. They look like very strange, foreign objects, but I vaguely know I’m supposed to keep track of and keep them on me. I recognize the loose feeling in my body as being caused by mushrooms, but all sounds and visuals are gone now. I’m oddly detached from this fact though. I think to myself, “Wouldn’t it be crazy if someone just came into existence from nothing as a grown adult who’s high on mushrooms?” So I knew humans in this reality were supposed to have a past and a life story, but I didn’t have one. “Wait,” I suddenly realized, “Isn’t that what’s happening to me right now?” I was very confused.

5:00 - I had a memory of taking mushrooms, but it felt incredibly distant, as if it was months in the past. Although obviously this was the logical explanation for what was happening to me, it didn’t seem plausible to me at the time. I thought some very bizarre metaphysical event had taken place and things were seriously wrong. This was very scary and unsettling. I think if I was just able to accept that falling asleep on mushrooms was the cause of this, then I could’ve relaxed and enjoyed the end of the trip, but this thought loop kept spiraling.

5:05 - I vaguely remembered my general life story, that I was in school throughout my childhood and have done various other things since then, but my past felt completely uninteresting and unimportant to me, so I didn’t really try to figure it out. It was still difficult to accept mushrooms as the cause, because I had no idea something like this could happen. It felt nothing like mushrooms had before, I was in a lethargic, dissociative fugue state. Like the normal disorientation after an afternoon nap amplified massively.

The only thing I could compare this to was trying to piece together what happened after I got a concussion one time, but even then it was much less strange and much easier to reorient myself. I know my head wasn’t physically hurt because I woke up in the same place I fell asleep, and my girlfriend had been with me the whole time.

5:10 - I felt complete nihilism. I was stripped of all psychological motivation. I believed I could do anything I wanted, but had no reason to do anything. This was actual nihilism, not what I thought nihilism to be before. What I called “nihilism” before was a set of ego fueled notions of how I’m so edgy and smarter than everyone because I figured out that nothing actually matters. But that was still filled with all kinds of judgments, beliefs, and values. With this, though, I had none of those. (Except I did still assign a negative meaning to meaninglessness) so I guess that still wasn’t true nihilism)

I dug my nails into my leg again and thought that all of us are here desperately, helpless, for no reason, and the only way we can redeem it is by clinging to each other and trying to show compassion.

5:15 - I felt guilty for the sheer length of time my girlfriend had been sitting here with nothing to do. I felt trapped in my own mind, unable to say anything. If I had been able to say the words “I forgot who I was” we could’ve talked and I would’ve felt better. But I also thought I had the right to sit there in peaceful silence. She hadn’t said anything this whole time either, probably feeling apprehensive because I looked visibly distressed.

5:20 - I finally asked if I had fallen asleep and she initially said she didn’t know, which made me feel more confused, but we quickly cleared it up and I was forced to conclude that it was indeed what happened. She was asking me about food, but I was so out of it. I was dissociative, I was talking to her but it didn’t feel like it was me. I tried to just give her my wallet so she could get food on her own, but she stayed with me

5:25 - We started walking back home and I felt like my identity as a human was a metaphysical prison I was being forced back into. While my memory was fully back now, it still felt like I had been newly born an hour ago and I was a bit disappointed about the person I had become. I resented that I would soon have to go to work and live out my normal routines. I was afraid I had been permanently changed and that I was going to be stripped of motivation like this forever

5:30 - I was able to tell my girlfriend that I had forgotten who I was and I started talking about what happened. The trip was completely over at this point, I was just extremely tired and struggling to process what had happened

Conclusion

Afterwards, I was wondering if I needed to radically change anything about my life, but I found that I was mostly ok with who I was. My motivation returned and I wasn’t permanently changed like I was afraid I was. But it felt like I was able to consciously choose to go back to being the person I was before. I probably did that out of fear and a desire for order and control. After initially processing it, I haven’t thought about it much until now.  

Looking back, I can imagine continuity, that I’m the same person with the same life story as I was last year.  But fundamentally that’s not true. I died, and was reborn. There’s a clear break, a clear discontinuity. I freshly came into existence 2 months ago and decided to continue being the person that my memories told me I was. That was not the only choice I could’ve made, but I’m happy with that choice for now.

The last hour was definitely scary, but I’m lucky to be quite psychologically stable and open to bizarre metaphysical ideas, so I still found value in the experience. I can definitely see how something like this could traumatize someone who wasn’t ready for it. 

Besides the falling asleep issue, I see the other difficult aspects of my trip as a mirror, showing my own dysfunctional nihilism to me.  This may have been worsened by the fact that I didn’t have a specific goal going into this trip.  It had been almost 5 years since my last trip, and I had always had the idea that I would eventually try a higher dose, this just happened to be when I had access to it.  Next time, I’ll have more positive, productive intentions going in and hopefully that will lead to better outcomes. I still see difficult experiences as immensely valuable though

Despite some difficulties, that 1st hour was profoundly beautiful. I didn’t know that kind of vibrant, surging feeling of being harmoniously alive was possible! I wish I had stayed awake to experience more of it. Next time I’ll try a lemon tek, as I heard it might help me stay awake. I’ll definitely tell my tripsitter to try to wake me up if this happens again, as that level of disorientation isn’t something I’d want to repeat. 

I think I definitely would’ve had a full ego death if I had stayed awake. Although I definitely experienced a rebirth, I didn’t feel the sense of oneness with my surroundings that a lot of people describe. Even upon first waking up, I still felt like a separate something, I just had no idea what that thing was

I feel better after writing all this, and I’m thinking I might trip again next week, this time on Hawaiian baby woodrose seeds, unless I decide I need more time to integrate

Edited April 1, 2022 by bmcnicho

[bmcnicho]

1st Hawaiian Baby Woodrose Trip Report